Page 92 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“I had to fake-kill a guy to scare Nicholas into thinking people were after him,” said Collins. “Maram put a spell on my gun, it turns bullets into bees.”

“It’s a beautifully written spell,” Nicholas murmured.

“Real, living bees?” Joanna said with interest.

“I don’t know, they definitely buzzed,” Collins said, and waved his hand; the bees were beside the point. Sir Kiwi took this wave as an invitation and got off Nicholas’s foot to leap onto the couch next to Collins, circling once before settling next to his leg. Nicholas felt a stab of annoyance at her disloyalty. “Maram did it in her study, the spell, with Richard watching.” Collins cut his eyes over to Nicholas and then looked down, hand settling on Sir Kiwi’s head. “I didn’t like it, obviously, but I didn’t have a choice. And I couldn’t tell you. I’m sorry. I would have. I wanted to.”

Nicholas was having too many feelings to add forgiveness to the list. “What were the exact terms of your NDA?” he said.

“I couldn’t say anything about my personal life,” Collins said, ticking it off on his fingers, “I couldn’t say anything about the Library itself, and I couldn’t repeat a damn thing Richard or Maram said to me. Not in writing or aloud. That’s a pretty standard contract, by the way. Maram’s probably under a similar one. Anyway, she did the spell, gave me back my gun, Richard left the room, then she asked me...” He swallowed. “Asked me how I felt about watching you bleed to death.”

Nicholas wasn’t expecting this and it hit him somewhere between his throat and heart. “I—what? I’m not, I wasn’t—”

“Yeah, you were,” Collins said. “Slowly, maybe. But even in the few months I was with the Library I could see it was getting worse, Richard wasn’t giving you any time to recover. I know how much blood a person can lose before it becomes a problem. I knew it was becoming a problem.” Collins cleared his throat. “I told her I didn’t like it much.”

“Virtuous,” said Esther.

“That’s when Maram told me she had a plan,” he said, glaring at Esther. “A plan to end it—not only what was happening to you, but the Library itself. My contract, everyone’s contract, the whole hellhole of a place, collapsed.”

“Oh, fun,” said Esther. “There’s nothing I love more than being an unwitting participant in someone else’s big dramatic scheme.”

“No,” Nicholas said, shaking his head, “That’s not possible. Maram loves the Library. She always has. She sought the Library out, not the other way around, she convinced Richard to hire her as soon as she was out of Oxford.” He said it again because it bore repeating. “She loves the Library. And she loves Richard. What possible reason could she have for wanting to destroy it?”

Collins ran his fingers through Sir Kiwi’s fur, looking suddenly nervous. “I asked the same thing. And she looked at me for a long time, like she was deciding something. Then she went into her bedroom and came out with a photograph—an old one, like from a disposable camera, with that little orange date in the corner. The image was murky, kind of green, it looked like a rainy landscape... but there was a little bit of dried blood in the corner. When she rubbed it off, the image changed.”

He wasn’t looking at any of them anymore, seemingly focused on stroking Sir Kiwi, whose tongue was out with pleasure from the attention.

“It was a lady in a hospital bed,” he said. “Holding a new baby. It took me a second to realize the lady was Maram. She was a lot younger, but she looked pretty much the same.”

Esther raised a skeptical eyebrow. “What does a baby have to do with anything?”

Nicholas stared at her—at that dark, arched brow. He had seen that expression before. Seen it nearly every day of his life. He had even practiced it in the mirror. And he knew, all at once, why Esther had looked familiar when he’d first seen her through the spelled glass.

It was there, in the sweep of her jaw, the decisive bow of her upper lip, the heart-shaped hairline. Those faint lines in her forehead that would grow deeper as her eyebrows kept up their constant dance. It wasn’t a direct resemblance, less photo-image and more impressionist. But as soon as he noticed, he could not unsee it.

She looked like Maram.

Maram, who’d gathered all of them here together in this room in the middle of rural Vermont, who had appeared in Nicholas’s life at the same time Esther’s mother had vanished from hers.

“What?” Esther said, because Nicholas was staring at her—and so were Collins and Joanna. Esther’s face was arranged in a sort of helpless confusion, which was how Nicholas knew she wasn’t confused at all.

She, like Nicholas and Joanna, was starting to understand what Collins was about to tell them.

“The NDA didn’t let her explain anything straight out, so at the time, the only thing I understood about the photo was that Maram had a kid,” Collins said. “Big secret, sure, but not enough to make me trust her—and I told her so. She said to wait, she said soon I’d figure it out. I think that’s why she told Nicholas how to break into Richard’s office, not only so he’d recognize his eye, but so I’d see the Scribe-seeking spell and look through those mirrors to Antarctica. And I did figure it out. I realized Richard’s spell had finally found another Scribe: someone else to bleed, someone else to kill. And the person he’d found was Maram’s daughter.”

Part Three

Bloodline

28

Nicholas had no memory of his own parents and few photographs. The only pictures he had of his mother were from her theater days, playbills and old cast photos in which she was nearly always in costume, her smiling lips painted, her skin unnaturally smooth and matte, her dark hair curled. He’d read the text of all the plays she’d acted in and knew she’d often been typecast as an ingenue or a naïf, a lovely girl whose narrative tensions existed not for the sake of furthering her character but for dramatic or comedic effect—and this was the role she seemed to play offstage, too. A young woman unlucky enough to fall in love with the Library’s prized Scribe, her presence in Nicholas’s life like her presence in all her plays: a tragedy only insofar as it fed his own. He didn’t know her well enough to cast her as anything else. In all the photographs, she looked like nobody’s mother.

Maram did not look like anyone’s mother, either. As a kid he’d sometimes indulged in the fantasy that she’d marry Richard, tying herself legally to Nicholas forever and officially solidifying what he already thought of as their family unit, but he made the mistake of asking her once and she’d laughed at him.

“My relationship with your uncle succeeds because it’s based on our love for the Library,” she had told him. “Not our love for one another.”

“You don’t love him?”

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