by Jim C. Hines
“Dare I ask what you’re planning to do with a ring and an old pepperbox?” Lena asked when I was done.
I beamed. “It’s a surprise. Give me two minutes to get ready.”
I slipped the ring onto my finger and vanished. In theory, true invisibility should have left me blind. Vision relied on the interaction between light and the cells at the back of the eye, but thanks to the ring, the light passed through me as if I wasn’t here.
Fortunately, libriomancy obeyed belief over physics, and few modern-day readers thought about invisibility on a cellular level. I ran back to Christina Quinney and took a lipstick from her purse, then hurried toward the garden. Once there, I dropped behind the overturned bench.
The seat and back were slabs of polished black granite. The engraving along the back read, In memory of Annette Butler. Had the truck hit this thing head-on, it probably would have broken both the bench and the truck, but it looked like they had struck it at an angle.
“I’m sorry about this, Annette.” I uncapped the lipstick and drew two red eyes and a large mouth. I wasn’t much of an artist, especially since the lipstick had turned invisible when I picked it up, but it left visible, waxy lines on the granite. I added a pair of angry eyebrows as well, along with uneven ears to either side.
I put the lipstick away and pulled out the pepperbox. Creating the powder of life from The Marvelous Land of Oz had been the easy part. The challenge was getting through the ritual to use it. I opened the box and sprinkled the powder over the bench, then raised my left pinky and said, “Weaugh.” Next was the right thumb. “Teaugh.” Finally, I raised both arms and waved them like a dancer doing jazz hands. “Peaugh.”
L. Frank Baum wrote some weird magic. I just hoped I had pronounced it correctly.
Through my glasses, the powder looked like white sparks melting into the metal and granite. The whole contraption gave a shiver. Lipstick eyes blinked, and the ears perked up.
“Hello there,” I said. “I need you to do me a favor…”
A wendigo was the first one to spot the bench bounding toward them. With a snarl, it broke away from the circle to meet this new threat.
The bench didn’t even slow down. It charged with a straight-on waddle, as if it wanted nothing more than for that wendigo to plop down and enjoy a nice, comfy seat. Instead, the wendigo grabbed the bench and lifted one end into the air.
It was an impressive display of strength, one which did the wendigo no good whatsoever as the seat and back clapped together like enormous granite jaws. The wendigo let out a high-pitched yowl of pain.
Lena used the distraction to sprint toward the trees. Two of the wendigos spotted her, but a chunk of brick downed one before it could react. A lucky shot with my shock-gun took care of the second. I was a lousy shot with my left hand, but the nice thing about the shock-gun was that even grazing the target was enough to drop it.
Harrison whirled, but thanks to the Ring of Gyges on my hand, he stared right through me.
He recovered quickly, ordering the wendigos back. A ghost flew from the automaton and swooped through the bench, weakening my spell.
My gun spat lightning at the three mages, but it fizzled into nothingness without reaching them. With everyone worrying about me and the bench, Lena was able to race out from between the trees, slip an arm around a wendigo’s throat, and haul it backward.
The wendigo’s choked cry was enough to attract attention. Two more wendigos bounded after Lena. I almost felt bad for them. Attacking Lena among the trees was a particularly bad idea.
I moved to the corner of the church and braced my arm against the bricks, sighting in on August Harrison, but one of the ghosts swooped into my line of fire. It could see me, even if Harrison couldn’t.
In the field, the bench staggered as another ghost continued to siphon its magic. Cartoonish eyes drooped, and its movements turned sluggish. But when another wendigo approached, the bench valiantly reared up and kicked it in the chest.
The ghost in front of me closed in. I pointed over its shoulder, uncertain whether it would see or understand the gesture. “Too late,” I said, grinning.
With two of the three ghosts focused on us while Harrison and the wendigos chased after Lena, the remaining book-mage was left alone to try to contain the automaton. It wasn’t enough. Wooden hands creaked, and a blast of hellfire shot outward. The woman with the green hair tried to jump out of the way, but the flames caught her in the side. She spun away, protecting her book even as she screamed in pain.
She tried to run, but the automaton struck a wendigo hard enough to knock its body into her. They both went down, and her book flew into the grass. The ghost in front of me peeled away, streaking back toward the automaton.
I didn’t stop to think. I simply ran. I held my shock-gun ready, but my attention was on that book. The wendigo who had been hit was very dead, but Green was groaning and trying to pull herself free from beneath the body. She was reaching for her book.
I got there first. The book disappeared when I snatched it up with my armored hand. The woman screamed again, fury overpowering pain as she struggled to follow.
I retreated to the church to study my prize. It became visible again as soon as I set it down. White silk cords bound wooden boards covered in red cloth. I opened the cover, then pulled my hand back. “Rice paper,” I whispered.
Strong and smooth, the paper held the ink far better than most modern paper. The columns of brown Chinese characters were as clear and sharp as the day they had been drawn. The pages were folded and pasted together, like a long scroll flattened accordion-style and bound into a single book. There were illustrations, but no color.
Based on what I had seen, this book was more than seven hundred years old. Give or take a century. That made it significantly older than Gutenberg himself. Of course, I was no expert, and I couldn’t know anything for certain without further research.
I turned carefully to the front pages and frowned. The first few pages were printed, either woodblock or movable type. But the inner pages appeared to have been written by hand.
I moved the book out of sight behind me and returned my attention to the fighting. Only two of the ghosts remained, and all but three wendigos were unconscious or too injured to make a difference. Harrison was red-faced, his angry shouts growing shrill with panic. My animated bench was limping and the automaton was in bad shape, but we were winning. Harrison launched another small swarm at the automaton, only to have their magic sucked away before they reached their target. Harrison cried out again, this time in pain. I grinned and started shooting, and he dove for cover behind the truck.
“Guan Feng?”
The voice belonged to a woman, and it had come from the book. I had heard whispers from books before, but this was different. It didn’t feel like misplaced snippets of dialogue sneaking into my thoughts. Whoever had spoken sounded more aware, more here.
At the tree line, roots broke through the earth to twine around a wendigo’s ankles. I aimed at the two remaining book-mages and pulled the trigger.
The book behind me screamed. The words were in another tongue—one of the Chinese languages, I thought…possibly Mandarin—but I understood them perfectly as they tore through my skull.
“Begone, Porter!”
In order for my magic to translate her words, those words had to be spoken by a living mind. This was no character brought to pseudolife to fight for August Harrison. Not only was this a real person, she knew what I was. And she was terrified.
“Bi Wei!” The woman with the green hair dragged herself free and began hobbling toward us. Harrison shouted an order, but she ignored him. I heard the book calling out to her, to Guan Feng, pleading for help.
I raised my shock-gun. I had endless questions, but we could sort things out as soon as everyone stopped trying to kill me.
The book screamed a second time. Magic poured forth, and I watched the gun dissolve in my hand.
The fact that I could see my hand meant th
e Ring of Gyges was fading as well. I scooted backward, but Guan Feng had spotted me. The book continued to scream, and a shadow darkened my vision. The sunglasses fell apart and dropped to the ground, leaving me blind to the magic swirling around and through me.
I couldn’t see what she was doing, but I could feel it. The armor on my right hand broke away like oversized scabs. I supposed I should have been grateful for that small blessing, but it didn’t stop.
As the ghost tore through me, my mind flashed back to the attack in Detroit. The devourer had seized me from the inside out, claws unraveling my memories and my thoughts. I had come so close to drowning in its hunger and rage. It had been an incoherent, instinctive attack. The devourer had no understanding or awareness of what I was, or of anything save the need to destroy me. This was different. Instead of incoherent fury, I sensed both fear and determination. Her attack was similar, but more controlled.
She was also stronger. These books, and whoever or whatever was acting through them, had been holding back.
I felt her attention splinter. She lashed out to slap the bench, which broke in two and stopped moving. Another strike knocked the automaton to the ground. She had plunged us all into a whirlpool of naked power. Even Guan Feng looked afraid as she limped toward us.
Where had they come from, and why would they follow a man like Harrison? Their power dwarfed whatever magic he had managed to steal from the Porters.
“Lena, get out of here!” I crawled away from the book and used the wall to push myself upright. A wendigo was bounding toward me on all fours. “Tell them we’ve been chasing Saruman.”
I hoped she would understand. Saruman was a dangerous villain in Lord of the Rings, but he hadn’t been the true threat. If whoever or whatever was trapped in these books got loose, they would make Gutenberg look like an amateur stage magician fumbling his way through cheap card tricks.
Several hundred pounds of wendigo slammed into me like a wrecking ball. My head bounced against the ground, and I rolled several times before coming to rest. As my vision gradually came back into focus, I found myself looking up at a snarling, frostbitten face that retained just enough humanity to be truly monstrous.
“I think you and I both know Lena’s not going to leave you alone.” August Harrison strode toward us, one thumb hooked through his belt loop. Metal creatures crawled over his chest and shoulders, like piglets fighting for their mother’s teat. Many were larger than the insects we had seen before, more like those Madagascar hissing cockroaches some people kept as pets. I searched for the queen, the cicada Nicholas had described, but couldn’t find it.
Harrison pulled an old paperback from his back pocket and fanned through the pages. I swore when I spotted the cover art. A yellow-and-red border framed an image of two scantily clad warrior women fighting over a well-muscled man chained to an oak tree. Harrison had tracked down a copy of Nymphs of Neptune.
“You write well, Isaac. Such detailed reports. I can’t begin to tell you how helpful you’ve been to my little army.” He tugged a rusted metal millipede off of his shirt and held it out for me to see. “I might not have Victor’s gifts, but I know my way around a machine shop. If he had shared these secrets with me, let me help him build sturdier, stronger creatures, he might have survived that attack.”
I heard genuine regret, even grief in his words as he stared past me. Despite everything he had done, Victor had been a part of his life for years. What must it have been like when the cicada arrived? If it was telepathic, did that mean it had shared Victor’s final, agonized moments with August Harrison?
Harrison brought the millipede closer, and any sympathy I had disappeared. Pointed iron legs clicked together. A series of overlapping brackets formed the segmented shell. Instead of antennae, a single slender blade protruded from the center of the millipede’s face, like some kind of stiletto-headed unicorn bug. The millipede was long enough to circle Harrison’s wrist with several inches to spare.
He dropped it onto my chest. I tried to fling it away, only to have the wendigo stomp on my arm. If I had been on pavement instead of grass, he would have shattered bone. I lay perfectly still as the millipede crawled higher and circled my neck.
Harrison turned to shout. “Miss Greenwood, I’m tired of games. I’ll give you thirty seconds, and then I’m going to let one of my pets bore a hole through your lover’s skull.”
He was sweating beneath that coat of bugs. I could see the dampness as they moved. His face was red, and he was out of breath.
Guan Feng approached, hugging her book to her body. She scowled at me like I was the genetically engineered offspring of Adolf Hitler and Jack the Ripper.
“Perhaps she needs more encouragement.” Harrison turned to the trees again. “You’ve lost one oak this year. Are you strong enough to survive the death of another?”
“Going after Lena’s tree didn’t work out too well for you last time,” I said. “How many more of your son’s toys can you afford to lose?”
He waved a hand, and the millipede’s grip tightened with a metallic click.
“You have no idea what you’ve allied yourself with, do you?” I asked. I didn’t bother hiding my smirk. If he was going to kill me, the least I could do was piss him off before I died. “You’re nothing but a parasite. I don’t know what they need you for, but as soon as they get it—”
“August.” Lena emerged from the trees carrying a long wooden spear. One of the wendigos jumped in front of Harrison to shield him, but Lena only laughed and hefted the spear over one shoulder. “You think I can’t put this thing through both of you?”
The millipede raced onto my face. It was heavier than I had expected, and its legs stung like thorns. I heard a whirring sound, and pain pierced the center of my forehead.
Harrison raised his book. “Even if that were true, killing me would guarantee Isaac’s death, and we both know you can’t do that.”
Blood dripped down the side of my head. I turned my head to keep the blood from running into my ear, which brought Guan Feng into the center of my vision. She was staring at Lena, and her eyes had filled with tears. She didn’t seem to be afraid. Not of Lena, at any rate. If anything, she looked like she was afraid to trust what she was seeing, like she wanted to touch Lena to confirm that she was real. She noticed me watching, and her expression turned to stone.
Lena stabbed her spear into the earth. The millipede pulled back, obeying Harrison’s unspoken command. My jaw unclenched, and I forced myself to breathe normally.
“Search her,” Harrison barked at Guan Feng. “Strip her of any magic, and don’t let her have any wood. Not even a toothpick.”
Lena smiled and spread her arms, never taking her eyes from August Harrison. Her unwavering attention even made me nervous. “If you hurt Isaac, I will shove an acorn down your throat and force it to take root in your gut. Care to guess how tall it will grow before you finally die?”
Harrison stepped forward and backhanded her. I pushed myself up, but the wendigo gave me an almost absentminded kick in the head.
Lena never even blinked. “Is your hand okay?”
Harrison grimaced and rubbed his knuckles. “It doesn’t matter. As long as I have him, you’re mine. And once you’ve spent enough time in my company, you’ll kill him yourself.”
Lena’s gaze dropped to me, and for the first time, her confidence cracked. As strong as she was, we both knew Harrison was right.
I understand humans are unable to remember their first years of life. Their bodies and minds develop so much, and so quickly during that time. Perhaps that’s why I remember so little of those early sessions with Nidhi Shah. I’ve read her case notes, but much of the person she describes is a stranger.
Only two thoughts etched themselves into my memory during that first meeting. The first was Nidhi’s smile, beautiful and warm and reassuring. The second was my realization toward the end of the day that I was completely in love with her.
I learned so much from her. Nidhi said one
way Frank controlled me was to make sure I never acquired the skills to be independent. Because it made her happy, I threw myself into study.
I mastered reading in three weeks. We began with children’s stories, like Doctor Seuss and the Berenstain Bears. (I learned later that she had deliberately avoided giving me a copy of The Giving Tree.) Once I could make it through those, she brought me a handful of comic books.
I devoured them. Tank Girl and Wonder Woman, She-Hulk and Batman, Catwoman and Katana. I wanted to meet them. I wanted to be them. I shaped my first wooden sword from my oak tree, mimicking the exaggerated, thick-bladed weapon from Katana’s appearance in an early Outsiders comic.
I was catching up on Black Widow one evening when I felt Nidhi watching me. I continued reading, enjoying her attention. I knew she was attracted to me. I could feel her fighting it every time we spoke, every time I hugged her or sat beside her on the couch. She had brought me into her home because I had no place to go. Now I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
“You’ve changed your hair,” she said.
I pulled my fingers through the black locks. I had done nothing. I hadn’t even noticed the darkening color until a week ago. My skin had turned a deeper brown as well, far more than it ever had before, even when I was working day in and day out beneath the sun. “Do you like it?”
She didn’t answer, but instead walked over to see what I was reading. “I loved that issue.”
“Me, too.”
I could have seduced her as I had done with Frank Dearing, could have taken her desire and grown it like a new-budded flower. But I refrained. Whatever happened, it was important that it be her choice. I wanted her to love me on her own terms.
She sat down, not on the couch beside me, but in the rocking chair at the end of the coffee table. “You’ve grown so much since you lost Frank. The Porters are asking for my evaluation. I believe you’re ready to live on your own.”
I jumped to my feet, heart pounding. “I’m not. I can’t—”