I’m officially reassigning you back to the field.
One little sentence, alluring and seductive, offering me a path to my dreams, then snatched away before I could seize it. Before it could seize me.
My breathing was rapid, and my heart continued to beat double-time. I hadn’t just fallen off the magical wagon; the wagon had run me over and dragged me six blocks down a pothole-ridden street. The effects were worse after two years away. My body was no longer used to channeling this kind of energy.
Two years behind a desk, cataloging magic but never able to touch it. Two years of purgatory, redeemed in that one little sentence.
I reached for the hanger. My hand trembled, to my great annoyance—another aftereffect of magic and adrenaline. The duster was heavy, lined with a polyethylene fiber weave that could stop small caliber bullets or turn away a blade. It held up pretty well against zombie horses, too.
I had sewn pockets into the lining, carefully sized and positioned to accommodate most American book formats. Twin constellations of black dots marked the leather shoulder pads where Smudge had ridden in the past. I slipped the familiar weight onto my body and brushed dust from the sleeves. The jacket still smelled ever so faintly of smoke.
“Looks good on you,” Lena commented.
It felt good. Familiar. It conjured memories of hope.
I returned to the library to stock up, a ritual my body remembered well even after so much time. My hands moved automatically to pull books from the shelves: Heinlein, Malory, L. Frank Baum, Le Guin, an old James Bond adventure. The spines were worn, and the pages fell open to the scenes I had used most often. I looped rubber bands into the books, top to bottom, to mark the pages I might need.
All total, I was packing sixteen titles when I finished, including a hardcover in the front that should provide a little extra protection for the heart.
“What about Deb?” Lena asked softly. “Shouldn’t you let the Porters know?”
“She’s not completely turned,” I protested weakly. Deb had tried to recruit me. Why would she bother unless something of our friendship remained? But when that failed, she had also tried to shoot holes in me.
“How do you know?”
“Someone can do magic or they can be magic, but not both. As Deb’s transformation continues, she’ll lose the ability to perform libriomancy.” She had to know the cost of her transformation. No libriomancer would willingly sacrifice their magic.
“We could go after her. If there’s any way to save her . . .”
I shook my head. Deb wasn’t like a drug addict who could check into rehab and get her life back. This kind of magical transformation was irreversible. I didn’t want to turn her in, but I had no choice. Given her access to the Porters, the damage she could do was too great.
I turned away and picked up the phone. Pallas wasn’t answering, so I left a brief voice mail letting her know our friend Deb had been “poached by a competing firm.”
“What will they do to her?” asked Lena.
“Knowing Pallas, she’ll assign someone to hunt and destroy her. Destroy the thing she’s become, I mean.” My words sounded distant. Mechanical. Deb was already lost. Knowing that didn’t ease the guilt for signing her death warrant.
“They’ll kill her for what someone else did to her?”
“Whatever bug-eater wormed their way into Deb’s mind killed her.”
“Isaac, she’s a victim.”
“I know that.” Just like Nidhi Shah. If Shah was alive, would the Porters have to destroy her as well? I slammed the phone back into its cradle. “I’m sorry, Lena.”
She peered out the broken door without answering.
“Of course, until Pallas says otherwise, Deb’s still an agent of Die Zwelf Portenære. As such, I’m obliged to follow her orders.”
Lena raised her eyebrows at my logic, but didn’t argue. I retrieved Smudge, who climbed up my sleeve to take his familiar place on my right shoulder.
Despite being out of the field for two years, I still kept a go bag packed with clothes, money, a small folded cage for Smudge, a handful of books, and a few other essentials. I stopped long enough to duct tape a bed sheet over the broken glass door to keep the mosquitoes out, then headed outside with Lena.
The Dalmatian a few houses down was barking madly from the fenced-in yard. I glanced up and down the street, but the houses out here were built with plenty of space and trees between them. Aside from the dog, nobody appeared to have noticed our little battle.
Deb’s car sat abandoned in the driveway. The doors were locked, but when I returned to the living room, I found the keys in her jacket pocket.
The instant I opened the car door, the stench of stale, rotting food poured out, making me gag. Fast food wrappers, pizza boxes, and crumpled cups filled the back seats, along with half-eaten crusts and spilled fries. Flies buzzed angrily at the intrusion.
“She was using the mess to attract insects,” I said, feeling ill. “The more she ate, the stronger she became.”
Smudge had perked up at the sound of the flies. He crept down to my wrist, crouched, and pounced. His forelegs snapped out to catch a black fly from midair. He landed on the side of the car, cooking the hapless fly in his legs and stuffing it into his mouth.
I opened the door and searched the front. A printout from the Lansing State Journal Web site described the destruction of the MSU library. Deb had told the truth about that much. If anything, she had understated the damage. A color photo showed yellow police tape around a low hill of rubble. The nearby buildings appeared untouched.
I found several books tossed carelessly onto the passenger seat. A pair of bloody brown feathers were stuck to the floor mat. Apparently Deb was starting to move up from insects to birds. I picked up a well-worn field guide to Michigan insects and fanned the pages.
Lena looked over my shoulder, her body brushing mine. “She was using libriomancy to create her own snacks?”
“Magically created insects wouldn’t give her the same strength or power, but they might have helped her control the hunger.” I studied the pages, noting the faint signs of char, like rot or mold eating the paper from the binding outward. “She’s been overusing this book, probably trying to stave off the change and hold on to her magic as long as she could.”
“And that’s bad?”
“Ray once told me magic was like electricity. Pump too many amps through a cord that’s not rated for it, and you risk melting it or starting a fire. Books can channel a lot of magic. So can people, for that matter. But there are limits.”
Smudge had crawled into the back seat, where he was digging into a writhing pile of maggots. He settled down and began to gobble them like popcorn.
“That is beyond gross,” I said, using a Jelly Belly to lure him out. I slammed the door shut. Lena started toward her motorcycle, but I shook my head. “We’re safer together.”
“We’re also an easier target.”
“Whoever targets my car deserves what they get.” I keyed in the code to the garage door opener. The door lurched upward, squealing in protest, to reveal the gleaming curves of a black 1973 Triumph convertible. Despite having sat untouched for more than two years, not a speck of dust marred the paint.
“It’s cute,” Lena said, tracing her fingers over the red pinstriping.
“It’s not cute.” I climbed into the driver’s seat. “The body’s mostly steel, so it’s tougher than a lot of modern cars. And it’s been modified for the field.”
Lena grabbed a small pack from her motorcycle’s saddlebag and squeezed it into the back, along with her two bokken. She waited while I backed out of the garage, then wheeled her bike in beside the old snow blower.
“I approve,” she said when she joined me in the car. She reached out to touch the wood-paneled interior, then poked the tiny blue
TARDIS that hung from the rearview mirror. “That’s the flying phone booth from Doctor Who, right?”
“It’s a police box. It was a gift from Ray, when I came back from my first solo mission in the field.” Ray had taken me out to the local pizza place to celebrate. I was pretty sure he had been even more excited about my success than I was.
Smudge raced down my sleeve, over the steering wheel, and onto the dash. Driving fascinated him. I had never figured out exactly why, but the old iron-and-ceramic trivet secured to the middle of the dash was his favorite spot in the world. As a bonus, in cold weather, he did a great job of keeping the windshield defrosted.
Lena pointed to the lower edge of the rearview mirror, where tiny symbols were etched into the glass. “What does this say?”
“It’s Spanish. The spell gives the driver a form of night vision. You’ll see the same characters on the windshield.”
“Nice. And that gray rock tied to the steering wheel?”
“A piece of hoof from a mountain goat. For traction control. We could take this thing snowmobiling on a frozen lake if we wanted, and we’d never lose control.”
“I didn’t think libriomancers could do that kind of magic.”
“We can’t.” I sped toward Highway 41. “I kind of stole it.”
“From who?”
“Ponce de Leon.”
I could see her staring at me from the edge of my vision. “As in Ponce de Leon the conquistador?”
“He wasn’t using it anymore.” I kept my attention on the road, especially the wooded areas to either side. Tough as the car was, a deer leaping out at the wrong moment could still inflict a fair amount of damage. I had deer whistles on the bumper, but I had seen too many wrecks and too many suicidal deer to trust them. “Besides, is it really stealing if you’re stealing from an asshole?”
“I’d have to double-check, but I don’t think the criminal code includes an asshole clause.” She rolled down her window and reached out, fingers spread against the wind. Smudge flattened his body on the dash. “So where are we going?”
“To see a vampire named Ted Boyer in Marquette.” Most vampires kept to the bigger cities where it was easier to go unnoticed, but Ted was a Yooper through and through, born and bred in the U.P. “He should be able to fill us in on the latest bloodsucker gossip.”
Lena played with the radio for a while, eventually settling on a country station. The air and the music all but swallowed her uncharacteristically quiet question. “Isaac, how many strains of vampirism can be cured?”
“Eleven,” I said. “There are a handful of others that can be managed like a chronic disease.” I had once met a vampire who worked as an electrical engineer, and had rigged an insulin pump to deliver a steady dosage of holy water into his system, just enough to keep the symptoms at bay. But most, including Deb’s strain, were incurable. “You’re worried about Doctor Shah.”
“About her, and about what they could do with her. Nidhi knows every Porter in the region. She evaluated and worked with you all.”
I gritted my teeth and pressed down on the accelerator. If the vampires were starting a war, they couldn’t have found a better person to fill them in on the strengths and weaknesses of their enemy.
Chapter 5
I TOOK MY TIME GETTING TO MARQUETTE, wanting to wait until the sun was fully risen. Ted was an old school vampire, mostly Sanguinarius Stokerus, though the hybrid that turned him had given him a few extra quirks. He would be sluggish and weak during the day, which suited me just fine.
“How do we know your friend isn’t involved in whatever’s happening?” asked Lena.
“First of all, Ted’s a coward. I don’t recall him ever going after a victim who was strong enough to put up a fight.”
“What’s the second reason?”
“I stuck a bomb in his head.” I searched for the arched wooden sign I remembered from my last visit. Ted lived on the southern edge of the city, about two miles in from the bay. “He had been preying on humans, so Pallas ordered me to eliminate him. Normally, the vampires would have taken care of him, but there were ‘jurisdictional complications’ between the Detroit and Green Bay nests. When I found Ted, he begged me to give him another chance. I figured it couldn’t hurt to have my own informant. The device also lets me track his location. He’s not tamed by a long shot, but this is the next best thing.”
“What happened after you left the field?”
“The Porters send someone up every couple of months. Mostly they just let the computer map his movements. It sends up an alert if he goes anywhere he’s not supposed to, like the Boy Scout camp west of town.” When I found him, he had been living in the woods and sneaking into tents at night to feed.
Lena looked around as I drove up the winding road. “And now he lives in a trailer park?”
“He says he’s comfortable here.” I veered left, toward the more heavily wooded area in the back. I quickly spotted Ted’s trailer, a yellow double-wide with green trim. An American flag jutted from a pole in the doorframe. Ted’s blue Ford Bronco sat in the dirt driveway, the body slowly losing the war against rust. A faded bumper sticker on the back read, Say yah to da U. P., eh?
While Lena grabbed her weapons, I opened the glove box and took out a small nylon bag and an old space opera. From chapter twelve of the book, I created a PDA-sized device with a glowing red dot dead-center on the screen.
I tugged open the screen door and knocked. Ted should be sleeping, but you never knew. Frenzied barking erupted from inside, followed by the sound of claws scratching the door. I tried the knob. “How are you with locks?”
Lena handed her bokken to me. They were heavier than I had expected. She slid a toothpick from a small pocket in the seam of her jacket and winked. “Watch this.”
She held the toothpick between her finger and thumb. The wood grew as if alive, lengthening and sprouting a flat triangular bump on one side. She slid the toothpick into the lock and closed her eyes. Instead of trying to pick the lock, she simply waited. Moments later, she grinned and turned the toothpick. When she pulled it back out, it had grown into a reasonable imitation of a key.
“Nice,” I said.
“You should see what I can do with rosebushes.”
I checked the nearby trailers to make sure nobody had noticed. The dog continued to protest our arrival to all who would listen, but either the neighbors had left for work, or else they had learned to tune out Ted’s pet.
Work. “Oh, crap. Remind me to call the library when we finish here.” I was supposed to open this morning. How many angry messages would be waiting on my machine when I returned home?
Lena opened the door and braced herself as a small, hyperactive beagle pounced at her legs, barking and sniffing. He didn’t appear aggressive, just happy. His entire butt wagged as he examined Lena’s sneakers.
Smudge shifted on my shoulder, watching the dog closely. “Watch yourself,” I said to Lena. “You know how dogs are with trees.”
She punched my arm, but did issue a stern, “Don’t even think about it,” to the beagle.
Ted’s home was unchanged from my last visit, well-kept and smelling faintly of barbeque. The living room was to the left, with a handmade entertainment center dominating one wall, and a decent collection of video games filling the shelves. On our right was a small kitchen and dining area.
I peeked in the fridge. No sign of blood, which was good. The freezer was bursting with venison packed into plastic bags, each one dated in black marker. “Ted’s a good hunter. He doesn’t bother to bring a bow or rifle, but ever since our ‘talk’ a few years ago, he’s made sure to pay for his hunting license every year. It’s amazing how quickly you start following the rules when someone sticks a cranial explosive to the base of your skull. He hasn’t had so much as a parking ticket since then.”
I walked down the hallway into the small utility room in the back, where peeling linoleum and the scent of antiseptic greeted us. The beagle grew even more excited, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. His collar and tags rang against the empty steel dish on the floor.
“Sorry,” I said. “No food until your owner wakes up.” I opened the storage closet to find a pile of rags and towels stuffed haphazardly onto the shelves. I dropped to one knee and reached past the towels until I found the tiny steel handle sunk into the back. A tug rewarded me with a metallic click. Standing, I pulled the entire closet, which swiveled out to reveal an aluminum ladder secured to the wall studs with what appeared to be old metal coat hangers.
Lena squeezed past, the brushing of her body against mine momentarily distracting me as she peered into the dark hole in the floor.
“Ted sleeps hard,” I assured her. I double-checked Smudge, who seemed far more anxious about the beagle than the vampire below.
She descended one-handed, holding both bokken in her other hand. I followed, and the beagle’s yips changed to a drawn-out, pathetic whine as he watched us from the edge of the hole.
The air below was damp and cool. A single incandescent bulb hung overhead. I found the chain and pulled, illuminating cinder block walls and a low ceiling lined with cobwebs and daddy longlegs. Ted’s makeshift cellar was the size of a small bedroom. A pair of metal support pillars were stuck into the middle of the cement floor, bracing the underside of the trailer.
Ted’s coffin rested on two wide logs, positioned like fat tree stumps. The coffin was glossy black, trimmed in silver, and looked entirely out of place in these dingy surroundings. The thing was polished so well I could see us both reflected in its surface. I wondered idly, not for the first time, how he had gotten it down here. Had he simply dug out a cellar and then moved the trailer into position on top, using his vampiric tricks to erase the curiosity of anyone who might have questioned?
Half of a Ping-Pong table was shoved against a wall. Ted’s old paddle and a single yellowed ball rested on the corner. He had painted a net on the wall, giving him a practice table where he could play against himself. A minifridge hummed beneath the table. An orange extension cord trailed up through a heavily caulked hole in the ceiling.
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