Ink Blood Sister Scribe, page 6
It had been two years since Esther had heard any of her family members’ voices. When Esther hadn’t come home after her father died, Joanna had sworn not to speak to her again, and though she knew her stepmother, Cecily, would have loved to hear from her, she found it was easier to think of her family as out of reach.
All that mattered was that Joanna was safe behind the wards.
The man who’d flirted with Esther the night before, the Coloradan carpenter, slid into a seat across from her, his plate piled so high she would’ve teased him about it had she been in any mood for teasing. He grinned at her through a mouthful of reconstituted eggs.
“Hey,” he said. “Esther, right?”
“Hi,” she said. “And you’re—Trevor.”
“Trev,” he corrected. “So, what’s on the docket for you today?”
Well, Trev, I’m going to spend the morning in a nausea-inducing hungover panic until my sense of steely resolve takes over and I can start figuring out who the hell brought a book to the base and whether they want to kill me or not.
“Not sure yet,” she said, letting her spoon fall into her barely touched oatmeal. “About to head to the shop to get my assignment. In fact, I should get going.”
“Oh,” he said, looking disappointed before rallying a smile. “Yeah. Cool. See you around?”
She managed what she hoped was a friendly smile. As she loaded her plates onto the conveyer belt into the kitchen, she caught sight of the exuberant blond of Pearl’s hair in line for food, and what had been a falsely pleasant expression on her face instantly was real. Pearl saw her, too, and made a beeline for her.
“There you are!” she said. “I was worried, where’d you go last night?”
“I overdid it,” Esther said, guilty for the lie. “Got the spins, took myself to bed.”
“Oh,” Pearl said. “You should’ve told me. I would’ve taken care of you.”
“It wasn’t a cute look,” Esther said.
“And this is?” Pearl said, gesturing to their matching coveralls.
“On you?” Esther said. “One hundred percent yes.”
Pearl shook her head. “Anyway, are you feeling better?”
“Much. May I recommend water? Gallons of it.”
“Noted.” Pearl leaned forward to kiss her, and Esther—too aware of the clink of forks on plates, the chatter, the watching eyes—jerked away before she could stop herself. Even as she pulled her head back, she knew it was a mistake, hurt spreading like a bruise across Pearl’s face.
“Sorry,” Esther said, “sorry, I—I still feel gross from last night.”
Even at the best of times, Esther wasn’t comfortable with public affection, though not because she was embarrassed. It was the open declaration of feeling that frightened her. Open feeling was a vulnerability that was easily exploited, and even now someone might be observing, planning.
“Okay,” Pearl said, her voice uncharacteristically flat. She took a step back and Esther immediately regretted the distance. “Well. See you at dinner?”
“At dinner,” Esther echoed, chest hollow. She paused in the doorway to watch Pearl make her way through the galley, stopping once or twice to chat. The mechanic, Abby, had taken Esther’s own vacated seat next to Trev and she waved Pearl down, Trev nodding his head at her in welcome.
Esther left the room.
It was minus ten Fahrenheit that morning and the wind was brutal on the walk from the dorms to the electrical shop, the snow so dry it squeaked beneath her boots. She had to squint against the powerful glare of the sun as it glinted off the white ground and the walls of the squat outbuildings, and she knew Pearl would be wearing her enormous pink knock-off Ray-Bans to protect her hungover vision, looking like a cross between a 1970s supermodel and a car mechanic. If there was a more appealing aesthetic, Esther hadn’t encountered it yet.
She should have accepted that kiss.
The electrical shop was in a dome-roofed building that was little more than a glorified supply closet, packed with so much equipment Esther’s jaw had dropped when she’d first seen it. Wires and cords of every thickness and color coiled around wall-mounted spools, and the walls themselves were lined with towering cabinets full of coax connectors, splicing connectors and cable ties, and pegboards displaying every kind of plier known to man.
Today, the shop was also packed with people, the morning meeting full of unfamiliar faces she’d normally have been quite interested in looking at, but she was so spaced-out it seemed like only minutes later that she’d gotten her assignment and was back out in that freezing wind, headed to one of the labs to replace some wiring.
It was easy work but uncomfortable, hours spent wedged below a sub-floor, much of it on her belly and back drilling a set of holes above and below, cold because she’d stripped out of her coveralls to her jeans for better mobility. Normally she wasn’t claustrophobic, but today the smallness of the space got to her, how there’d be nowhere to go if someone trapped her in, and the job took her longer than usual because she kept popping back out into the open space of the lab to warm her hands or get a level or change a drill bit, or just sit there, reassuring herself.
She wished the work was more complicated, so it would distract her from the rotisserie of her thoughts. Thinking about books, about magic, was inextricable from thinking about her family—especially about her sister, living alone in that drafty house with only her books for company. Every time Esther’s mind drifted, it drifted in one of two directions: fear, or Joanna, and oftentimes the two paths crossed.
Her very first memory was the day Joanna was born, when Esther was three. This was also the day she’d learned—or at least absorbed—the truth that Cecily wasn’t her biological mother, that she’d been born to a different woman entirely, and that woman was dead. She didn’t know for sure whether she truly remembered this day or only remembered the story of it—but whether the memories were fabricated or not, Esther had them.
Jo had been born at home in their downstairs bathroom, in the enormous cast-iron clawfoot tub because Cecily said a Pisces should enter the world in water. Abe had spent nine months studying midwifery and delivered her himself, not only because Cecily wanted a home birth but also because Abe’s paranoia wouldn’t allow for the hospital. Not that Esther had known this at the time.
What she remembered from that day: the buttery taste of the cookies Abe had made to distract her; the sight of a floating cloud of red from between Cecily’s submerged legs; the sound of Cecily screaming louder than Esther had known a person could. And her father’s voice, answering one question and raising many more, “No, honey, your mother had you in a hospital.” Then Joanna, crumpled and pink like a cast-off Band-Aid but with perfect tiny human hands and perfect, luminous human eyes.
Later, as the sisters grew, Esther hyperfocused on their differences, but as a little kid she’d been far more hypnotized by their sameness. They both loved chewing lemon peels and watermelon rinds, loved pictures of goats but not actual goats, loved putting sand in their hair so they could scratch it out later, loved watching their parents slow-dance in the living room to Motown records. They loved the sound of wind, the sound of breaking ice, the sound of coyotes calling on the mountain.
They disliked zippers, ham, the word “milk,” flute music, the gurgling sound of the refrigerator, Cecily’s long weekends away, Abe’s insistence on regular chess matches, and days with no clouds. They disliked the boxes of books that came to their door daily or were lugged home by their father, disliked their dusty lonesome smell and how they consumed Abe’s attention. They disliked when their parents closed the bedroom door and fought in whispers. They hated the phrase “half sister.” There had been no half about it.
Not until the day Esther was nine and Joanna nearly six, when Abe had sat Joanna down in the living room, Cecily hovering over his shoulder with a reassuring face but a fretful air she couldn’t tamp down. Joanna had been perched on the couch in front of the coffee table, and on the coffee table were seven books. The books, like most books their father concerned himself with, were very old.
“We’re just trying something out,” Abe said, which was not unexpected; he was always trying things out.
Only days before, he’d put a book in Esther’s hands, a very old one with a soft leather cover and pages like dried leaves, and asked her, “Can you rip this up?” She’d stared at him suspiciously, thinking it must be a trick—how many times had he told her to be careful with the books, and now he wanted her to ruin one? “Go on,” he’d said. So she’d given it her all, yet despite how fragile the paper had felt between her fingers, she hadn’t been able to tear a single page. She hadn’t even managed to make a crease. Under her father’s watchful eye, she had tried to light it on fire, then tried to wreck it in water to no avail; it remained perfectly intact. Abe had been frustrated, but not with her, and she’d enjoyed his attention.
So she said, “Can I try, too?”
“Not this time, honey,” he said. “You know my important books, the books that make things happen—you know how they don’t work on you?”
Yes, Esther knew.
“Well, that’s special. It’s something special only to you. I’m checking to see if there’s something special in Joanna, too.”
“You’re already special,” Cecily said to Joanna, who’d looked alarmed at this.
“Of course,” Abe said, “of course. You’re both amazing little earthlings.” (They’d been in the throes of an obsession with aliens at the time.) “Now, Jo.” He crouched before her, his beard bristling with restrained excitement. “See these books? I want you to tell me if there’s anything unusual about any of them.”
Joanna accepted this task with her usual solemnity. A second later she said, “This one is very ugly.”
Abe looked at the book she was pointing at, a hardbound in stained brown cloth that was a lot thicker than the others. Esther could tell her father was disappointed, but she herself felt a twinge of gladness. Whatever test was happening, she wanted Joanna to fail. It was a new feeling, and it didn’t feel good.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s fair. I agree. Anything else?”
Joanna shook her head and Abe sat back, sighing. Cecily looked deeply relieved. But a second later Joanna said, “Except one of them sounds funny.”
The mood in the room changed instantly. Abe sat fully upright, incredibly alert, and Cecily sucked in a sharp breath. Both were focused completely on Joanna.
“What’s it sound like, honey?” Abe said.
“Buzzy,” said Joanna. She shrugged, a gesture she’d learned recently and repeated any chance she got. “Buzzy with glitter in it. And it tastes like . . . pancakes.”
“Which book sounds buzzy?” Abe said. He was on the verge of shouting, which meant he was getting excited. He rarely shouted in anger.
“That one,” Joanna said, poking the thinnest of the bunch, bound in tattered red leather. “Can I have Thin Mints?”
“No!” Abe shouted, thrilled. “Thin Mints are for after dinner! Ah, I knew it! I knew it!” He pulled Joanna into his arms, kissing the top of her head again and again, exuberant in a way Esther had never seen. She looked at Cecily, wanting to understand what was happening, but Cecily was staring at Joanna, a hand at her throat, tears in her eyes. She looked so sad Esther was frightened.
“Mommy,” she said. “What’s happening?”
But whatever it was, it didn’t include Esther. Cecily kept staring at Joanna and Abe, Joanna delighted by the attention if bewildered at its cause, and Abe radiant with happiness.
On that day, Esther stopped focusing on sameness and started to notice difference.
She didn’t understand that, then, of course. Didn’t know she’d just lived a turning point in her life, a line drawn between her sister, who could not only read magic but also hear it, and Esther herself, who could not. It was a line that became a wall as time passed, a stone wall like the ones that snaked through the forests around her childhood Vermont home, relics from a time before the trees had reclaimed the fields and the walls were divisions between properties, between families.
Looking back, it was silly that she’d never put two and two together. The wards were magic; Esther was immune to magic; Esther was immune to the wards. But until her father had spelled it out for her when she was eighteen, she hadn’t fully understood the ramifications.
As long as she was living in the house, the wards couldn’t protect anyone, not Abe, not Cecily . . . not Joanna. Anyone who wanted to find Esther’s family had only to find Esther.
Esther sighed. She wasn’t a person given to introspection or nostalgia—or rather, any natural tendency she might have had toward such things had been stamped out years ago. They didn’t serve a life like hers. But today she was positively wallowing.
Normally she treated a bad mood with socialization or sex, but the blood-marks marring all the communal mirrors had made her far too suspicious to seek out company, and she couldn’t find Pearl. So after work ended for the day she made her way back to her room and set to remembering everything she could about mirror magic.
There were two kinds she knew of, two that her family had in their collection: magic that impacted one mirror, and magic that connected two. Single-mirror magic, which could alter the reflection a person saw in the glass and probably do other things Esther didn’t know about, required only one person to read the spell, only one to activate it with their blood. Double-mirror spells, however, required two people: one at either mirror. Then they could be used for communication, like a kind of esoteric video call, and to pass things back and forth.
Not living things, however. She remembered now—and wished she didn’t—an afternoon her father and sister had spent experimenting with groundhogs. Joanna had ended up crying, and Esther had overheard Abe saying to Cecily, sounding mildly traumatized himself, “They effed up all our cucumbers, but no creature deserves that.”
Otherwise, she didn’t know much. After all, to Esther magic was irrelevant. Her blood was singularly useless in activating spells and magic had no effect on her whatsoever. As a kid she’d been fascinated by her family’s work—what kid wouldn’t be?—but as the years had passed, she’d turned decisively away from books and blood and spellwork, and toward the tangibles: things she could touch, see, manipulate, fix. Magic felt like a dreary extension of the world itself, a world of people seeking, holding, and losing power she herself could never access.
She stretched out flat on her bed and hurled her pen at the ceiling, then caught it when it came back down. It had left a tiny, almost imperceptible black dot, which joined all the other tiny dots from all the other times she’d thrown all her other pens. A creature of habit, indeed.
One single person with a book way out here would be remarkable but it did not necessarily have to be alarming. Two people, however, two people in separate places operating two sets of mirrors that functioned in tandem . . .
That would suggest intention. A reason. A plan.
Esther had tried to wipe away the blood and it hadn’t come off. So, whatever the spell was, it was still in progress. Which meant if there was someone watching on the other end, they’d have seen Esther notice.
They would know she knew.
Her bedroom door suddenly rattled and caught, and she sat up so quickly she felt her heart in her ears. The fluorescent brightness of her room reasserted itself, as if she’d been somewhere dim, and she stood, automatically assuming a stance she’d perfected after years of training in martial arts gyms.
“Hello?” she called.
“It’s me,” Pearl called back, and immediately Esther’s pulse reacted to the familiar voice and settled. She opened the door and Pearl smiled down at her. “Want to head to dinner?”
Esther had lost track of time. “Oh, yes, let me get my sweater.”
Pearl milled around the stamp-sized room while Esther tugged on her red wool sweater, pulling her hair out from its collar in a staticky tangle. She didn’t know much about her mother, Isabel, but from the one photograph she’d seen she’d had beautiful, straight, shiny hair. It seemed unfair that of all the traits Esther could’ve gotten from her father, like, oh, the ability to hear magic, she’d instead inherited his frizz-prone curls and lactose intolerance.
“How goes the translation?” Pearl said, picking up the Gil novel from Esther’s nightstand and peering at one of the colored Post-it Notes.
“Amateur as ever,” said Esther.
Pearl threw herself down on the bed. “I looked that book up,” she said. “Did you know it’s worth, like, thousands of dollars?”
“Yeah,” Esther said. “It could’ve been my college fund, if I’d gone to college.”
As soon as she’d said this, she wished she could take it back; she knew college was a tender spot for Pearl, even if she wouldn’t admit it. Pearl only said, breezy as ever, “Oh, higher education is overrated.”
Esther reached down to squeeze her socked foot. Pearl’s parents had split up when she was a baby and both were heavy drinkers, but while her American father had barely been around, her mother had determinedly held things together for her daughter as best she could. She’d worked for twenty years as a receptionist in the same Sydney dental office, saved money for Pearl to go to university, and only drank in the evenings. Esther knew Pearl had spent many mornings tiptoeing around her mother’s passed-out form, usually on the couch but sometimes on the floor, cleaning up the bottles and sticky spills of booze from the night before so her mother wouldn’t wake up and weep from shame at the mess she’d made.
They’d been very close, and when Pearl had gone overseas to study in California, Pearl’s mother had missed her terribly. Without someone else to care for, someone for whom to perform the stability she’d valiantly maintained for so long, what control she’d had over her drinking quickly eroded. Pearl had come home the summer after her freshman year to find her mother in such a sharp decline that she’d stayed in Sydney and hadn’t ever returned to her studies, even after her mother died six years later. For Pearl, college was synonymous with a bone-deep, grieving guilt, whereas for Esther it was just another bitter bead in her rosary of missed opportunities.
