Ink Blood Sister Scribe, page 19
Richard smiled at him. “Still in a bad mood, then?”
Nicholas couldn’t deny he felt better than he had in weeks. “No,” he said honestly. “That was amazing.”
“If you’d asked me about your book right from the start, instead of keeping it from me, we could’ve read it together days ago,” Richard said. His tone was mild, not reproachful. “I hope next time you’ll trust me. Secrets are bad news, Nicholas. In the end, they’ll only make you feel worse.”
At the time, it had not occurred to Nicholas to wonder how his uncle had found the book in the first place; how he must have gone through Nicholas’s study and maybe even his bedroom to find where Nicholas had hidden it. At the time, he was too dazed with satisfaction and gratitude. But that night, long after he’d thanked Richard and promised not to keep anything from him again, he lay in bed going over the events of the day and felt a twinge of resentment. Even at ten he’d known that Richard’s view of secrets went only one way: secrets kept from Richard were bad, but secrets Richard kept, himself? Well.
Now, many years later in Richard’s study, he thought of his uncle’s long-ago words with fury.
Secrets are bad news, Nicholas. In the end, they’ll only make you feel worse.
He was still standing at his uncle’s desk staring down at the draft of that abhorrent spell. Collins had stomped into the next room and suddenly popped his head round the door.
“Get over here,” he said. “Now.”
“Excuse me?”
Collins’s head disappeared.
Nicholas took a second to rearrange the desk, so it looked as it had when they’d come in, then took one last look around the study, forcing himself not to skim over the enormous jar and its grotesque inhabitant. He needed to remember.
In the other room, Collins was staring intently at one of the mirrors, arms crossed. Nicholas came to stand at his side. They were in front of the one labeled Clinic, which framed a room that looked like a nurse’s office in an American high school movie, with a large desk and several beds separated by curtains—though none of the curtains were closed and there was no one at the desk.
There was someone in one of the beds, however; someone with a lot of blond hair and a pale, sleeping face. And standing at the foot of the bed, her own face in profile, another woman, this one dark-haired and light-brown-skinned and wearing a sweater Nicholas couldn’t help noticing was very ugly. Just as he started to turn away, however, Collins said, “Wait,” and someone else came into the frame from the side, then turned to stare right at the mirror.
“Tell me,” Collins said, pointing. “Is that Tretheway?”
Nicholas realized with astonishment that Collins was right. It was Tretheway, his former bodyguard.
“I thought that asshole was fired,” Collins said.
“I thought so, too,” said Nicholas.
“Can he see us through the mirror?”
“Not if it’s the spell I wrote last May, which it must be,” said Nicholas. “You can pass things back and forth but it’s one-way vision only. Come on, I don’t give a damn what Tretheway’s up to.”
“Hang on,” Collins said. “The girl.”
The dark-haired woman had turned, and she, too, was staring directly into the mirror. Nicholas nearly took a step back, so purposeful and intense was her gaze, her eyes bright beneath thick, expressive eyebrows. She stared searchingly, then turned away again. Tretheway had disappeared from the frame. She was facing his direction and saying something.
“Do you know her?” said Nicholas. There was something familiar about her, maybe. “Is she one of ours?”
Collins didn’t answer. He was staring at the glass as if transfixed and Nicholas reached out to pull him away, but the woman looked back at the mirror and Nicholas paused. Tretheway came into the frame again, his back to the glass, mostly hiding the black-haired woman, one of his hands rigid at his side. He was holding a gun.
“Oh shit,” said Collins.
The woman was speaking again, her hands were up like she was calming a dog. Tretheway cocked his elbow almost casually, pointing the gun at her, and for a second both were so still it looked like the image had frozen on the screen. Then, so suddenly that Nicholas found himself gripping Collins’s sleeve in alarm, she leaped into action, throwing herself forward in a tackle that sent both her and Tretheway flying to the ground and Collins let out a shout like he was watching a football match. The two were half out of sight of the mirror now, only their lower bodies visible, boots and knees tangling in a desperate scuffle.
“Whose side are we on?” Nicholas said urgently. “Do they both work for the Library?”
“I don’t give a shit about the Library,” Collins spat. “I hope she throttles him.”
Nicholas didn’t think she would. Tretheway was strong and well-trained. But just as he thought this, the woman reared into view: she’d gotten the upper position with Tretheway beneath her, though her lip was dripping blood and one of Tretheway’s hands appeared to yank her forward, and then they both vanished again.
“Oh fuck,” said Collins.
Through the mirror someone swung back into view. It was Tretheway this time, bruised and bloodied but grinning. It was clear from the set of his shoulders and the position of his arms that he was strangling the woman beneath him.
“Get up,” Collins begged her. “Get up, get him.”
Only then did Nicholas notice that the blond person in the bed had risen. She was in a cloth gown with one arm strapped to her chest in a sling, looking unsteady on her feet. In the other hand she held a flower vase with what appeared to be a single plastic flower glued inside it. She was creeping up to Tretheway’s side, her face terrified but determined. She raised the vase in a trembling hand. It was clearly the only weapon she’d been able to find and it looked useless and pathetic.
Her swing, however, was neither of those things. With surprising power, she brought the vase down on Tretheway’s head, and he lurched to one side, half vanishing again. The blond woman leaned quickly down and when she stood, she was holding the gun.
She looked at it.
She looked at Tretheway, who was rising, his broad back obscuring their view again, blotting her out until all they could see was his pale sweater.
The scene that came next was all the more horrifying for being completely silent. Tretheway jerked once, the wool of his sweater going red below one shoulder blade, and then he keeled over. Gone from the frame. All they could see was the blond woman, gun out, mouth open, visibly shaking.
Nicholas’s hand was still clamped on Collins’s arm, all thoughts of leaving vanished from his head. The woman in the sling appeared to be screaming the same word over and over, maybe her friend’s name, sinking to her knees. It was too late, Nicholas thought numbly. Tretheway had been shot, yes—but not before he’d strangled the dark-haired woman to death while Nicholas and Collins watched.
But then she surged into view, her face red, cheeks hollowing as she gasped for air, and Nicholas released his own breath. At his side, he heard Collins do the same. The woman with the gun dropped it and grabbed onto the dark-haired woman with her good hand, both of their mouths moving frantically at one another. Nicholas could not even begin to guess what they were saying, but the blond woman had stopped screaming and was now weeping, her shoulders shaking. She looked back toward where Tretheway was lying, invisible.
“Is he dead do you think?” Nicholas said.
Collins looked ill. “I don’t know,” he said.
Suddenly the two woman both turned toward the mirror in tandem. The blonde in the sling was still crying but she was nodding now, too, and they moved closer to the frame, crouching down to where Tretheway must be lying. The black-haired woman was apparently rifling through his pockets and came up with a slim book that Nicholas recognized. It was one of many simple memory-wipes he’d written over the years, and he felt a jolt of total otherworldliness, watching this stranger handle an object he’d bled and sweated over.
An object designed to suck in whatever reader was unlucky enough to lay eyes on its first page.
“Don’t,” he said aloud to her, “don’t look, don’t say the words,” but it was too late—she was already skimming the first page of the memory wipe spell. She flipped through to the next page, then the next, yet had no visible reaction to the spell written in Nicholas’s own blood.
The magic did not touch her.
“That’s impossible,” Nicholas breathed.
A second later she’d shoved the book into the back waistband of her jeans and dragged Tretheway into view by his armpits, his head lolling on his neck, and the blond woman gripped the leg of his coveralls with her good hand. They dragged him closer until they were right on the other side of the glass, the black-haired woman so near that Nicholas could see splatters of Tretheway’s blood on her face. She grabbed Tretheway’s limp hand. On Nicholas and Collins’s side, the glass rippled. Like a worm through wet soil, Tretheway’s fingertip came through to the last knuckle, the nail black, the bones twisted from its journey through the mirror. The finger disappeared and the two women began to struggle with the body.
No sooner had Nicholas wondered what they were doing than he understood.
“They’re pushing him through,” he said.
The finger had been a test. Now Tretheway’s hair prickled through like spikes of growing grass, and then came his bruised forehead, and his face, which was now horribly misshapen—his nose smashed to one side, his jaw misaligned, his eyes sucked back in their sockets as if by an invisible vacuum.
His shoulders stuck and then suddenly began to come through—and wrapped around one shoulder was a small, brown hand with bitten nails. Nicholas gaped at it. The second it had come through the black-haired woman yanked it back, holding it up to her chest in a panic, examining it, clearly expecting it to be warped like Trev’s body was warped, but it seemed to be all right. A second later she resumed her struggle and the rest of Tretheway’s shoulders came through. At that point the magic did its work and gulped the rest of his body into the room with Nicholas and Collins, spitting it out to lie crumpled at their feet. The gun came tumbling with it.
Neither of them could do anything other than stare. If Tretheway hadn’t been dead before, he certainly was now, and the contortions of his mangled flesh were sickening. His skin had held together but everything within had not. He was twisted and bulging beneath that thin unbroken surface. When Nicholas looked back at the glass, the mirror—and every other mirror in that room—had gone blank. They were only mirrors again, disconnected from the life that had charged them on the other side. The life that had just ended.
15
The only positive thing about this whole godawful situation was that Esther now knew that Pearl hadn’t betrayed her.
Trev’s body had gone through the mirror like it was passing through mercury, not even a trace of blood left behind on the cold, hard glass. As soon as he’d vanished, Pearl let out a low moan and sank onto the infirmary floor.
Esther, her whole body aching from the fight and buzzing from the adrenaline of what had felt like near-death, spat frantically onto a clean patch of her sweater sleeve and began to rub the blood marks on the mirror that had opened it in the first place. She was terrified that if she left them up, someone would step out from the frame and kill her and Pearl where they stood. Living things could not pass through mirrors, she knew this—or thought she’d known it, but despite the test she’d made of Trev’s finger, despite how it had come back bruised and twisted and wrong, there had been that terrifying instant where her own had slipped through the surface, and she had felt nothing at all. Perhaps it was the passage from one place to another that ruined a body, and not the entry.
Trev had not been fully dead when they’d pushed him through, but if there had been any doubt as to whether the journey through the mirror had finished what Pearl’s shot had started, it was laid to rest now, as the rusty stains of his magic came away easily beneath Esther’s scrubbing. His living blood had activated the spell from this side; his still-living blood had allowed his own body to pass through; and now that he was dead, the spell from this end was broken.
She wiped away the last of the blood from the glass and crouched in front of Pearl.
“Thank you,” she said. There was a lot more she wanted to say, starting with I’m sorry.
“Please tell me I’m hallucinating,” Pearl said. “Please tell me I’m on drugs, tell me this is a bad dream.”
“It’s a bad dream,” Esther said. She was scanning Pearl, looking for traces of Trev’s blood. There was a little on her fingers and wrists. “You need to wash your hands.”
“I need to wash my brain,” Pearl said. At any other time, this would have made Esther laugh. But it was clearly not a joke and the fact that Esther planned to do more or less exactly that made it even less funny.
She went over to the sink in the corner and soaked a wad of paper towels, then came back to Pearl and carefully wiped down her hands, cradling them in her own palms. There was a streak of blood on her face, too, though whose Esther didn’t know, and she cleaned that as well. Then she looked down at herself. Her sweater was only lightly stained but there were a few smears on the floor, and the thigh of her jeans was soaked red. Pearl’s infirmary gown was wet and red at the hem.
She would take care of that in a moment. If they had a moment. If no one tried the door of the clinic, found it locked, and raised the alarm. She had no idea what Trev had told the medic to make her leave or how long she’d be gone.
“Do you know where they keep those gowns?” Esther asked Pearl, and to her great relief, Pearl nodded. “Okay, change yours and put the dirty one here, then get into your bed. I’m going to clean the floor.”
Pearl did as she was told, her movements jerky and dissociated, and when she’d gotten into a new gown—struggling a bit with her sling—and climbed onto her bed, Esther went to the supply closet and filled a bucket with soapy water.
“He attacked me,” Pearl said. “Trev. When we were skiing. One second we were talking, and the next he just—his face changed, and he came at me and—” She stopped, her breath coming short. After she’d caught it, she said, “Who was he? What just happened? How did you know you could put him through the—the—put him through the—” She seemed unable to complete the sentence. Another shaky breath. “What the hell is going on, Esther?”
“He was after me, not you,” said Esther.
“Yes, thank you, I got that bit. Why?”
Esther was mopping as quickly as she could, emptying and refilling the bucket until all traces of blood were gone, which did not take nearly as long as she might have feared. None of this would stand up to a forensics team, but by the time anyone noticed he was missing and began to worry, Esther would be long gone.
She hoped.
Besides, there would be no trace of his body, no murder weapon, and there were no cameras in the clinic—why should anyone suspect foul play? And there were no witnesses, either. Or there would be no witnesses by the time Esther was done.
“Where did the nurse put the clothes you wore skiing?” Esther asked Pearl.
“I don’t know. Esther, please, just look at me for a second and explain.”
Esther squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them and turned. The book she’d taken off Trev’s body would completely erase Pearl’s memory of the past twenty-four hours—it would reset her back before the shot, the ski, the argument—but this Pearl, the one trembling on the bed and staring at Esther with desperation, still remembered. This Pearl deserved something, didn’t she? And why not the truth? It was a thought too seductive to turn down. Just for a moment, she and Pearl could live in the same world together.
“It will sound crazy,” she said. “But try to believe me. Remember that you just saw Trev go through a mirror.”
“I don’t know what I saw.”
“Yes, you do. If you can’t accept that, you won’t accept anything I’m about to tell you.”
Pearl bit her lip, quiet. Then she said, “Okay. Yes. I saw it.”
Esther turned back to search for Pearl’s clothes as she spoke. “Magic exists,” she said, “and it’s channeled through certain books. My family can sense those books, they can hear them, though I can’t. My father spent his whole life collecting them, and he has—or had, they’re my sister’s now—hundreds. Incredibly valuable.”
She’d found the clothes folded in the metal medicine cabinet in a plastic bag, and she shucked her own bloodied garments and jammed them into the bag in place of Pearl’s.
“When I was a baby,” she said, “a group of people broke into our apartment in Mexico City to take the collection. They didn’t get the books, but they killed my mother. I don’t know the details. All I know is that afterward, my father took me and went underground. Or to Vermont, anyway.” She was shivering at the sink in her underwear, washing her hands and face as best she could, afraid to turn around and find disbelief on Pearl’s face. “It’s not only that I can’t hear magic, I’m also immune to it. We don’t know why. But when I was eighteen my father realized that the wards he used to block our house from being found didn’t block me, so all anyone had to do to find my father and stepmother, and my sister, and the whole collection, was find me.”
She paused to hitch Pearl’s clean jeans up around her waist. Pearl was taller and slimmer, but she could roll the hems and the oversized sweater was plenty long enough to cover the fact that the pants barely buttoned, and in the mirror—only a mirror again—Esther appeared clean and unbloodied, if a bit bruised around the face.
“My dad gave me a choice,” she said, turning back to Pearl. “I could stay home and put my family in danger, or I could leave and never come back. Obviously, I chose the latter.”
Pearl was staring at her. She seemed to have calmed down a bit while Esther was talking, or at least she wasn’t visibly shaking anymore, though she was nearly as pale as the walls.
“Get under the covers,” Esther urged.
