Page 22 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

If this was true, then there was more than one person behind the glass. And if she decided shedidtrust the mirror, it meant she was likely trusting one single person of several, or many. And there was at least one here at the base, too, with the book that activated the glass from this side. They were communicating, passing things back and forth.

So Esther’s first step should be finding the person on this side—the person with the book.

She wished suddenly and fiercely that her sister was here, not only because Joanna was a book-bloodhound who’d have sniffed out the magic in ten minutes flat, but because Joanna was, if nothing else, an expert in these things. And Esther badly needed an expert.

There’d be physical evidence of the spell marking someone’s body, but cuts and scrapes were hardly uncommon around here—Esther had a recently healed gash on her own ring finger from a slipped screwdriver, and most books needed nothing more than a pinprick and dollop of blood. Looking for injuries wouldn’t help. She opened her laptop and waited for her work email to load, then pulled up the list of all the new employees that had been circulated a few weeks before. What she was looking for, though, she didn’t know, and she closed it again in frustration.

The only action she seemed to be allowed was a decision.

To use these plane tickets, or not. To trust the person in the mirror, or not. They had quoted Gil, which in some way, shape, or form meant theyknewher, beyond even her name. But you could be known by your enemy.

Or whoever was on the other side had simply seen her tattoos and used them against her.

It seemed so unfair that just when she’d decided to stay, someone else told her to leave. And she couldn’t pretend any longer that the mirrors had nothing to do with her, which meant her father’s paranoia had been well-founded all along.

She had known that, though. Deep down.

She’d tested it only once before, at twenty-two, after three years of painstakingly cobbling together an electrician’s license from four different institutions. Her last school had been in Spokane, Washington, and she’d been dating a man she liked, though not as much as she liked Pearl: a journalism student named Reggie who’d moved to Spokane purely because that town loved basketball and so did he.

In late October she had broken her month-to-month lease and packed what few things she was taking with her, as she did every year, this time into a little Honda she was planning to drive across the border to Vancouver. Reggie had cried when she’d told him she was leaving and unexpectedly she had cried, too, and had let herself be convinced to come for one last dinner the day she was supposed to leave at eleven. She’d stay till ten thirty, she figured, and then start driving.

Instead, at ten o’clock, post-coital and exhausted, she had curled in the circle of his arms and fallen asleep. She hadn’t exactly made the decision to test her father’s warnings and stay; she simply hadn’t left. It was a non-choice, an action that had been taken in the passive voice, so she didn’t have to think about it or face what she was doing.

She had woken to the sound of someone screaming in her ear.

It took her a moment of panic to realize it wasn’t a scream but rather the building’s shrieking fire alarm system—and it took her another moment to see there was somebody standing beside the bed. Still bleary withshaken-off sleep, she glanced down, but Reggie was right next to her, blinking in gummy confusion. The person in their bedroom was a man, large, white, blond, holding a gun.

At that point she’d been moving around for nearly four years and had picked up some skills along the way. One of them was reading people, which she’d always been good at but had since honed to an art after realizing that if she didn’t make friends fast, she’d never have them. And she could see on this man’s face, scantly lit through the window by a distant streetlamp, that he was as startled by the alarm and her wakefulness as she was. The window was wide open, cold air coming in. It was right before dawn.

“What is this?” said Reggie. He was a big guy with a deep voice, and she saw the stranger tense. The fire alarm blared on and beside her, Reggie had gone very, very still. “You looking for money, man? What are you looking for?”

The man raised the gun. “Get out of the bed,” he said, gesturing at Reggie. “I’m not looking for money, I’m looking for your girlfriend. If you get up and out of here, you won’t get hurt.”

“Do you know him?” Reggie asked Esther. She shook her head. Her voice was still in dreamland, inaccessible, but she was certain the man’s face was completely unfamiliar. She would have remembered him, with his cleft chin and nearly invisible blond eyebrows. She thought she saw a square outline of something tucked into the front pocket of his thin black sweatshirt; the outline of what could be a book. But she was seeing things, she had to be seeing things.

“Get up,” the blond man said once more, and then, when neither of them moved, he brought the gun down hard on Reggie’s head. Esther screamed and Reggie fell back against the pillow, blood dripping down his face like a torn seam. He struggled to sit up and the man hit him again. This time Esther saw the whites of his eyes as they rolled back and he didn’t stir, unconscious. She was shaking uncontrollably now and raised both her hands in the air.

“Good,” the man said, and grabbed her by the wrist. His touch felt like a manacle. “Now come with me.”

Suddenly, someone started banging hard on the apartment door. “Fire department!” A man’s voice yelled, muffled but audible. “Open up! Anyone home?”

Esther met the stranger’s gaze.

“Keep quiet,” he said, squeezing her wrist tighter and leveraging the gun at Reggie’s unconscious form, “or I shoot him.”

“We’re coming in!” bellowed the fireman outside. “Stand away from the door!”

A second later there was an enormous crunching sound and the stranger said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He hesitated, but the thudding sound of footsteps was coming toward the bedroom door, and he cursed again, dropped Esther’s arm, stuck his gun in the back of his pants, and went headfirst out the open window. A second later their bedroom filled with firemen, who had expected flames and found instead a man bleeding from a head wound and a woman screaming his name.

It turned out someone had called 911 and reported a fire in Reggie’s apartment, maybe as a prank, maybe in error, but either way it likely saved their lives. The EMTs on the scene assured Esther that Reggie would be all right, but she would never forget the sight of his dazed, shocked face covered in blood as they loaded him into the ambulance.

Later she would half convince herself it was a coincidence, that the blond man had been there for money or, god forbid, assault, but not for her, specifically. But by the time she’d talked herself out of her own initial panic, it was many months later and she was living on an organic farm in Northern British Columbia, so off the grid she pooped in buckets of sawdust. Every few days she drove thirty-five miles into the nearest decently sized town to take a women’s self-defense class, because never again did she want to feel so physically helpless in the face of danger.

The class ran for eight weeks and when it was finished, she enrolled in another, and when that one finished, she joined a boxing gym. Whenshe moved from Vancouver to Mexico City, she’d switched to jiu jitsu; in Oaxaca, muay thai; in Los Angeles, MMA, which had agreed with her. It made her feel brutal, powerful, and in control, and she stuck with it for several years before she’d gone back to boxing. The sense-memory of Reggie’s unconscious form in bed beside her and the grip of the man’s hand on her wrist had faded over the years, but was still strong enough that, in all subsequent exercise routines, she preferred punching bags to yoga mats.

Here at the station, it felt like Spokane all over again, only this time she had overstayed her time on purpose, mistaking purpose for deliberation and deliberation for logic. But her choice to stay had never been based on logic. It had been based on the swooping, giddy feeling that swept her body whenever Pearl touched her, the way her mere presence made Esther’s pulse thrum between her legs. Lust, passion, weakness, whatever you wanted to call it. Any other incidental feelings... well, Esther’s mind and heart had always been in thrall to her body.

How foolish of her to have thought that she could have this, something real. If she did not end it herself, it would end as it had with Reggie: in bloodshed. She couldn’t put Pearl in danger.

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