by Jim C. Hines
I carefully slipped Smudge into an inner pocket, then opened the book and pulled out a pair of mirrored sunglasses. The glasses were enchanted to show magic and to protect the wearer from visual-based attacks.
Deanna Fuentes-McDowell—the gorgon—strode toward us, her burqa thrown back. I glimpsed skin like sandalwood, black serpentine hair, and brown eyes full of unimaginable sorrow. I dropped the book and reached for my shock-gun.
Through the darkened lenses, I saw the ghost controlling her. It stretched toward me, devouring the magical discharge from my weapon, then stripping the protection from my glasses.
The transformation began with my own eyes. My vision clouded as lens, cornea, and ocular fluid solidified. My lids blinked once over gritty stone, and I had just long enough to swear silently at my own stupidity.
Author Margaret Stone died at 3:15 this afternoon at Providence Portland Medical Center, two hours after being shot by a gunman who broke into her home.
Stone is best known as the author of the Red Death series, set in a post-apocalyptic plague world inhabited by humans and vampires. The third book, Red Night, was a New York Times and USA Today bestseller, and Stone recently announced that the books had been optioned by a major film studio.
Eric Crocker, the alleged killer, was arrested at the scene and is being held for psychiatric evaluation. Crocker’s online presence paints a picture of a longtime genre fan, a man whose love of science fiction and fantasy border on the obsessive. His recent posts describe his growing alarm over the revelation of the supernatural, particularly the magic known as libriomancy.
“It’s real,” Crocker shouted as he was forced into a waiting police car. “I’ve always known it was real. Witches and ghosts and aliens. She was one of them, spreading poison through her words. We have to fight back. We have to stop them before it’s too late!”
Margaret Stone’s first book was Time Wyrm, a critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful adventure published in 1991. She went on to write twenty-six more novels, two of which were finalists for the Nebula Award, one of science fiction’s highest honors.
Stone was also an outspoken advocate against animal cruelty. Her work often featured the rescue of abused animals, and for the past five years, she ran an annual fundraising auction for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Stone is survived by her husband Christopher Hooks and their three children. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in Stone’s memory to the ASPCA at http://www.aspca.org/donate.
IN A WAY, the loss of sight saved my life. Blindness helped eliminate the distractions of the real world, letting me concentrate on the magic racing through my body, petrifying every cell. My thoughts translated that magic into Greek text, excerpts from stories and myths thousands of years old.
My lungs felt like they were filling with sand. Silence closed around me as my inner ears hardened. I tried to peel back the words, to chip them away and free my heart to beat, my lungs to expand once more.
I was used to touching a book to manipulate its magic. In this case, the gorgon had sent her stories through me. I captured the words, the belief and terror that had grown up around the myth of Medusa and her sisters. Athena’s curse transforming the gorgon’s beauty to this monstrous form. The battle between Perseus and Medusa. The blood that was both deadly poison and healing elixir. And of course, the gaze that turned her victims to statues.
Much of the text was irrelevant. The venom of her hair, the tale of her birth. All that mattered were the passages fighting to fossilize my body.
One word at a time, I chiseled them back.
Stone rasped through my throat. I blinked, and the darkness changed to a grainy mess of clouds and shadows. Cold, numb fingers curled. My palm felt like dried plaster. Skin flaked away, the pain jolting my nerves. I stopped trying to move for fear I’d accidentally snap off a limb.
The gorgon was running toward me, little more than a slash of gray through the static of my vision. Other figures moved awkwardly to intercept her, their heads turned away to protect them from her curse. I focused not on the gorgon’s body, but on the magic flowing through her, the words that stretched out like tendrils of stone to my body. I seized those words in my mind and hurled them back.
She stumbled, her feet turned heavy and unresponsive. My blood pounded so hard that my still-healing veins threatened to split from the pressure. Like a mirror to a laser, I turned her own curse against her.
She stopped moving. The last of my petrified body melted back to flesh as the gorgon’s power rebounded through her. Much of her body was already stone. The serpents of her hair moved sluggishly, like snakes in a torpor from cold. Two ghosts swirled around her, seeking to dissolve my counterspell as it spun muscle and bone into rock.
I reached for the stories Meridiana had used to remake Deanna’s body. As I unraveled them, her hair fell limp. Scales dropped away, leaving thick-curled black locks. The curse died along with the gorgon’s form, and Deanna slumped to the ground.
For a moment, I thought I had saved her, but her body was still. You couldn’t restore life to the dead, and I had spoken to Deanna’s ghost in Rome.
Sweat stung my eyes. I dropped to one knee and took Smudge from my pocket. As quickly and carefully as I could, I peeled away the spells that had come from Deanna.
“Meridiana knows we’re here,” said Ponce de Leon. “We need to—”
“Shut up.” How long since Smudge had been petrified? Sixty seconds? Maybe more. I flung my useless sunglasses aside and squinted at the tangle of magic that defined the little fire-spider. I hadn’t read his book in ages, but I could see the individual passages crumbling. “Come on, dammit!”
I had restored his body, but he wasn’t moving. I snatched one of the dying fragments of magical text, a passage in which Smudge accidentally set fire to his owner’s oil-slick fingers. I knew these books. I remembered the scene. I clung to that memory, used it to restore the broken text, and wrapped it around Smudge’s body.
Sweat stung my eyes. Line by line, I raced to repair my friend. I felt someone crouch beside me—Lena, from the sound of creaking wood.
My eyes were dry from my time as an almost-statue. My vision hadn’t completely returned either. Black clouds fogged the edges of my sight. I restored another scene, this one a fight between Smudge and a zombie.
One of Smudge’s legs twitched. Slowly, he began to stir.
I wanted to jump to my feet and shout, Holy shit, did you see that? This was Gutenberg-level libriomancy, and I had done it! I had stopped a gorgon and saved Smudge—and myself as well.
“This sort of thing is normal for you, eh?” asked Lizzie, gesturing toward Frankenstein’s monster and the ex-gorgon.
“No, that was new.” My clothes still felt gritty, but I didn’t care. I was alive, as was Smudge. Though he had curled into a tight, glowing ball, like a lone ember in the smoldering grass. I pulled a jellybean from my pocket and offered it to him.
“Are you all right?” asked Lena.
I rubbed my eyes. It didn’t help my vision. “Good enough.”
“Then we should be going,” said Ponce de Leon.
I nodded. Once Smudge cooled enough for me to return him to my shoulder, we walked down the trail toward the river.
Meridiana stood knee-deep in the water on the far side, gathering magic from her e-reader. Behind her was a naga, an enormous seven-headed serpent that had twined three of those heads around a fat birch tree. An ogre of some sort stood beside Meridiana, with fists like moldy sacks of meat hanging in the water. A winged monkey straight out of Oz perched in the branches overhead, along with what could have been a harpy, or maybe a fury. And standing in the darkness beyond was Death personified, a tall black-robed figure with a scythe.
“I know you took the sphere from the fort, Isaac.” Meridiana’s attention remained fixed on the water. Ghosts swirled around her, ready to intercept any magical assault. “You should have left it in Ger
bert’s poem.”
The water in front of her was a circle of perfect blackness. I tried to decipher the magic in the portal, but where the water itself was smooth as glass, the spells Meridiana had poured from her e-reader were like swirls of ink, diffusing through one another and rendering the whole thing unreadable. I pulled out my phone and tapped the screen. The wireless signal here was faint, but I didn’t need much. “And you shouldn’t have saved all of your books on one device.”
Her ghosts moved to counter my assault, but this had nothing to do with magic. This was all about Kirsten LaMontagne’s skills as a hacker. The dead had no way of blocking the wireless command that reset Meridiana’s e-reader to factory default settings.
She screamed. Had any of her books remained in its memory, I had no doubt she would have killed me on the spot. But it would take time to restore her electronic library.
Unfortunately, the loss of her e-reader didn’t undo the spells she had already cast. The portal remained, as did her ghosts and her monsters.
“Bring him to me,” she shouted.
The flying monkey and the harpy—definitely a harpy, now that I could see her better—launched themselves from the trees. When they were halfway across the river, a series of gunshots rang out like firecrackers. The monkey splashed down into the water, while the harpy managed to wing her way to a pine tree, where she clung to the branches and nursed her bleeding shoulder.
The smell of gunpowder drifted through the air. I had counted five shots, and they had come from both sides of the river. Tee Jandron stepped into view holding a pump-action shotgun. Walt Derocher was with him, dressed in camo and holding the rifle he used for hunting bear. I spotted Jaylee Parker a little way down, one arm in a sling, the other extending a black revolver toward the naga.
Meridiana flung her e-reader away and yanked out her cell phone. Magic shimmered into existence from whatever books she had stored on her phone, shielding her and her creatures from the bullets.
More shots rang out, and the world turned to chaos. The ogre waded toward us. The bullets only seemed to annoy him. Behind me, Ponce de Leon leaned forward to jab his cane into the edge of the river. The water froze around the ogre’s legs, trapping him in place.
The kitsune had drawn a pair of chrome-plated pistols and was returning fire against my reinforcements. Death and the naga were both coming toward me.
Lena scaled an old maple tree like she was Spider-Man, her fingers sinking into the wood. Twenty feet up, she plunged both hands into the maple. The entire tree shuddered. Thick roots punched free of the dirt and reached for the naga.
Meridiana’s ghosts were everywhere. They freed the ogre from Ponce de Leon’s magic, weakened Lena’s hold on her tree, and turned my shock-gun into a useless paperweight. I concentrated on Death, trying to rip the myth and magic from its mortal frame, but something struck me from behind.
I hit the ground hard enough to knock the wind out of me. When I looked up, the cloaked skeleton stood at my feet. I knew he was a construct of myth and magic, but it was profoundly disturbing to look up and see Death himself looming over you. Fingers of yellowed bone tightened around the old, curved wood of his scythe.
Branches from Lena’s tree reached for his neck. He caught the closest with one hand. Lena screamed as the branch dried and crumbled.
I scooted back. “You know, in some stories, Death lets his victims challenge him for their lives. I don’t suppose I can interest you in a game of Monopoly?”
He raised his scythe.
A lopsided grin crept over my face. “Before you kill me, you might want to check your cloak. It seems to be on fire.”
The skull tilted in what I assumed was confusion. He twisted around to see flames creeping up his back. Smudge raced higher, leaving a trail of fire behind. Death tried to strip off his cloak, but he couldn’t do that while holding the scythe. By the time he tossed the flaming cloak away, leaving a naked and somewhat less imposing skeleton standing in shin-deep water, Smudge had managed to hop onto his shoulder.
Death reached for the fire-spider. Smudge was quicker, darting up the jawbone and then disappearing into the left eye socket.
Death’s skull lit up like a jack-o’-lantern.
I wasn’t sure the skeleton could feel pain, but he was certainly upset. He dropped his scythe and stumbled back. Thin, yellowed fingers dug into his eyes, but judging by the flickering red flames, Smudge had squeezed through the back of the eye into the larger brain cavity.
I studied the skeleton for a moment, but my vision wouldn’t focus. Black smoke obscured the words of his enchantment. He was doubled over now, gripping his own head like a bowling ball.
I crawled to retrieve the discarded scythe.
Lena would have reminded me that this was a victim, just like Jeneta. And she would be right. But whoever he had been before, that person was already dead.
I swept the scythe’s blade through the neck. It was an awkward strike, but it worked. Death collapsed in a clattering pile of bone. I snatched the skull before it could roll into the water.
Smudge crawled out of the skull onto my arm, turned to survey his work, and began cleaning his forelegs.
“Show-off,” I said.
The staccato cracking of gunfire had mostly died down. Ponce de Leon was struggling against a swarm of ghosts, and it looked like he was losing. Lena had knocked the kitsune’s guns away, and they were battling hand-to-hand. Lizzie Pascoe was slumped against the base of a tree. She wasn’t moving.
I concentrated on Meridiana, searching for the stories I had seen within the celestial sphere. Meridiana’s stories, binding her to Jeneta Aboderin.
The harpy tackled me from behind. The naga struck my legs. I saw Smudge fall, but I couldn’t catch him this time. Talons gripped my head, grinding my face into the pebbled riverbed. I tried to get my mouth above the water, but the harpy was too strong. I clawed at her wrists as they dragged me toward Meridiana. I tried to fight, but I couldn’t think, couldn’t concentrate on anything but the need for air.
I felt Meridiana’s magic crawling through my thoughts, searching for the location of the sphere. I heard her cry of triumph as she uprooted the memory she needed. The water’s distortion made it sound far away.
The harpy wrenched my head up. I gasped for breath and searched for Smudge. I had no idea whether or not the fire-spider could swim.
Ponce de Leon hurled a spell, but Meridiana deflected it into a nearby tree, which shrank to little more than a sapling. Some sort of reverse aging magic. Nice.
“You thought you could hide the sphere from me?” she asked.
I coughed and spat river water. “I won’t fetch it back.”
“I didn’t ask you to.” She stepped to the edge of the portal.
“How did you overcome the problem of textual misalignment?” This kind of libriomancy risked sending things into the world of the book, which essentially destroyed whatever you were trying to teleport. Maybe blending the magic of multiple books somehow canceled out the effect? For an instant, I could almost see how she had layered the different stories into the water, and then the harpy’s fist thudded against my temple.
Meridiana ignored me. I saw her guiding the portal’s magic toward the memory she had stolen from me. Ripples spread from the center, rebounding from the edge as if trapped by an invisible barrier. She looked at me, either making sure I had no final tricks, or else wanting to be sure I saw her triumph. Grinning wildly, she plunged her hands into the river.
Triumph turned to shouts of rage and pain. Bubbles and steam roiled from the portal. A cracking sound like the snapping of giant bones filled the air as the water tried to freeze and boil at the same time.
Meridiana screamed, her hands and forearms trapped in the ice. Unearthly cold spread outward, and fog obscured normal vision.
I twisted around, reaching for the stories within the naga and the kitsune. I didn’t have time to destroy them, but I tugged at their magic long enough to make them let go. The
y staggered away from me. I crawled through the water, following Meridiana’s cries until I reached her side. Once there, I pressed a hand to her side, searching for what remained of Jeneta Aboderin. For the girl who had rolled her eyes at my obtuseness and fed raisins to Smudge and taught minnows to dance to the magic of her words.
“‘For he must fly back to his perch and cling,’” I muttered, quoting the fragmented Dunbar poem I had shared with her from within Meridiana’s prison. “‘When he fain would be on the bough a-swing.’”
What Meridiana had done to her monsters was crude and clumsy compared to the magic smothering Jeneta’s mind. The gorgon had been a human body wearing a mask of story; with Jeneta, the transformation was internal. Meridiana’s thoughts were welded to her own.
“Jeneta would have known better than to reach into that portal.” I tugged harder.
“Stop,” Meridiana snarled. “I’ll kill her.” I saw her power turn inward. Deep within the tangle of text and magic, Jeneta cried out in pain.
“No, you won’t.” A shadow moved through the fog, coalescing into the shape of Nidhi Shah. She gripped an oddly shaped pistol with both hands.
“What took you so long?” I sagged back in the water. “I told you that as soon as she reached into the portal, I’d need you to get out here and save my ass!”
“There was a harpy in the way,” said Nidhi. “I had to wait for Lena to take care of it.”
“You’re going to shoot us?” Meridiana sneered. “Go ahead. Murder the poor girl.”
“You don’t know what that is, do you?” I grinned. “You knew about Harry Potter and the Goblin’s Scepter. But you missed the other books the Porters put together. That’s a JG-367 from The Foretelling. I made it for Nidhi on the way over. It’s locked in exorcism mode. She’s not going to shoot Jeneta. Just you.”
Nidhi pulled the trigger, and a line of crackling amethyst light speared Meridiana’s chest. I saw her summon her ghosts to disrupt the JG-367’s magic. With her attention distracted, I reached for the ambition, the hatred, the stories Meridiana had donned over the centuries, the legends she had built and fed upon. Her dreams and her hunger. One story at a time, I added my efforts to the JG-367 to pull her out of Jeneta’s body.