by Jim C. Hines
“I doubt it, but anything’s possible. Why?”
I stared at the cricket box. A cop friend downstate had once described what he called the “pucker effect,” the body’s automatic response when something just wasn’t right. He wasn’t talking about the lips; the puckering happened farther south, and every cop learned to trust that instinct.
I closed the blinds and turned around. Most of my books were in the office or the library, but I could work with what was stacked around the bedroom for late-night reading. A copy of Dune, an urban fantasy by Anton Strout . . . I skimmed the latter, and soon held the protagonist’s favorite weapon: a heavy metal cylinder that extended to a full-sized bat at the press of a button.
I read Dune next, hoping with each sentence that I was imagining things. Smudge could simply be running hot after the day’s excitement. I certainly was. But he had been calm and cool earlier in the night, before Deb arrived.
I kept the bat in its collapsed state and tucked it into a pocket of my robe, creating a rather embarrassing bulge. If pressed, I could always blame that on my exchange with Lena. I pulled the other side of the robe over the front and cinched the belt tight, hoping neither of my guests would notice.
Finally, just before leaving the room, I opened the small screened-in box with Smudge’s crickets and snatched a fat one from the end of a half-devoured cardboard tube.
When I returned to the library, I found Deb whispering to Lena. Deb glanced up, asking, “How’s your head?”
“Better.” I stopped a short distance away, looking through the glass door behind her and hoping to spy something, anything lurking outside that would explain Smudge’s reaction. The backyard was empty. “Are you ready to hunt some vampires?”
“At least there are no dinosaurs this time,” she answered.
I forced a chuckle. “Damn Michael Crichton. Do you know how much it cost me to fix my car? State Farm doesn’t cover acts of dinosaurs.” I stepped closer. “We should have kept a few eggs. If Smudge can survive in this world, so could they. We could send trained velociraptors out to fight vampires. The movie rights alone would make us rich.”
I relaxed my right hand, allowing the cricket to squirm free. It dropped to the floor and took a single hop before freezing.
I had hoped I was wrong, that Deb would make some scathing comment about my insect-infested home, or simply step forward to crush the cricket under her heel. Instead, she tensed like a cat preparing to pounce. It lasted only a second, maybe two, but it was enough.
I pulled the bat from my pocket and pressed a button. The weapon sprang to its full length with a satisfying metallic clunk.
“Freud would have a field day with that.” Deb backed away. Her tongue flicked over her lips, and her eyes kept darting toward the cricket.
“How long since they turned you?” I checked Lena, who wasn’t moving. She watched Deb with glazed eyes, as if drugged.
“Three weeks.” Deb reached into her jacket. “I’m sorry, hon. I really wanted to bring you back in one piece.”
Chapter 4
I SLAPPED THE POWER PACK clipped to the back of my belt. A translucent wall of energy shimmered to life around my body, courtesy of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Bullets ripped directly from the pages of Deb’s book into my shield, but none penetrated. It was the same defense I had used against the Iced Z dealer’s guns two years ago.
Deb must have prepared the book earlier, opening its magic to a scene of gunfire and leaving it ready in case she needed a quick, silent weapon. It was difficult, dangerous, and illegal as hell. I would have loved to know exactly how she had pulled it off.
The sharp metal scent of gunpowder filled the room as bullets spat silently from the page and ripped into the shelves behind me. I jumped forward, trying to protect Lena and the books with my body. I swung the bat with both hands, striking the book hard enough to knock it up and away from me. The shield only stopped high-velocity impacts, which meant I could still use old-fashioned weapons like knives and bats.
Bullets gouged the wall and ceiling, raining chunks of plaster down on my head. My backswing smashed Deb’s wrist. Had she been human, that blow would have shattered bone. I did jar her enough to make her drop the gun, which was little comfort as she stepped in, caught the bat, and twisted it away from me. She slammed her other hand into my chest, sending me staggering into the shelves.
Pain radiated from the center of my rib cage, but I did my best to keep it from showing as I brushed myself off. “Wallacea, right?”
The full species name was Muscavore Wallacea, informally known as the Children of Renfield. They weren’t technically vampires, but they ran in the same circles. Deb wouldn’t be as fast or strong as the sparklers I had faced in the library. She was more than a match for a human, though. For a dryad, too, from the look of things. Lena still hadn’t snapped out of her trance.
“War is coming,” said Deb. “The Porters aren’t going to win this one. I don’t want to see you hurt.”
“You fired a machine gun at me!”
“I was aiming for your legs.” She shrugged. “If you’d have let me into your mind like your friend here, I wouldn’t have needed the gun.”
That was where the headache had come from. I grinned and tapped my head. “Blame that on the fish in my brain.”
Deb stared. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Telepathic fish.” I shrugged, using the movement to scan the closest shelves. What kind of weapon would take out a Renfield? “You need to read more Douglas Adams. The fish translates other languages by eating incoming thought waves. Turns out it provides a bit of a buffer against mental assaults, too. Gobbles up psychic attacks like candy. I wrote a paper on it three years ago.”
“You put a fish in your brain.” Her fingers inched toward her jacket. “You’re an odd man, Isaac Vainio.”
“Why are the vampires really attacking us, Deb?”
“I didn’t lie to you. Someone, probably a Porter, has been working against the vampires. But we didn’t attack the library, and we didn’t take Gutenberg.” She snatched a book from her jacket.
I kicked the cricket across the floor, then lunged for the copy of Starship Troopers on the closest shelf. Deb had a head start, but as I had hoped, the cricket broke her concentration long enough for me to find the scene I wanted.
A chittering sound filled the room, and Deb froze. Between the buzz of enormous wings and the click of chitinous bodies moving together, it was like I had ripped a hole in the side of a giant insect hive.
Disturbing as the noises were to me, I was human. Deb, on the other hand, had become a creature who lived by consuming the strength of insects and small animals. Her book forgotten in her hands, she reached toward mine, toward the enormous insectoid aliens within the pages.
I sidestepped to pick up the book she had used to fire at me. Her magic was still active. I set Starship Troopers on a shelf and gripped Deb’s book with both hands. “Let Lena go and drop your books. The jacket, too. Then we’ll talk.”
She wrenched her attention away from the sound long enough to glance at Lena, who started as if woken from a dream.
“Good. Now drop them.”
Deb stared at the pages of her book, and for a moment I thought she was going to try magic. Her knuckles whitened with pressure.
I raised the book, and my fingers sank into the paper, touching Deb’s magic. I could feel the staccato concussions of gunfire within the text, waiting to be released. “Please don’t make me do this.”
She relaxed, tossing the book to the ground. She slipped off her jacket as well. “Could you please shut that?”
I reached over to close Starship Troopers, muffling the alien bugs. “Are you all right, Lena?”
“I will be.” Lena pressed a hand against the wall for balance. “She was trying to persuade me you had been turned. She wanted me to make sure you came quietly, so we could ‘help’ you.”
“Lena has a stronger mind than I expected, and I’m s
till figuring out these new powers,” Deb said. “If you’d given me another five minutes—”
“Tell me about Ray,” I interrupted. “The truth. Were you involved?”
“I’d never hurt Ray. I wish I knew who murdered him.” She slunk backward until she reached the glass door. “I told you, hon. We didn’t start this.”
“You’re saying we did?”
“Be careful who you trust, Isaac,” Deb said. “Gutenberg is over six hundred years old. Is he even human anymore? Does anyone really know him?”
“I know he wouldn’t destroy his own archives.” I tried to say more, but my throat constricted, and I began to cough.
“I’m sorry, Isaac.”
The book she had dropped lay on the floor. Wisps of yellow-green gas seeped from the edges of the pages. Chlorine. My shield would stop bullets, but not air. A shield that suffocated the user wasn’t terribly helpful.
Deb swatted my book away hard enough to rip the binding, and then Lena’s right hook slammed her back. The follow-up punch was hard enough to knock Deb through the door and onto the deck out back.
I staggered toward the broken door. If I could get outside . . .
The cloud thickened around me, clinging to my body. I might have admired that trick, if the gas hadn’t been burning my lungs from the inside out. Lena grabbed my arm, trying to help me outside, but that only brought her into the worst of the chlorine. I pointed to Deb’s book.
Lena grabbed it and drew back to throw.
“No!” The word grated the inside of my throat, but Lena lowered her arm. I snatched the book and squinted as gas continued to rise from the paper. I tried to hold my breath, but my lungs and throat hurt too much, and the muscles wouldn’t obey.
I wiped my eyes and glanced at the cover. This was an annotated history of World War I. I flipped the pages until I found Deb’s spell, which resembled a jagged tear down the center of the book, rimed in green frost. Pressing my hand over the rip did nothing to stop the flow.
My nose dripped, and my vision blurred. I could barely hear over the pounding in my head. Pulling the hem of my bathrobe over my mouth and nose, I leaned closer, trying to make out the text. This chapter described the use of chlorine gas against the British in 1915. The Germans had deployed more than a hundred tons of the gas. Enough to wipe out a good chunk of Copper River.
“Get out of here!” The words triggered another coughing fit, as if my body were trying to expel my lungs from my chest.
Lena caught my shoulders to keep me from falling. I closed my eyes, rereading the words in my mind. I could see Deb’s spell, but I couldn’t manipulate it. If I was going to stop this thing, I needed to use my own magic.
Lena braced me as I bore down, straining my fingers against the page until I ripped into that April battlefield. I expanded the rip until it devoured the hole Deb had created. The book was now mine, as was its magic. Magic that continued to pour out.
At the library, I had dissolved my weapons back into their texts. I did the same thing here, treating the chlorine as a single magically-created artifact. My vision flashed and sparked as I struggled to draw the gas back into the pages.
Slowly, the chlorine thinned. I collapsed against Lena and did my best to keep from vomiting. I brought the book to my face like a gas mask. My coughing grew worse as it pulled out the chlorine that had pooled in my lungs.
I couldn’t talk, so I turned around and raised the book to Lena. She nodded, putting her hand over mine and pressing the book to her mouth and nose. As the pounding in my head eased slightly, a new sound made me wince: a high, piercing beep.
“Smoke alarm,” I gasped. I staggered toward the bedroom. Most of the gas had stayed with me, but some had dispersed through the house. I found Smudge curled in a ball at the bottom of his tank. Bits of blackened, smoldering web clung to his body, and the air smelled like smoke, but he wasn’t burning anymore. He wasn’t moving at all.
I yanked off the lid and carefully scooped him free, setting him on the bed. I lowered the book over his body like a tent.
Come on, I prayed. You’ve faced worse than this. Arachnid lungs weren’t the same as ours, but even if I had known everything there was to know about spider anatomy, Smudge was no ordinary spider. I had no idea how much gas would be toxic to a fire-spider.
A wisp of smoke rose from beneath the book, and I sagged with relief. I pulled the book away, and Smudge crawled slowly toward me. I lifted him into my hand. Together, the three of us made our way back out to the kitchen, where I set Smudge down on the counter.
There was no sign of Deb. I put the book down and poured a cup of water for Lena, then got another for myself. The cold both stung and soothed my throat. I felt like I had swallowed a sandblaster.
I made my way back to the living room and grabbed The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe from the shelves. I turned to a dog-eared page and pulled out a small crystal vial full of red liquid. I opened the vial and allowed a single drop to fall onto my tongue.
Instantly, the pain began to recede. I passed the bottle to Lena. “You should only need one drop,” I said in a voice that sounded almost human again. “It’s supposed to heal any injury.”
Once Lena finished, I poured another drop onto my fingertip and extended it to Smudge. His mandibles tickled my fingertip, and soon he, too, was back to his old self.
I picked up Deb’s World War I book and squinted at the edges of the pages, where the paper was glued to the spine. Lines of ragged black seared the inner margins, invisible to anyone not trained to see it. The char wasn’t bad enough to be a threat, but further use would cause problems.
I sealed Starship Troopers next, then returned my bat and shield to their respective texts. I considered keeping the medicine, but I was pushing things too far already. I remembered Ray Walker lecturing me on the importance of terminating my spells.
“Every time you reach into a book, you’re creating a portal, a hole into magic.” He had punched a hole in the top of the half-empty pizza box to demonstrate. “The more of that energy you return, the faster those holes heal. Now, the universe is pretty tough, and you can get away with keeping the occasional fire-spider, but don’t push it. Not unless you want to rip open something you can’t fix.”
I returned the vial to the book, then surveyed the damage to my library. Angry as I was at Deb’s betrayal, seeing the bullet-ridden texts was worse. It was one thing to shoot at me, but to destroy my books . . . I picked up an Asimov paperback, examining the tattered hole through the spine and pages.
“So you have vampires among the Porters,” Lena commented. “That’s new.”
“Deb’s not exactly a vampire.” I set the damaged book on the arm of the chair—she had shot my chair, too!—and returned to the kitchen to finish the rest of my water. “Muscavore Wallacea, from a ninety-year-old book called Renfield. It’s a sequel to Dracula, written by Samantha Wallace. In her book, the Renfield character wasn’t mad at all, and actually gained certain powers by consuming the smaller lives of insects and other creatures. Renfield was strong, fast, and able to influence the thoughts of others. Let a child of Renfield into your head for too long, and that ‘madness’ becomes infectious.”
Lena whistled. “In other words, I owe you a thank you.”
“After the sparklers at the library, I think we’re at one save apiece.”
Her answering smile took some of the sting out of the past twenty-four hours. She picked up her bokken and strode out the back door, glass crunching beneath her bare feet. “Do you think she’s right about someone from the Porters working against the vampires?”
“I don’t know.” I took a slow, shaky breath, trying in vain to calm myself. I was in way over my head, but I no longer cared. “But I say we get out of here and find out.”
I stood in front of the open hall closet, staring at a brown suede duster on a wooden hanger.
I’m officially reassigning you back to the field.
One little sentence, alluring and seduct
ive, 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.