Libriomancer (9781101597552)

by Hines, Jim C.

  The fire was slower to consume her. She burned for more than a minute, laughing for much of that time, until her body was finally reduced to ashes.

  Granach picked up the guard’s gun and pointed it at me. “I thought Loyola was dead,” she said softly, using her other hand to brush away dust that had once been a vampire.

  “He was stabbed and shot,” I said. “He fled out the door, fell, and . . .”

  “Dissolved into mist,” Lena finished. “We thought he had died and burned.”

  “You carried him into the heart of our nest, concealed within your jacket.” Granach strode toward me. I never saw her hand move, but the impact of her fist knocked me into the wall.

  “Kyle was there,” I protested. Speaking made the right side of my jaw pop, and my cheek was bleeding. “Ask him!”

  “Ask the one you influenced with your magic?” She pointed the gun at my forehead. “Mister Vainio, you’re going to tell us the truth. Cooperate, and you and your friends die quickly.” Her lips curled, and steel glinted from her teeth. “I rather hope you refuse.”

  Alarms buzzed in the distance, and I was fairly certain the lights were flashing, though that could have been the result of Granach bouncing me against the wall.

  At least I knew why Smudge had been so nervous this whole time. He wasn’t worried about being surrounded by vampires; he was upset about the vampire who had hitched a ride in my jacket. Stupid physics-defying magic. If Mister Puddles had just obeyed the law of conservation of mass and energy, I’d have felt his weight clinging to me.

  “If you pull that trigger,” Lena said softly, “it will be the last thing you do.” She held two sharp wooden stakes. She gripped one by the point, ready to throw, while keeping the other low for stabbing. “You’re old enough I’m betting you can’t dodge at this distance.”

  In other circumstances, I would have heard boots tromping down the hall as reinforcements arrived, but these were vampires. There was a rush of air, and then we were surrounded.

  I hunched against the wall, trying to look harmless as I shoved a hand into my pocket, reaching deeper until I touched a metal sphere the size of a softball. “I think you should tell them to lower their weapons.”

  “Give me one reason,” Granach demanded.

  I licked my lips. “Because I’m holding a thermal detonator.”

  Nobody moved. I carefully pulled out the softball-sized silver orb. It was heavier than I had expected, and I had no idea how sensitive it might be to rough handling. I wasn’t even a hundred percent certain how to activate it.

  That was one of the problems with libriomancy. Sure, I could create Harry Potter’s wand, but that didn’t mean I knew how to use it. I had nearly given myself carpal tunnel trying to levitate that damn feather.

  “You were searched!” Granach looked furious enough to rip me apart.

  Lena appeared almost as annoyed as the vampire. “You were carrying a bomb around inside your jacket?”

  “Did I forget to mention that?” I gave her a sheepish shrug. “The pockets are bigger on the inside. I should probably warn you all that I’m not sure what kind of blast radius this thing has. It might just destroy everyone in this hallway, or it might rip through the whole mine, and the next thing you know, your little kingdom is Michigan’s biggest sinkhole.”

  Granach smiled and lowered her gun. “Go ahead, little human. Run away. Run as fast and far as you can. It won’t be far enough.”

  “Ray Walker was my friend. I want to find this killer as much as you do.”

  “You could be telling the truth,” Granach conceded. “Or you could be one of Gutenberg’s pawns, sent to eliminate our prisoner.”

  “Mister Puddles was one of you!” I protested. “He could have entered the nest any time he liked!”

  “But he couldn’t have reached the prisoners,” Doctor Shah said. “For that, he needed you.”

  “You’re not helping!” I stepped toward Granach, hoping she could read me well enough to recognize the truth. “Give me one week. I can find Gutenberg.”

  “How?”

  “By doing something really stupid.”

  To my surprise, that earned a genuine bark of laughter. “Like confronting us in the heart of our nest?”

  I tried to smile. My hand was sweating, and the detonator was feeling heavier with every passing moment.

  “What are you planning, Isaac?” Doctor Shah stepped closer. Of everyone here, she was the only one who might have some idea what I was considering. “You can’t—”

  “I’ll need their help.” I pointed to Lena and Shah.

  Granach chuckled. “The doctor stays here, but you can have your dryad. In fact, I’ll make her a deal. Bring me the body of the one behind this, and I’ll give you back your lover. If you’re unable to defeat Gutenberg . . .” Her smile grew. “Then in seven days, you bring me Isaac Vainio.”

  Lena stood taut as piano wire. Her knuckles were tight, and her fingers appeared to have sunk into the wooden stakes, as if she were one with her weapons. “I can’t.”

  Granach gestured, and one of the guards pointed his gun at Doctor Shah.

  “Deal,” I said before Lena could answer. “Let’s go.”

  “Lena!” Shah’s voice was as sharp as I’d ever heard. She shook her head.

  “I’m sorry.” Lena relaxed her grip, allowing the stakes to clatter to the floor. I couldn’t tell if she was speaking to Shah or to me.

  Shah switched to Gujarati. I didn’t understand the language, but my magic translated the meaning. “Isaac, if Gutenberg is behind this . . . you know what dissociative identity disorder implies.”

  “No secrets.” Granach backhanded Doctor Shah, knocking her to the floor. Lena rushed after her, but two of the vampires caught her by the arms, dragging her back.

  I nodded to Doctor Shah, and allowed the other guards to escort me away.

  Trading the darkness of the nest for the bright sun made me sympathize with the undead. I covered my eyes as daylight did its best to burn out my retinas.

  The Triumph appeared untouched. I had no doubt someone had attached a tracking device, but I could find that later with a bit of magic from James Bond. Lena moved stiffly, avoiding eye contact.

  “It’s all right,” I said quietly.

  She glanced up.

  “We’ll find Gutenberg, and we’ll get Shah back.” I shivered, the aftereffects of too much magic and too many people trying to kill me. Trying to fight it only made the trembling worse. I leaned against the car and worked to slow my breathing. I felt like I had spent the past few days mainlining espressos. “Then you and Doctor Shah can go back to your lives.”

  “I’m sorry.” The vampires had returned Lena’s bokken. She hugged them both to her chest. “I thought Nidhi was—”

  “I know.” My words came out more clipped than I had intended. I should have been preparing for what was to come next, and instead I found myself thinking back to the magic flowing from her tree through us both, the happiness in her eyes as we left the restaurant this morning, the feel of her lips on mine. “You did . . . you’re doing what you have to.”

  I stared at the car, trying to assess whether or not I was up for driving. Reluctantly, I fished out my keys and handed them to Lena, trying to ignore the way her fingers brushed my palm.

  “Can you really find Gutenberg?” she asked.

  “That depends on how well Plan B works.” I climbed into the car and tried to settle my mind. “We didn’t recover all of the stolen books from the archive. In theory, I might be able to use those missing books to find whoever has them.”

  “In theory?”

  “I’ve never done it before.” I knew of only one person who had. “We’ll need a quiet place to work, away from people.”

  “One quiet, isolated place in t
he middle of Detroit. Not a problem.”

  “Not the middle. We’re off to one side.” My head was throbbing, but I resisted the urge to use magic to heal the damage Granach had done. Doctor Shah was right. I was overdoing it, and if I was going to find our killer, I couldn’t afford to weaken my barriers any further.

  “Do you believe they’ll return Nidhi?” she asked quietly as we pulled out of the parking lot.

  “I believe that if we can find Johannes Gutenberg, we’ll be in a much better position to demand they hold up their end of the deal.”

  I closed my eyes, thinking about everything we had learned. Chesa had tortured an elder vampire for two days, but hadn’t enslaved him. An elder would have made a valuable slave, suggesting she couldn’t do so. The libriomancer probably had to do that in person.

  I was more worried by the fact that Chesa wasn’t a true vampire by most standards. A libriomancer who could control vampires was bad enough, but this one could control other magical creatures as well. I glanced at Lena, imagining her brown eyes tightening, pupils shifting into pointed crosses.

  “What did Nidhi mean at the end?” Lena asked. “What’s so special about a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder?”

  “Remember what I said to you about the dangers of libriomancy and the way books could reach back into you? It’s possible Shah was seeing different people fighting to control Chesa’s body. It’s also possible those shifts in Chesa’s behavior all came from the same mind. From Gutenberg’s mind.” I hugged my jacket tighter around my body. “Magically speaking, dissociative identity disorder looks a lot like possession.”

  Chapter 12

  NEITHER OF US SPOKE MUCH AFTER THAT. Not that I could blame Lena for her silence. Thanks to me, her lover was still trapped underground.

  I had planned it all out. The love magnet, the extra weapons to hand over, convincing anyone watching that I had been disarmed . . .

  Smudge had known. He had tried to warn me, but I was convinced I knew what I was doing. That I was smarter than the bloodsuckers in their nest, smarter than the killer. And because of that arrogance, the killer had used me to infiltrate the nest and destroy our one potential lead.

  At Mackinac Island two years ago, I had at least managed to stop my enemies before almost destroying myself. This time, all I had accomplished was to help a murderer. If Lena hadn’t been there and given me time to retrieve that detonator, I’d probably be dead by now.

  “I should have called Pallas,” I said quietly. “Asked her to send a real field agent to question the vampires.”

  “You could call her now,” Lena suggested.

  I shook my head. Having helped to eliminate the one person who might have led us to Ray Walker’s murderer, I could think of only one other option, and there was no way Pallas would sign off on it.

  I closed my eyes, remembering Shah’s expression as we were dragged away. Shah had the best poker face of anyone I knew, but she had been trapped down there for days, surrounded by creatures who considered her little more than livestock. She hadn’t been able to hide her despair.

  “It doesn’t make sense. Gutenberg knows the dangers of possession better than anyone.” Gutenberg had written the laws of libriomancy. But Chesa had been enslaved by libriomancy, and who else could command Gutenberg’s automatons? Ponce de Leon was powerful, but he was no libriomancer. Nicola Pallas used bardic magic. Deb DeGeorge’s power was fading, and she had shown no symptoms of possession. I mentally reviewed the other libriomancers I knew, but not one of them was strong enough to challenge Gutenberg.

  “Power makes people believe they’re invulnerable,” said Lena.

  “But why now, after so many lifetimes of practicing magic? And why didn’t anyone notice the signs?” I sagged back in the seat.

  “Maybe someone did. Maybe they pointed it out to him, and he brushed their concerns aside until it was too late.” Her words were pointed, and she still didn’t look at me.

  “I’m all right,” I said. For the moment, anyway. What I was planning could change that all too easily.

  Within two more miles, we had traded the busy streets for an old neighborhood that felt like a ghost town. Abandoned houses watched over the road through empty, jagged-edged windows. Up ahead, a maple tree had fallen through the roof of a two-story house with faded siding. Weeds and shrubs were well on their way to reclaiming driveways and sidewalks.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  She pointed to a large brick complex up ahead. The closest building was twice as long as a football field. A broken sign over the entrance read:—motive Plant of Detroit. “This is one of the largest abandoned factory complexes in the country. It was shut down decades ago. The city wants to bulldoze the whole place, but attorneys from both sides are still duking it out in the courts.”

  The car lurched drunkenly as we passed beneath the old sign. The road looked like it had been bombed back to the Stone Age. Lena downshifted and did her best to avoid the worst of the gaping cracks and potholes.

  The whole place had a post-apocalyptic feel. Graffiti covered the walls of the main plant and the various connected buildings. I spotted everything from simple gang tags to a full mural showing a stylized George Washington gunning down a field of robots, which was actually pretty awesome.

  We passed what might have once been a warehouse, but was now little more than a blackened patch of cement surrounded by weeds. A few metal support beams jutted from the ground at the edges.

  Weeds brushed the underside of the car as Lena pulled into a crumbled blacktop parking lot. I retrieved Smudge and climbed out. The movement reawakened the throbbing pain in my neck and head.

  I adjusted the familiar weight of my armor-laden jacket, then grabbed the paper bag full of books out of the back of the car. The air here smelled like dandelions, clover, and urine. I strode past the nearest building. The outer wall was long gone, and the pillars within the three-story structure made it feel like a parking garage.

  An old, wooden boat with a cracked hull and peeling paint had been dragged inside. It looked like someone had dumped it here, where it had been repurposed into a makeshift shelter.

  “This place was the cutting edge of modern technology during World War II, rolling out bombers and other military hardware,” said Lena.

  Glass, wood, and rubble crunched under my feet. We cut through the corner of the building and emerged into a courtyard of sorts. Brick walls rose up on two sides. Little grew here, the ground being smothered in a layer of debris and red bricks. Green vines climbed the far wall, nearly reaching the top of the three-story building.

  I brushed off a broken slab of cement and sat carefully on the edge, then turned Smudge loose to hunt. This place was pretty much an all-you-can-eat buffet for a creature who lived on insects. He was relatively cool to the touch, which was reassuring.

  I pulled a book from my jacket and used it to create a gold-plated handgun.

  “What are you doing?”

  I gripped the gun with both hands, sighted in on a patch of bare earth, and pulled the trigger twice. Dirt and pebbles sprayed the air, and Smudge flared into a tiny torch. He settled down quickly, though not before giving me a nasty eight-eyed glare.

  “Signaling to anyone here that this is a good time to make themselves scarce.” I set down the gun and grabbed the first book from the paper bag. This was an older fantasy novel by Fred Saberhagen, and included a magical sword with the power to kill anyone, anywhere in the world.

  “You haven’t told me what you’re doing,” Lena said.

  I read the first few pages, searching for the tingle of magic. I felt nothing but the unpleasant jolt of the lock. “A locked book is magically useless to anyone except maybe Gutenberg himself, but not even he should be able to use its power. Not unless he first rips away that lock.”

  I set the Saberhag
en aside and picked up the next book, Mira Grant’s Feed. “Magic 101.” I skimmed the opening scene. “Libriomancy works because we can create identical copies of a text. That generates a kind of magical resonance between books. Libriomancers essentially reach into every copy of a book at once in order to access the cumulative belief of readers.”

  Feed was locked as well, thankfully. I wasn’t up for fighting a worldwide zombie epidemic this week. I set it aside and reached for a Soviet-era thriller called Rabid, by C. H. Shaffer, in which a Russian scientist develops a new, weaponized version of the rabies virus.

  I hadn’t read this one, but as I ran my fingers down the opening pages, magic sparked through my bones, making me yelp. I tried again, pressing harder until my fingers pierced the paper.

  I could feel the tattered remains of the lock, but it didn’t stop me from accessing the book’s magic. Block-printed Latin text swirled beneath my skin. I had never been able to read the text of a magical lock before. Excitement pushed everything else aside as I concentrated on the words. “Et magicae artis adpositi erant derisus et sapientiae gloriae correptio cum contumelia.”

  “Which means?” Lena asked impatiently.

  “‘And the delusions of their magic art were put down, and their boasting of wisdom was reproachfully rebuked.’ Gutenberg used the Bible to lock this book.”

  I pressed deeper. It was like reaching through a broken window. I could touch the book’s magic, but the lock jabbed and sliced my flesh as I did. I slowly withdrew my fingers. My skin was undamaged, but my joints felt cold and stiff.

  I turned the book over to read the summary. The heroine was a beautiful doctor working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She was the first to diagnose the new form of rabies, making her a target for Russian spies. I skimmed the back, then flipped through the final chapter, searching for any mention of a vaccine or cure. “Nothing,” I whispered. “They burn down the Russian lab and irradiate the last samples. CIA guy gets shot, but it’s just a flesh wound. Meaning this book could be used to create a highly contagious and deadly virus, one with no known cure.”