by Jim C. Hines
“Oh, good, Ted. Insult the woman who just took your gun away.” I raised the detonator, earning a low snarl. “Her name’s Lena Greenwood. She’s the one who’s going to humiliate you—again—if you give us any crap.”
“Yah, I know that name. Tree lover, right?” He pointed to the trapdoor. “Would one of you bring Jimmer down here before the damn fool jumps and breaks his neck?”
The beagle looked ready to do just that. I could hear his claws scraping the edge of the hole as he peered down at us, his entire body quivering. He whined piteously as I approached. The instant I held out my arms, he launched himself into the air. I nearly dropped the detonator, but managed to catch both it and the dog. I set him down, and he raced toward the coffin.
Ted dipped a finger into the thermos and offered the red-coated digit to the dog, who reared up and began lapping at the blood.
“If you’ve made yourself a vampire beagle—” I began.
“Nah, Jimmer just likes the taste.” He set the thermos in the corner of the coffin and stretched. Without looking, he grabbed a plastic lighter and a half-empty pack of cigarettes from a pocket in the coffin’s blue satin lining. “So what will it take to get rid of you so I can go back to sleep?”
“A clean blood test, for starters.” While he lit up, I opened the small pouch I had taken from the glove box. Inside was a compact plastic glucose meter, modified by the same engineer who had rigged his insulin pump to fight his vampirism. I uncapped a canister of blood test strips, pulled out a green one, and stuck it into the meter. “Which arm?”
He blew a stream of smoke in my face, but extended his left arm. I jabbed a silver needle into the skin and pressed the drop of blood to the test strip. The meter beeped a few seconds later, the screen reading 23.
“Am I clean, boss?” Ted asked with a scowl.
“You’re within normal range.” The green strips were calibrated for Stokerus vamps. Anything under 60 meant Ted was sticking to his nonhuman diet. “The bug-eater who tried to kill me used to be a Porter.”
Ted paused in mid-drag. “They turned a Porter? That’s ballsy.”
“What’s going on, Ted? Why come after us now?”
“Don’t ask me.” He sucked his finger clean, then dipped it into the thermos again for the dog. “If it was up to me, I’d have sent someone to off you years ago.”
I sighed. “And if I’d followed orders, I’d have left your ashes in the bonfire pit at Camp Gichigamin.”
He didn’t answer.
“You’re here because I convinced the Porters you could be useful to us.” I leaned closer. “If you’re going to give me attitude instead of answers, then you’re not useful anymore.”
His attention shifted to the detonator.
“Go ahead, take it. I can make another. Any libriomancer can.”
“All I know is you aren’t the only one with problems,” he said sullenly. “Vampires have been disappearing for a few months now. We figured they’d been dusted, that maybe another idiot was trying to play slayer. It happens every once in a while. They don’t usually last long. But then a few of the missing vampires showed up again and started causing trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” asked Lena.
“Hunting humans. Fighting and killing other vamps.” Ted chugged the rest of the blood, then licked his lips, leaving a faint residue on his beard and mustache. “That’s nothing new. Every newborn vampire thinks he’s hot shit until someone else pounds the shit right out of him and shows him what’s what, but this is different. One of these upstarts even slew her own sire.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” I said.
“Nah, the way I hear, this was a southerner. They don’t mess with their makers. They can’t.” He lit another cigarette and flicked the first butt into the corner.
“Southerner?” Lena asked.
“Sanguinarius Henricus.” Another relatively young bloodline, one which had arisen from Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire series. “Ted’s right. Harris’ vampires are intrinsically incapable of acting against their masters.”
Ted wouldn’t hesitate to lie to me, but he was a lousy actor. The shotgun, the chain smoking, the twitchiness in his hands . . . everything suggested he was genuinely spooked.
“They say you’re the ones behind this,” Ted commented. “Maybe even old man Gutenberg himself.”
“‘The biggest liar in the world is They Say,’” I muttered. “Douglas Malloch.”
Ted stared. “Who?”
“Never mind. Get dressed, Ted.”
His lips pulled back, a threat display which would have been far more effective had his fangs not been sitting in a Porter lab downstate. “Why?”
“I need a bloodhound, someone who can sense and track other vampires.” That power was one of the reasons Ted had returned to the relative seclusion of the U. P., where others of his kind wouldn’t be constantly triggering his territorial instincts. “You’re going to help me check out Ray’s place, and then you’re going to lead us to the bastard that killed him.”
“The hell I am!”
“Hell is the other option, sure.” I raised the detonator. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten what you really are. What you did to those boys.”
His tongue flicked out, moistening his lower lip. “I been clean for years now. You know that, eh? Whatever’s going on down there, I want nothing to do with it.”
“Fine.” I backed toward the ladder, then jabbed a button on the control unit, and Ted shouted incoherently. He was out of his coffin and halfway to my throat when Lena drove a knee into his gut. She spun, tossing him onto the Ping-Pong table.
I held the detonator so he could see the countdown. “Twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes. That’s how long you have left, unless I enter the cancellation code.”
“You son of a bitch. I’ve lived this long by minding my own business, not butting in on—”
“They killed Ray,” I said softly. “They turned my friend. Now get dressed.” I glanced at the dog. “And you should probably call someone to watch Jimmer while you’re gone.”
I stood impatiently while Ted finished spreading a green tarp in the trunk of my car. Next, he hauled a plastic bucket from the trailer, removed the lid, and dumped five gallons’ worth of dirt and pebbles onto the tarp. He tossed the bucket away and climbed inside, stifling a yawn as he shaped himself a dirt pillow. “Not a lot of room back here.”
“It’s daytime,” I said. “You’ll be snoring in five minutes.”
He tossed the tire iron out. I had to jump to one side to keep it from smashing my shin. A tow cable followed, and then a pair of emergency flares. He bent his knees and settled his head on the dirt. “Hey, how about turning off that countdown? What if you wipe out and die in a wreck on the way downstate? I don’t want to get blown up because of your crappy driving.”
I slammed the trunk and gathered up the things he had thrown out, squeezing them in behind the seats.
“Do we really need him?” Lena asked as we pulled out of the trailer park. “Can’t you just pull out a time machine and go back to prevent the murders from happening?”
“Most time machines won’t fit through a book,” I said. “The book is the window for the magic, meaning we can’t create anything larger. And no, we can’t just create a twenty-foot-wide copy of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. Otherwise I’d have taken my own personal spaceship to the moon years ago. How much do you know about libriomancy?”
“Not that much,” she admitted.
I swerved around a suicidal woodchuck, earning a cranky shout from the trunk. “Go to sleep, Ted!” To Lena, I said, “What we do is no different than any other magic. At its heart, magic is a two-part process: access and manifestation. Few people can tap into magical energy. Those who manage usually can’t control the manifestation. The magic fizzles, or if they’re really unlucky, it fries their minds.
“I can touch magic, but I can’t shape and define it on my own the way a true sorcerer could.
The key to libriomancy, the secret Gutenberg unlocked, was that when hundreds or thousands of people read a book in the exact same form, it creates a pool of belief anchored to that form. Gutenberg did it with roughly two hundred copies of his Bible. Most of us need thousands.”
“So an oversized book wouldn’t work unless you printed and distributed thousands of them,” Lena said. “So why not pay off some author to write about a handheld time machine?”
“Gutenberg’s a bit paranoid about anything that could, in theory, be used to erase him from existence. The Porters do have a few ghostwriters on payroll, but putting in a request requires a stack of paperwork like you wouldn’t believe. Between the speed of bureaucracy and the speed of publishing, if I requisitioned a toy like that today, the book might come out three years from now. And then there’s the magical cost of trying to change time. I’d have to work through the equations, but that much power could easily burn you out of existence.”
I gunned the engine, pulling into the passing lane and putting an SUV towing a pontoon boat behind us. It would be hours before we reached the bridge, and longer yet to arrive in East Lansing. Meaning there was time to ask Lena something that had been bothering me. “You’ve known Doctor Shah a long time, right?”
“She took me in when the Porters found me. I watch her back, especially when she gets called in to consult on the ugly cases. Remember that big oil spill down south? We spent two weeks down there, working with a displaced family. My job was to keep the family from eating Nidhi. You do not want to trigger a mermaid with full-blown PTSD.”
“So you’ve met a lot of Porters,” I said.
“Nidhi doesn’t share the details of her cases, but I see most of her clients at least in passing.”
“Then why come to me?” I glanced at the speedometer and eased back on the gas. Stress always seemed to weigh down my foot. “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the rescue at the library. But I’m a cataloger, two years out of the field.”
“You were the closest Porter I could trust to—”
“Nope,” I said. “I know what you told Deb, but the closest Porter to Dearborn, not counting Ray, would have been Nicola Pallas. Instead of a five-hour trip, you drove eight in order to—”
“Six.”
I ran the numbers in my head and winced to realize how fast she must have been going. “Six hours away from the vampires who had taken Shah, to find me. So either you knew the vampires were coming after me next—”
“I didn’t,” she said. “It’s possible they followed me. I didn’t see anyone, but that doesn’t mean much.”
Sparklers could have run alongside the highway, keeping pace until they figured out where she was going, then running ahead to Copper River to track me down. I didn’t know what kind of records the vampires kept, but it wouldn’t be too hard to find the lone libriomancer working in the U. P.
Lena had saved my life, and Smudge trusted her, but something still wasn’t adding up. “You said you could trust me. Why? We barely know each other.”
“I . . . read your file.”
“I see.” I stared at the road. “So you already knew about Mackinac Island.” About everything I had told Doctor Shah. The nightmares, the grief, the breakdown when they reassigned me.
“Not everything.”
“Does Shah know you had access to her files?”
Lena shook her head. “If she knew, she’d be even angrier than you are.”
“I doubt that.” We were doing ninety by the time we hit Highway 2. I forced myself to relax. “Did it occur to you that breaking into someone’s psych records wasn’t the best way to build trust?”
“I’m sorry, Isaac. I didn’t have a choice.”
“Bullshit.”
“That’s easy for a human to say,” she shot back. “I couldn’t go after Nidhi. I wanted to. More than you’ll ever understand. But I couldn’t. Not alone. I needed you.”
“Why?”
“To protect me.”
“Me?” I choked back a laugh. “From what?”
“From what I am. What I could become.” She looked away. “There are two kinds of magical creatures in this world. Those that arose ‘naturally,’ and those that were created. I’m one of the latter. I was born fifty years ago in the pages of a cheap paperback.”
The stiffness in her body and the numbness in her voice reminded me of myself, sitting in Doctor Shah’s office after Mackinac Island. “You can’t bring intelligent beings into our world from books.”
Aside from the problem of size, no book could truly capture the complexity of a sentient being. The fictional mind couldn’t handle the transition into the real world. They went mad.
One of my earliest jobs for the Porters had been at an elementary school, where I had been sent to repel an invasion of little blue men. An overly talented fourth grader had somehow managed to pull them out of an old book. Three apples high and batshit insane, every last one of them. I never had gotten the smell out of my steel-toed boots, and the deranged singing had earwormed me for weeks.
Even Smudge was rather neurotic. He had run endless laps in his cage for weeks after I created him, until he collapsed from exhaustion. He probably would have died from the shock if he hadn’t been written to be so loyal. I had needed his help, and that core loyalty gave him a lifeline, a mission that saved him from madness. “How could you have come from a book?”
“This was when the Gor novels first came out. Just like any other hot trend, authors scrambled to join the bandwagon.” She spoke in a monotone, reciting the story instead of telling it.
I knew the Gor books, a series by John Norman famed for its portrayal of sexual servitude. Tarnsman of Gor had been the first of dozens, back in the late sixties. The series had been popular enough to spawn an entire subculture.
“The book was called Nymphs of Neptune.”
I groaned. “Really?”
That got a quiet chuckle. “A terrible title for a terrible book. There were twenty-four nymphs, all of whom looked roughly the same. The author had a fondness for plump women, describing us as ‘the Grecian ideal of beauty and perfection.’ Our surface appearance changed, depending on the desires of our lovers. One of us was given to ‘a noble Nubian warrior,’ and she became ‘dark as the richest chocolate, to match her lord and master.’”
My fingers clenched tighter around the wheel. “And somebody published this crap?”
“Oh, it was quite popular for a time.” She sighed. “Central to a nymph’s nature is the inability to refuse her lover.”
“You’re not allowed to say no.”
“I’ll never know who reached into that book and pulled out an acorn from the tree of a dryad. They must have tossed it aside and forgotten all about it, but my tree grew with magical swiftness. Within a few years, I emerged naked and lost. I wandered for two days until I came to a farmhouse. The first person I met was a farmer named Frank Dearing. He took me in. I helped work the fields during the day, and by night—”
“I can guess.” My jaw hurt from clenching it.
I had always assumed Lena to be a natural-born dryad. The idea that she had been created, grown from a seed in a bad pulp novel . . . created to be someone’s plaything, like some kind of magical sex toy . . . I felt physically ill just thinking about it.
Lena touched my forearm. “It’s all right.”
“How the hell is it all right?”
“I was happy. Content. I didn’t know any better. Part of our nature is that we don’t want to say no. When Frank died and the Porters found me, they brought me to Nidhi. They thought I was suffering from Stockholm syndrome. They knew I was magical, but we didn’t discover my origins until later. By then . . . I had spent so much time with her.”
I looked at Lena, the black hair, the brown skin. “You and Doctor Shah?”
“We’ve been lovers for nine years.”
My mental clutch jolted and stalled as I tried to incorporate this information into my image of Doctor Shah.
“You only knew her as a therapist,” said Lena. “If you met her outside of the office, you’d probably like her. She’s a bit of a geek, too.”
“What do you mean, too?” I asked, but my heart wasn’t in the banter.
“Nidhi grew up reading comics, especially She-Hulk and Tank Girl. Those fantasies helped to shape me. The Nymphs of Neptune were able warriors, and there were plenty of scenes where we fought our sisters for the pleasure of men. I learned to fight for a better purpose.” She shrugged. “It could be worse. I’m smart, strong, and nigh indestructible.”
Being born from an acorn, she wouldn’t have experienced the shock of transition the way a more fully-fleshed character might. I suspected her nature helped there as well, just as Smudge’s had. Presumably both Frank Dearing and Doctor Shah wanted a sane lover, and Lena would have been shaped by those desires. “Is it strength if you exist to fulfill someone else’s fantasy?”
She flexed an arm. “Tell you what. Let’s arm wrestle, and you can tell me if that strength is real.” Her words were playful, but muted.
“This doesn’t explain why you read my file. Why you sought me out.” My anger at Lena had fled, replaced by confusion. Her athleticism, her energy, her sense of humor, everything I found so appealing about her, were these things simply a result of how her race had been written?
“Think about it, Isaac. My lover was taken by vampires. If she’s not dead, if they turn her like they did your friend Deb . . . her desires define me, Isaac.”
“And you can’t refuse your lover. So you need—” I almost swerved off the road.
“You’re not usually this slow on the uptake,” Lena commented.
“You want me to become your next owner?” Red sparks crackled from Smudge’s back, either from the anger in my words or my driving.
“I knew you were attracted to me, when we met before. You appreciated my body, but you also liked me. Your file confirmed that you’d make a good partner.”
“And you didn’t think you should let me in on this plan?”
“Sorry, I got a bit distracted saving your ass from those sparklers.”
“Lena, I can’t—”