Page 86 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Joanna found she was trembling slightly, taken aback by her own forceful reaction. It was catching up to her, having so many people in her space, and she felt like her heart rate hadn’t settled since they’d arrived. But she took a deep breath and moved to the sink to wash her hands, letting the sound of running water and the hot rasp of the air dryer fill the uncomfortable silence her outburst had left in its wake. When her fingers were perfectly dry, she opened the wards to their first page, calming a little at the familiar feel of the age-softened pages and the tight scrawl of the writing inside.

Nicholas stayed a step back, bending at the waist with his hands in his pockets to look as she showed him each of the fifteen pages one by one.

“Amazing,” he said. “It’s identical to the ones the Library uses, except my father edited ours so communication spells could pass through. Mirror-spells and the like—they wouldn’t work here.”

“But I told you my mother put something through a mirror the other day.”

“Nothing can come back through, though. In the Library something could. Where did your father get these again?”

“They were Esther’s mother’s. Her family had them.”

“Curious,” said Nicholas.

“Joanna, would you add my blood to the wards while we’re down here?” Collins said. “So I can go outside without falling over?”

Joanna answered without checking herself for courtesy. “No.”

“Come on,” Collins said. “Someone’s gotta walk the dog.”

“Hello,” said Nicholas, raising his hand.

“Okay, but someone’s gotta walkme,” Collins said. “I can’t stay cooped up in the house all day, I need a little exercise or I’ll go nuts. Please? I’m begging you. I’m the only one who’s bound by the wards here. Plus, you can take me off them anytime.”

Joanna examined him. He did seem too large to be confined, and he’d been pacing the house all morning—stomping up and down the stairs, rattling around in the kitchen, wrestling way below his weight class with Sir Kiwi. Too, there was something about him she implicitly trusted, and it wasn’t (she swore to herself) because he was good-looking. Good-looking, blue-eyed men were usually the least trustworthy of anyone—how many times had she read of a villain with “icy blue eyes”? But Collins’s eyes weren’t icy at all. They were homey, soft, an old-denim blue like a pair of perfectly worn-in jeans, and they were focused on her now, full of hope. She found she didn’t want to say no to him. But...

“No,” she said again.

Collins gave Nicholas a beseeching look and Joanna recalled the way she and Esther used to ask their mother for something and then move on to Abe when Cecily said no, hoping for a more satisfactory response. She could tell that in this situation, she was Cecily.

“I agree it doesn’t seem entirely fair that he’s the only one confined to the house,” said Nicholas, and then both of them were looking at her, two sets of pleading eyes. Only her family had ever been on these wards—but then, until recently, only her family had ever been in the house at all. Changes were happening whether she was ready for them or not, and after years of resistance, it was easier now to give in.

“Fine,” she said, picking up the silver knife from the desk. “Give me your hand.”

Collins came forward very quickly, as if afraid she’d change her mind, and rolled up his sleeve unnecessarily. His hand, she saw, was like the rest of his body, large and strong and well-formed. It was lightly calloused, with taut veins that ran along the backside and up his muscular forearm, and his fingers were long and blunt-tipped, his nails well-kept in theirbroad beds. Joanna stared down, feeling the warm weight of his palm in hers, until Nicholas cleared his throat and she jerked back to attention.

She swallowed hard and pressed the knife into Collins’s pointer finger, then watched as he pressed it to the back of the codex right next to her own bloody fingerprint. Right where Abe and Cecily’s blood had once stained the page. She thought she felt the wards shiver as they shifted to accommodate him and he stepped back, staring down at his still-bleeding finger as if he couldn’t meet her gaze.

“I’m sorry,” Collins said, voice quiet. “I know how hard all this is for you.”

Joanna flexed the hand that had been holding his. “It’s all right,” she said.

She closed the wards and set them back behind their glass door on the desk, above the vampire book, which on Nicholas’s insistence was tightly wrapped in an old jacket. She could still hear it, though, a deep, discordant gong cutting through the peaceful hum of the other books, a wrong note played over and over.

Nicholas’s attention, too, was on the book.

“Do you mind,” he said, “if I take this back upstairs with me? I’d like to have another look at it.”

“Be my guest,” said Joanna.

Upstairs, Esther was bowed over her work, the finished pages accumulating across the dining room table to dry. Nicholas gave them a professional once-over, looking down his nose like the judge of a pony show, saying, “Very nice, very nice, oh,verynice,” until Esther reached out to shove him away.

“You’re making it extremely hard to concentrate,” she said. “What if I copy a word wrong and accidentally turn Collins into a chicken?”

“I did notice you’re out of eggs,” Nicholas said to Joanna.

Collins himself had vanished with Sir Kiwi as soon as they’d comeback upstairs, slamming the door behind him like he couldn’t wait to get out. As she watched him leave, Joanna had felt a flicker of dejection that she decided was jealousy. She would have liked to take a walk, herself, but was nervous at the thought of leaving Esther and Nicholas alone in the house, writing their magic. It was partially her paranoia—she didn’t want to leave them without supervision—and partially her desire to be included even though she was powerless to help.

After a while she contented herself with going out onto the cold porch, where she was somewhat disappointed to find that Collins was nowhere to be seen—he must have taken Sir Kiwi into the woods. But she smiled in delight when she saw that the cat was waiting for her, twining around the railing with his tail raised. She’d been worried the unfamiliar smells of dog and people would scare him off.

---