Page 52 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“Pearl,” Esther said, immediately terrified that the spell had gone wrong somehow, and Pearl would be like this forever, a hollow shell of magic, but at the sound of her name Pearl picked her head back up, her expression confused but alert.

“Esther?” She sat up straight. “Ow, what the hell. My arm, what the, where am, is this the clinic?”

Her voice was so natural, so wiped of the fear that had shaken it minutes before, that Esther felt a chill roll down her spine. She took the bookfrom Pearl’s lap and tucked it under one arm. “You had an accident,” she said. “You’ll be okay, but—what do you remember?”

“Remember?” Pearl repeated, like it was a foreign concept.

“You went skiing this morning and fell,” Esther said. “You broke your wrist and hit your head, it’s a concussion but not a bad one. The medic said it’s normal to experience some memory loss.”

“I thought amnesia was only in movies,” Pearl said, gingerly touching her head. She looked a little scared again, but that was appropriate for the situation. “Where is the medic?”

“She stepped out for a second,” Esther said, through a lump in her throat so painful she could barely pronounce the words. “Let me go and find her.”

She stood, preparing to leave, then paused.

“There’s one thing I don’t want you to forget,” she said to Pearl. “Even with your concussion. I don’t want you to forget that I really care about you. More than I’ve cared about anyone in a long, long time. Whatever happens next... that isn’t going to change.”

Pearl looked frightened. “What do you mean, whatever happens next? How bad is this head injury, exactly?”

“I’m not worried about your head,” Esther said, smiling in the most reassuring way she knew how. “I just want you to remember how I feel about you.”

“Okay,” Pearl said, half smirking. “Got it. You”—she employed air quotes—“really care about me.”

Esther knew Pearl wanted more, wanted something else, a different configuration of words, but now wasn’t the time for truth. Maybe that would come later when Esther fulfilled her promise.

“Yes,” she said. “Now rest.”

The medic, it turned out, was in her bedroom sleeping. This was discovered after Esther hadn’t been able to find her and, worried aboutwhat Trev might have done to her, she’d alerted the office. They’d paged her on the intercom, and she showed up ten minutes later, cheek creased from the pillow, completely confused. She was under the impression it was the beginning of the day, not the end of it, and didn’t seem to remember Pearl being brought to the clinic, though she didn’t seem terribly concerned about her lapse in memory.

“Long hours will do that to you,” she said to Esther confidingly.

No, thought Esther, magic will do that to you, but she only nodded and smiled.

The first dinner shift had started, and the halls were full of people returning from work, some of them talking and laughing, some of them yawning and quiet. Esther felt caught out by every hello that came her way, waiting for someone to say, “Hey, have you seen Trev?” Or “Hey, how come you look like you spent the afternoon disposing of a body?” But why should they wonder such things? Only Esther’s world had been warped.

With as much subtlety as possible, she crept around the station wiping away every blood mark on every mirror: the gym, all the common bathrooms, the kitchen. Each time she approached a mirror her heart seized up, thinking something or someone would break through, but nothing, no one, did. By the time she’d finished, it was seven o’clock. Her plane was in twelve hours. In twelve hours, she’d be gone.

Finally, she went to what had been Trev’s room and stood in front of his door, steeling herself, though for what she didn’t know. Inside, the small space was tidy and uncluttered save for a sweatshirt dropped at the foot of the bed. Esther wiped away the blood marks on the mirror above his personal sink.

Then she started moving through a perfunctory search, looking for her stolen novel and for answers to questions she didn’t know to ask. She opened drawers, rooted through folded sweaters, even opened the contact lens case on Trev’s nightstand and looked down at the tiny empty puddles of saline solution.

She found dried yarrow and several other herbs she didn’t recognize,and, wrapped in a towel and tucked beneath the mattress, she discovered the book he must have used on the mirrors. Like the memory wipe this book was also inexplicably new, bound in the same neat, mechanical fashion. Somewhere, she knew, there was a mirror book that had to be nearly identical, in the hands of people who wanted to kill her.

And someone, maybe, who wanted to save her. Someone who was helping her get out.

The Gil novel was, to her grief, nowhere to be found, and aside from the book and herbs there was no other evidence that Trev was anything other than the Colorado carpenter he’d been playing. She rewrapped the mirror book in Trev’s towel and carried it with her to her own room, where she methodically shredded every page of both it and the memory wipe, until her trash can was full of confetti and the spines of the books flapped hollow and useless.

Then she began packing.

16

Only as Joanna was leading her mother up the porch stairs and to the front door did she realize that she’d never actually seen anyone move against the wards and into her house.

Cecily was blindfolded and clinging to Joanna’s arm. She couldn’t keep her balance and seemed to have no awareness of anything but Joanna, who had to lean down and physically tap each one of her mother’s feet to get her to lift them to the next step. It was frightening to see Cecily so slack-jawed and helpless, like a flashback and premonition at once, reliant in the circular way of both infants and the very old.

Joanna guided Cecily through the door, and she stumbled into the foyer with a gasp, then bent forward with her hands on her knees. Joanna took off her boots and went to the kitchen to get her mother a glass of water and when she returned Cecily had untied the scarf from her eyes and was staring at Abe’s old brown leather jacket, still hanging on the coatrack.

“Here,” Joanna said.

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