Page 50 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Esther squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them and turned. The book she’d taken off Trev’s body would completely erase Pearl’s memory of the past twenty-four hours—it would reset her back before the shot, the ski, the argument—but this Pearl, the one trembling on the bed and staring at Esther with desperation, still remembered. This Pearl deserved something, didn’t she? And why not the truth? It was a thought too seductive to turn down. Just for a moment, she and Pearl could live in the same world together.

“It will sound crazy,” she said. “But try to believe me. Remember that you just saw Trev go through a mirror.”

“I don’t know what I saw.”

“Yes, you do. If you can’t accept that, you won’t accept anything I’m about to tell you.”

Pearl bit her lip, quiet. Then she said, “Okay. Yes. I saw it.”

Esther turned back to search for Pearl’s clothes as she spoke. “Magic exists,” she said, “and it’s channeled through certain books. My family can sense those books, they can hear them, though I can’t. My father spent his whole life collecting them, and he has—or had, they’re my sister’s now—hundreds. Incredibly valuable.”

She’d found the clothes folded in the metal medicine cabinet in a plastic bag, and she shucked her own bloodied garments and jammed them into the bag in place of Pearl’s.

“When I was a baby,” she said, “a group of people broke into our apartment in Mexico City to take the collection. They didn’t get the books, but they killed my mother. I don’t know the details. All I know is that afterward, my father took me and went underground. Or to Vermont, anyway.” She was shivering at the sink in her underwear, washing her hands and face as best she could, afraid to turn around and find disbelief on Pearl’s face. “It’s not only that I can’t hear magic, I’m also immune to it. We don’t know why. But when I was eighteen my father realized that the wards he used to block our house from being found didn’t block me, so all anyone had to do to find my father and stepmother, and my sister, and the whole collection, was find me.”

She paused to hitch Pearl’s clean jeans up around her waist. Pearl was taller and slimmer, but she could roll the hems and the oversized sweater was plenty long enough to cover the fact that the pants barely buttoned, and in the mirror—only a mirror again—Esther appeared clean and unbloodied, if a bit bruised around the face.

“My dad gave me a choice,” she said, turning back to Pearl. “I could stay home and put my family in danger, or I could leave and never come back. Obviously, I chose the latter.”

Pearl was staring at her. She seemed to have calmed down a bit while Esther was talking, or at least she wasn’t visibly shaking anymore, though she was nearly as pale as the walls.

“Get under the covers,” Esther urged.

“Please come here,” said Pearl.

“We don’t have time—”

“Please.”

Esther swallowed hard and went to sit by Pearl on the bed, stiff and awkward until Pearl flung her good arm around Esther’s shoulders and buried her face in Esther’s neck. Then Esther did the only thing she could: she shifted position until she was holding Pearl very close, careful of her broken arm, her lips against Pearl’s soft hair. She could feel her own face, normally so biddable, acting of its own accord, her mouth screwing up tightly, her eyes watering.

“I will believe you,” Pearl said, voice muffled against Esther’s skin, “until another explanation presents itself.”

“There are no other explanations,” Esther said. “I gave you the truth.”

“Is that why you were going to leave?” Pearl said, pulling back a little to look at Esther. “Because Trev was... after you?”

“Yes,” said Esther.

The hope on Pearl’s face was so painful. “So does this mean you’ll stay?”

It always came down to this. With Joanna, with Reggie, with Pearl. Esther was a danger to those she loved simply by being herself.

“I can’t,” Esther said. “They know where I am. You already got hurt because of me, and both of us almost got killed.”

“But you said Trev was going to use you to get to your family, to your father’s books. He wasn’t going to kill you,” Pearl said. “Right? He only wanted to question you, or—”

Esther shook her head. “What I’ve told you is the extent of what I know.” She touched her throat, which would be purple with bruises soon enough and ached from where his hands had squeezed. “Itfeltlike he was going to kill me.”

“Instead,” said Pearl, “Ikilledhim.”

“You didn’t, technically,” said Esther. “He was alive when we put him through the mirror.”

“Oh, god,” Pearl said, and wiped her wet cheek on her good shoulder.

The room was as cleaned as it was going to get. Esther had a bag of bloodied clothes tied up in one hand but anyone who entered would see nothing out of the ordinary at all. It was absurd, how normal everything looked. Pearl was still shaking in tiny tremors.

“You don’t have to remember it,” Esther said.

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