Page 6 of The Shadowed Oracle (The Bonded Worlds #1)
Chapter Four
Ingrid couldn’t remember a time in her life when she wasn’t tormented, gawked at, or pursued. Even surrounded by staunchly serious nuns and the promise of damnation echoing throughout the halls, teenage boys constantly chased and clawed at Ingrid in the group home she was raised in.
She was stared at. Pointed at. Whispered about.
Stopped by older men on the street who couldn’t help but ask her name, where she was going, or the most common: to compliment her eyes.
They were a deep red with a ring of gold around her pupils, caused by heterochromia only recorded in people with albinism.
Except Ingrid. She was a rarity. The outlier.
As she noticed what so many other women endured, though, she felt a slight relief to know her experience wasn’t so alien.
These threads of understanding helped her make sense of what it was to be part of the female race, and she began to think of her mother and what lessons she’d missed out on from her.
She would fantasize about what she might have been like, wondering if she’d dealt with something similar. Were her eyes the same? Her hair? Was she beautiful? Did she love her husband very much, and had he always been so sad, even before?
They were questions she’d never get answers to, but continued to ask herself.
To dig for something palpable that she could cling to.
She had no image of her mother besides a folded black and white photo her father kept in his wallet, and any questions posed back then were answered shortly, dismissively.
“She is gone,” her father would say. “She can’t come back.”
Ingrid learned not to push any further. Despite skipping her first two years of schooling, she was a perceptive child, adept at reading others’ emotions.
“Empathic,” her father always said. On rare outings to the grocer or a pit stop between new homes, she’d be overwhelmed in such close proximity to others, as if their thoughts and feelings were funneled into Ingrid’s mind.
This sensitivity, as she matured, made socializing nearly impossible, and the pursuit from the opposite sex even harsher.
Something in these men seemed to fundamentally change.
She could see it, feel it happening in real time.
Like something took hold over them, ripping away their humanity and debasing them to their most basic functions.
Whatever was inside Ingrid, she decided, whatever had doomed her since birth and had attracted the nightmares, it might’ve also infected those around her.
This broken brain and her beautiful burden—these were her curses.
Both, ironically, were passed down from parents who left her almost nothing else.
The only inheritance she received was a creepy old necklace that her father had wrapped around her neck right before dropping her off at the group home, and she hated that, too.
A worthless piece of jewelry and tainted DNA. Two halves adding up to one thing… She needed a way out. Needed to resign herself to take what little was given to her, and use it to her advantage. She might’ve resented her beauty, but she wouldn’t let her only gift go to waste.
Her hometown was only a six-hour drive from the opportunity and bright lights of Los Angeles, and the moment she turned eighteen she made the journey by bus. She didn’t want fame, nor riches. She only wanted freedom and enough money to carve out a little portion of the world for herself.
Though the price of such real estate, she found, cost more than she was willing to pay.
Casting call after casting call, modeling gig after modeling gig, she ran into the same problem she always had.
She had the personality and the look for magazines, TV, movies, yet the Man in Charge always pushed for more.
An endless shuffle of interchangeable male faces transformed right in front of her, like the mere opportunity of having such beauty asking for a chance, for a job, a shot at success, it was too much for them to bear.
Neon lights. Music so loud it vibrated her skull.
The chalky taste in her mouth, the blurred vision from the drugs slipped into her drink.
And that sweaty face peering over. It was the purest form of evil she’d ever beheld, and it was the only thing she could remember about her last night in Hollywood.
The last night of her failed attempt at escape.
The abuse she suffered wasn’t the heaviest burden to carry—it was the embarrassment.
How she loathed herself for being so na?ve, so vain.
Thinking it would be easy, that anything in this cursed life of hers would be easy.
She had no choice but to block it out as best she could.
Choosing to instead remember how she walked into that police station, told her story, endured the skeptical sneers, then packed it all up, every belonging she owned in one night, and went back home.
Defeated, disillusioned, destitute, dejected, but not broken.
Never broken.
A different kind of ambition set in. She would be patient. Acquire her freedom the old-fashioned way, with hard work and determination, too engrossed in her multiple demanding jobs to be sidetracked by anyone or anything else. Not even her nightmares.
It’d been drilled in her head to keep them a secret.
To lie. To run away. But she was done with that now.
She would never run again. She refused to be seen as an ill girl at the mercy of her internal torment, or an innocent lamb to be feasted upon.
She would take control of how other people saw her, and more importantly, how she saw herself.
When she’d saved a sufficient amount of money from her myriad jobs, she drove into the heart of San Francisco looking for the perfect place to finish the process of her rebirth. She knew what she wanted, but a basic internet search didn’t give her enough of a feel for where she wanted to get it at.
She went from shop to shop, sometimes stopping before she even went through the front door.
The aura of the tattoo parlor had to be perfect.
And if it passed that test, the next task would be a game of sorts.
She would ask the artist for the ugliest thing she could pluck from her nightmares—a ghoulish, wraithy-looking face of an androgenous corpse to be inked over the front of her neck and extending upward to her jawline—then she’d wait for the artist’s reaction.
It was an image that haunted her mind frequently, a perfect symbol for the inexplicable darkness that followed her, and, as Ingrid predicted, a perfect indicator of what kind of person the tattoo artist was.
Some artists flat-out denied Ingrid due to the extremity of it. Most carelessly shrugged and asked her to sit down. Some thought she was on drugs (she wasn’t at the time) and others assessed her with prodding eyes before demanding to see the money up front for the lengthy, expensive job.
But only one artist, a lovely woman not much older than Ingrid, whose arms and legs were covered in traditional Japanese irezumi, simply talked to her.
“Is this something you’ve thought about for a while?” the artist asked. Had the images resonated with her? Had she thought about what kind of career she might want in the future?
Ingrid answered them all with a confident, “I know what I want.”
And then, finally, the artist asked if Ingrid was okay.
Ingrid knew then that she’d found the right person for the job. She told the artist that she was very clear-headed, as lucid as she’d ever been. “I just want to change. To forget about the past versions of myself.”
She wanted to bury that na?ve damsel and be remade.
The tattoos on her neck and jawline were only the beginning.
She wanted her entire body covered with the worst images and terrors her mind had laid on her.
Her arms would be full of monsters and creatures.
Her chest would be covered in dying landscapes and mythical beasts.
And her face, too, would have to be marked.
The artist, after hearing Ingrid’s reasoning, looked her over once more.
She examined the flawless complexion. The glistening raven-black hair.
Her perfectly symmetrical bone structure anchoring it all, giving her the look of an angel, something unreal, so undeniably appealing it seemed like Ingrid had fallen here from another world.
And in that moment, the artist understood. She could see the alienation. The pain. Resentment. Injustice. Suffering. Abandonment. Abuse. Someone who had been blessed with beauty, yet cursed in all other aspects of her life. A paradox in which that beauty only served to stir up more issues.
The artist agreed to the job, but surprisingly told Ingrid the tattoos would cost much less than what all the others had quoted her for…
on one condition. Ingrid would sit down with the artist for a week and plan out every single part of her body.
If she was going to cover it with monsters, at least the monsters would be skillfully coordinated.
It was art, after all, and art could not be rushed.
The days that followed were among the best of Ingrid’s life.
She and the artist met late at night at the tattoo parlor, brainstorming and sketching out ideas.
They’d order food (and more food) and laugh together like little girls at a sleepover, swapping stories and bonding over the good, the bad, the absurd.
The artist never asked prodding questions about Ingrid’s strange past, never treated her differently, and not once did she mention Ingrid’s odd eye color.
Ingrid had made a friend and, consequently—but purely by accident—she’d been completely sober throughout their time together. It never occurred to her to alter her mind during the collaboration. She was too happy. Felt too present, too understood.
By the end of the month, they had turned Ingrid’s body into a remarkable, albeit terrifying, piece of artwork.
Her neck was covered with a ghoulish face and surrounded by shadows and framed on the sides by two half-dead trees.
Her arms were a perfect blend of monsters and creatures of the night.
Her back was now a haunting and ominous landscape.
Her chest, stomach, legs and feet were covered in black vines, intricate lines and symbols, with deadly insects and mythical creatures crawling through them.
And her back was so detailed you might find some new nightmare every time you examined it.
But that was where the ink ran dry. In their time together, the tattoo artist convinced Ingrid to leave her face bare.
If the goal was to embody and embrace her nightmares, while also deterring men from seeing her as an angelic little morsel, then that goal had been achieved.
Anything on her face would’ve been overkill, deterring from the masterpiece below—or, at least that’s how the artist put it.
She was adamant, and Ingrid’s opinion might’ve differed, but she trusted her.
The rapid transformation, the idea of using an entire body as one big canvas, it was already so hypnotizing to look at.
Photographs of Ingrid’s body were framed and put up in the tattoo shop.
Word spread, and every tattoo artist in the area had seen, either online or in person, and marveled at the work.
The popularity of the images brought a small amount of fame to the artist. Hundreds of thousands of people online followed and shared her work.
Hordes of new customers came into her shop and requested her specifically.
The artist became so in demand that even Ingrid struggled to get an appointment, though both women knew there was no new tattoo idea, and it was only an excuse to see her friend.
Work came first, and so the artist worked, and worked, and worked… until an opportunity at a better shop in a more desirable location came in.
“I have to,” the artist told Ingrid, pointedly averting her eyes. “It’s too much, too good to pass on.”
Ingrid didn’t argue. A part of her had always prepared her for the worst. And only a few months after those intoxicating long nights, Ingrid was alone, once again.
As for her goal, it had worked for the most part.
The predators were fewer in number. Only now, they were of a more off-center and unpredictable breed.
The men who looked at her with that animal, sickly desire were men with voids and gloom not dissimilar to hers.
Men with self-destructive curiosities and macabre tendencies.
Men that, Ingrid began to think, might send sadistically ominous text messages in the middle of the night—their idea of flirting, or a warm-up to whatever they had planned next.