Page 74 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“Oh, great,” said Collins. “Give me to an amateur.” But his eyes were crinkling at the corners.

Esther, on the other hand, was silent, as she had been on this topic since Nicholas had made the connection on the plane over New Zealand. He could feel the disbelief rolling off her in waves, and underneath it, something else. Something tense and bitter that didn’t make sense to him. Shouldn’t she be pleased, to be told that what she’d always thought was a weakness was in fact the deepest form of power?

If anyone should be unhappy, Nicholas thought, it was him. And there was a small, childish part of himself that did not like to believe he wasn’t, after all, special. Unique. The one and only.

But when you were the one and only, it meant you were alone.

Nicholas had been alone all his life. The past few blurred days had been dreadful: a complete upheaval of his entire life, horrific revelations he hadn’t even begun to process, and he wasn’tsickly,Collins, but he couldn’t deny he felt like absolute wrung-out shit. Yet for all that, he was also more exhilarated than he’d been in years. Almost giddy. Granted, he’d lost a lot of blood, suffered a multitude of shocks, and barely slept, so his emotions mightn’t be entirely rational—but still.

In helping him escape Maram had proved once and for all that she cared about him; he and Collins were maybe, possibly, becoming friends; he and Esther could maybe, possibly, become friends; Sir Kiwi was safe; and he wasn’t alone.

“Hey, Nicholas?” Collins said in the mirror.

“Hey, Collins?”

“It’s fucking creepy when you smile to yourself like that.”

Nicholas smiled wider. Esther took an exit too fast. Collins braced himself against the window.

23

Joanna was standing at the kitchen counter trying to open a well-sealed jar of tomatoes when she heard an engine. She froze, jar in hand, a butter knife poised to pry off the flat metal of the underlid, and listened. There it was: a rattle that sounded closer than the occasional whoosh of the passing trucks she could hear in winter when the deciduous trees dropped their muffling leaves and the sounds from the county road made it down her long driveway.

She put down the tomatoes.

Surely it was a trick of the wind, a noise somehow carried from the far-off street. Her senses strained at their leashes, verifying what a dog could’ve sensed without twitching an ear, but instead of passing, fading, disappearing, the sound was growing closer. It was an engine—a car—a loud one—and it was on her driveway.

But that wasn’t possible. She took a step and stopped, took a step, and stopped. Her heart was suddenly beating so fast she felt breathless. She did not know what to do. It was past seven and she’d just come up from setting the wards, she’d felt the tingle and swish as they reasserted themselves, so this sound, this car, this coming-closer,was not possible.

Her palms had grown damp in the space of seconds. She wiped them on her jeans. There was a hunting rifle in the back hall closet, and she moved swiftly to retrieve it, though even as she shook out bullets from the age-softened box and fed them into the barrel, she recoiled at the idea of actually shooting anyone. How much time did she have to get used to the idea? A minute? Less?

The vehicle was growling closer.

Joanna went to the door and turned off the hall light. From this angleshe could see the dark driveway through the small, four-paned window but couldn’t herself be seen. The rifle felt slippery in her sweating hands, and she could hear herself panting in quick gasps. Panic wouldn’t help. She forced herself to assume a posture of calm, relaxing her shoulders, unclenching her jaw, willing her body to trick her mind, but as she did so, the headlights of a car flashed through the thin branches and another surge of adrenaline knotted any muscle she’d managed to relax. The car rounded the bend in the drive and came fully into view.

Joanna leaned forward, desperate to catch a glimpse of the passengers through the car’s front windshield, but the sun had set, and it was too dark to see anything until the car rolled to a stop by her truck and the porch light illuminated two figures in the front seat.

One of them was big and square, and the other was small with lots of dark hair. That was all Joanna could make out at first. The big one drew her gaze, but even as her attention snagged fearfully on wide shoulders, another part of her was sluggishly attempting to make sense of the other passenger. Their silhouette struck her deep in the pit of her stomach, and she lurched with sudden vertigo. Her body had recognized the driver before her brain had caught up.

Then her brain caught up.

The driver turned toward the light and Joanna saw, clearly and unbelievably, that it was her sister.

Esther’s face registered in every single part of Joanna’s consciousness at once. It was like a flash bomb had gone off inside her head, her ears ringing, her heart slamming. Esther. Esther washere,in the driveway. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. Esther had not disappeared. Esther turned off the car’s engine.

Joanna couldn’t move, could barely breathe, and she jumped an inch off the ground when the rifle slipped from her fingers and hit the floorboards with a thud. She picked it back up, shaking. She watched as her sister—her sister, here, home—ran her hands through her hair and said something to the person beside her. Then she climbed out of the frontseat and the slam of the car door was so loud, so tangible, it ricocheted through Joanna’s body like a shot.

She rocked back from the door, her free hand pressed to her chest, the other still clutching the gun. How many times had she dreamed of this? Of her sister, come home? Yet the only thing she could do was peer through the window like it was a television screen, like whatever was on the other side couldn’t possibly come through onto this side, into her life.

Esther was out of the car now and standing by the hood. She gazed at the house, her face still and unreadable in the shadows—and older, grown-up. Behind her, a third person Joanna hadn’t noticed spilled out of the back seat, along with a small puff of fur, but Joanna couldn’t tear her eyes from her sister.

Esther took a breath so deep that it was visible in the rise and fall of her chest, then turned and went around to the passenger side of the car. She opened the door and leaned in to tug the other person upright. Both the other people appeared to be men, and although the big one was much, much taller than Esther, and much, much broader, he clung to her shoulder like he would fall over without it, which probably, thanks to the wards, he would.

The back seat passenger, however, seemed impossibly unaffected. He was pacing the dark front yard, his face tilted toward the sky rather than the house, and he didn’t seem dizzy or confused at all.

They were perhaps three truck-lengths from the house and she could hear their voices though she couldn’t make out what they were saying. The man pacing the yard had made it to the tree line, and Esther called loudly to him, waving him back. Even without understanding the words, her sister’s voice hit Joanna like a hammer against glass. It was unchanged, that voice. It sounded like Joanna’s childhood, sunlit and safe and gone.

Both Esther and the other man were standing on either side of the big one now, supporting his weight. They were coming toward the porch and its yellow glow. They were at the porch steps. If either of them looked upnow they would see Joanna’s pale face staring through the glass, but both were intent on their companion, getting him to bend his legs to climb the stairs. They managed to haul him up the first one. Then the second. Two steps left.

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