Page 88 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Collins turned to Nicholas. “What next?”

“Now we wait for the pages to dry so Esther can bind them.”

“How long will that take?”

“Not long, thirty minutes? Forty?”

“Don’t put the book back downstairs yet,” Collins said, eyes locking with Joanna’s. His voice sounded strained, like he was fighting to keep it level. “Please. Not until the spell’s ready.”

“Why on earth not?” Nicholas said.

“I can’t tell you.”

Joanna exchanged a baffled glance with Esther, the book droning on the coffee table like a distant chainsaw. “Can I put it in another room, at least?”

“Anywhere except the basement,” said Collins.

Wanting to allay whatever inexplicable anxiety had hold of him, Joanna went to stash the book in the pantry, where its low, unpleasant buzz would be muffled by several doors, but she could still hear it faintly as she moved around the house. It was quieter, however; bearable.

Esther’s ink dried quickly, and Joanna watched in interest as Nicholas walked her through the process of binding. He ended up doing most of it himself, a quick coptic binding sewn with ordinary black cotton thread, the leather cover cut from an old jacket and stitched on instead of glued to save time. The binding itself did not matter much, Nicholas explained, so long as the book was bound. Ancient forms of magic, like scrolls or prelinguistic carvings, had once had to be similarly “finished” before the spell would take effect—the blood-mixed clay had to be fired, the kollesis perfectly aligned.

She watched Nicholas stitch the binding with a practiced hand and marveled at how many of her lifelong questions could be answered by the simple fact of his presence.

Nicholas put the final stitch in place and tied off the thread, then snapped it between his teeth and grinned up at Esther. “Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve written your first book.”

“Don’t congratulate me until we know it works,” Esther said, but Joanna could hear quite clearly that it would. The finished product looked very little like the other books in Joanna’s collection: its pages were comprised of cheap white printer paper and its binding was neat but very simple, its cover a stiff and unadorned leather. It wasn’t the appearance that Joanna cared about. She cared about the sound. And this homemade volume, written in a single day by her own sister’s hand with blood from her own sister’s body, hummed like a beehive in the heat of July.

“All right, let’s do this,” Collins said, his entire body practically twitching with anticipation. “Read it to me.”

Beneath the comforting sound of Esther’s spell in her hands, Joanna could still hear the ugly murmur of the book in the pantry, a tug on her mind’s ear. She set the new book back on the dining room table and turned toward the kitchen. “The vampire is distracting. Let me just put it down—”

“Leave it,” Collins snapped, and she whirled on him, stung by the harshness in his voice. He cleared his throat, making a clear effort to modulate his tone. “Come on, Joanna, please. Read me the spell first, then do whatever you have to do in the basement.”

A jitter of nerves surged through Joanna’s body. “Why don’t you want me to go in the basement?”

Collins blanched. “It’s not—I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.” Joanna was already moving away from him, away from Nicholas and Esther’s disconcerted faces and into the kitchen, ignoring Collins calling her name, his voice a full panicked pitch higher than she’d ever heard it. She didn’t stop to grab the book from the pantry; a sudden, certain instinct had shoved her concerns firmly elsewhere.

As she pushed open the wooden door in the basement, she heard immediately that something felt different—or sounded different. It was like listening to a song she knew by heart and realizing one of the instruments was missing from the background. Her pulse was racing even before she went to the desk and registered the off-kilter space of it.

The shelf that held the wards, a shelf that had never in her entire life been empty, was.

She fell to her knees, searching behind the desk, under it, around it, as if she’d carelessly knocked the wards off somehow, but she knew she wouldn’t have done that, she knew that wasn’t what had happened, and she ran back through the basement and up the stairs without even locking the door behind her. She burst back into the dining room and went straight to Collins, rocking to a stop in front of him, so breathless with rage that she could barely get the words out.

“What have you done?” she said.

Collins looked down at her, his face white, his pupils huge in his blue eyes. He swallowed hard but said nothing.

“What?” Nicholas said. “What are you talking about?”

She kept her eyes on Collins’s, refusing to look away. Her whole body was shaking with adrenaline and fear and hurt. “He took my book of wards,” she said.

Still Collins was silent. Nicholas said, “That’s ridiculous. He didn’t touch your wards.”

Collins cleared his throat. He shook his head. When he opened his mouth, his voice was rough.

“Yes,” he said. “I did. I took them. And I won’t give them back.”

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