Page 80 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“This is a vampire,” Nicholas said.

A patently ridiculous sentence, but still, Esther looked down at the book Joanna had brought up from the basement and shivered. It sat spread open on the coffee table, limned in soft light, and looking far more innocuous than it had any right to. She and Nicholas and Collins had all slept late, so it was already midmorning, a day as gray and chilly as the one before. The living room was warm with wood fire and stuffy from the sleep of three people, but Esther could feel the cold coming off the window glass. The closeness she’d felt with Joanna last night had ebbed; this morning her sister felt distant, perched on the piano bench with her long hair loose around her shoulders, her gaze fixed on the book in front of Nicholas, beautiful like a portrait and as remote. In the light of day, she saw that while Joanna was still unmistakably Abe’s daughter, with the same dimples and thin-bridged nose Esther had also inherited, she looked more like Cecily now that she was an adult. This, too, made Joanna feel far away.

Probably Esther shouldn’t have been surprised to learn she could still feel that same old jealous ache she’d felt as a child, searching her face in the mirror for signs of her own birth mother, her own family, but there it was, like a trick knee in the rain. Another ache was the thought of how physically close she was to Cecily, mere miles away, yet still so far. If her stepmother hugged her right now, she thought, she might start crying and never, ever stop.

“A vampire?” Joanna repeated.

Collins, who was standing in a corner slurping coffee, said, “Oh, shit.”

“Have you been touching this with your bare hands?” Nicholas demanded.

“My dad said to keep it away from blood, not skin,” Joanna said, sounding a touch defensive. “What do you mean, vampire?”

“A vampire is a fifteenth-century spell that protects activated books,” said Nicholas. “It kicks in as soon as anyone attempts to add their blood to the spell in progress, which your father must have done. I’m very sorry,” he added, and he did look sorry.

“You’re telling me he died because of some... some magical booby trap?”

“I’m sorry,” Nicholas said again.

Joanna put her head in her hands and Esther, feeling uncertain, went to sit beside her. Joanna turned toward her with a wretched expression, mouth twisted the way it had when she was a kid trying not to cry.

“He should have known better,” Joanna said, and Esther understood why this information was hitting her sister so hard. For Joanna, their father had always been the pinnacle of knowledge, yet he’d been killed by nothing more than a stupid mistake. A mistake that had taken Nicholas less than a minute to spot.

“Had you ever seen anything like this before?” Esther said. “A—what’d you call it, a booby-trapped book?” She already knew the answer and miserably, Joanna shook her head. “So dad couldn’t have known,” Esther said.

Joanna shook her head again, eyes wet, and Esther’s own throat tightened in response. She didn’t know what to say to comfort her. Her sister had been the one to find their father, after all. She had seen firsthand the brutal cost of Abe’s mistake.

“Joanna,” Nicholas said suddenly. Something in his voice had changed. “Where did your father get this book?”

Joanna looked up, eyes still damp. “I don’t know,” she said. “He never talked to me about it. I didn’t even know he had it until he died.”

Nicholas held the book out, his grip odd, like he was holding somethingrotten he’d wrestled from his dog’s mouth. “This is a Library book. Was a Library book.”

Esther’s pulse quickened immediately.

“How do you know that?” Joanna said.

“Did you notice this symbol?” he asked, opening to the back cover to show them a small, embossed gold book, and when Joanna nodded, “It’s not decorative, it’s functional. It’s the mark of a spell we call the expiration date—we put them on every book that comes through our collection.”

Esther pulled her feet up onto the bench and linked her arms around her knees, the urge of a frightened animal to make itself compact, reduce the target area. “What does it do?” she said. “The expiration date.”

“It’s an object-connected intuitive divination spell,” Nicholas said, and Esther saw that Joanna, despite everything, smiled at this, clearly pleased with the jargon. Nerd. Esther felt differently.

“Say that again in dumb-dumb, please.”

“The spell adheres to an object,” Nicholas said, “and conveys information directly into someone’s mind. In this case locational information, to Richard’s mind.”

“A tracking spell,” Joanna said.

“Exactly,” he said, pointing at her. “No, don’t look so alarmed, the Library can’t find us unless you take the book outside the boundaries of your wards. You haven’t, have you?”

“No,” Joanna said. “At least, I haven’t in the past two years. I don’t know about before. But what does the book itself do?”

“Well, I haven’t seen this exact book,” Nicholas said, “but I think—no, I’m certain—that Ihaveseen a draft of it.”

Collins, who’d been standing, sat down heavily on the closest surface, which was the record player. Cassettes rattled and a cardboard record cover fell to the floor and Joanna half rose, concerned—though for Collins or her record player, Esther wasn’t sure.

Nicholas was holding the spine very close to his right eye, squintingat the binding. “If this is the book I think it is... I’m relatively certain it’s human.”

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