Inked Read Online Free PDF

might be, too. I suddenly couldn’t seem to get enough air in the claustrophobic little room.
    “You will lead me to him.”
    “If I knew where he was, don’t you think I’d have told you?” There was a weird, teakettle sound. The air around us had gone into motion, sending Sedgewick’s piles of clutter flapping against the ceiling like trapped birds.
    “Lia!” Sebastian’s fingers bit into my arms, bruising hard. “Sedgewick was wrong! Our abilities are not defined by the limitations of anatomy. We are magical beings, and when we make connections, they are magical also. In some cases, mated pairs among our people have been known to share images of what one is seeing, or to experience something of what the other is feeling—”
    “For Weres, perhaps. I’m not one!”
    That won me a hard glance. “We both know that isn’t true.”
    “My mother was Were; I am human,” I repeated, angry that he couldn’t seem to understand. “Considering how often I have to say that, maybe I ought to get a tattoo!”
    “Tattoos are only skin deep. What you are runs through to the bone.”
    “What my mother was. Lobizon tried to turn me, but they failed. You know that!”
    The leaders of my mother’s clan had pressured her for years to have me undergo the Change, but she had always hedged, telling them it was my decision. And her rank was high enough that they had been unable to force the issue as long as she lived. But barely two days after she died, they sent a group to attack me, intending to take the choice out of my hands. Sebastian had saved me by adopting me into Arnou, which as the clan of the current bardric , outranked Lobizon. As long as I remained under his protection, they couldn’t touch me.
    Sebastian didn’t say anything for a long moment. “How certain are you that we are not being overheard?” he finally asked.
    “Pretty sure. The Corps usually spies on other people.”
    “Be certain.”
    I threw a silence shield around us. “Okay.”
    Sebastian slanted a sharp look at me. “I could not allow someone into my clan, not even for Cyrus’s sake, without knowing the truth. You carry Neuri. Why bother to deny it?”
    It hit like a quick punch to the gut, leaving me breathless. No one ever said that word aloud, not even me. It was the elephant in the room, the thing that even my mother had tiptoed around in case uttering it somehow made it more real. I’d been fifteen before I learned the name for the problem that would define my life: Neuri Syndrome.
    It occurs sometimes when the mother is Were and the father is not, which is why female Weres rarely marry outside the clan. It’s a variation on lycanthropy, but doesn’t permit its carriers to change. It also prevents them from ever getting the full-blown disease—and therein lay the problem.
    Weres have a low birthrate—the disease often proves deadly to children younger than five or six, killing many in the womb—and therefore periodic “recruitment” is necessary. The clans feared that carriers of Neuri might pass their resistance on to their children, who might disseminate it to their kids and so on. Married to Weres, they would weaken the clan by infecting the bloodlines. Married to humans, they might ensure that, one day, there would be no one left to turn.
    Of course, that argument had made a lot more sense in the medieval world when people tended to live in small villages and rarely traveled. The local gene pool had been limited, and contamination from Neuri had been a real threat. With the much larger, more mobile population of the modern world, the danger was miniscule. But I hadn’t noticed anyone changing the old kill-on-sight rule.
    My mother had fought her clan elders not to give me a choice, as she’d claimed, but because the disease I’d been born with had already made it for me.
    “I haven’t denied anything,” I told Sebastian angrily, when I got my breath back. “I just don’t see any reason to broadcast my status as