Page 111 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Maram’s hands came up though she wasn’t struggling anymore. She was touching Richard’s face, her fingers on his furious mouth. “For the books,” she said. “For the future of magic.”

Richard raised a hand to hit her again, and Nicholas pressed the barrel to the center of the femur where it was thinnest. He pulled the trigger.

The shot was so loud it drowned out other sensations, blurring the recoil pain in Nicholas’s hand and turning Maram and Richard and Esther into figures in a pantomime, all face and silent gesture: Richard’s hand completing its arc against the side of Maram’s head, Maram staggering to one side beneath the blow, Esther climbing to her feet. Nicholas blinked hard, trying to clear his eye and head, and looked at what he’d done.

Under the barrel of the gun, the yellowed bone was cracked in two.

His ears were ringing from the sound of the gunshot but even so, he could hear the sound Richard was making: a high keening wail like an animal in pain. Nicholas turned from the portrait to find his uncle stumbling back from Maram, one hand going to the desk to hold himself up, his bloodied teeth bared in a grimace. Maram was doubled over, reeling from the recent blow, and suddenly Esther was at Nicholas’s elbow, her hands pushing into his jacket, patting at him. Her lower lip was split and her face was frantic, hair tangled, all her usual composure shattered like the bone frame.

“Nicholas,” she panted, “hurry, Nicholas, the book,” and he understood what she wanted. He could not let himself look back at his uncle,who had both hands on the desk and was barely keeping to his feet, head hanging. Nicholas pulled the book from his jacket pocket and gripped one half of it, Esther’s hands closing around the other side.

Abe and Joanna took good care of their collection. Nicholas had noticed this in the basement—the archival temperature and humidity, the glass cases to keep the dust away, the leather covers supple. Nicholas knew from his own experience, both with books and with the many fine leather boots he made sure were oiled every few months, that cared-for leather lasted a long time and was exceedingly difficult to tear with one’s bare hands. Even leather made from the delicate hide of a human could be tanned into resiliency and, with the proper regimen of care, kept pliable and tough and unrippable.

But this book gave way beneath Nicholas and Esther’s hands like it had been waiting for its bone counterpart to shatter, so it, too, could come apart. The pages fell from the spine like a butterfly with its wings sundered, and the leather cover tore so easily that Nicholas and Esther both fell back as the book came apart between them, paper floating down. As the first page hit the ground, so did Richard.

Richard fell to his knees and curled forward, his salt-and-pepper hair turning ash-gray, then bone-white, thinning across a scalp that was pink, then mottled, then sepia and taut across his skull. On some vestigial instinct of love Nicholas turned from Esther and went to his knees beside him, not close enough to touch, and Richard turned his face toward him.

This was the nightmare.

Those familiar features, those gentle eyes, that smiling mouth, all of it twisted in agony, and beneath the agony, a disbelief so pure it was almost innocent. Richard’s face began to collapse like a bad squash, his skin aging before Nicholas’s sight, wrinkling in folds and then tightening around his cheekbones and jaw as his eyes went rheumy and jaundiced. They sank into the dark hollows of their sockets and his lips skinned back from his teeth, still tinged red with blood, his gums swelling and receding until his mouth was all long yellow tooth and panting purple tongue. He wasmaking a hideous sound, like he was breathing with lungs made of glass, and he reached for Nicholas with fingers that were clawed and gnarled and tipped with broken fingernails, his wrists like twigs as his flesh lost all moisture and adhered to the bone.

Then he slumped over, eyes and mouth still open and gaping, a mummy in a beautiful suit.

“Are you all right?” Nicholas heard Esther asking Maram.

Richard’s twisted hand was inches from Nicholas’s knee. Nicholas stared at it. It was unrecognizable as having belonged to a human who’d been alive only seconds before. Was it anger that had made Richard reach out in his last moments? An urge to strike? Or had it been something else? One final, fruitless attempt at connection?

“You understood,” Maram said to Esther. “About the bullets. I hoped one of you would. You understood everything.”

“Yes,” Esther said.

There was a silence. Richard’s hand began to swim in Nicholas’s vision. “And you understood, too,” Maram said, “about... about the relationship you and I share?”

If Nicholas had been in any state to laugh, he might have. He’d never heard Maram sound so awkward, so unsure. But he could barely hold his head upright on his neck, much less find the energy to smile. The part of him that had grown up seeking comfort in Richard’s kind face wanted to grip the warped inhuman fingers of his uncle’s hand and find a spell that would bring Richard back to life so he could explain himself, so he could tell Nicholas it was all a misunderstanding and Nicholas could beg his forgiveness and Richard could give it.

“I’d like to hear you say it clearly,” said Esther.

Maram cleared her throat, regaining a little of her officiousness. “Well, I’m, that is, I don’t feel I can quite use the word ‘mother,’ given our circumstances, but it’s true that I’m the person who gave birth to you.”

“Thanks for that,” said Esther.

Black was encroaching on Nicholas’s vision, a dizzying tunnel he lethimself keel into. He put his head down on his knees and felt the very tip of Richard’s curled dead fingers touch his hair, almost a caress, and for a moment he let himself pretend. But then Esther’s living fingers touched his shoulder, so warm and solid that they brushed all pretense away and Nicholas understood, with mingled grief and triumph, that this was real.

36

Clouds looked different from above. They peaked and valleyed like a landscape, their hollows purple with unshed water, summits blazing white and pink in the last flares of the evening sun. Knolls and mesas went wispy at the edges, trailing off into the blue sky like smoke and breaking the illusion of solidity that almost made it seem the plane could put its wheels down and land.

Esther touched Joanna’s hand where it lay on the armrest between them.

“Jo,” she said, in a way that made Joanna suspect it wasn’t the first time she’d said it.

“Hmm?” said Joanna, forehead still pressed to the window.

“I said, do you want a drink?”

Finally, Joanna turned. Spots of light danced in her vision and the interior of the plane looked yellowed, cramped and drab compared to what lay outside. Both Esther and a flight attendant were staring at her. Esther had a glass of something pale and fizzy sitting on her folded-down tray.

“Coffee,” Joanna said to Esther, and when her sister gestured to the waiting flight attendant, readdressed her request. “Coffee. Please. With milk.”

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