Libriomancer (9781101597552)

by Hines, Jim C.

  This was a first edition paperback from Ballantine, with Barbara Remington’s psychedelic cover painting that showed green hills and pink mountains, along with random trees and snakes and lizards and what appeared to be emus. The spine was badly creased, with bits flaking away. The librarian in me cringed at the repairs I had made at age eleven, using what looked like half a roll of clear packing tape to try to fix the cover.

  Gutenberg had locked the book to keep the ring of power from escaping. Our world had enough trouble with power-mad leaders already. I carried this book for other reasons than magic.

  Every libriomancer had a first book. Etched more sharply into my memory than my first kiss, this book had been my magical awakening. I remembered sitting on my bedroom floor reading late into the night, my blue bedspread pulled over my head like a makeshift tent as I shone a Batman flashlight onto these very pages.

  I hadn’t wanted the ring. Gandalf said that ring was trouble, and eleven-year-old me believed him. I had wanted Frodo’s sword, Sting: an elf blade, one light enough for someone like me to use. Frodo’s tormenters had been goblins and orcs; mine were the bullies down the street, waiting at the bus stop to play another round of Punch the Nerd.

  I opened the book to a familiar scene. I knew these words by heart, but I read them anyway. Frodo had been stabbed by the Witch-king of Angmar. He was taken to the elves in Rivendell, where he was reunited with his uncle Bilbo. It was Bilbo who gifted his nephew with mithril armor and the magical sword named Sting.

  I brushed my fingers over the yellowed pages, feeling the cold magical current beneath the words: Gutenberg’s lock, though I hadn’t recognized his magic at the time. I had been imagining the warmth of Rivendell, the sunlight and the gentle breezes, the sense of peace that filled the air, and then . . .

  Like any child raised on tales of magical worlds beyond paintings and mirrors and wardrobes, I had yearned to enter Middle Earth, to reach through.

  My entire hand had gone numb. For an instant, it was as if my fingers had transformed into living text, words in brown ink spiraling through my skin and muscle and bone.

  I had screamed, flung the book across the room, and hadn’t touched another novel for almost a year. My parents, convinced I was on drugs, had forced me to see a therapist.

  At the time, I hadn’t understood the words that tried to consume my hand. Nor had I seen them well enough to write them down. But by the time I entered college, I had taught myself enough to identify those partially-remembered fragments as Latin.

  I could feel Gutenberg’s lock, like an invisible chapter squeezed into the book, deflecting and trapping any magic that leaked from the pages. In theory, it should do the same to anyone trying to reach in or manipulate the book, which meant a lock was impossible to reverse.

  Of course, once you had yanked Conan the Barbarian’s sword out of a book to fight off a rabid weresquirrel, “impossible” lost a lot of its punch. If anyone could unlock a book, it was the man who had invented libriomancy. And the first step would be to acquire the original, locked texts.

  I fanned the pages. The velvet-textured paper against my fingertips brought back memories of those early, untrained attempts at magic, many years after my late-night Tolkien trauma. As I began to figure out how to deliberately tap into that belief and love of the story, I had gone a little bit overboard. I almost flunked my senior year of high school, being too busy collecting things like a sonic screwdriver (which I had never figured out how to use), a crystal ball from L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, an impressive array of swords, and the winged sandals of Hermes himself.

  The sandals should have been the end of me. Being a teenager, I had immediately snuck out to try them, and probably would have broken my neck in the maple tree out back if Ray Walker hadn’t shown up before I had risen more than ten feet or so.

  Freaked out at being discovered, I had tried to flee. So Ray shot me in the ass with a tranquilizer dart filled with distilled Moly, the same herbs I had used to counter Deb DeGeorge’s magic. Ray’s potion had countered the magic of my sandals and brought me slowly back to Earth, flailing and screaming the whole way down.

  It was Ray who welcomed me into the world of magic, introducing me to libriomancy. Years later, he had introduced me to Johannes Gutenberg as well.

  I didn’t want to believe Gutenberg could be involved, but I couldn’t ignore the evidence. I set the book aside and picked up my phone and dialed Pallas’ number.

  “Isaac. Wait one moment.”

  I grimaced at the electronic squeal that erupted from the speaker. “Nicola?”

  “What did you find in East Lansing?”

  “Deb said someone had hacked our communications,” I said warily. “I’ve already had one Porter try to kill me this week.”

  “This connection is now secure. We’ve heard nothing further from Ms. DeGeorge. Her apartment was empty, and she appears to have gone underground. Perhaps literally. As for myself, either I’ve been turned by our enemy and therefore already know any information you might share, or else I remain human and Regional Master of the Porters, in which case I would appreciate your report.”

  That certainly sounded like Pallas. “I dragged Ted Boyer down from Marquette. He sniffed out the vampire that killed Ray and tracked it to the archive.”

  “We investigated the archive. There was no sign of any vampire.”

  I explained how the vampire had snuck back in through the steam tunnels. “Something pounded that library to rubble. I don’t know anything that can inflict that kind of damage without being spotted, except one of our automatons.”

  The phone went silent. I could imagine her playing with the earpieces of her reading glasses, which always hung from a gold chain around her neck.

  “Why did you allow my not-so-official return to the field?” I demanded. Pallas wasn’t my favorite person in the world, but she wasn’t stupid. Much as I wanted to find Ray’s killer, honesty forced me to recognize I wasn’t the best choice. “Why aren’t there a dozen field agents in East Lansing right now?”

  Lena emerged from the bathroom wearing cutoff shorts and a T-shirt, rubbing a towel through her hair. She cocked her head, and I mouthed Pallas’ name.

  “I know Gutenberg is missing,” I said. “I know the automatons have vanished. Why allow a cataloger who’s already proven himself unfit for field duty to take the lead on this?”

  “Because I’ve lost DeGeorge, the automatons, and Gutenberg himself,” Pallas said. Fatigue slurred her words. “As a cataloger who’s unfit for field duty, I imagine you’re low on the list of potential vampire targets. At least you were, until Lena led them to you.”

  “Or maybe I’m the perfect target,” I shot back. “Someone low on the food chain, who you wouldn’t bother to watch as closely.”

  “Which is why I asked someone from outside the Porters to look in on you and confirm your humanity.”

  Someone from outside . . . “De Leon?”

  “He owed me a favor. Isaac, there are larger problems here. Moscow was struck by an ‘earthquake’ two weeks ago which appears to have been magical in nature, destroying several former KGB facilities. Similar strikes have been reported in London, Afghanistan, Hong Kong, and Nigeria over the past three months.”

  I remembered hearing about the quakes in London and Hong Kong. “Automatons?”

  “Possibly. Though we suspect at least one such attack was carried out by a Porter with an all-too-human grudge. There’s no pattern, and with Gutenberg and the automatons gone, I’m doing everything I can to keep the Porters from fracturing beneath the weight of regional and national differences.” She took a long, slow breath. “None of which is your concern. What else have you learned?”

  I described my fight with the vampire, including the way he had self-destructed at the end. “I’ve never come across anything like it, either the eyes o
r the ability to burn a vampire from within.” I hesitated, then added, “I think it might have been Gutenberg’s work.”

  “Unlikely,” Pallas said flatly.

  “Who else could control the automatons? Who else would speak a six-hundred-year-old German dialect?”

  “I know Johannes Gutenberg as well as you knew Ray Walker. Better, in fact. We would know if he had been turned. He would never turn against his own Porters, and there’s not a man or woman living today with the power to force him to do anything he doesn’t want.” When she spoke again, she sounded pensive. “You’re certain about the dialect?”

  “As certain as I can be without having lived in fifteenth-century Mainz.”

  Another pause. “So what do you intend to do next?”

  “Ted said there had been other problems among the vampires. We need more information, and I figure the best way to get it is to go to the source.”

  “I see. Be careful, Isaac. I’m short on people, and would prefer not to lose any more.”

  The phone went dead. I stared at it in disbelief. “She didn’t tell me to back off.”

  “That’s good, right?” The bed shifted as Lena sat down beside me. “Would you have followed her orders if she had?”

  “Pallas doesn’t generally give her underlings much choice in the matter.” I replayed our conversation in my mind. “She doesn’t believe Gutenberg could do this.”

  “You disagree.” It wasn’t a question.

  “There are Porters who treat Gutenberg like a god, but he’s not. Nobody’s invulnerable.” Even if Pallas was right that no one alive had the power to control Gutenberg, that didn’t mean he wasn’t acting of his own free will. We just didn’t know why. “I’ve got to talk to the vampires, find out what they know.”

  “Tomorrow.” Lena’s tone was hard. These were the same vampires who had taken Nidhi Shah, who had pursued her into the U.P. and tried to kill us both.

  “Will you be all right?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said, too quickly. She smiled and traced the veins on the back of my hand with her finger. “Though I could be better.”

  I tried not to stare at her bare legs, or the way her breasts pulled the thin material of her shirt taut, or the quirk of her full lips that suggested she knew exactly what was going through my mind, dammit.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before,” Lena said softly. “About me. Why I sought you out.”

  I nodded, lost for words and distracted by the gentle tingle of her finger on my skin.

  She glanced at the wall. “The couple two rooms down is having sex right now.”

  I managed a moderately coherent, “Huh?”

  “I can feel it. Their desire. The pleasure.” She tilted her head slightly, a bemused smile on her face. “He’s not terribly good at this. He’s trying too hard.” She turned her attention back to me and shrugged. “This is what I am. I can’t stop any more than you can stop seeing the world in color.”

  “Actually, the rods in the eye only see black and white, and they require less light than the cones, so if it’s dark enough—”

  “Shut up.” She gave me a playful smack on the arm. “Did you know we passed one couple and two individual men having ‘automotive relations’ on the road today? Including one on the Mackinac Bridge?”

  “Thank you so much for telling me that. In addition to everything else, now I can worry about some lonely guy jerking his wheel at the wrong time and driving my car off the bridge.”

  She laughed. “On the bright side, being able to sense desire and lust means very few men can sneak up on me. It’s not something I want to know. It’s voyeuristic and uncomfortable. But it’s what I am, meaning I can’t help knowing how much you’re struggling with your desire, trying so hard to do the right thing.”

  “I’m—”

  “If you apologize, I’ll drag you out of the room and throw you into that sorry excuse for a pool. You’re supposed to want me, Isaac. It’s how I was written. And the more time I spend with you, the more I see you in action . . .” She smiled again. “Just know the feeling is mutual.”

  “What about Doctor Shah?” Between my exhaustion and the labyrinthine tangle of urges and emotions, it came out more harshly than I had intended.

  Lena jerked back. “I should lie to you,” she said softly. “Say you’re the only one I want now. But I love her, too.”

  “Too?” I repeated.

  For the first time, I saw Lena Greenwood blush, her cheeks and ears darkening. She raised her chin and looked me in the eyes, which glistened with unshed tears. “Nidhi used to struggle with the same conflicts. She felt guilty. She questioned whether I truly loved her, or if that love was just an artifact of what I was, a magical rebound after losing my former lover. ‘It takes time to truly fall in love,’ she said.”

  “How did she move beyond that guilt?” I asked.

  “By accepting what I was.” Lena stared at the TV, but it was obvious she wasn’t seeing it. “She worked with one of your catalogers to figure out where I had come from. We read my book together. I remember lying in bed, laughing with her over some of the more over-the-top scenes. I remember holding her as she wept angry tears after we read the chapter where the rules of my being were spelled out. She is . . . was a good person, Isaac. She made me a good person.”

  “I know,” I said. “And I’m sorry.”

  “I want to show you something.” She took my hand, tugging me toward the door. We walked together out of the hotel and around to a small park out back, beyond the fenced-in pool that smelled of mildew and chlorine.

  The playground was old and ill-tended, built back before brightly-colored plastic equipment replaced aluminum and steel. The heavy chains of the swing set clinked in the breeze. A chipmunk darted through the muddy wood chips at the bottom of the slide and vanished into the pine trees beyond. I filled my lungs with the humid air and the smell of the clover that had overgrown much of the ground. It made me momentarily homesick for the U. P.

  Here I was, walking hand in hand with a gorgeous woman, slowly starting to relax for the first time in days. Naturally, I had to open my mouth and spoil it. “How much of who you are is you?”

  “You mean, how much of who I am will change and shift to adapt to my new lover?” She didn’t appear offended. “Physically, my coloration shifts, but my body doesn’t change. Beyond that . . . I don’t know. I don’t think of it as changing so much as getting to experience more of life. With Nidhi, I learned to love rock climbing and skydiving, country music, fresh malapua, and old episodes of M*A*S*H. Before her, Frank Dearing taught me to love the earth, the feel of the soil, the pride of the harvest, the satisfaction of a long day’s work. Those loves don’t go away, exactly . . . but they fade to make room for the new.”

  “So if you and I . . .”

  She winked. “Yes, there’s a good chance you’d turn me into a devoted Doctor Who fangirl.”

  Her fingers remained twined with mine as she led me past the monkey bars toward the trees. She gave me a sideways glance. “I’ll be here when you make up your mind. Or if you just need help getting to sleep tonight.”

  With a mischievous smile, she jabbed her bokken into the ground and tugged me close, her arm circling my waist. Before I could react, she slipped her other hand behind my neck and kissed me.

  She leaned into my body, and we both staggered a step before catching our balance. Her legs and hips pressed into mine, and her fingers twisted into the back of my shirt. She tasted faintly of mint, and any remaining conflict I was struggling with slipped away as her tongue darted between my lips. I kissed her harder, wrapping my arms around her body.

  “Mm.” The soft moan of her mouth against mine made me pull her in even tighter. When she finally broke away, both of us were breathing hard. Her eyes were bright, and the way she looked
at me was more sensual than any kiss.

  She stepped away, pulling me after her through pine branches that jabbed my exposed skin but didn’t appear to bother her in the slightest. Without taking her eyes off of mine, she reached out to touch the trunk of the largest tree. Her fingers slipped between folds in the bark, disappearing in much the same way that I reached into my books, and I gasped.

  “Can you feel it?” she whispered.

  I nodded dumbly. The air brushed over every pine needle, making the hairs on my body rise in response. The tree’s roots dug deep into the ground. I curled my toes into my boots, feeling the immovable strength of the tree rising through my bones.

  “Nidhi never could,” she said quietly. “I hoped, given what you said about sensing magic, that I might be able to share this with you.”

  A squirrel jumped from the branches, and I laughed. “It tickles.”

  “A little, yes.”

  “This isn’t your tree.” I wasn’t sure how I knew. It simply felt off, like trying to sleep in an unfamiliar bed.

  “I can rest in any tree, but you’re right. This isn’t the tree that houses what I am. After the vampires cut down my oak . . .” She shook her head, tugged me close, and kissed me again. “I took cuttings from my tree. When I went to your house, I grafted one to the oak tree behind your house. If you decide— If I return, that will become the tree that houses the rest of what I am.”

  Her brown eyes watched me, reading my face. I still didn’t know what was fair or right. All I knew was as I stood there feeling Lena’s magic and her connection to the trees, thinking about her returning to Copper River with me, I felt happier than I had been in a long time.

  “Isaac?”

  “Yes?”

  “Sweet dreams.” She grinned and slipped her hand free from mine, pressing herself against the tree. A part of me felt like I should turn away to give her privacy, but she had invited me to watch this. Her arm thrust deeper into the trunk. One leg followed. She turned sideways, squeezing into a tree barely wide enough to accommodate her.