Page 5 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Still, she had to try. Shewantedto try.

Tonight, she was experimenting with the new moon, after the last fewfull moons had yielded no results—not even when she’d had a flash of what she thought was genius and managed to gather a whole half cup of menstrual blood. She had been so hopeful that might be the key. According to her admittedly surface-level research, peripheral blood was nearly indistinguishable from menstrual blood, forensically speaking, and she’d only ever managed to have three of her many books analyzed anyway—so it was absolutely possible the tests that had listed “blood” as the main ingredient of the ink had misled her in terms of where that blood may have come from.

But no. The book she’d written with her period blood was as ineffectual as all the others she’d attempted.

As ineffectual as she knew this one would be.

Still, hope and curiosity kept her at the stove, powdering the blackened herbs in a grinder and then mixing them with the blood from her hand, an egg yolk, a pinch of gum arabic, and honey. The result was a thick, dark paste that would write beautifully when mixed with water, but likely do nothing else. She kept her third ear pricked for any sound that might suggest the ink was more than just a homemade pigment, listening for the bodily hum that ran like syrup through her veins whenever she was near a book... but the ink stayed black and silent.

She had planned to write the book tonight, copying the text of one of the smaller spells in her collection, a ten-page sixteenth-century Persian incantation that was now faded but had once called up a fire that blazed without burning for roughly ten minutes. “The egg-cooker,” her father had called it jokingly. But looking down at the quiet paste, her hand still stinging, she knew instinctively that the act of writing would be pointless.

Blinking back tears of frustration, she left the mess on the stove and moved across the kitchen, the green-and-white seventies linoleum buckling here and there beneath her feet. The floor always brought her father’s voice to her mind, deep and cheerful and so terribly missed; “Gonna retile this soon,” a sentence repeated so often it had taken on the cadence of ritual, but he hadn’t retiled it and no one ever would. She opened a canof tuna to scrape into a bowl, but when she stepped out onto the porch, shivering in the snow-scented air, the cat was nowhere.

It was full night now, no moon to light the sky, but the cloud cover sent down a distilled, silvery gleam that caught in the finger-bone branches of the birch trees lining her cleared yard. Among the pearly birches, the spruce and pine were little more than rustling shadows that dissolved into the darkness of the forest beyond. Joanna squinted through the trees, searching for movement, but other than a faint breeze the night was still.

Disappointment welled in her, black as the blood ink cooling in its cup, and she shook it off with a laugh. What was she doing, anyhow? Trying to lure a wild animal to her door and then what—invite him in? Offer him a bed by the fire, stroke his soft fur, talk to him, make him her friend?

Yes.

She put the bowl of tuna down on the top step and went back into the house.

Joanna had been born in this house and had lived here all her life; first with her whole family, and then, after her sister ran away and her mother moved out soon after, with just her father. For eight years it had been only Joanna and Abe, and ever since Abe’s death two years ago, it had been only Joanna. The house was an old Victorian, too big for one, its formerly white paint now a stained old-tooth gray, the wooden trim aged from gingerbread elegance to stale exhaustion. Even the steep arches of the roof and windows had dulled, like overused knives. The door creaked on its hinges as she swung it closed.

Inside, it was as quiet as the forest. It always was. The dark wood of the front hall gave way to the artificial brightness of the kitchen, tinged faintly amber from the glass shade of the hanging overhead light, and the window above the sink—which during the day looked out over Joanna’s herb garden—was a murky black mirror. Joanna felt herself unintentionally matching her footsteps to the quiet around her, soft, like she was trying not to disturb her own empty home.

More and more this ever-present silence felt like a function of the wards Joanna had lived behind all her life; another kind of invisible bubble that cut her off from the rest of the world, protective, stifling. For the first year after Abe died, she’d imagined him around every corner, had heard his voice as she cooked dinner (“Spaghetti again? You’re gonna turn into a noodle”), practiced pop songs on the piano (“Fiona Apple, nowthere’sa voice”), or sat on the porch with the watercolors he’d bought her (“You get this talent from your mother, I couldn’t draw a polar bear in a snowstorm”). But little by little even his imaginary voice had faded and now she had to work to conjure it in her mind.

Sometimes Joanna couldn’t help but try to imagine someone else in the house with her, a mutable dream-figure of a man, tall and strong and kind. She’d read a lifetime’s worth of romance novels and had no trouble picturing the physical possibilities: his mouth on her neck, his broad shoulders crowding her against a wall, his hands hiking her skirts up around her waist. Not that she wore skirts, but the closet of her sexual subconscious was full of petticoats. It was the other parts of the fantasy that gave her trouble. The parts where she attempted to imagine anyone besides her family in this house with her. It stretched her imagination just to envision the little striped cat at her heels, though she was getting better at it. She could almost see him now, leaping onto the white-tiled tabletop to bat at one of the sprigs of dried herbs that hung in the window.

Her father had been allergic to most animal dander, but even now she couldn’t bring herself to get a pet, though as a child she had wept for one. Her older sister had caught frogs for her, trapped garter snakes, collected jars of snails, but it hadn’t been the same. She’d wanted something soft that could accept and return her love. Now there was something painful about the idea of letting an animal inside and making Abe’s own home inhospitable to him, or to whatever wisp of his spirit remained.

If one believed in spirits, which Joanna did not. Of the hundreds of handwritten books her father had gathered, books that when read aloudcould do everything from tune a piano to bring rainclouds in a drought, none held spells to speak with ghosts or otherwise reach into the realm of death. That had to have been the first thing any early writers would have tried—whoever they were, however they’d written.

“It’s not for us to ask how,” her father had said, over and over. “We’re here to protect the books, to give them a home, to respect them—not to interrogate them.”

But how could Joanna not wonder?

Especially after one of the books Abe had protected all his life turned on him.

It had only taken her six months after Abe’s death to break one of his most rigid rules and bring three books—though all of them with faded ink, the spells used up—outside the protective wards of her home and to a conservation lab in Boston. Even to conservationists who didn’t know the truth of what they were seeing, the books were objects of fascination, ancient and rare, and Joanna had donated all three in return for access to their lab reports once the DNA and protein samples had been analyzed.

If she could finally learn how they’d been written, perhaps she’d understand why and how her father had been killed by one. And if she learned how they’d been written, well, it stood to reason she’d then be able to write them herself—didn’t it?

Apparently not.

The lab results had thrilled and frightened her in turn, though in retrospect she thought she should’ve suspected. The magic within the books needed blood and herbs to activate, after all, so it made sense the ink itself was based in the same. But it cast a terrifying light on some of her longer books. How much blood was in those pages? And whose?

She spread plastic wrap over her bowl of ink paste then rebandaged her hand, which had finally stopped bleeding. With the stove off, the kitchen was chilly, so she made herself a cup of tea and took it into the living room. Only one lamp was on, the tall one with the green fringed shade, and in thelow greenish light the room looked even more cluttered and nest-like than usual: wool blankets piled on the faded red couch, abandoned half-drunk mugs of tea mingled with books on the floor-to-ceiling shelves, and sweaters tangled in the shiny black legs of the piano in the corner, their arms outstretched across the threadbare Persian rug. The woodstove, which Abe had installed in the brick enclosure where a fireplace had once been, glowed with warmth. Joanna felt, not unpleasantly, like a mouse returning to her den.

She had been sleeping down here by the stove since mid-October, trying to conserve heat. The tall narrow windows with their warped panes were already sealed tight in plastic, and she’d nailed thick army blankets to the ceiling and walls of the stairwell, to cut off the downstairs from the drafty upstairs—the latter of which would remain unheated and untouched until March. Functionally, her world had been reduced to four rooms: kitchen, dining room, living room, bathroom. And the basement, of course. She’d started this habit the winter her father had died and found it economical not only in terms of propane and wood, but comfort. One person didn’t need a whole cold, dark house.

She fed the stove and checked the dusty face of the grandfather clock ticking by the cracked leather armchair—it was six forty-five, which meant she had fifteen minutes before the wards needed to be set, so she sat at the coffee table with a notebook and pen to make a list of errands for tomorrow’s foray into town.

The list was short.

Post office.

Buy bread and see Mom at store.

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