Page 95 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“What if I’m wrong?” Nicholas was saying. “What if Esther and I destroy the book and it wasn’t Richard’s after all, it’s some innocent soul who’ll drop dead in the middle of Sunday dinner with their family, what if—”

“Innocent soul?” Collins said. “Nobody who got their hands on that particular book could be innocent.”

“Who are we to pass that judgment?”

Nicholas’s agitation was understandable, Esther thought. She’d probably be agitated, too, if she thought she might have to kill someone she knew, even if he’d done to her what Nicholas’s uncle had done to him. Not that Esther had any uncles that she knew of. She wondered, while trying very hard not to, if Maram had brothers, and if Isabel had brothers, and if those imaginary brothers were in fact the same people.

Her whole childhood she’d devoured stories of children with dead and missing mothers, often easier to find than stories of children whose mothers were alive and well. The absence of a mother was a promise ofadventure; mothers made things too safe, too comforting. Children with mothers didn’t need to look outside their homes for affirmation of their supremacy in someone’s story. They didn’t need to write their own protagonism.

Esther remembered Cecily complaining about this when they’d watchedThe Little Mermaid, Cinderella,andSnow White,offended by the lack of loving birth mothers and the prevalence of monstrous stepmothers. She’d squeezed Esther tight and smeared her cheek with red kisses and said, “This evil stepmother loves you very much.” But despite Cecily’s love, which Esther had never doubted, she had already identified within herself the same motherless quality that drove Ariel to shore, Cinderella to the ball, Snow White into the forest. Her motherlessness was intrinsic to her sense of self, and her sense of self was all she’d had these many years alone.

What would it mean if her mother was alive? Not only alive, but aware of Esther and watching out for her, passing notes through magic mirrors and protecting her from afar, her own fairy godmother. What would it mean if her mother had not died, but left her?

Esther sat in an armchair with Richard’s book in her hands and carefully erected a set of partitions in her mind—a little room where these thoughts could careen around as quickly as they liked, slamming against the walls, throwing themselves to the floor, temper-tantruming for attention they would not get unless Esther opened the door. There was no time to open the door. The door could wait. She turned the key firmly in the lock.

“Quit talking yourself out of this,” Collins was saying to Nicholas.

Nicholas slumped back against the piano. “Maybe I want to talk myself out of it,” he said. “Maybe I’m not prepared to star in a Shakespearian tragedy and murder my uncle.”

“If you’re talking about Hamlet, he didn’t murder his uncle—that’s the whole point,” Collins said. “He couldn’t make up his mind and everyone died because of it.”

“He kills him in the third act!”

“Well, what the fuck act is this, then?”

Esther stood. She was still holding the book and subtly adjusted her grip, arranging her fingers just so before reaching out to Nicholas. “Here,” she said, “I don’t want to touch this anymore.”

Still glaring at Collins, Nicholas reached out to take it. Esther waited until she could see his fingers tighten around the cover, his grip secure, and then shepulled.

Instinctively Nicholas pulled back, a tug-of-war that stopped when he caught on and dropped the book, furious.

“Esther!” Joanna said. She sounded impressed.

“You,” Nicholas stuttered, “you—you—you were tricking me into killing someone!”

“Yes,” Esther said, looking at the book, still unruffled and intact in her hands. “And it should have worked. We pulled hard enough to at least tear a page or two, but look, the paper’s not even wrinkled.”

Nicholas’s outrage could still be seen on his face, but it was subsiding in favor of curiosity. “Odd,” he said, taking it to see for himself. “You’re right.”

“Should we try again?”

He looked at her sharply, but then seemed, all at once, to deflate. He rested his free hand against the wall, steadying himself. “Yes. Let’s try again.”

Nicholas held the book open while Esther attempted to tear out an untearable page, and then they switched, Esther gripping the cover as Nicholas yanked on the fragile old paper with all his strength. Then they each held one wing to rend it apart like a wishbone. They tried to see if it would burn in the fire. They ran it under hot water in the kitchen sink.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. It was just as fruitless as Esther remembered from when she’d tried to destroy it for Abe.

By the time they took the book out of the sink, their hands drippingbut the book bone-dry, Nicholas appeared exhausted and ill and Esther didn’t feel much better than he looked.

“It’s no use,” Nicholas said, slouched at the kitchen table over a cup of nettle tea he wasn’t drinking. “I should have known. We won’t be able to destroy the book until we destroy whatever object he’s attached his life to, which is almost definitely the bone in the portrait frame. Maram would know that—she’s too clever not to, which means the whole theory is worthless. She wouldn’t send us across an ocean to do something when she knows we’d fail.”

“Thirty-five minutes until the wards drop,” Joanna said, as if everyone present had not also been staring at the clocks.

“I give up,” Nicholas said, and laid his head down on the table.

But Esther did not have the luxury of surrender. She knew her sister would not leave the house unless Esther knocked her out and dragged her, which wasn’t out of the question but also certainly wouldn’t go far in repairing a relationship they’d only just begun to mend.

“Collins, are you sure she said the wards absolutely had to drop? Because if she only wanted to bring our attention to the book, she’s done that, and we can put the wards up.”

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