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

Esther pushed Pearl's hair off her sweaty face and tried not to think about her family or her father's warnings or about the days that had ticked by since November 2. She focused instead on the present, on the thump of the bass and the feel of Pearl's body against hers. She thought, I wish I could do this forever.

But there was no "forever" where bodies were concerned, and eventually she had to pee.

In contrast to the noisy clamor of the party, the bathroom down the hall was almost eerily silent when Esther banged through the door and fumbled with her jeans. The sound of urine echoed loudly in the stainless-steel bowl and she could hear her own drunken breath, heavy from dancing, raspy from talking. The flush was a roar. At the sink, she paused in front of the mirror. With one finger she smoothed back a dark eyebrow, batted her eyelashes at herself, wound a few locks of hair around her finger to give her loose curls more definition. Then she stopped. Squinted.

There was a series of small marks along the mirror's perimeter, brownish red smears that sat atop the glass. They were symmetrical but not identical, one at each corner, a swipe as if with a paintbrush or thumb. She leaned close, examining, and wet a piece of paper towel to rub them off. The towel did nothing, not even when she added soap, her heart climbing into her throat. She tried to scratch the marks off. They didn't budge.

She stepped back so quickly she nearly fell.

A person didn't grow up like Esther had without recognizing the sight of dried blood, much less a pattern of it that could not be removed, and no one could grow up like she had without recognizing what that bloody pattern might imply. The smell of yarrow returned to her, though whether it was in her mind or here in the bathroom she wasn't certain.

Blood. Herbs.

Somebody here had a book.

Somebody here was doing magic.

"No," Esther said aloud. She was drunk, she was paranoid, she'd been locked in a cement box for six months and now she was seeing things.

She was also stepping away from the mirror, eyes still locked on her own terrified face, scared to turn her back on the glass. When she bumped up against the bathroom door, she whirled around and slammed through it, then ran down the narrow hallway toward the gym. The cardio room was so bright it seemed to buzz, the equipment standing in mechanical rows on the padded gray floor and the green walls making everything appear sickly pale. There was a couple making out on one of the weight benches, and they squawked in alarm as Esther crashed past them and into the gym's white, single-stalled bathroom.

The same reddish-brown marks were on the mirror, the same pattern. They were on the mirror in the bathroom by the rec room, too, and the one by the laboratory, and the one by the kitchen. Esther stumbled to her bedroom, heart in her throat, but thank god her own mirror was untouched. Probably just the public mirrors had been marked—a small comfort. She couldn't smash every mirror in the station without calling attention to herself or getting in trouble.

Esther locked the door behind her, standing in front of her mirror with her hands on the top of her low dresser, leaning her weight on the wood so she could think. Clearly this was some kind of mirror magic, but she was too freaked-out and drunk to recall what that might entail. One of her family's books could turn a mirror into a kind of mood ring, the glass reflecting a person's true emotions for an hour or so, and then there was that mirror in Snow White, the one that told the evil queen about the fairest in the land ... but was that kind of magic just fairy-tale shit, or was it real life?

She needed sobriety, clarity. She hung her head and steadied her breath. On the dresser, bracketed between her hands, sat the novel she was translating from Spanish to English, and she stared at its familiar green cover, at the decorative border and stylized sketch of a dark doorway beneath the title. La Ruta Nos Aportó Otro Paso Natural by Alejandra Gil, 1937. As far as Esther had been able to find, this novel was Gil's first and only publication—and it was also the only thing Esther owned that had belonged to her mother, Isabel.

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.