Page 67 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Esther was far too frightened and far too tired to trust her instincts right now... but she couldn’t help thinking that neither of these people seemed like they wanted to kill her, which was encouraging. But famous last words:I don’tfeellike I’m about to be murdered.

The Englishman held up a finger. “Okay, first things first. Magic books. Why don’t they work on you?”

Esther was suddenly dizzy. She had never heard anyone outside her immediate family so much as acknowledge the existence of magic, much less put it so plainly,magic books; a term that seemed almost ludicrously charming compared to her lifelong experience. It was the novelty of this more than anything that made her suddenly honest.

“I don’t know,” she said. “They just never have.”

His eyes—one bloodshot, one oddly white in comparison—were locked on her face, searching, as if she were an instruction manual in a language he didn’t understand. “You can’t read spells?”

She couldn’t see any reason to lie. “No.”

“And they have no effect on you?”

“None.”

His eyes widened even further and he shook his head slowly, then more vehemently. Then, out of nowhere, he started to laugh.

It was the laugh of someone so tired that their exhaustion had turned to energy, wired, crackling, half-hysterical.

“Oh Jesus,” he said, putting his head in his hands, still laughing. “Oh no.”

“What?” she said. “What?”

He shook his head again, shoulders shaking.

“What?” the big one said, and Esther felt briefly consoled that she was not the only confused party.

“I figured it out,” said the Englishman. “I figured out why Maram sent us to you.” He looked back up at her, his mouth still twisted in a manic grin. “You’re like me,” he said, and started laughing again. “You’re a fucking Scribe.”

22

In Boston it was snowing.

“We should’ve got off in L.A.,” Nicholas said, shivering on the pavement in front of the decrepit duplex Collins had led them to. Collins had climbed the cement steps and was waiting for an answer to his resounding knock while Sir Kiwi strained the end of her leash, searching for a place to pee on the small patch of dead grass Nicholas supposed passed for a lawn.

“What was that, Nicholas?” Esther said. He and Collins had dropped their false names somewhere over the South Pacific. “You’re not loving this gorgeous New England weather?” She’d been pacing the curb with far more energy than Nicholas would expect from someone who hadn’t slept since they’d left New Zealand.

“Bit too much like Old England for my tastes.”

Nearly thirty hours ago, right as Nicholas and Collins set out across the Library grounds, it had started sleeting, and Nicholas hadn’t been fully warm since. Thank god for Collins’s reminder that he needed a proper coat or he’d have fled in just his sweater. He had packed his backpack and Sir Kiwi’s carry case in the kind of dreamlike haze that made time go all syrupy, moving around his bedroom picking things up and putting them down again. He needed his toothbrush, obviously, but did he need his Church loafers? Did he need his linen dressing gown? What about cuff links?

“No, no, no,” Collins had said, pulling everything out of his backpack and shoving Nicholas onto the bed. “Sit. I’ll do it.”

Nicholas had been too tired and too woozy to argue. The only things he’d insisted on were his old copy ofThe Three Musketeers, a rolled-up blood collection bag, and several clean needles because he’d never traveledwithout them, plus a falsified prescription for insulin so TSA wouldn’t confiscate the syringes. He’d felt a stab of humiliation at how quick and efficient Collins was compared to him, but that humiliation had vanished when he’d had to practically carry Collins across half an acre of warded Library grounds.

He’d seen people go through the wards before, naturally he had, but they’d always been in cars, so the effects were both shorter-lived and less noticeable. But Collins had barely been able to keep his footing, his eyes rolling around in his head like a horse having a fit, muttering nonsense as Nicholas had dragged him through the tall wet grass toward the road, both of them stumbling under Collins’s not-inconsiderable weight. As soon as they’d passed the perimeter of the wards, Collins had fallen to his knees and retched, cursing, the knees of his trousers soaking in the sleet-wet grass. Then he’d got up, squared his shoulders like nothing had happened, and set off down the black pavement to find a car to steal.

Which gave Nicholas yet another reason to lift Collins’s NDA as soon as possible: he wanted to know where on earth he’d learned to hot-wire cars. Though that wasn’t what they were planning to do now, here in Boston. Now, they were getting a car the legal way, by borrowing one. Apparently.

It had been Esther’s idea not to take the final leg of their flight to Burlington, and instead remain in Boston and find their way to Vermont on their own.

“But the tickets—” Nicholas had said, on a plane somewhere above the American Midwest.

“Exactly,” said Esther. “You may trust this Maram person, but I for one have never even met her. I don’t like the thought of her knowing our every move, knowing our moves because sheplannedthem. This is our one chance to shake the trail a bit. We’ll end up where she wants us to, but we’ll do it our own way.”

“How?” Nicholas had demanded. “You need ID and passports andall that to rent a car, so it’d be as trackable as taking a plane would be. Same with buses, I imagine.”

Esther had been quiet, which meant she was conceding his point—and Nicholas had found himself quietly pleased that he already knew her well enough to recognize this. Twenty-four hours of air travel and concentrated conversation had rather speeded them past the initial stages of mere acquaintanceship, and a quarter of the way through his life, Nicholas thought he might be in the process of making his very first unpaid friend.

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