Page 84 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Esther wriggled one of her arms out of her coat and rolled up her sweater sleeve. The equipment Nicholas had brought looked sterile and medical, out of place in the red, glowing candlelight, and Nicholas leaned over the center console to tie an elastic around her forearm with the practiced air of a doctor. Then he took her wrist in his cold fingers and aimed a syringe, pausing to look up at her, questioning. She nodded.

There was a slight sting as the needle pierced the soft skin. “Excellent,” he said. “You’ve got lovely veins, mine are squirrely. Now keep going.”

Esther started the prayer again, sinking into the warm, buzzing glow as blood began flowing from her arm. She felt a tugging pressure from somewhere inside her chest, a wide wash of sweetness that encompassed her whole body then focused down into her arm and came out vivid red through the tube and pooled in the bottom of the plastic bag. The last time she’d seen this much blood was when she and Pearl killed Trev and pushed him through a mirror. Had that really been only a few days ago? She’d confessed to that secret; both Joanna and Nicholas knew, and telling them had removed some of the weight.

She thought of Collins, then, of how long he’d been silent and alone. She was doing this for him, after all; pouring out a piece of her heart so that he, too, could share of himself.

She finished the prayer and no one spoke for a while, all three of them attuned to that inner sound, the endless, honeyed hum. This was the first time Esther was hearing it, yet she felt, somehow, that she’d been listening to it forever. That perhaps it was the first sound she’d ever heard, and perhaps would be the last, when her time came.

“How old were you?” Esther asked Nicholas eventually. “When you first bled like this?”

“Eight,” said Nicholas. “I was a late bloomer.”

It was meant as a joke, and Esther smiled dutifully, though she did not find it funny. Nicholas should not have been forced to do this at eight; just as Esther should have been given the option. She found that she desperately wanted to begin writing, to see how the feeling might change as the ritual changed, if the power would ebb and flow or stay the same, this steady pour of syrup.

“This ought to be enough,” Nicholas said, leaning into the front seat again. “Here we go—” He did something deft and slightly uncomfortable to the needle in Esther’s arm and suddenly it was out, though the feeling, that beautiful thrum, lingered in its wake. Nicholas said, “You all right?”

He was pressing a wad of paper towel to the bright bubble of blood that sprang up in the needle’s wake, his cold fingers gentle. The memory of that all-encompassing feeling still pulsed inside her. She wanted more.

Nicholas tilted the bag to the candlelight. “You’re very well-oxygenated, look how red this is.”

“This is more clinical than I thought it would be,” Joanna said.

“It isn’t always,” said Nicholas. “Sometimes the work demands a more specific method of getting the blood out.” He weighed the bag casually in one palm like he was measuring flour for a cake. “Anything to do with heat or fire, for example, you’ve got to burn yourself open. Which is difficult, since burned flesh tends to want to meld, not part.” He glanced at Esther’s face and laughed. “Man up, Esther. No one’s coming at you with a lit match. Yet.”

Esther’s annoyance over thisman updid a pretty good job of distractingher from the thoughts that had been twisting her expression. She hadn’t been thinking of herself. She’d been thinking of Nicholas again, of what had been done to him.

Nicholas, oblivious, was handing the bag of blood up to Esther. “Let’s go inside and char some herbs.”

They blew out the candles and left the truck with its cab still draped in fabric. In the kitchen, Nicholas turned out all the lights and lit more candles, and the three of them clustered around the stove. They blackened a pot of herbs and Nicholas stirred them with a wooden spoon while Esther poured the blood in slowly. It was so similar to the picture she’d always had in her head of evil witches that she almost laughed—and then she started feeling things again. The stirring of translucent wings. Everything was dim and flickering and the surface of the ink was so dark it reflected the candlelight back at her, a pool of red-tinged night shimmering with stars.

“That should do it,” Nicholas said eventually. Esther took a long, slow breath and stopped stirring, letting the feeling fade as the liquid calmed and stilled. “Now comes the harder bit. Actually writing.”

26

Joanna supposed it made sense that Esther did not in fact write the book—she copied it. It was Nicholas who did the actual writing, typing away on the desktop in the dining room until he finished a document full of the kind of looping, recursive sentences Joanna would recognize anywhere, nonsensical on their own but accruing meaning with each repetition:... and from the closed mouth is a closed chain, and the closed chain opens like a mouth. Every link is a mouth that opens like the closed mouth will open.

“This reminds me of your emo poetry phase,” Esther said, skimming the first few pages as they were spit from Joanna’s dusty printer.

“Bad enough you stole my diaries,” Joanna said, and plucked the pages from Esther’s hands to look at them herself. “Worse that you remember what was in them.”

“It isn’t poetry,” said Nicholas, leaning back in his chair and looking miffed. “And let the record show that if I did write poetry, it would be excellent. This is magic. I might be able to teach you the basics of ink-making in a morning, but the words themselves took me years to master, so show some respect, please.”

“It’ll work, though?” Esther said. She set the stack of paper on the dining room table beside the well of blood-ink. In the light of the 1970s faux chandelier, the ink was as dark as her eyes. “Even though the words didn’t come from me?”

“Yes,” said Nicholas. “In fact, I wonder if it’ll be strengthened by the collaboration. Or maybe that only works if one of us gives our life to the writing of it. There’s a lot I don’t know about working with another Scribe.”

“There’s a lot I don’t know about this house,” Collins said, and Joanna jumped. He’d come up behind her without warning and was standing at her back, nearly a head taller and twice as broad as she was, though he slouched a bit as she turned, as if to make himself less intimidating. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You don’t,” Joanna said, and it was true. Despite his size and a certain sense of pent-up energy about him, there was something oddly calming about his presence. Nicholas was all sardonic drama, Esther all activity and energy, and Joanna herself had already burst into tears twice today—Collins was easily the least reactive person in the house.

“I was just wondering if maybe you’d give us a tour of the place,” Collins said. “While Esther’s writing.”

“You’ve seen most of it,” Joanna said.

“I mean your collection,” Collins said. “Your books.”

Nicholas had been folding and numbering the pages that Esther was preparing to write on, but at this he looked up.

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