Page 26 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“One cup,” said Richard.

Nicholas sat on the other side of the low table in a pink armchair, its arms carved like lion’s heads, and lowered his face toward his coffee. Richard leaned back on the sofa, ankle resting on his knee, but despite the casual posture his brow was creased with quiet worry.

“How’d you sleep?” asked Maram.

“Like the dead,” Nicholas said. “Sorry, like thenearlydead.”

“If you’re managing to make jokes, then you don’t understand the danger you were in last night,” Richard said.

“I had a gun in my face,” Nicholas said. “I’ll venture to say I do understand.”

“If Collins hadn’t been there—”

“Yes, I’m fully aware,thank you,” Nicholas said.

“How are you feeling?” Richard said.

In truth, Nicholas did not feel entirely himself; he kept seeing the metal barrel staring him down, hearing that sharp retort of gunfire, feeling the pounding of his heart, and then there were those honeybees he’d likely hallucinated (probably stuffing from the shot-up seat, he’d decided).

He sidestepped the question and asked his own. “Did this have anything to do with what happened in San Francisco?”

“We don’t know,” said Richard, his voice careful. “We’re trying to find out. Regardless of who was involved, their intent was probably the same.”

Grievous bodily harm, then. Fantastic. “Do you know what happened to that man after Collins shot him?”

Richard winced.

Maram said bluntly, “He died.”

“And his body?”

“With some of our people in the Met,” said Maram. “They’re working to identify him, though no luck yet.”

“It would have been nice,” said Richard, “if Collins hadn’t been quite so trigger-happy. If he’d thought about the fact that we might have some questions before taking that shot.”

“There wasn’t much time for thought,” Maram said.

Richard rubbed his eyes with an elegant hand. “Still.”

Nicholas found himself in the novel position of wanting to defend the man hired to defend him. “Collins saved my life.”

“He certainly did,” Richard said. “And he’s getting a bonus for it.”

“Great,” Nicholas said. “What’s the going bonus for someone’s life these days?”

His uncle’s jaw tightened. “Yourlife is priceless.”

Nicholas would have been more moved by this if he wasn’t keenly aware of its financial truth. Since his father had died when he was barely two, he was the last living Scribe. This knowledge came thanks to a spell Richard had inherited that scoured the earth for people like Nicholas—scoured, year after year, but never found. The Library’s collection was thegreatest in the world, its vast reserve of books loaned out to those in the know at high cost and in high secrecy, and culturally Richard maintained influence by partnering with universities and museums across Europe.

But financially, loaning out the old books did not pay nearly so well as offering customized new ones. So long as Nicholas remained alive, writing, and in the care of the Library, the Library remained rich; and so long as they remained rich, they remained powerful. Last night had come about because someone had traced the source of that power to Nicholas.

“Mystery creates intrigue, which creates desire, which creates commodity,” said Nicholas. “Perhaps if you didn’t keep me such a secret, I wouldn’t have such a target on my back.”

“I really don’t have the energy for this argument today,” said Richard, but he clearly couldn’t help himself from adding, “Besides, that logic is absurd. A person won’t try to steal the Crown Jewels unless they know the jewels exist.”

“Please,” said Maram, “let’s stick to the subject at hand, shall we?”

“Are any of our books missing?” Nicholas asked. If the man was somehow a thief as well as a would-be murderer, they’d be able to find him easily enough. Every Library book had an “expiration date,” a rechargeable spell dating back to the late twentieth century that had been affixed to each title in the collection and was added to every new book as soon as Nicholas had written it, in the form of a small, embossed symbol of a book on the back page. It was in fact a tracking spell that was automatically activated in the event a book had not been returned to the Library after the forty-eight-hour lending period was over; it alerted Richard to the book’s precise location and had saved not only several books over the years, but once, Nicholas’s life.

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