Page 13 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“Buzzy,” said Joanna. She shrugged, a gesture she’d learned recently and repeated any chance she got. “Buzzy with glitter in it. And it tastes like... pancakes.”

“Which book sounds buzzy?” Abe said. He was on the verge of shouting, which meant he was getting excited. He rarely shouted in anger.

“That one,” Joanna said, poking the thinnest of the bunch, bound in tattered red leather. “Can I have Thin Mints?”

“No!” Abe shouted, thrilled. “Thin Mints are for after dinner! Ah, I knew it! I knew it!” He pulled Joanna into his arms, kissing the top of her head again and again, exuberant in a way Esther had never seen. She looked at Cecily, wanting to understand what was happening, but Cecily was staring at Joanna, a hand at her throat, tears in her eyes. She looked so sad Esther was frightened.

“Mommy,” she said. “What’s happening?”

But whatever it was, it didn’t include Esther. Cecily kept staring at Joanna and Abe, Joanna delighted by the attention if bewildered at its cause, and Abe radiant with happiness.

On that day, Esther stopped focusing on sameness and started to notice difference.

She didn’t understand that, then, of course. Didn’t know she’d just lived a turning point in her life, a line drawn between her sister, who could not only read magic but also hear it, and Esther herself, who could not. It was a line that became a wall as time passed, a stone wall like the ones that snaked through the forests around her childhood Vermont home, relics from a time before the trees had reclaimed the fields and the walls were divisions between properties, between families.

Looking back, it was silly that she’d never put two and two together. The wards were magic; Esther was immune to magic; Esther was immuneto the wards. But until her father had spelled it out for her when she was eighteen, she hadn’t fully understood the ramifications.

As long as she was living in the house, the wards couldn’t protect anyone, not Abe, not Cecily... not Joanna. Anyone who wanted to find Esther’s family had only to find Esther.

Esther sighed. She wasn’t a person given to introspection or nostalgia—or rather, any natural tendency she might have had toward such things had been stamped out years ago. They didn’t serve a life like hers. But today she was positively wallowing.

Normally she treated a bad mood with socialization or sex, but the blood-marks marring all the communal mirrors had made her far too suspicious to seek out company, and she couldn’t find Pearl. So after work ended for the day she made her way back to her room and set to remembering everything she could about mirror magic.

There were two kinds she knew of, two that her family had in their collection: magic that impacted one mirror, and magic that connected two. Single-mirror magic, which could alter the reflection a person saw in the glass and probably do other things Esther didn’t know about, required only one person to read the spell, only one to activate it with their blood. Double-mirror spells, however, required two people: one at either mirror. Then they could be used for communication, like a kind of esoteric video call, and to pass things back and forth.

Notlivingthings, however. She remembered now—and wished she didn’t—an afternoon her father and sister had spent experimenting with groundhogs. Joanna had ended up crying, and Esther had overheard Abe saying to Cecily, sounding mildly traumatized himself, “They effed up all our cucumbers, but no creature deservesthat.”

Otherwise, she didn’t know much. After all, to Esther magic was irrelevant. Her blood was singularly useless in activating spells and magic had no effect on her whatsoever. As a kid she’d been fascinated by her family’s work—what kid wouldn’t be?—but as the years had passed, she’dturned decisively away from books and blood and spellwork, and toward the tangibles: things she could touch, see, manipulate, fix. Magic felt like a dreary extension of the world itself, a world of people seeking, holding, and losing power she herself could never access.

She stretched out flat on her bed and hurled her pen at the ceiling, then caught it when it came back down. It had left a tiny, almost imperceptible black dot, which joined all the other tiny dots from all the other times she’d thrown all her other pens. A creature of habit, indeed.

One single person with a book way out here would be remarkable but it did not necessarily have to be alarming. Two people, however, two people in separate places operating two sets of mirrors that functioned in tandem...

That would suggest intention. A reason. A plan.

Esther had tried to wipe away the blood and it hadn’t come off. So, whatever the spell was, it was still in progress. Which meant if therewassomeone watching on the other end, they’d have seen Esther notice.

They would knowsheknew.

Her bedroom door suddenly rattled and caught, and she sat up so quickly she felt her heart in her ears. The fluorescent brightness of her room reasserted itself, as if she’d been somewhere dim, and she stood, automatically assuming a stance she’d perfected after years of training in martial arts gyms.

“Hello?” she called.

“It’s me,” Pearl called back, and immediately Esther’s pulse reacted to the familiar voice and settled. She opened the door and Pearl smiled down at her. “Want to head to dinner?”

Esther had lost track of time. “Oh, yes, let me get my sweater.”

Pearl milled around the stamp-sized room while Esther tugged on her red wool sweater, pulling her hair out from its collar in a staticky tangle. She didn’t know much about her mother, Isabel, but from the one photograph she’d seen she’d had beautiful, straight, shiny hair. It seemed unfairthat of all the traits Esther could’ve gotten from her father, like, oh, the ability to hear magic, she’d instead inherited his frizz-prone curls and lactose intolerance.

“How goes the translation?” Pearl said, picking up the Gil novel from Esther’s nightstand and peering at one of the colored Post-it Notes.

“Amateur as ever,” said Esther.

Pearl threw herself down on the bed. “I looked that book up,” she said. “Did you know it’s worth, like, thousands of dollars?”

“Yeah,” Esther said. “It could’ve been my college fund, if I’d gone to college.”

As soon as she’d said this, she wished she could take it back; she knew college was a tender spot for Pearl, even if she wouldn’t admit it. Pearl only said, breezy as ever, “Oh, higher education is overrated.”

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