Page 7 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Isabel had been murdered, Abe said, by people who viewed the books as a commodity, like diamonds or oil—products to be bought and sold and killed for rather than a phenomenon to be guarded. Such people had been around as long as books had been around, and, like so many who dealt in commodities, book-hunters often took advantage of unrest and oppression in order to profit. Abe knew this better than most. His own paternal grandparents had possessed the same ability to hear magic that Abe had passed on to Joanna, and they’d owned a small theater in Budapest that was renowned for its incredible stage effects—actors passing through solid objects, set pieces floating with no visible wires, curtains engulfed in smokeless flame... Until 1939, when they were raided under the auspices of a law limiting the number of Jewish actors allowed in a theater.

Both husband and wife disappeared in the raid. So did all the books that had made their impossible special effects possible. All save for the few volumes the Kalotays had kept hidden in their home; volumes that made it to the United States with Joanna’s grandfather when he came over on a container ship in 1940 to live with an uncle in New York. Three books, secreted away in the false bottom of a trunk.

These three books still sat behind glass in Joanna’s basement, hard-won family heirlooms—and evidence of the danger in using magic too openly.

According to Abe, anyway. According to Cecily, the danger hadn’t been in using magic; the danger had been in living under a fascist regime. The stolen books, she maintained, were simply more Nazi spoils of war, more precious things they felt entitled to, like paintings, jewelry, gold fillings, lives. It was true that Abe had a frustrating tendency to blame historical atrocity on an underlying hunt for books: once, when Esther brought homeThe Cruciblein the eighth grade, he’d tried to suggest that the Salem witch trials may have been orchestrated by book-hunters, which had agitated Cecily nearly to tears.

“That’s the kind of logic bigots thrive on,” Cecily had said. “It makes it seem like the accusations were true, that the people killed for witchcraft were, in fact, practicing magic. But no: hatred and fear, that’s all it was. That’s all it ever is. Think of the lies told about the Jewish people, lies about blood ritual and human sacrifice... Hatred, fear, and the desire for control. Call it what it is, Abe.”

However, given both the family history and what had happened to Esther’s mother, Joanna supposed she couldn’t blame her father for his paranoia. It was a wonder he’d kept collecting after Isabel’s death, building the library back up until Joanna’s bookshelves now held two hundred and twenty-eight magical volumes.

Two hundred and twenty-nine, if you counted the brown leather book Abe had borne with him into the front yard when he died.

Joanna did not.

That book was an outlier in nearly every way. All books required blood to activate, but that one hadn’t simply accepted her father’s blood—it had sucked him dry. And it was the thickest book she’d ever seen, its pages crammed with text, which meant it had been written with so much blood it made her own blood run cold. She was also relatively certain that the thread binding the pages together was hair. Human. It was also one of only two books in their collection that was, to use her father’s words, “in progress”—a book whose spell was still ongoing.

Joanna did not know what the book did, because she could not read it. The only clear image was a small gold embossment of a book on the back cover. The words themselves eluded her eyes, they swam and darted like the colors in a kaleidoscope. This was what books in progress looked like to anyone but the reader, though Esther could have read it. Could have but wouldn’t. A book in progress couldn’t be destroyed, either: torn or burned or drowned. Only the person who’d first read the spell could end it. By choice—or by death.

Books in progress sounded subtly different from a resting book, too, the hum more a swarm, and this book, the one her father had hidden foryears and then carried with him to his death, sounded the strangest of all. It was deep like a rotting tooth.

When Abe had first died, she’d assumed the book was new to him, recently acquired. And, raised in the shadow of his paranoia, she’d assumed, too, that his death had not been accidental. It seemed certain that someone had given him that book on purpose; someone had killed him so they could take his books for themselves. The same fate that had met Isabel, and Joanna’s great-grandparents.

Her father had gathered their collection several different ways: by combing used bookstores and estate sales, attending rare books conventions, regularly ordering huge lots of antique books on eBay and hoping the boxes would arrive buzzing, and buying directly from people who knew what they were selling. He had kept detailed records of each transaction and in the days after his death Joanna had scrutinized every note he’d taken, looking for suspects—but then she had found a different record. A notebook she’d never seen before, hidden beneath his socks in his top dresser drawer.

It was an old composition notebook, the pages yellowed, and the dates went back twenty-seven years. Abe had been keeping this notebook since before she was born. There weren’t many entries, perhaps one or two per year, but as she read, it became very clear that the book in progress was not new to Abe at all.

Unbeknownst to Joanna, he’d had it her entire life, and for her entire life had been attempting to destroy it. He’d soaked it in turpentine and lit it on fire; he’d taken a chainsaw to it; he’d doused it in bleach. His last entry, made the day before he died, read,Curious what will happen if I add my own blood to the mix. Will it negate or interrupt the spell? Worth a try tomorrow.

Abe had been attempting to end whatever spell had been ongoing between the book’s pages. Instead, the book had ended him.

Now it lived atop the desk at the front of the rooms and Joanna took care never to touch it with her bare hands. Nor did she let it come too close to her book of wards, which were too precious to sully.

(Abe’s voice in her head, quizzing her as he’d done when she was young: “Not a book, technically. What do we call these early manuscripts?”

A codex.Semantics, Dad.

Precision of language, Jo.)

The book of wards—codex of wards—was in Latin, and despite its small size was the most powerful and rare in their collection; not only for what the book could do, which was considerable, but because unlike any of the others, whose ink eventually faded and with it the magic, the ink of the wards could be recharged. The codex had belonged to Isabel and at the time of her death had been in storage with a hundred other books, untouched by whoever had killed her. Three days after she died, Abe had packed up his daughter and driven without stopping across the border, across the continent, to his family’s old home in Vermont. That night he’d used the wards for the first time and had not let them drop for the rest of his life. Nor would Joanna.

She went to the sink and washed her hands thoroughly, then held them for a long while beneath the hot air of the electric dryer, until she felt every last remaining speck of moisture wick from them. Then she went to the herb cabinet and put a pinch of dried yarrow and vervain into a small bowl, which she brought back to the desk.

Herbs and plants were not strictly necessary to read the spells—blood alone would suffice—but they enhanced all magical effects, strengthening potency and increasing duration. There was never a single “correct” answer, but rather many possible factors, and Joanna had memorized everything from innate magical properties (vervain for protection, datura for knowledge and communication, belladonna for illusion) to physical correspondence (delicate herbs for delicate magic) to geographic specificity (chamomile for Polish spells, chincho for Peruvian). This last was helpful only if Joanna knew roughly where a book had come from, and yarrow was one of her most-used herbs because it was circumboreal and grew widely across the world.

She set the yarrow and vervain aside for now, picked up the tiny, leatherbound, fifteen-page codex, and spread it out on wooden support wings Abe had made. She let it fall carefully open. Silver knife in hand, she considered reopening her cut from earlier, but that would hurt unnecessarily, so she went to the usual spot on her finger and poked with the sharp tip until a drop of blood welled obediently to the surface. It was the brightest color in the room, more alive than even the body it had just quit. She held her bloody finger over the powdered herbs and let the bright red slide down her skin. Then she dipped her bleeding finger to the mixture and pressed the cut to the codex itself.

Unlike most books, which simply absorbed the drop of blood they were offered, the wards drank. As soon as she’d touched her finger to the page it began greedily swallowing her blood, her finger stinging with slight suction as if a tiny mouth was latched on, and the ink grew brighter, blacker, fiercer on the linen page. She’d been setting these wards all her life and had always found that suction comforting, but after Abe had died, she’d been terrified for months that the wards would turn on her, as that other book had on her father. They never did, though, and by now she was used to it again. As she fed the words, the Latin—a language she didn’t speak well—began to re-form beneath her eyes into something she understood. She took a slow, measured breath, and began to read.

“May the Word all-powerful grant unto this home a silence born of silence, and may the silence arouse to the heavens a flight of angels that none with ill intent shall see, for as the sky closes itself tight with a mantle of clouds so now shall angels obscure this home from the seeking eyes of the wicked world. Let life make dark the herbs and the life make dark these words, which make the Word...”

On and on she read, fifteen pages of angels and wings and malicious gazes, until the last sentence rang out and with a rustle like a million sweeping feathers, Joanna felt the wards reassert themselves. A slight popping sensation sounded in her already-buzzing ears, as if the sealaround the house was hermetic in science as well as etymology and magic. The house was again, as ever, unmappable, untraceable. Nobody with ill intent could find her.

In fact, nobody at all could find her. The wards—set each night at the same hour—made certain of that, circling the boundary of her property so that her driveway and the house beyond it were essentially invisible to anyone whose blood wasn’t in the warding book. It was an invisibility not only of the eyes but also of the senses and the mind: the location of the property could not even be thought about, much less sought and found. The people in town had known Abe and Joanna for almost three decades, yet if asked where the two of them lived, a blurry look would come over the neighbors’ faces and they’d shrug, smiling, baffled. “Up the mountain?” they’d suggest. Or sometimes, “Down the mountain?”

Not even Joanna’s mother could locate her if she came looking; not since she’d moved out and stopped adding her own blood to the wards each night. If Cecily wanted to visit, Joanna would have to go and get her and drive her in, which Abe had made her swear she would never do.

This promise, at least, she hadn’t broken.

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