by Jim C. Hines
The four of us fell into a diamond formation with Lena at the head, while Nidhi and I walked a step behind to either side, helping to create a buffer for Nicola.
A reporter shoved a microphone over the barriers. “What are the Porters doing about magic-using rebels and mercenaries destabilizing Africa?”
“I’ve got this one.” I raised my voice. “Africa is a continent. A big one. You’ll have to be more specific. Are you talking about the libriomancer helping the government fight Boko Haram in Nigeria? The rumors about rebels in Mali using blood magic? Or do you mean the three adze who’ve been acting as vigilantes, most recently in the Ivory Coast?”
The adze in question had become known as the Diamond Fireflies after disrupting a diamond mining operation in Sierra Leone and freeing twenty-six child slaves. The vampire-like trio had also brutally murdered three overseers before transforming back into their firefly forms to escape.
I kept walking before the reporter could respond.
“Ms. Pallas, why are the Porters unwilling to defend this country?” asked another reporter.
“The Porters are a worldwide organization, founded in Germany. We have more members from India and China than we do from the U.S.” Nicola’s voice cut through the shouts like a shark through water, a trick of her bardic magic. “The Porters will continue to work with the international community to protect this world from magical threats. We will not support legislation to allow the selective drafting of magically gifted individuals, or any other efforts to militarize our people and our work.”
The anger wasn’t all directed at us. I spotted one small group holding signs that said JUSTICE FOR MARCUS VISSER. Visser was a young werewolf from Maine who’d been shot and killed in early September by a pair of hunters, neither of whom had been charged with any crime.
“Isaac, will you autograph my library card?” A young woman shoved a laminated card and silver Sharpie at me. I scribbled my name and returned it. A camera flash went off directly in my face.
I tried to smile, remembering the photo USA Today had run of me in mid-sentence with my mouth open and eyes half-shut. I’d looked like a stoned Muppet. How the hell had I gone from a small-town Michigan librarian to having to worry about paparazzi in a single year?
“Isaac, please heal our son!”
I stopped walking. A small gap opened to my right. Reporters jockeyed for a better angle.
The plea had come from a couple with a boy no more than two years old, asleep in a stroller. The parents looked to be in their mid-to-late twenties, roughly the same age as me, but in that moment I felt decades older.
“Isaac . . .” Nicola pitched her voice only for me, but that single soft-spoken word carried both warning and a history of arguments stretching back almost a year. Arguments I had generally lost.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked, unable to stop myself.
“His name’s Caleb,” said the father. He had both hands on the wooden barrier. Two police officers moved closer, ready to intervene. “He has hypoplastic left heart syndrome. We’ve been waiting six months for a heart transplant.”
“We saw a story about you on television,” the mother added. “The Discovery Channel one. How your team had cured cancer and diabetes in rats, regrown missing limbs, and healed broken bones. When we heard you were gonna be here, we thought . . .”
She bit her lip and fell silent. The crowd grew still, waiting for my response. Several of the police officers were listening as well. I thought I read sympathy in the eyes of one. Fear in another. A third touched the handcuffs on his belt, a not-so-subtle warning.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, hating myself for how mechanical it sounded. “We’re only beginning human trials this month, under strict supervision from the National Institutes of Health.”
They’d come hoping I’d heal their son’s heart, and instead it was like I’d reached into their chests and squeezed the life from theirs. The mother’s eyes filled with tears. The father put a hand on the stroller as if to keep from falling.
I could do what they asked. I could cure an entire ward of children of every disease known to humanity. A battered copy of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe waited in the SUV, along with my other books. I could open the pages and pull the power of Lucy’s healing cordial into the world. A single drop, and their son would be healthy.
At which point they would be taken into federal custody, their son quarantined, and I would be arrested for violating hastily passed and ill-informed laws against using magic to “physically or mentally influence, alter, or otherwise interfere with another person.”
Most states had eventually added Good Samaritan clauses, allowing exceptions for emergencies that posed “immediate threat to life and limb,” but those didn’t apply here. I could use magic to push someone out of the path of oncoming traffic, but thanks to the fearmongering and ignorance of people like Senator Alexander Keeler, I couldn’t help a child suffering from a potentially deadly heart defect.
If they’d come to me in private, that would be one thing. But not here. Not with so many cameras, so many people, so much raw emotion waiting for a spark.
The moment they publicly asked for my help, they guaranteed I couldn’t give it. I’d bet anything that within the week, a doctor from the NIH would be stopping by their home, not to help, but to confirm their son was still critically ill. To make sure I hadn’t helped him by using “untested and unproven magical techniques that have not been fully evaluated for safety and long-term side effects.”
People had gone to jail over this fight. Libriomancers as well as doctors who’d been forced to watch patients die when the simplest magic could have saved them.
I was tempted to do the same. Save Caleb, and to hell with the consequences. Only those consequences wouldn’t stop with me. My arrest would derail every research project under my supervision, including medical research. It would also provide more ammunition to people who saw us as rebellious outsiders, people who would take any excuse to dissolve the Porters and seize full control of New Millennium.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. I pulled a business card from the inner pocket of my suit jacket. “Call this number. A woman named Kiyoko Itô handles all incoming calls. Tell her you spoke with me. I’ll try to get Caleb into the next round of medical trials at New Millennium.”
“Medical trials?” the father snapped. He pressed up against the barrier, his fists clenched. Lena shifted her balance, ready to take him down if needed. “You know how many damn medical trials we’ve been through in the past two years?”
I could guess. My niece had suffered through multiple surgeries and procedures for years, following an accident that took her leg. I’d seen how slow and tortuous the American medical system could be. I’d been fighting for the past year for the right to help her, and others like her.
The mother took my card. Tension tightened her face. Both of them were fighting tears.
Nidhi pressed past me. “Did someone tell you to come here and ask Isaac for help?” She kept her voice low enough most of the mics wouldn’t pick it up.
The father nodded. “Yeah, that’s right.”
Someone had set this family up, using their pain and desperation to stage footage of a libriomancer heartlessly refusing to help a dying child.
Before Nidhi could press for information, another man shoved to the front of the crowd and shouted, “A year ago, you said magic was a gift! When you gonna share that gift with the rest of us?”
“What’s New Millennium really doing behind those walls?” yelled another. “They get fat off of our taxes, then let us die!”
New Millennium had no federal or state funding, but this wasn’t the time to point that out.
“We should go,” said Nidhi. “Now.”
Heat from the cage at my hip added to Nidhi’s warning.
Lena took my hand and pulled me toward the car. Whatever else people might have said, whatever the crowd shouted after us, it all turned to gray noise.
/>
We were halfway to our next meeting when my phone went off. Not the smartphone in my pocket; this was a private line, known to only a dozen people, three of whom were sitting in the SUV with me.
I clenched my jaw to activate the connection. “This is Isaac.”
The communicator in my lower right molar would pick up subvocalizations almost as clearly as speech. But speaking out loud let the others know I was on a call. Also, I’d been told I sounded drunk when I subvocalized.
“She escaped again!”
I closed my eyes and gently thumped my head against the headrest. “Vince, it’s been a long day. Wherever Kerling has gone, she always comes back eventually.”
“She took half my bologna sandwich, scattered trash over my desk, stole my favorite pen, and left a feather on my printer. I think the feather was deliberate.”
“I’m two thousand miles away, Vince. I can’t help you find your missing crow.”
Beside me, Lena chuckled.
“I wired the door of her cage yesterday afternoon. If she opened the latch from the inside, it should have set off an alarm.”
Vince Hambrecht was an infectious storm of energy and enthusiasm, the first of three libriomancers I’d brought onto my research team at New Millennium. His indignation at being outsmarted by a crow was tempered by his obvious delight in their ongoing game. “Maybe you should have had Talulah or Charles double-check your setup.”
“Everything was working just fine. The cameras went dead for three hours last night, right when she got out. That can’t be coincidence, Isaac. And what about the time she stole the Escape key from my keyboard? She was taunting me.”
At nineteen, Vince was the youngest researcher on site. He’d discovered his abilities a year and a half ago, and was still in that overenthusiastic phase where he was likely to blow himself up along with everyone within a hundred-foot radius if you didn’t keep a close eye on him.
Some people would say we never really outgrew that phase.
The Porters had found him working part-time at the Toronto zoo to put himself through grad school. He’d begun college at the age of fourteen, finished his undergrad at seventeen, and had just completed his veterinary coursework when Nicola recommended I bring him onto my team at New Millennium.
He’d read The Story of Doctor Dolittle more than forty times, trying to gain the power to speak with animals. Failing that, he’d used various other books to try to get similar abilities. Last month, it was drinking dragon blood from Mercedes Lackey’s Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms books.
Magic didn’t make the animals particularly intelligent conversationalists, but for Vince, an endless litany of “Feed me!” and “Mine!” and “I’m horny!” never seemed to get old.
“I told you, I’ve checked Kerling twice. There’s no trace of magic, aside from the healing and rejuvenation you did for her. I still think it’s Talulah messing with you. Heaven save me from libriomancers with too much time on their hands. How’s the rest of the menagerie doing?”
His voice went soft. “Mortimer died yesterday afternoon.”
“I’m sorry, Vince. He was one of the rats, right?”
“He came in three months ago with a missing tail and infected teeth. Once we healed him, he bit you on the palm.”
“Yah, I remember.”
“Doctor Dickinson took the body. As far as I can tell, Mortimer died of old age, not anything we did. But those NIH ghouls insist on cutting him up for study. They’d better give the remains back this time. That rat deserves a proper burial.”
“Email me a copy of Mortimer’s file and your report, and let me know if the NIH finds anything unusual.”
“Will do, Boss.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Sorry.” He hesitated, then blurted, “While I’ve got you on the line, could we talk about Project Crichton?”
“We are not making baby dinosaurs, and that’s final. The last thing we need is a bunch of juvenile velociraptors eating one of our federal babysitters.”
“They wouldn’t get loose, Boss.”
“Says the man who can’t keep a little crow secure. Have you even read Jurassic Park?” Our SUV pulled into a parking lot on 8th Street. “I’ve got to go. Remind me when I get back, and we can try putting a tracking spell on Kerling.”
Lena was smirking when I hung up. “Vince versus the crow again? What is this, round eight?”
“At least.” I climbed out of the SUV and grabbed my old duster from the back, not caring how badly the battered leather jacket clashed with my suit and tie. The reassuring weight of the books in their various customized pockets was more important than any fashion faux pas.
“When are you planning to tell him you uplifted Kerling’s intelligence?” Lena asked.
“When it stops being funny.”
“You shouldn’t interfere with New Millennium research projects,” said Nicola.
“I’m not. I’ve been keeping detailed notes on Kerling’s progress. And Vince’s.” I raised my hands as if to ward off an assault. “The particular magic I used on Kerling could have all kinds of implications for healing brain damage and mental incapacity, not to mention boosting intelligence in general. It’s a legit project, I promise.”
Lena smiled. “You light up when you talk about that place. It’s a shame you couldn’t get them to build it in the U.P.”
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula would have been an ideal location, with plenty of open land away from populated areas. We also had a healthy werewolf pack, and I’d hoped we could hire some of them for security and other positions. I’d gone to Lansing to push the potential job creation and publicity benefits, but Governor Sullivan was firmly in the anti-magic camp, as was much of the state legislature. I’d hardly left the capitol building before they were passing bills prohibiting magical research in Michigan.
“There’s so much we could learn, so much to do. Medicine, engineering, archaeology, astronomy . . . I’m close to getting a meeting with NASA about a permanent magical portal to the moon!”
She laughed and kissed me. “Almost makes the politics worth it.”
The politics were the second worst part of my job, right below having to leave Lena for weeks at a time. She’d been out to visit, but Lena was a dryad. Her oak tree was still rooted in Michigan, as was her other lover. She carried part of that tree within herself, allowing her greater freedom, but she still had to return home at least once a week.
“Before you go to the moon, how about one of those portals between Vegas and Copper River, hm?”
“It’s at the top of my To Do List,” I promised.
She laughed again—I loved that sound—and took my hand as we walked into the restaurant. Tension knotted my muscles like Christmas lights after a year in storage, but being with Lena helped. She had a gift for finding joy and beauty, and for helping others to remember those things.
The Square Pie Pizzeria was one of the more upscale D.C. restaurants, complete with candles and white tablecloths and wait staff in black bow ties. More importantly, they provided privacy and damn good pizza. Lena, Nidhi, and I had come here at least once on each of our too-frequent trips. Nicola had reserved a small, private room near the back.
Representative Derek Vaughn looked to have arrived only moments before. He finished removing his jacket, then waited politely while the rest of us took our seats. Once the waiter jotted down our drink orders and left, shutting the door behind him, Vaughn leaned over to kiss Nicola hello.
“Hell of a day.” Weariness dulled his vote-winning smile. “I thought that hearing would never end.” Thanks to his New Orleans accent, it came out Ah thought dat hearin’ would nevuh end.
As I understood it, he and Nicola had met after a committee hearing in early August. A few weeks later, he’d taken her to one of the best jazz bars in D.C. It was love at first song. How he and Nicola had kept their relationship a secret from the media and the Joint Magical Committee these past two months was a whole other kind of ma
gic.
I unclipped Smudge’s cage and set it on the table between Vaughn and myself. Smudge perked up and poked his forelegs through the bar. He knew this place, and had developed an appetite for anchovies.
“What do you think?” Nicola asked, without preamble.
Vaughn sipped his water before answering. He was an intelligent, quick-witted man who’d started out as a public defender. His ruffled graying hair and gentle blue eyes, framed by laugh lines and silver-rimmed glasses, tended to make people underestimate him. “Hard to say. Homeland Security is pushing hard to get more of you Porters on the payroll. People are scared, Nic. They want guarantees that some voodoo curse won’t turn New York City into a graveyard, or a vampire won’t mind-rape the president into launching nukes at his own country.”
“Voodoo is a religion, not a school of magic,” I pointed out. Though technically, enough authors had written about voodoo dolls to make them a viable tool for libriomancers to pull out of books.
“I know that, boy.” Vaughn took another drink. “Point is, they think you’re holding back. A lot of folks want all of you Porters rounded up, along with the vampires, werewolves, and the rest. Dryads, too, I’m afraid.”
Lena smiled. “They’re welcome to try.”
“I haven’t seen things this tense since the Cold War,” he went on. “Folks think World War III is coming, and when it arrives, it’s gonna fly in on broomsticks, waving wands and massacring muggles.”
“The world’s doing the best it can to make it happen,” I snapped. “North Korea is mandating everyone read one government-approved novel each month, trying to build up a library of magical weapons. Here in the States, Senator Keeler wants us to help him turn hundreds of soldiers into vampires. China detonated a fucking nuke trying to get to the Students of Bi Sheng.”
Vaughn’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know that?”
“Because I have friends there.” The Students of Bi Sheng were a small group of survivors from five hundred years ago, practitioners of an alternate form of libriomancy. They’d fought a magical war once before, and were determined to stay out of world events. There were days I’d been tempted to join them.