Page 107 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“Enough,” Richard said. “Nicholas, give me the book.”

“Nicholas, don’t,” Esther said, and took another step. The gun was about four feet from her head now, with Richard another two feet behind it.

“Nicholas has done quite a lot to protect you,” Richard said to her. “Do you really want him to see me do this? His nightmares are bad enough.”

Esther glanced to Maram and for the first time, she found Maram looking back. Their eyes met, a shock like a live wire, and Maram gave her the tiniest of nods—but not tiny enough. Richard caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and said, “What is—”

But Esther didn’t give him time to finish. She launched herself at him, taking those four feet between them in one leap, and Nicholas’s shout of horror was drowned out by the explosion of the gun.

34

Aside from the vampire that had drained her father’s blood, there was only one other book in Joanna’s collection that had been in progress for as long as she’d known it. It was bound in a neat natural leather, and she’d often wondered about the spell that was ongoing between its pages, wondered who’d first read it and what had become of them.

Now she knew.

In the basement, she and Collins had watched as Cecily pricked her finger, pressed her blood to the last page of the leather book, and broke the silencing spell she’d read over two decades before. Joanna had heard the slight shift of sound as the spell ended, and even after they’d closed the door on the collection and climbed the stairs, she thought she could still sense the changed hum of the books below her.

Sir Kiwi was sitting in the hall waiting for them and leaped up as they came back in through the basement door, luxurious tail wagging. Cecily bent to pet her, her hand trembling slightly. Now that the shock of seeing Cecily was wearing off, Joanna realized her mother was wearing nothing more than slippers, black leggings, and the Beatles’RevolverT-shirt she had probably gone to sleep in, and her bare arms were goosebumped from the cold. Joanna ducked away down the front hall to the closet, returned with a thick wool sweater that had once belonged to Abe.

“Here,” she said to her mother. “You can wear this.”

Cecily held the sweater in her hands, shivering, though she didn’t move to put it on. She traced a finger over the black pattern woven into the cream background. “This jacket is older than you are,” she said. “I bought it for your father when we lived in Mexico City.”

Joanna had already turned to follow Collins and Sir Kiwi to the kitchen, but at these words she stopped. “How is that possible? You and dad met after he came here.”

“No,” Cecily said. “That was the story we decided to tell you girls. But really, we met in Mexico City. When your father was still with Isabel.”

Her voice, which was calm and steady, did not match her impossible words. A chill swept across Joanna’s skin. “What? What are you saying?”

Cecily fit her arms into the sweater and pulled it tight across her body. “Let’s sit down.”

The kitchen lights were on, and everything felt too bright, from the shine of the hanging copper pans to the reflective glint of the fridge to the bare lines of Cecily’s resolute face. Joanna turned off the overhead, dimming the room from a glare to a glow. Now they were lit only by the hanging lamp above the stove, its light soft from a grease-blurred bulb. Cecily sat at the kitchen table and Joanna sat across from her.

Collins held up the kettle and, putting his degree to good use, said, “Tea?”

Both Cecily and Joanna shook their heads, but Collins filled the kettle anyway, then leaned against the countertop with Sir Kiwi at his feet, glaring at Joanna. Even in their short acquaintance, she had come to recognize this as his worried face, and she tried to smile at him, but could feel it was a failure. His glare intensified.

Cecily was looking at him, her expression baffled. “Who exactly did you say—” Cecily started. Joanna cut her off.

“You said you came here to tell me the truth.” She took a postural lesson from Collins and squared her shoulders, set her jaw. “So tell it.”

It seemed for a second that her mother might protest, but then Cecily nodded. She smoothed her hands against the table like she was rolling out a map, then closed her eyes. She inhaled long and deep before opening them again.

“This all begins,” she said, “with Isabel.”

Isabel had always been ambitious. She was born in Mexico City to a Zapotec mother and a half-Spanish father and raised in the family bookstore. The bookstore was a relic of the colonial fortune her paternal side had managed to mostly squander, and it had been started by her paternal grandparents as a passion project in the early thirties—intended at that time not for income, but to raise their social capital among the writers and artists whose presence they courted at their dinner table. It was from Isabel’s paternal grandmother, the Mexican socialite and sometimes-writer Alejandra Gil, that her parents had inherited not only the bookstore but also what was then one of the largest collections of magical books in North America; and it was from this same grandmother that Isabel had inherited the ability to hear magic.

She must have inherited her ambition from one of her grandparents as well, because her parents themselves had none of their daughter’s ferocious drive. By the time Isabel was born, her family’s generational wealth lay squarely in two courts: connections, and books. Her parents, who’d maintained their expensive habits long after they could afford them, were only too keen to capitalize on the first and sell off the latter, to Isabel’s dismay. From a young age she’d been convinced that her family’s books held answers to the questions that had occupied the human mind for as long as it could think, answers she believed might be found in the mechanism that allowed these books to be written in the first place.

Was the power channeled from without, or did it come from within? Was it God, or Gods, or spirits, or demons? The miracles described in so many religious texts, were they in fact the product of powerful books, or had books been written in emulation of miracles?

Whatever the power was, wherever it came from, it spoke to her. As a little girl she’d imagined herself like Juana de Arco, chosen by a holy voice to lead and protect, and as she grew older she was more practical but no less dedicated. How could she study the texts and protect them if her parents kept selling them off?

It was Isabel who devoted herself to maintaining her parents’ backroom collection, Isabel who traveled around first the city and later the country making contacts, asking questions, hunting down leads on new merchandise. She learned to appraise and to price. She read every book in the collection so many times she knew them by heart, and understood the patterns of repetition and intricacies of phrasing that their pages seemed to demand. Through study she began to know the world well enough to understand that she wanted it to know her.

She tried unsuccessfully to convince her parents to change to a lending model—like a kind of library, she kept saying, so they could make smaller but ongoing gains instead of a large onetime profit. That way they’d be able to keep all the books instead of letting them fall through their fingers, the numbers of the once-impressive collection slowly dwindling as they were sold off one by one. But her parents refused. Too much hassle when it was so easy to simply sell a book whenever they’d spent the funds from the last one.

At the time that Isabel was coming of age in the late seventies, the five largest book communities in the world were centered in Mexico City, Istanbul, Tokyo, Manhattan, and, most notably to Isabel, London.

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