Page 53 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Cecily gulped the water and handed the glass back, her red kiss on its rim. “That was horrible,” she said.

Joanna resisted the urge to saygood. “Take off your shoes.”

Cecily obeyed. How strange to have another person in her home. How strange that it had once been Cecily’s, too.

“What did the wards feel like?” she asked, curious.

Cecily was peering into the hall mirror and running her hands through her hair, surveying herself as Joanna had seen her do a thousand times before, but at Joanna’s question she dropped her hands as if startled to catch herself in the instinctive act.

“Like being in a dream where you can’t see or hear anything,” Cecily said, “but you know you’re on a boat and the boat is sinking.”

Joanna could not fully imagine this description, but she accepted it. She hung their coats by Abe’s on the old coatrack and watched as Cecily traced one carved wooden hook with her finger.

“The same,” she said.

“Most of the house is,” said Joanna, though as soon as she’d spoken, she wondered if that were true. Cecily hadn’t taken much with her when she’d moved out and neither Abe nor Joanna had added much new, but still, she knew the house felt different than it had when her mother—and sister—had lived in it. It had felt smaller back then, cozier.

Cecily was trailing past her into the kitchen, where the late-afternoon sun was shining through the window above the sink, sparking off the copper kettle and the peeling yellow walls. Joanna felt grateful for this warm, flattering light, grateful that the kitchen was presenting its best face for judgment, and then angry with herself for this gratitude. It didn’t matter what her mother thought. Her mother had tricked her and trapped her.

“He never retiled the floors,” Cecily said, scuffing a foot along a buckling wave of linoleum. But even Joanna, who felt raw and sensitive under Cecily’s gaze, could tell it wasn’t a criticism; her mother’s voice was low with complicated emotion.

“No,” said Joanna. “Though we did get a new toaster.”

Cecily smiled and too late, Joanna remembered her anger.

“You have thirty minutes,” she said. “Do what you came here to do.”

“I need a needle or a knife,” Cecily said.

Joanna plucked her little silver knife from the drying rack. “I’ll carry it. You tell me what to do with it.”

She could see on her mother’s face just how much Cecily disliked the intimation that she posed a threat. “You can’t think—”

“My house,” said Joanna. “My rules.”

Cecily looked as if she might argue but then visibly gave up. She turned and left the kitchen to walk through the dining room, and too lateJoanna remembered the spread of materials she’d left out on the table: the strips of leather, skeins of thread, the jar of glue, stacks of different kinds of paper. She saw her mother’s eyes take it all in and hoped that Cecily would not put the clutter together into a conclusion, but Cecily sucked in a sharp breath and turned to her with an expression of fear that seemed outsized to the situation.

“Jo,” she said. “You haven’t been... you can’t... write the books?”

It had started out a statement but ended as a question.

“Only experimenting,” Joanna said, and Cecily’s features shifted from afraid to relieved. Joanna could imagine what she’d been thinking—that if Joanna learned to make the books herself, she’d be too deep to ever emerge, she’d be gone. Maybe she was even right. Joanna wouldn’t ever know.

Cecily paused in the living room, taking in the blankets, pillows, folded piles of clothing on the corner armchair.

“You sleep down here?”

Joanna did not owe her mother any explanations but her defensive urge kicked in again and she said, “It’s warmer. And it saves on heating bills.”

“You mean it saves on the glamour spell you use to fill the propane tank.”

“Heating bills,” Joanna repeated.

Cecily parted the tacked-up blankets that separated the living room from the staircase leading to the second floor and Joanna followed. The temperature dropped as they climbed, and Joanna shivered, wishing she hadn’t removed her coat. She trailed her fingers along the banister, the wood still polished bright from years of her family’s hands.

Despite her fury, her hurt, despite what Cecily had done to bring about this situation, part of Joanna did not feel angry at all to be following her mother up these stairs that she’d been climbing for so many years alone. It was the same childish part of herself that thrilled at the soft press of the cat’s head in her hand.

Cecily stopped at the second-floor landing and looked around. She took a step toward the end of the hall and the largest bedroom, the one she’d once shared with Abe, then put her back to it and surveyed the other two doors. She could feel her heart thudding in her throat as she waited to see what her mother would do. She did not have a single guess.

---