by Jim C. Hines
The pages looked like someone had lit a fire in the center of the book’s spine, blackening all but the outer edges. The damage had rendered the book useless for libriomancy, like a cracked lens in a laser. I would need to update our database. Magical resonance treated identical copies of a book as a single point, which was why we could touch the belief of all readers of a given title. But those same principles meant every copy of Asimov’s collection now carried the same magical charring, though only libriomancers would see it. Every copy of this book would be useless for years, even decades. Depending on the severity, the damage could even creep into other editions of the same book.
“You’re angry at Gutenberg for keeping secrets from you.” Nidhi cocked her head to the side. “Yet every time Lena or I ask you about your secret research project for the Porters, you change the subject.”
I drew a tally mark in the air, acknowledging the point. “You saw what I’ve been working on,” I said softly. “The shadow that tried to claw its way out of my spell.”
“The woman?”
“Or something like her. Jeneta called them ‘devourers.’ They’ve been trying to break through to our world. Gutenberg assigned me to figure out what they were and how to stop them.”
“That would explain the stress. How far have you gotten?”
“I’m not even close.” I carefully closed the Asimov book and tucked it back into my bag. I’d need to write up a report for Pallas. She would not be happy. “I don’t even know if what we saw through my spell is the same thing that tried to kill me in Detroit. The manifestation was similar, but not identical.”
“Helen believes a libriomancer was behind this,” Nidhi said. “She’s scared whoever it is will come after the werewolves next.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Tension lined her eyes and forehead. “There are libriomancers who enjoy power more than they should, but if anyone were capable of this kind of violence, it should have been caught and dealt with long before reaching this point. As for your devourers, we screen for symptoms of possession.”
“You can’t screen for what you don’t know about,” I countered. The Porters hadn’t yet recovered from the last libriomancer to turn against us. I didn’t know how the organization would survive a second betrayal. “How much trouble are Jeff and Helen going to give us?”
“None for now. I convinced them to let us look for the killer on our own.”
I glanced up. “How did you manage that?”
“I reminded them that the Porters are a pack. If one of us did this, it’s our responsibility to stop that person. Just as Jeff and Helen would personally hunt down any of their people who broke pack law.”
“Nice.” I ran my fingers over the rest of my books. “I’ll look up any wendigo encounters from the past decade. Maybe this is a simple revenge thing.”
Nidhi said nothing, but I had worked with her long enough to recognize the tilt of her head and the slight compression of her mouth. She didn’t buy that any more than I did.
A knock at the door made me jump so hard Smudge had to grab my ear to keep from being dislodged. I held very, very still until he released me.
Lena opened the door and peeked inside.
Nidhi jumped to her feet. “What’s wrong?”
Sweat beaded Lena’s brow, and her face was pale. The muscles in her neck were taut. She gripped the doorframe so tightly her knuckles were white. “We have to leave.”
I started toward her, but Nidhi was faster. She slipped an arm around Lena for support. Lena accepted gratefully, resting her head against Nidhi’s.
I waited in awkward silence until Lena kissed Nidhi and pulled away.
“Are you hurt?” I asked. “Did someone—”
“It’s not me.” She frowned and shook her head. “It’s not this body, I mean. It’s my tree. Something’s wrong.”
“I’ll drive,” I said. There was no way I was letting her ride a motorcycle on these roads in her condition. I might have burned through a little too much magic today, but I was in far better shape than Lena.
“I’ll be right behind you,” said Nidhi.
Lena didn’t protest. She tossed Nidhi the keys to her bike while I shouldered my bag.
“Isaac.” Nidhi directed a pointed look toward my bag. “Be careful.”
“Of course,” I said, but I was already thinking beyond the weapons in my book bag. If someone was hurting Lena’s oak, I intended to bring my entire library down on their head.
A 1973 Triumph convertible wasn’t the most practical choice of car for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Setting aside Michigan’s attitude toward foreign-made cars, the little two-seater was simply too small and unreliable for the no-holds-barred assault winter launched on the U.P. each year. Up here, the ideal winter vehicle was anything you could mount a snowplow to. When I first brought the car up, more than one person had offered wagers on how many times I’d put it into a ditch or get myself stuck at the bottom of an icy hill.
I had pocketed close to four hundred bucks from those bets. This thing was far safer than my old pickup truck. The previous owner had installed a number of magical modifications, including traction spells strong enough for me to do a slalom course at full speed across a frozen lake. Or in this case, to swerve around gravel roads at speeds somewhere between insane and suicidal.
Lena’s body was rigid, her eyes closed. She kept her hands clamped around her bokken. She gasped occasionally, tight breaths that hissed through her teeth, but otherwise made no sound.
I was fairly certain the loss of her tree wouldn’t kill her. Not immediately, at least. She had survived the death of her previous oak earlier in the year by grafting branches from that tree onto the one in my backyard, but it hadn’t been an easy transition.
Besides Nidhi and myself, only a handful of people knew the location of Lena’s tree. Of those, I couldn’t think of anyone with reason to harm her. But the timing couldn’t be a coincidence. “Did anyone else see you this afternoon?”
Lena shook her head. “Jeff and Helen would have known if we were followed.”
I turned off the headlights when we reached my street, so as not to alert anyone at the house. The porch and garage lights had come on automatically at sundown. I saw nothing unusual, but as I drove past the driveway to park on the side of the road, Smudge dropped into an alert crouch on the dashboard. Heat rippled over his body.
“Stay here.” I grabbed Smudge and my books. Smudge climbed onto the leather strap of the book bag and clung there, all eight eyes watching the house. I leaned over and opened the glove box, using its light to skim a copy of H. Allen Conrad’s Time Kings.
“Like hell.” Lena pulled herself out of the car, leaning on her bokken for support.
Thankfully, she waited for me to finish creating a fully charged and loaded shock-gun. I had been practicing with this particular gun since July, though it wasn’t always easy to find a secluded enough space for target practice. The shock-gun was a two-stage weapon. Pulling the trigger fired a tiny, electrically charged pellet at supersonic speed. A split-second later, the gun’s power source triggered an electrical discharge that followed the path of ionized air particles.
In layman’s terms, I had a pistol that shot lightning. The charge could be adjusted from “Low-grade Taser” to “Barbeque a Medium-sized Dinosaur,” and had a range of up to one mile. From a distance, it was designed to look like an ordinary revolver. Best of all, unlike so many fictional ray guns, this one had usable sights.
“Just don’t point that thing at my oak,” Lena said.
I rotated the cylinder to setting two, which should drop anyone we encountered without killing them. Keeping the gun pointed to the ground, I crept around the garage to the back of the house, Lena pressing close behind. Clouds curtained the moon, making it difficult to see anything beyond the silhouette of her tree, but it appeared undisturbed. I crouched by the corner of the house, searching the yard and the trees beyond, but found nobo
dy.
“It feels diseased,” Lena whispered. “Like rot spreading through my bones.”
“Could someone have poisoned it?”
“It wouldn’t work this quickly, or hurt this much.”
From inside the house came a sharp thud, followed by the sound of breaking glass. Lena pulled me back.
“Front door,” I whispered. The sliding door leading in from the deck was locked from the inside, and smashing through glass doors tended to alert whoever you were trying to sneak up on.
We circled around to the front. The storm door had a hole drilled through the aluminum frame, which was odd, as it hadn’t actually been locked. The twenty-year-old wooden door had three holes, as if whoever was trying to break in hadn’t been able to figure out how to disable the deadbolt. I readied my weapon, waited for Lena’s nod, and turned the knob.
It didn’t budge. Whoever was inside must have gotten the door locked again behind them. I slid the key into the lock, turned until it clicked, and opened the door.
The hinges creaked faintly. I held my breath, but heard no movement from inside. The brass plate on the doorframe was scraped and bent, like someone had held an oversized drill against it. What kind of incompetent break-in was this?
Lena grabbed my arm before I could step inside. “Look down.”
The drill had left sawdust scattered over the tile floor. I stared for several seconds before I realized what had caught her attention. There were no footprints in the sawdust.
“The hell?” I mouthed silently.
Lena’s bokken flattened in her hands, each sword taking on a perfectly honed edge sharp enough to cut through one and a half vampires in a single strike. She slipped past me to check the kitchen. I waited for her signal, then moved into the library.
I had read far too many books about this scenario, not to mention all the monster movies, to be happy poking through a dark house. I gripped the shock-gun in both hands, half expecting a chainsaw-wielding zombie or alien slime-monster to leap out at me as I checked between each of the shelves.
A grinding sound made me whirl. Lena put her back to the counter and gestured toward the hallway. I moved through the kitchen to cover her as she crouched by the hall and stretched her fingers to touch the hardwood floor. She would be able to feel if anyone or anything was crouching around the corner, waiting to pounce. After a moment, she rose and stepped into the hall.
The noise was coming from my office. From my computer, to be specific. It sounded like the hard drive was trying to spin up, but kept stuttering out. The office itself was empty.
“I’ll check the bedroom,” Lena whispered.
“Be careful.” The prospect of catching whoever had attacked her tree appeared to have given her a second wind, but I didn’t know how long that would last.
The monitor was blank except for a blinking cursor prompt. I switched on the desk lamp. Books were scattered over the floor. My heart thudded against my ribs when I spotted a two-hundred-year-old Spanish diary with a freshly-cracked spine and pages pulled loose. It took all my willpower to keep from switching the shock-gun to setting six. Busting into my house was one thing, but someone would pay for this.
The framed space shuttle print on my wall had fallen, and triangles of glass littered the floor. Both the commander and the pilot from that mission had autographed the picture for me. That must have been the crash we heard from outside.
“Nobody’s been back here, either,” Lena called. “The house is empty.”
I picked up the diary and carefully placed it on the desk. There was a bookbinder over in Presque Isle who should be able to repair the damage. I found my new e-reader on the floor beneath the chair. Small electronics were some of the most common targets for burglars, but they had destroyed the reader instead of taking it. The screen looked as if it had been shot at close range.
I sat down in front of the computer. Smudge scurried over to perch on a Petoskey stone paperweight I had gotten for my one-year anniversary at the library. He was still antsy, and I moved several books out of reach of his flames.
I wasn’t worried about my data. Gutenberg himself would have trouble getting past the safeguards Victor Harrison had installed in our networks, and most of my research was backed up on the Porter network. But why take the time to destroy the computer?
Bits of broken plastic peppered the floor. A hole the width of my index finger was bored through the case. I held down the power key, then cycled the computer back on. I wasn’t hoping for much, but the screeching clatter from inside made me jump back.
It wasn’t the hard drive this time. A large silver beetle crawled out of the hole. Gleaming wings buzzed, and it zoomed past my ear before vanishing into the hall.
“What was that?” Lena asked from the doorway.
“Some sort of scarab beetle, I think.” Except that scarab beetles from Michigan would be darker in color, and were unlikely to be nesting in my computer. I crouched on the floor and peeked into the hole, keeping my eye back in case there were more. When nothing attacked my face, I popped the side off of the case to study the machine’s guts. Ordinary beetles wouldn’t have chewed through both plastic and metal, either. “Did you see which way it flew?”
Something buzzed within the computer. I dropped it and jumped back as a second, smaller beetle crawled out from between the hard drives. This one flew straight for the window, striking hard enough to chip the glass. Smudge raced across the desk in hot pursuit.
By the time I reached the window, the thing had chewed its way outside, right through the double-paned glass and the metal screen.
Lena sagged against the wall. “I think I know where it’s going.”
I swore as I realized what she meant. If these things had bored through glass and plastic, how much damage could they do to an oak, even a magically strengthened one?
Smudge circled the hole in the window, as if searching for the best way to squeeze through. I tapped the window, trying to get his attention before he decided to melt his way through the glass. A piece of candy brought him scurrying back to my shoulder.
By the time I flipped on the lights out back, Lena was heading for the garden she had planted two months ago. Rosebushes walled the garden, all save an archway in the front. The branches and thorns were strong enough to repel deer and other creatures. Two varieties were in bloom, one a deep, smoky purple, the other yellow. Most of the flowers were as large as my hand.
In the very back, protected by climbing rose vines, Lena’s oak stood on the boundary between my yard and the woods beyond. The leaves were thicker than any of the surrounding trees, and smaller branches shone with new bark where they had sprouted in the past months. I followed her outside and ducked through the arch of thorns, stepping carefully between the corn and the red peppers.
Lena reached for me with her free hand. Taking mine in hers, she pressed my palm to the rough bark, avoiding the rose thorns that could have pierced my hand. Lena’s fingertips slipped between mine, sinking into the bark as if it were soft clay. “What do you feel?”
Most days, I couldn’t distinguish between Lena’s tree and any other. My magic simply wasn’t strong enough. Few Porters had that kind of power, which was why libriomancy had spread so quickly. Books gave us a crutch, allowing us to draw on the belief and will of others to supplement our own power.
Today was different. I was raw and exposed from my spells in Tamarack. My barriers were down, meaning I was better able to feel and manipulate magic.
I felt her connection to the oak, the sense of stability and timelessness. The roots ran deep, and while the tree might sway with the wind, it was so much stronger than any human. Much like Lena herself.
This wasn’t the first time I had felt the magic of Lena’s tree, but never before had I wanted so badly to pull away. An itching sensation spread through my skin, as if something were squirming and burrowing through my muscles. I fought the urge to scratch until I bled. If it was this unpleasant for me, what was Lena feeling?
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She swore and yanked her hand back. Her fingertips were bleeding. I spotted tiny metal pincers snapping from a small hole in the wood, but the insect retreated before I could get a closer look.
“Whatever they are, they’re killing my tree.”
Frank Dearing was not a good man, but my years with him made me happy.
I loved his fields almost as much as I loved him. I was stronger than his other hands, able to work longer without breaks. I gave strength to the plants that needed it, and I rooted out those dying from rot or insects before they contaminated the rest. Frank’s family had lived on this farm for three generations, but I knew the crops in a way he never could.
I seduced him for the first time in early March, a month after I had stumbled onto his farm. Snow melted beneath my bare feet as I hauled bales of hay from the barn. The cold didn’t bother me, and I enjoyed the crisp wind on my skin. I had taken to wearing shorts and old T-shirts, hand-me-downs from one of the other hands. They were too small, but I liked the way they hugged my flesh.
When I finished spreading the hay, I returned to fetch the ax and hose. The water trough had frozen over again.
I felt Frank watching as I swung the ax through the ice. I glanced over to see him standing on the porch, sipping his coffee. His desire warmed my body in a way sunlight never could. I pretended not to notice, but adjusted my stance to better display the curves of my legs and ass. When I hauled broken chunks of ice from the trough, I allowed the water to drip down my chest. My nipples tightened, blurring the line between pain and pleasure.
I used the hose to rinse away the hay that clung to my skin, then slicked my blonde hair back. I could feel the hem of my shirt stiffening from the cold, which surprised me. With the heat surging through my blood, I half expected to see steam rising from my body.
I smiled at the sound of his boots as they crunched through the snow. I would have known him by his footsteps alone, strong and solid.
“What the hell are you doing, girl?” he asked gruffly. “Get into the barn and change into some dry clothes before you freeze to death.”