Libriomancer (9781101597552)

by Hines, Jim C.

  Rats poured through the rubble, disappearing into a gap in the wall. I continued to shoot, trying to clog the hole with their bodies, but it wasn’t enough.

  Lena tossed dead rats aside, exposing a neatly drilled tunnel roughly six inches in diameter. “Where would this lead?”

  We were at the edge of the library. I frowned, trying to orient myself and visualize the other buildings on campus. “I’m not sure.”

  Lena moved cautiously into the hole. I followed her through the sloping tunnel, which emerged at the base of a rectangular corridor. Light from grates overhead revealed steel pipes running along the wall. I flipped off my flashlight and grabbed my copy of Alice. A quick drink from chapter four, and both Lena and I were expanding to our normal size. I pressed a hand to the wall, trying to stifle the mad banter of the Queen of Hearts. I definitely needed to stop using this book for a while.

  Smudge climbed up my jacket, resuming his customary place on my shoulder. “Steam tunnels,” I said softly. Even from here I could feel the heat wafting from the pipes. The floor was bare cement, the walls a dingy yellow. “They run beneath most of the buildings on campus.”

  The ground was clean. No fur, no droppings, no tiny footprints. “Split up?” asked Lena.

  I nodded and set off to the left. I could hear voices from up above, and once what sounded like a skateboard going past, but there was no sign of our vampire. The grates were closed, and I was fairly certain we would have heard if anyone had opened them. Rats could have squeezed through, but that many fleeing rats would have elicited screams.

  The thing that had slaughtered my friend wouldn’t have fled. It enjoyed killing, and it hated Porters. It was here.

  “What did the Porters do to you, anyway?” I called. “Trim your fangs? Send you home to your sire with your tail between your legs?” A soft chuckle in the distance made me jump. I raised my gun, trying to identify the source of the sound. “You know, you’ll be the fourth vampire I’ve killed this week.”

  “Porters.” From the way the vampire spat the word, I could tell two things: it was male, and it was pissed. “So arrogant.”

  His words echoed in the tunnel, making him harder to track. “Where’s Gutenberg?”

  “You have no idea who he is. What he’s done.”

  I whirled. How the hell had he gotten behind me? “So teach me. This is a university, after all.”

  He stepped into the light, all six-foot plus of him. His skin was milky white. He had belted on a worn pair of blue jeans, but was otherwise naked. He must not have had time to finish dressing after shifting back to this form. Shaggy brown hair hung past his neck, and dust clung to his chiseled body. He paced in a tight line, head and shoulders hunched forward. “You think your weapon can stop me, Isaac?”

  I tried to hide my reaction. I failed.

  “Oh, yes. I know exactly who you are, little libriomancer.” He smiled, his fangs digging into his lower lip. Smudge burst into flame as the vampire stepped closer. I twisted my head away from Smudge, being careful not to break eye contact with the vampire.

  “Likewise,” I said. “You’re the thing that murdered my friend.” I pulled the trigger.

  His face contorted in pain, and he began to dissolve. It took me a second to realize he wasn’t disintegrating the way the rats had. Instead, he sank into a pool of pink-tinged mist that swept toward me.

  I fired into the mist, burning a hole through the cloud, but it didn’t slow the vampire down. He spread out to surround me. Smudge raced down my body and jumped into the mist like a tiny butane torch, burning away the fog, but he was too small to do any serious damage. I backed into the wall. An arm solidified from the mist, and fingers seized my wrist.

  “Lena, I might need some help back here!”

  I snuck my other hand into an interior pocket of my jacket as he re-formed. My fingertips touched a thirty-year-old paperback. When the vampire saw what I was doing, he ripped the jacket off of me, nearly taking my arms with it. I managed to retain my grip on the book, even as he spun me around and pressed me against one of the steam pipes. A layer of foam insulation kept me from burning my face off, but the vampire pushed harder, as if he intended to shove my skull right through the pipe.

  I craned my arm and pulled the trigger. My shot grazed the vampire’s face, causing the skin to blister and peel. He yanked my wrist, and my gun clattered away. He switched his grip to my collar, jerking me to and fro like a dog shaking a squirrel, then slammed my back into the opposite wall.

  “Beg, libriomancer.” His breath was cool and foul, like an animal had crawled into his chest to die. His left hand clutched my throat. Fingernails like razors poked the soft flesh behind my jawbone.

  “What the hell are you?” I whispered. His eyes were like none in any vampire book I had read. The pupil of each eye was cross-shaped, as if someone had taken the slitted pupils of a cat and superimposed them at right angles. Golden irises glittered in the firelight.

  “Would you really like to know?” His mouth opened wider.

  The sad thing was, I did. A previously undiscovered species of vampire? I would have loved to know where he had come from.

  I tightened my grip on the book. The rubber band marked a page I had read so many times I could have recited it in my sleep. It was one of the few books whose magic I could use without reading the page, which was exactly why I carried it. My fingers sank through the paper into hot desert air.

  The vampire pulled a black-hilted skinning knife from his belt. Dried blood darkened the blade’s edge and the nasty-looking hook on the back. “Beg for me,” he whispered.

  The fingers of my hand closed around the end of a metal tube. I shifted my grip, allowing the book to drop away. I flipped a switch, and a glowing blade thrummed magically to life.

  My first swing severed the vampire’s arm at the elbow. The knife clanged against the ground. I ducked low, taking his legs off with the backswing. He hissed and began to dissolve into mist.

  I stepped to the side, studied the pipes for a moment, and slashed through the lower one. Hot steam blasted down, directly onto the mist. He re-formed a few seconds later, dragging himself out of the steam with his remaining arm.

  I pointed the humming blade at his throat. “Ray Walker was my friend.”

  His expression flickered. Confusion, fear, rage . . . emotions flashed past like a roulette wheel.

  “You’re going to tell me where to find Gutenberg and what the hell you are,” I said. Ted had been terrified of this thing. Why?

  His eyes glowed like coals, making the black cross of his pupils appear even darker. “You’ll find out soon enough, Porter.”

  The flames started inside of him. Fury changed to pain, then fear as smoke poured from his mouth and nose. He cried out as fire consumed his body. Moments later, Smudge and I were alone, staring down at a layer of black, oily ash.

  I deactivated my blade. The handle slipped from my fingers to clank against the floor. I heard Lena call my name, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t move at all.

  The vampire’s final taunt had been in Middle High German.

  Chapter 8

  I WAS STILL standing there, staring at the blackened mess on the floor, when Lena arrived.

  “You killed him.” Disapproval sharpened her words.

  “I didn’t, actually. I cut off a few limbs, but that shouldn’t have been enough to destroy him.” I knelt and touched the ash. It had a thick, crunchy texture, like something you’d clean from your oven. “He burned up from the inside. Maybe to stop me from questioning him.”

  “A vampire with a self-destruct button?”

  “That’s what it looked like to me. Either he killed himself, or someone else did.” I wasn’t aware of any vampires who could spontaneously combust at will. I wiped my hand on the wall. “He knew my name.”

 
“If he was able to read Ray’s mind—”

  “He didn’t try to read mine.” I hadn’t felt any of the telltale pains like I had with Deb back at the house.

  Lena gestured to the pipe, which continued to hiss and spray hot steam into the tunnel. “We should get moving before someone comes to check on that.”

  I pried myself away from the remains of our one lead and followed her back down the tunnel, filling her in on the details of the fight.

  “Did you learn anything that could help us?” she asked.

  I thought about his final words, spoken in Gutenberg’s native tongue. “Maybe.”

  Lena had found some of the missing books from the archive. I counted a total of thirty, carelessly stuffed into a pair of plastic milk crates. Given the empty shelf I had seen, there should have been at least fifty.

  Each of us picked up a crate. “If I can get onto the Porter database, I should be able to pull a list of which titles were shelved where and figure out what else he took.”

  “What about the tunnel to the library?” Lena asked.

  I hesitated. There were a number of spells which could have collapsed the small passageway. I flexed my hands, feeling the magic coursing through my veins, crackling for release. When I had returned my weapon to its book, voices from another galaxy had insinuated themselves into my thoughts, just as had happened with Alice in Wonderland.

  “I’ve got this,” Lena said, watching me with much the same focus as Doctor Shah used to. She returned to the wall where we had emerged and dropped to her hands and knees. I did my best not to stare at the way her jeans hugged her thighs and backside as she pushed her bokken into the tunnel.

  I could just make out thin roots and branches sprouting from the end of the weapon. Dust and bits of concrete began to fall as the tendrils bored into the tunnel.

  Lena rose and brushed her hands together. We avoided the grates, walking instead until we came to a locked door that, once Lena worked her lock-picking magic, opened into a basement hallway. We strode past what appeared to be grad student offices. Only a few of the old wooden doors were open, and none of the students gave us a second glance as we found our way to a stairwell and left, emerging about a block east of the library.

  “Wait.” I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and closed my eyes.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Listening.” Searching beneath the clanking of construction equipment, the grumble of distant cars, for any trace of magical energy. “The more magic I use, the more . . . permeable I become to that magic. It can cause problems if I push too hard.” The whispers in my head were only the first symptom. “I’m hoping I can use it. If someone else was controlling this vampire, I might be able to sense them.”

  “Permeable?”

  “The more you reach into books, the easier it becomes for those books to reach back into you.” The past few days had left me hypersensitive to magic. The locked books gave off a cool, heavy pull that made me think of dead stars floating in space.

  I opened my eyes and turned in a slow circle. I could feel the Triumph in the parking garage, which was an accomplishment all by itself. As long as I pushed myself to the brink of madness, I’d always be able to remember where I parked. But I heard no other magical whispers, no trace of another presence.

  If someone else had destroyed that vampire, they had either done so from a distance, or else they were strong enough to hide from my amateur attempt to find them.

  Gutenberg could have done so with ease.

  “Ted told us other vampires had been taken,” I said. “That they had been turned against their sires. We need more information. Were there any commonalities in who was taken? Did they develop the cross-shaped pupils this one had? What’s the pattern?”

  “What you need is to rest,” Lena said firmly.

  She was right, and tomorrow would be better for what I had in mind anyway. But my body was wound too tightly for rest. I wanted to act.

  “We passed an Internet café on the way in,” I said. “I should at least check our taxonomy of vampires to see if there’s any mention of those eyes.” Given how many vampire books I had read, the odds were slim I had missed such a thing, but it was better to be certain.

  She shifted her crate to one arm and waved her remaining bokken under my nose. “Tomorrow.”

  I raised my hands in surrender, then bent to pick up my crate of books. “All right,” I agreed. “But first thing in the morning, we head to Detroit and start questioning vampires.”

  Lena drove us to a small motel off the highway, giving me time to think. I kept imagining the fight in the steam tunnels. Had the hatred and fury been the vampire’s own, or had it come from whoever was controlling him? Was he killer or puppet?

  The young man at the front desk gave us a skeptical once-over, taking in the dirt and dust that made us look like vampires ourselves, freshly risen from the grave. “Can I help you?”

  I reached for my wallet, but Lena was faster, slapping a credit card onto the desk.

  “How many beds?” he asked mechanically.

  Lena grinned. “Just one.”

  My neck and cheeks grew warm, even though I knew it meant nothing. Lena would find a tree to sleep in, just as she had done last night.

  Our room was about what you’d expect for a roadside motel, decorated in industrial beige with generic, vaguely floral artwork hanging on the wall above the bed. The air conditioner didn’t so much purr as gasp asthmatically, spitting out a faint musty odor.

  I flipped on the television for Smudge, channel-surfing until I found SpongeBob SquarePants. I couldn’t stand the show, but Smudge liked the voices. I opened his cage, and he scurried up onto the screen, where he proceeded to dart to and fro in his endless quest to catch SpongeBob’s red tie.

  Lena closed the curtains and sat lazily in a chair by the desk, her bokken leaning against the wall. She kicked off her sneakers and socks, then flexed her feet, a slow, luxurious movement that reminded me of a cat stretching. “Are you planning to spend the whole night pacing?”

  “Considering the fact that I’m planning to beard the vampires in their den tomorrow, I think a little nervous pacing is warranted.” But I forced myself to stop, plopping down on the corner of the bed instead. “They have to play by Porter rules in the real world, but once we enter the nest, the rules change. It’s like a reservation, with its own sovereign law. If they believe the Porters are working against them . . .”

  “So we take precautions,” she said.

  “We’ll need to stop at a bookstore. Even if they don’t kill us, convincing them to listen could be a problem.” Particularly since the one vampire who might have proved my point had immolated himself.

  Lena rose easily to her feet and strode toward the bathroom. “Do you mind if I grab a quick shower?”

  I shook my head, mentally cataloging possible titles to buy tomorrow.

  “You’re pretty filthy yourself, you know.”

  I blinked and looked up. “What?”

  She leaned against the bathroom doorframe, arms folded, watching me with a mischievous smile “You really need to work off some tension. And so do I.” Her grin grew. “With or without you.”

  And just like that, I was no longer thinking about vampires. “Um.”

  “It’s your choice, Isaac.” She slipped into the bathroom, but left the door open a crack. I heard the rustle of cloth, and my imagination filled in the details. The faint scratching of a zipper, the sound of jeans tossed carelessly to the floor. The elastic snap of a bra strap as she undid the hooks.

  I took a deep breath and lay back on the bed, trying to clear my head. The spray started up in the shower, followed by the metal scrape of the shower curtain rings.

  Back in the nineties, a Porter by the name of Ken Cassidy had used a bit of magic from a
Piers Anthony novel to make women fall in love with him. To fall in lust, rather. Deb DeGeorge had been called in to deal with him, slipping some of his own potion into his drink so that he fell in love with the next creature he saw.

  The last I heard, Ken had abandoned magic and devoted his life to caring for his Amazon parrot, Annabelle.

  If I took advantage of Lena’s nature, was I any different from Ken Cassidy? Regardless of whether or not I was the one casting the spell, Lena was forced by magic to seek out a partner and mate, no different than any of Ken’s victims had been.

  So what was the alternative? Do the “noble” thing and wait for her to find someone else?

  Oh, hell. Now she was singing. A Madonna tune, from the sound of it. I could see her in my imagination, her thick black hair slicked down between her shoulder blades, the light gleaming on her wet skin.

  Lena was a hamadryad. A nymph. Meaning I had no doubt she could very thoroughly and effectively help me “relieve my tension.” On top of everything else, I was curious. She appeared human, but she was something more. Something magical. What would it be like to step through that door, to strip off these filthy clothes and join her?

  My last relationship, if you could call it that, had ended more than a year ago. It had lasted six weeks, which was about average for me since joining the Porters. But Lena knew about magic. I wouldn’t have to hide that part of my life, to pretend to be someone I wasn’t.

  I walked to the bathroom. Through the door, I could just make out the steamed glass of the mirror and the yellow shower curtain, beyond which stood . . . a fantasy. A dryad created from the pages of what sounded like a horny teenager’s sexual daydreams.

  “Dammit.” I gritted my teeth and pulled the door shut. It didn’t quite muffle Lena’s chuckle.

  I stomped back to the bed. Sitting down was significantly more uncomfortable than before. Jaw tight, I tugged a battered copy of Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring from one of my jacket pockets and did my best to concentrate on something other than Lena Greenwood.