Page 110 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

She went down the hallway, letting herself breathe, struggling to keep her thoughts straight and opening the door on autopilot. She was so distracted that she could scarcely process what had come in along with a gust of chilly air.

The cat.

He had walked into the house, past her legs, without even glancing up, as if he’d done it a hundred times, and she stared after him, dumbfounded, as he sauntered toward the kitchen. Despite everything that was happening, despite what her mother had just told her, she found herself smiling. This had to be a sign, didn’t it? A sign that everything would be all right?

She heard Collins say, “Oh, hey, kitty cat!” Then, “What’d you do with Joanna?”

“Jo?” Her mother called.

She shut the door again and rested her forehead against it for a breath, then turned and followed the cat. She found him crouched on the linoleum next to Collins though not quite within arm’s reach, his ears flat, staring across the room at Sir Kiwi, who was whining excitedly and straining against the hold Cecily had on her.

“So Isabel,” she said to her mother. “Maram. She’s been protecting Esther. That’s what all this was for.”

Cecily readjusted her grip on Sir Kiwi, staring at the cat. “Your father was madly in love with Isabel,” she said. “Even after we got together, I think he believed she might come to her senses and return to him, to Esther. And when that never happened... I don’t think he ever trusted her again, not on any real level. He thought she wanted to keep Esther a secret from Richard not just to protect her, but also because it gave her power over him. He thought Esther was another card in Isabel’s deck, to be pulled when the time was right.”

“You trust her, though,” Collins said. To Joanna, it sounded like a question. “You think she’s on our side.”

Cecily shook her head. “Isabel’s loyalty has always been to the Library.”

“But not anymore, right?” Joanna could hear the smallness of her own voice and she tried again, louder, stronger. “She wanted to finish what she started when she gave you that book. She wants to keep Esther safe.”

Cecily looked up. Her face was bloodless, her eyes hooded and wet. She said, “I don’t know what she wants.”

35

It was true, what Richard had said. Nicholas’s nightmares were bad enough.

He did not need to add the feeling of Esther pulling her arm from his grasp, or the way Richard’s face hardened as his finger bent around the trigger. He didn’t need the memory of that unmistakable crack, the collision of firing pin and powder, the acrid scent of an explosion, didn’t ever need to relive the way he felt as he watched Esther pitch forward, his own knees barely holding him up, his heart a clenched fist as he watched her body fall.

And like so many nightmares, this one wasn’t making logical sense.

Instead of keeling over onto the ground, Esther’s body kept moving through the air—forward, not down. As if she wasn’t falling at all, but leaping. Nicholas’s ears were buzzing in the aftermath of the gunshot, a buzz that grew louder and louder, and maybe this wasn’t a nightmare after all but a dream, because there were bees in the air, fat droning honeybees the size of bullets. One of them whirred past Nicholas’s eye, black legs laden with pollen, and behind it, Esther’s body was colliding with Richard’s.

Maram had spelled Richard’s gun just as she’d spelled Collins’s. The bullets were useless.

Richard let out an inarticulate roar as the propulsion of Esther’s low tackle sent him staggering backward into his desk, papers flying as his arms swept the desktop for vain purchase. There was no use, he was going down. He hit the ground with a jarring thud as Maram leaped away from him and behind the desk.

“Nicholas,” she shouted, “Nicholas, the portrait, the frame!”

Nicholas was exhausted. His brain was foggy with lack of sleep, his red blood cells were far from replenished, and though Esther had not actually been shot his body was still reacting as if she had, shocked and shaking. But even the confusion of the past few minutes had not managed to erase years of following Maram’s orders, and he acted on instinct, moving without quite having decided to.

He vaulted toward the portrait as Richard backhanded Esther away and struggled to his feet, but she wrapped her arms around his legs, dragging behind him as he lurched forward. He tried to kick her off. She clung on, and he fell back to his knees as Nicholas barely skirted his grasp and got behind the desk. Maram was standing below that bloodstained painting, one hand hovering over the canvas, her face a mask of urgency.

“It’s covered in protective spells,” she said, “I can’t touch it.”

Nicholas grabbed at the frame and pulled, but the painting was anchored to the wall and barely gave beneath his scrabbling fingers. Behind him he heard Esther grunt in pain, and when he turned, he saw that Richard had fought free of Esther’s attempts to keep him on the ground and was lurching to his feet. Esther was on her hands and knees, maybe dazed from the blow that had opened the dripping red cut above her eye, and Nicholas had a nonsensical shock of incredulity that Richard would waste a Scribe’s blood like that. Then he heard a click and felt the nudge of cold steel against his hand.

Maram was handing him her gun.

“Shoot it,” she said. “Shoot the bone.”

Nicholas, who’d been under armed guard all his life, had been around many guns yet never held one, much less shot one. But he didn’t have time to doubt himself. Richard was behind the desk now and bowling into Maram, who was much smaller than he was, and unlike Esther had neither years of training nor any real strength to speak of. Richard held her tight against his chest, almost as if they were embracing, her arms pinned to her side.

“Why are you doing this?” he said. His voice was anguished but hiseyes had never looked more like the eyes of the man in the portrait: cold, glittering, fathomless. He hadn’t seen the gun Nicholas was levering to hold against the yellowed femur bone at the base of the frame, his fingers curling around the grip.

“I’m sorry,” Maram gasped. “I have to do what’s best for—”

“For who?” Richard slammed her against the wall, her head connecting with a hollow thud. “For Nicholas? For this girl? Not for yourself—you could’ve lived forever with me but instead you chosethis, and why? For whom?”

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