Page 51 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Pearl’s tears were pooling in the corners of her eyes and sliding down her pale cheeks. “What do you mean?”

Esther showed her the book she’d lifted from Trev’s pocket. It was new, she noticed—bound like a modern hardcover, by machine. She had never seen a book this new.

“Is that a—I feel ridiculous saying it out loud,” Pearl said.

“A spell book,” Esther said. “Yes. It’ll take away your memory of the past day, so you won’t remember holding the gun or pulling the trigger, you won’t remember being attacked. None of it.”

Pearl didn’t look relieved, she looked horrified. She recoiled from Esther’s touch, her nostrils flaring. “And I won’t remember any of what you just told me.”

“Well, no.”

“And when I think about Trev,” she said, “I’ll think about him as a fun new friend and I’ll wonder where he is, I’ll worry about him. Without knowing that I was the one who killed him.”

“You didn’t kill him,” Esther repeated.

“I shot him and now he’s dead,” Pearl said. “Anything else is semantics.”

“I like semantics.”

“I don’t want to forget what you told me,” Pearl said. “A whole season together and this is the first time you’ve really been truthful.” Through all this she had been crying steadily, one slow tear at a time, and Esther touched one of those wet tracks on her cheek with as much tenderness as she could manage without breaking down herself. “And it seems dangerous to forget what I did. I feel ithere.” She pressed her palm to her chest. “My body’s going to remember even if my mind doesn’t. Won’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Esther said.

The slow tears came a little faster, Pearl’s mouth trembling uncontrollably, and she sucked in a shuddering breath, getting herself under control. “But... but if people notice Trev’s gone missing and ask me what happened, I don’t know if—I don’t think I could—I’m not a good liar, Esther, you know that. I don’t know how to handle this. I don’t know what to do.”

Esther said nothing. She didn’t even nod. This choice had to be Pearl’s alone.

Suddenly Pearl gripped her hand, hard, her fingers pressing into Esther’s palm. “Promise me something,” she said.

“I’ll promise you anything I can without lying to you again.”

Pearl nodded. “If magic really does exist, and you really can erase my memory, and I let you do it—you have to promise to come find me again once you’re safe. You have to promise to tell me everything that happened, and tell me again about your parents, and the books. Fill in all the blanks. I don’t want to forget forever. I want toknow.” She took a shuddering breath. “But I don’t think I can handle knowing right now. Alone.”

Esther wanted this to be a promise she could keep. “Yes,” she said. “I promise.”

“Swear to me,” said Pearl, extending her little finger, but instead Esther uncurled her other fingers and pressed a kiss to her palm.

“I swear it.”

“Okay,” Pearl said. “Do it before I can think too hard about it.”

“I can’t do magic,” Esther said.

“So then—?”

“You have to do it yourself.”

“How is that possible?”

“You have to read this book out loud. Wherever it says ‘you,’ say ‘I,’ and where there’s a place for a name, you say your own. When the spell starts catching, it’ll take you through to the end, I think. It won’t interrupt itself with its own effects. Or they usually don’t.”

Pearl was staring at her. “The way you’re talking about this... the way you handled Trev, I feel like I never really knew you.”

The wave of feeling came so fast Esther didn’t have time to pull up her defenses. “You did,” she said. “And you will again, because I’m coming back, remember? You’ll get to know me. If you still want to.”

Pearl reached out and Esther thought she was reaching for the book, but then her good hand was cupped around the back of Esther’s neck and Esther leaned on instinct, her mouth meeting Pearl’s and feeling the give of those soft lips as they parted beneath hers, the scrape of those sharp teeth. She closed her eyes and let herself have this one second of luxury: being kissed by someone who knew her, all of her. Then she pulled away and set the book on Pearl’s lap.

If Esther could have been touched by magic, she might have used the spell on herself, afterward, to wipe the memory of its unfolding from her mind. It took Pearl twenty minutes to read it, twenty minutes that Esther spent panicking someone would try to come through the door, but no one did, and she watched the magic take Pearl over word by word. She watched Pearl’s eyes go dull, her mouth moving not by her own will but by the will of something else, a force that powered the voice it was in service to, the magic carrying itself forward as Pearl’s eyes grew more and more fixed on the page, her tone more and more monotonous, until finally she spoke the last word and her hand dropped from the page and she slumped forward like a doll abandoned mid-play.

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