by Jim C. Hines
“What is it?” I asked.
“Death attracts death. The ghosts are pulled to this place. They clamor like children.”
I looked to Deb, hoping she would know whether this was normal behavior or a sign that our ghost-talker was about to snap. She spread her hands and shrugged.
“Victor’s thoughts tunnel inward.” Nicholas’ words grew louder. “Why him? Why now? He doesn’t want to die alone.”
“Enough ghouling.” Deb swatted him on the back of the head like he was a misbehaving puppy. “Can you talk to the dead guy or not?”
“Yes,” Nicholas said grudgingly.
“Ask him about the insects,” I said.
Nicholas mumbled to himself, repeating the questions in another tongue. An old form of French, if I wasn’t mistaken. “He reverse-engineered one of Gutenberg’s automatons.”
Deb was the first to recover her voice. “He did what?”
“It’s all about miniaturization and user interface these days,” Nicholas said. The intonation was Victor’s. It was spooky. “Microscopic spells laser-etched onto the inner workings, telepathic interface, and as much memory and storage as I could give them.”
“Why?” I asked.
“To search out lost and forgotten magic. I sent six prototype scouts into the world. One was eaten by a bass. Another was struck by a locomotive. Three survived to report back, sharing their findings with the queen, and through her, with me.”
“A bass?” I thought back to the damage they had done to Lena’s tree. “That shouldn’t have stopped these things.”
“I could have ordered it to work free, but that would have hurt the fish.”
It was such a Victor thing to say, I couldn’t help but smile. “What about the sixth?”
“Lost overseas.” He shuddered, then stared blankly at the empty air where Victor had died.
“Tell us about the queen,” I said.
Nicholas relayed the question. “A cicada, three inches long, with carbon fiber wings and a titanium exoskeleton. A redundant twin-chip brain. The eyes were tiny black pearls. She was magnificent, Isaac. I wish I’d been able to show her off. You would have loved her.”
“The queen controls the other insects?” I asked.
“The song of the cicada can reach 120 decibels. My queen’s commands are silent to our ears, but her children can hear her even from the far side of the world.”
“What did you tell her as you were dying?” asked Nidhi.
Nicholas stepped back and seemed to come back to himself. “Victor cupped her in his hands.” He brought his own hands together, mimicking Victor’s final seconds. “Past and present flooded together as the barriers of memory crumbled. In his mind, he was a child once more. He was in pain, but didn’t remember where it had come from. He knew only that he wanted comfort. Like a child, he called out.”
“He wanted family,” Nidhi whispered, her words clipped. Her hands tightened into fists.
“Yes,” said Nicholas. “Victor sent the queen to fetch his father.”
Frank Dearing died in late autumn, after the trees had shed their leaves, but before the snow arrived to freeze the earth.
I was asleep in my oak when he died. The shock felt as though lightning had split my tree, blackening the exposed heartwood. I ran to the house as quickly as I could, but even before I reached the bedroom, I knew he was gone.
He looked little like the man I loved. His eyes were open, and his lips were pale and dry. He had been sleeping in red long johns, which smelled of urine. His upper body was bare, and the skin on his chest was unnaturally pale.
I scooped him into my arms. His limbs hung limp. Even his skin sagged loosely, emphasizing the bones beneath.
My thoughts were clouded as if I had been drinking, though I had spent much of the night in my oak, and time in my tree usually cleansed alcohol and its effects from my body. I didn’t know what to do. I had no other friends, nor had I ever wanted or needed any. Frank was my world.
I acted on instinct, carrying him from the house. I wove carefully through the trees, making sure not a single branch snagged my lover’s hair or scratched his skin. I hated the coolness of his body against me. My tears dripped onto his chest.
When I reached my oak, my first impulse was to bring him into the tree with me and never emerge, but that felt wrong. Disrespectful and wasteful.
I knew human burial customs, but I couldn’t let Frank be locked away in a box, buried forever in the earth while the ex-wife who had turned her back on him waited impatiently to scavenge through his belongings.
I rested him gently at the base of my tree and drew a blanket of leaves over his body. Only then did I retreat into my tree, where I could feel his weight pressing down on my roots.
This was proper. This was love and respect for the dead.
I reached deeper into the wood of my oak. The roots curled inward, digging through the cold, hard dirt to peel open the earth. Other roots eased Frank into the newly dug hole, curling around him like a blanket and sliding him closer to the taproot.
Frank and I had been together for so many years. I couldn’t lose him. I wouldn’t. His body would sustain my tree, becoming part of me and giving me the strength to survive his loss.
I MIGHT HAVE BEEN the only one in the room who understood Nidhi’s curses, the Gujarati words she spat so quickly I could barely keep up.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Victor’s insects went to find his father. How do we get from that to killing wendigos and attacking Lena’s tree?”
Nidhi watched the sleeping girl, her face unreadable. “Does your family know about your abilities, Isaac?”
I shook my head. “My brother walked in on me once while I was practicing pulling coins from Treasure Island, but I don’t think he saw anything.”
Deb’s lips pursed like she had eaten something sour. “My family doesn’t, but the Porters cost me a fiancé about fifteen years back.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“You don’t know everything about me, hon.”
“Victor’s father is a monster.” Nidhi turned to face us. “August Harrison beat his wife for years. That lasted until Victor was eleven years old. Two days after August broke his wife’s nose, Victor was watching through the window as his father mowed the lawn. He enchanted the family car, which smashed through the garage door and tore across the yard. August tried to get away, but he wasn’t fast enough. The car broke his femur. He spent more than a month in traction.”
I gave a low, soft whistle. Victor had always seemed so pleasant and easygoing, with half his attention permanently lost in his work. “And that’s the guy he wanted when he was dying?”
“Victor’s mother died eight years ago,” said Nidhi. “He had no siblings, no spouse. August Harrison was the only family he had left. And their relationship was…complex.”
Jeff snarled. “Doesn’t sound complex to me. Rip the bastard’s throat out and be done with it.” I relayed his comment for the others.
“When August finally returned from the hospital, he acted like he had changed,” Nidhi continued. “He apologized to his wife and son, and promised to make things better. Two days later, he took Victor out to dinner, bought him several new toys, and asked Victor to teach him magic.”
“Power and control,” Lena said softly.
“Exactly,” said Nidhi. “August used violence to control his family, but that was only one tactic of many. He threatened Victor’s mother to control his son, and threatened the son to control the mother. He kept tight rein over the finances and their social connections, making them dependent upon him for everything. Magic would have been one more weapon in his arsenal. And Victor was a child. He loved his father. For that reason, and because he thought it would appease August’s temper, Victor tried to do as his father had asked.”
“An eleven-year-old trying to teach a grown man magic?” That couldn’t have ended well. Magical ability almost always manifested during childhood or adole
scence. If August had the slightest potential for magic, it would have shown up long before then. Victor had been untrained. He wouldn’t have known how he had controlled the car, let alone how to impart that understanding to others.
“He couldn’t do it,” Nidhi said. “Every failure enraged August further. He accused Victor of lying, of deliberately keeping his secrets to himself. He never again laid a finger on his wife, but he beat Victor three more times. The third time, Victor fought back.”
“How?”
Her lips twitched. “Do you remember Teddy Ruxpin?”
“Sure. My grandparents got me one when I was a kid. Stupid thing gave me nightmares.” I stopped when I realized where she was going with this. “Victor attacked his father with a talking teddy bear? All it did was move its eyes and mouth while it played cassette tapes.”
“Not when Victor was done with it,” Nidhi said. “That teddy bear climbed onto the mantel, leaped out, and garroted August with a length of mint dental floss. They left him unconscious on the floor.”
“Why would Victor reach out to him?” Lena shook her head in disbelief.
“Death is rarely rational,” Nicholas said absently. He appeared far more interested in the dead than the living.
I couldn’t hold Victor’s dying mistake against him. I just hoped we would be able to fix that mistake before August Harrison did any further damage. “Why didn’t the Porters wipe August’s memories?”
“In the beginning, they didn’t realize how much he had seen,” said Nidhi. “Victor refused to talk about the abuse. His parents told the Porters they thought Victor had been playing in the car, and the whole thing was an unfortunate accident. As far as we knew, neither of them suspected anything magical. We didn’t learn the truth until months later, when Victor told us how his father had cowed the family into silence. The Porters visited August Harrison and did their best to erase his knowledge.”
“That obviously didn’t work,” I said bitterly.
“It did for a time.” Nidhi sighed. “Victor was never as careful with magic as he should have been. Over the years, August must have seen enough to piece the truth back together.”
My parents and I hadn’t always gotten along, but I couldn’t imagine growing up as Victor had. I knew he had done time as a field agent, but I had never been able to imagine him facing off against monsters or magic-wielders gone bad. Now I understood. Monsters wouldn’t scare a man who had grown up with one.
“If August has no magic, how does he control the insects?” asked Lena.
“Nicholas—Victor—said something about a telepathic interface.” August couldn’t have built the insects, any more than he could have pulled my shock-gun from its book. But once I made that gun, anyone could point and shoot. Likewise, if the queen was telepathic, August didn’t need magic. “We know he has the queen. Who was the libriomancer with him?”
“August Harrison had no friends among the Porters,” Nidhi said. “The few people who knew of him felt nothing but contempt.”
“What happens if the queen dies?” asked Deb. “Do the rest of the bugs drop dead, or do they freak out and go after anything that moves?” When nobody answered, she punched Nicholas on the shoulder. “That was your cue to ask the dead guy.”
Nicholas scowled, but turned back toward the place where Victor had died. “Victor isn’t certain what will happen if the queen is killed. Her loss would stop them from breeding or evolving, but—”
“Breeding?” Three of us spoke at once.
“Victor used a fractal matrix for the core spells, allowing the queen’s magic to be passed on.” His eyes crinkled with amusement. “The insects aren’t the true danger. Victor says you should be more concerned about the knowledge they could hold. They were designed to interface with his personal computer network, to better share their findings.”
I sat down on the undersized pink desk chair and stared at the wall where Victor’s backup server had once sat. He had disguised the machine as a potted cactus. I remembered the first time I sensed the power coming from Victor’s system, and his mischievous smile as he watched me try to figure out what I was looking at.
Jeff cocked his head and let out a sharp grunt, somewhere between a bark and a growl. Of us all, he was the only one who wouldn’t understand the implications.
I had no idea what a fractal matrix was, but that was the least of our problems. “Victor Harrison designed most of the security for the Porter network.” Anyone else who tried to hack our database would be lucky to survive in their natural shape, but if Victor had programmed his pets to avoid such traps, and if they had access to his system and software…
“August Harrison could have everything,” Nidhi whispered. “Personnel records. Histories.”
“Research reports.” My reports. “Oh, God.”
“What’s wrong?” Lena asked.
I swallowed to keep from throwing up. In my mind, I was back in the woods, standing over the broken body of the murdered wendigo. My throat felt like it had turned to stone.
Lena touched my arm. “Isaac?”
“He wanted their skins,” I whispered. “That’s why August had to butcher them while they were alive. Wendigos revert to human form when they die, and he needed the monster. He wanted to take their power. Their strength.”
“How do you know?” asked Lena.
“Because I wrote the paper explaining how to do it.”
They were all staring at me. “Explain,” Jeff snarled.
Eight years ago, I had never met a nonhuman. Ray had told me stories of vampires and werewolves, but they weren’t real. Not yet. “This was when I first started training with Ray Walker down in East Lansing. We were talking about the nature of magical creatures.”
I had come dangerously close to failing out of my first semester at MSU. I hadn’t cared about my introductory courses. Why waste my time in a lecture hall when I could be studying magic? My textbooks sat unopened while I tore through magical theory and history. I skipped labwork in order to practice using my own powers.
“Libriomancy is an extrinsic magic. I use books to pull magic into myself before I can manipulate that magic. Werewolves and vampires use intrinsic magic. Your bodies use that energy automatically. You can’t control the process any more than I can consciously manufacture white blood cells. We’ve known for centuries that intrinsic and extrinsic magic couldn’t exist in the same person. It’s why Deb lost her libriomancy when she changed.”
“Get to the point,” Deb said.
“Back in the 1920s, a group of Porters were searching for a way to use intrinsic magic without losing their other abilities. They…they started by investigating werewolves.”
Jeff’s lips pulled back, and his hackles were up again.
“Werewolves show up in folktales throughout the world,” I said. “Armenian stories talk of God punishing women by wrapping them in cursed wolf pelts. The women are human during the day, but monsters at night, murdering and feasting on their loved ones. Other cultures tell of skin-walkers, humans who take on the power of wolves and other beasts by donning their fur. The Úlfhednar of Norway dressed in wolfskins and were said to be all but unstoppable. Countless fairy tales talk of enchanted belts that transform the unsuspecting into monsters.”
I was stalling, presenting background information instead of jumping to the heart of my confession. Nidhi knew it, too. I could tell from the crease between her eyebrows.
“They experimented to see if werewolf skins retained their magic, and if that intrinsic magic from…from freshly harvested samples…could be transferred to human beings.”
Jeff lunged at me, but Lena moved just as fast. She kicked him in the side, and his jaws clacked shut, missing me by inches. Jeff’s claws scraped the floor, but before he could recover, Lena was kneeling on his neck. She clutched her bokken in both hands, holding it like a quarterstaff, and ready to strike with either end.
“Their work wasn’t sanctioned,” I said. “When Gutenberg found out, he put
an end to it.” The researchers had been transferred to other regions. A slap on the wrist, considering what they had done.
“What did you do?” Jeff growled.
“Their experiments failed. The skins didn’t preserve the magic long enough to be useful.” When I read their papers eight years ago, I hadn’t thought about werewolves. I had been too busy thinking about the possibilities. What if infusing people with magic could be as easy as applying a nicotine patch?
“You thought wendigo skins might work better,” Lena said.
“Their results suggested a process of rapid magical and biological decay,” I said miserably. “I thought the cold might slow or even stop that process.”
Jeff had stopped struggling, but his ears were flat against his head.
“The Porters have…samples…from various species,” I said. “I requisitioned—Ray helped me to order a patch of wendigo hide. About two square inches, packed in dry ice. We used rats from the pet store, shaving their fur and applying a tiny square. Two didn’t respond at all, but the third showed increased strength and hostility. The changes lasted for several days.”
“How do you collect these samples?” Jeff snarled.
“When a werewolf goes feral, the pack hunts him or her down. Other magical creatures aren’t as self-regulating, so the Porters have to get involved.” I stared through the window. “The bodies are brought back for study and disposal.”
“You said wendigos revert to human form when they die,” Lena said.
“I know.” I couldn’t look at her. “I suspect they put the wendigo into some kind of stasis. It wouldn’t have felt anything.”
It had all been so logical eight years ago. Only a handful of intrinsically magical creatures were sentient. Most were closer to animals. The more we could learn, the better we’d be able to manage them, even protect them when necessary.
How much of our work had August Harrison been able to access? He must have found Victor’s notes, and he had obviously discovered my research papers. Had he been searching specifically for ways to gain power, or had he stumbled onto my reports by accident?