Excerpt from Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Torzs, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"No," Trev said, smiling in amusement as she leaned over shamelessly and sniffed his neck.

"Hmm," she said.

"Maybe it's my deodorant," he said. "Cedar. Manly."

"It does smell nice," she said. "But no, I thought—well, never mind." They were closer now than they had been, and Trev's friendly eyes had become openly flirtatious, clearly taking her neck-sniffing as a declaration of interest. Esther took a step back. Even if she weren't taken, he looked like the kind of man who probably owned a lot of recreational outdoor equipment and wanted to teach her how to use it. However, she admired the controlled way he moved his body; it reminded her of the trainers she'd met at the martial arts gyms she'd been frequenting for years.

She opened her mouth to say something flirty, because she didn't want to rust, after all, but then her sensitive nose caught that other scent, the one that had distracted her a moment ago. God, what was it? It put her right back in her childhood kitchen; she could see the bulbous green inefficient fridge, the dents and dings of the maple cabinets, the feel of warped linoleum beneath her feet. Vegetable but not a vegetable, almost spicy, and it smelled fresh, which wasn't common around these parts. Rosemary? Chrysanthemum? Cabbage?

Yarrow.

The answer came to her, words tumbling back to her throat from where they had been perched on the tip of her tongue. Yarrow, achillea, milfoil, plumajillo.

"Excuse me," Esther said, eschewing social decorum, and turned away from the confused carpenter. She pushed past a cluster of people comparing tattoos by the cereal nook and ducked through the hanging blue streamers someone had taped, seemingly at random, to the ceiling, taking short breaths through her nose. She was tracking the unmistakable scent of the herb, the smell of her childhood, but she knew it was pointless even as she strained for it. It was already a memory again, supplanted by the aroma of pizza and beer and bodies.

She stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by music and chattering strangers, stunned by how strongly the fragrance had hit her heart. Was someone wearing it as a perfume? If so she wanted to put her arms around them and bury her face in their skin. Usually, Esther kept loss at arm's length; she didn't think about all the people she'd left behind over the years, she didn't think about any of the places she'd called home, and aside from the postcards she sent her sister and stepmother once a month, she didn't think about her family. It was a constant, tiring action, this not-thinking, like keeping a muscle flexed at all times. But the scent of yarrow had unflexed that stern muscle and with its relaxation came a cousin to the same sadness that had poured over her in Pearl's doorway earlier.

Pearl herself was across the room, face flushed, her teased hair tangled like she'd just stepped off the back of someone's motorcycle or out of someone's bed. She was wearing a dark purple lipstick that made her eyes look berry-bright and talking to a woman who was nearly as tall as she was. Esther charged toward them, intent on pulling herself out of this mood as quickly as she'd fallen into it.

"Tequila," she said to Pearl.

"This is Esther," Pearl said to the woman she'd been talking to. "Electrician. Esther, this is Abby in maintenance, she lived in Australia last year!"

Abby and Pearl were giggling at each other, cheerfully drunk. Pearl poured all three of them a shot, then poured Esther an extra after she'd gasped down the first. Already she was feeling better, shaking off the malaise that had been clawing at her throat. She was a person made for the present, not the past. She couldn't afford to forget that.

The party had done its job in starting to wipe away the over-winters' protective isolationism, and soon enough there was dancing, more drinking, a weird game that involved shouting the names of birds, even more drinking. A beaker, predictably, puked. Pearl and Abby spent some time screaming happily in one another's faces about someone they somehow knew in common from Sydney, someone who had a really bad dog, and then Pearl dragged Esther onto the makeshift dance floor and wrapped her long, leggy body around Esther's shorter one. The music was deep and pulsing and soon they were grinding like they were in a real club and not in a little heated box on a vast stretch of ice, many thousands of miles away from anything that might be called civilization.

Excerpted from Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Torzs. Copyright © 2023 by Emma Torzs. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.