Page 15 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Esther let out a whoosh of breath. She was relieved. She was disappointed. She was furious. If she was the punching type, right about now was when her knuckles would be bleeding from the shatter of silver shards. Instead, she slammed the notebook against the mirror loud enough that the bang echoed around the tiles but not hard enough to do any damage. She knocked against it like a bird who mistook the glass for sky.

WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU?

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

“Fine,” Esther spat, and grabbed her notebook. She hadn’t been expecting an answer, not really, but the impenetrability of it infuriated her.

She was turning to leave when she saw it.

A distortion. A shimmer like a pebble thrown into a pond, ripples moving outward, the reflection in the mirror still intact but wavering. Esther’s breath caught. She turned back.

Surfacing through the glass was something flat and cream-colored. It was paper. Very nice paper, thick and toothy, expensive. It came through the mirror and dropped into the sink, where leftover droplets of water immediately began to curl its edges. Esther snatched it before the ink could smear, a few sentences in a gorgeous, old-fashioned cursive, though the letters were harried and dashed-off. At the bottom was what looked like a bloody fingerprint. She read it with shaking hands.

Esther: I am begging you to trust me. You and those you care for are in danger. Go home to your sister immediately. There is a cargo planeleaving in three days and you must be on it. Take these and do not communicate through the mirror again. I am not the only one watching.

Before these words had fully registered, something else was coming through the glass: a manila envelope, also bloodied in one corner. Esther opened it, her breath coming so fast she could hear it echo around the empty tiled room, and pulled out a small, navy blue bound booklet and several pieces of shiny, printed paper.

She turned the booklet over and blinked. It was a passport. A U.S. passport, and a stack of plane tickets. These, too, were stained minutely with the blood that had allowed them to pass through the mirror.

She flipped to the first page of the passport and found her own face staring back—her face as it had appeared just last night, inquisitive, staring into the mirror but superimposed on a gray background. Someone had taken a photograph of her in the mirror. Someone had made her a passport under the nameEmily Madison,an eerie, WASPy facsimile ofEsther Kalotay.The tickets were also for Emily Madison, and they were for three days from now. They traced a route out of Antarctica, through New Zealand, to Los Angeles, Boston, and, finally—to Burlington.

The little airport closest to her childhood home.

She sank to the floor, the tickets quaking in her hands, her mind spinning. She was so dizzy with confusion she almost missed the last thing that came through, but the clank of plastic on porcelain alerted her that something had fallen into the sink. She stood and found a plastic vial with milliliter measurements on the side, tightly shut. Inside was three milliliters of red liquid.

Blood.

There was a label on the vial, filled with cramped writing. That same graceful hand in miniature.

This is the path. It will provide the natural next step.

5

The water in Nicholas’s wineglass was beginning to bubble.

Around him, the other guests—each clutching identical glasses—broke into excited murmurs, and Nicholas had a brief bird’s-eye appreciation for the strangeness of the scene: a group of twenty people in dinner jackets and cocktail dresses standing among the sleek white leather sofas and black lacquer cocktail tables of this penthouse drawing room, the red damask walls boasting a Rothko, an Auerbach, and a splendid view of the glittering London night outside—yet everybody in attendance was staring with rapt attention not at the art or out the window or at one another, but into their wineglasses.

Everybody except Nicholas.

At the front of the room, posed dramatically in front of the black marble hearth, the host of the evening, Sir Edward Deacon, stood with a book in his hands, droning on and on in his florid, phlegmy voice. The guests’ murmurs changed to gasps of delight and awe as the bubbles in their water turned from clear to turbid, taking on first a brownish, mineral cast and then deepening in hue as the host kept reading. People had begun lowering their noses to their glasses, inhaling the now-tannic bite and whispering foolish things like “Red! It’s really turning red!” and “My god, it smells like wine!”

From just over Nicholas’s shoulder came a long, inelegant snort, and he glanced around to see his bodyguard leaning to sniff his own glass, clearly imitating the other guests, and doing a poor job of it. For one thing, Collins was the only person in the room holding the wineglass by the bowl rather than the stem. For another, despite the decent suit Nicholas had picked out for him, he still looked like a last-minute extra in a filmabout the Boston Irish mafia, someone’s daughter’s pugilistic boyfriend maybe. Quite at odds with the smart milieu.

Sir Edward ended the reading, finally, letting the last word ring out in a sort of squawking triumph, and the guests quieted down, raising their eyes from the liquid in their glasses—now a dark, nearly violet burgundy—to their host. Sir Edward took his time shutting the book, clearly savoring the anticipation of his audience, then he held the volume aloft in one hand. His butler, who’d been standing to one side with a small, slightly bloodied dish of powdered herbs and a full wineglass on a tray, took a step forward. Sir Edward took the glass, replaced it with the book, and the butler stepped back again.

“My dear friends,” said Sir Edward. “You hold in your hand the founding vintage of one of the finest winemakers in the world—a glass of wine that no one living can claim to have tasted.” He paused, eyes sweeping the room. “No one, that is, except for us. It is my absolute pleasure to share with you tonight this 1869 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.” He paused again and everyone gingerly applauded, mindful of their glasses. “As many of you know, this project has been years in the making, ever since I first dreamed it up in the limestone vineyards of Burgundy—and it’s a dream I never could have realized without the cooperation and collaboration of Richard Maxwell and Dr.Maram Ebla.”

Richard was across the room from Nicholas but easy to see because of his height, and Nicholas felt his jaw clench as he watched his uncle incline his head, smiling, to accept the light applause. Maram was probably doing the same at his side, but she was obscured from Nicholas’s view by a particularly broad man in a last-season Tom Ford jacket.

“And now, let us raise our glasses in a toast.”

All around Nicholas, elegant arms were lifted, but he couldn’t bring himself to move.Cooperation and collaboration, what bollocks. Sir Edward might’ve had the idea, just as Richard might’ve brokered the deal and Maram might’ve sent people to France to gather grape leaves and vineyard soil, but Nicholas was the one who’d spent nearly six months draftingthe actual book; he was the one with the barely healed scar still pulling at the crook of his elbow; he was the one down nearly two pints of blood.

The toast had ended and now everyone was swirling their wine and raising their glasses to their lips, sipping, exclaiming, congratulating, patting Richard on the back, shaking Sir Edward’s hand—and not a single one of them would be in this room if it weren’t for Nicholas, and not a single one knew it.

He turned to Collins, who had a mouthful of wine and did not seem happy about it. “I’m getting air,” he said. “Don’t follow me.”

Collins spat his wine back into his glass.

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