by Jim C. Hines
“He knew you?”
“Even through the book.” The thing he had sent after me could have been the manifestation of his madness, the raw, out-of-control hunger and fear.
I pushed the memory aside and clasped my trembling hands together, trying to think. Every libriomancer had a specialty. Deb DeGeorge did history. I was a sci-fi geek. The characters he had named were from mysteries and thrillers . . . but nobody local fit that pattern.
“Can possession be cured?”
“I wouldn’t know how. People like Doctor Shah are supposed to make sure it never gets to this point.” There was nothing physical to dissolve back into the book. You’d have to use magic to try to unravel the original mind from the characters, but how? You couldn’t reach into a man’s mind like he was a book and pull out what you needed.
I blinked and turned that thought over in my head. Slowly, I climbed to my feet. “Time to take care of that thing.”
“We should call the Porters,” Lena said. “Let someone else deal with the aftermath so you can rest.”
“We don’t have time. How long do you think this will hold it?” I made my way inside, testing every step. Lena stayed with me, using her remaining bokken as a cane to support her injured knee. Roughly four feet of rubble covered the spot where she had pinned the thing like an insect. One of the walls creaked, making me jump. “I need to examine the body.”
Lena scowled. “Of course you do.”
Digging a hole through the mess would have been hard enough without the characters shouting in my head, warning me to don protective gear, to call in a team to sterilize the entire place. I was constantly jumping at imagined noises and movement that vanished as soon as I turned to look.
Bricks shifted, and a blackened hand reached for Lena’s wrist. She fell backward. “There you go.”
I crawled over to where she had been working. I could just make out part of the face and left arm. The skin had changed. The charring was worse, and black dust fell away from the fingers every time it moved, reaching unerringly toward me.
I picked up a metal bolt and poked the back of the hand. It felt like burnt leather.
Was this my fault? Had I damaged the book so badly in my attempt to find the killer that I had allowed him to send this twisted, unfinished creature back after me?
“I could try to finish what he started,” I mumbled. “Separate it from the book and fix it in this form long enough to destroy it.” But even if I knew how to do that, who was to say the character I created wouldn’t carry the virus? “You think the vampires would let me borrow their dungeon to study this thing?”
Lena didn’t answer.
I couldn’t heal a book, and ultimately, that was all this was: a burnt, pissed-off book oozing magic all over the place. “I need to lock it.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know how to do that.”
“I don’t.” I sat back and rubbed the dust from my eyes, remembering hastily scrawled Latin reaching out to constrict me. “But Gutenberg figured this out centuries ago. All I have to do is duplicate his work.”
“He probably wasn’t sitting on top of a killer book at the time.”
I forced a chuckle at that. Gutenberg probably hadn’t been so burned out that the simplest spell could have cost him his sanity, either.
I pulled a paperback from my pocket and brought it toward that blackened hand. Instead of a lock, maybe I could simply dissolve it into another book?
The instant the fingers touched the book, black char spread like charcoal dust through the pages. I yanked it back. So much for that approach.
“Magic is a two-part process. Access and manifestation,” I whispered. Both I and my counterpart had accessed the book’s magic. He had controlled the manifestation of that magic.
I closed my eyes, rereading the opening chapter of Rabid in my mind, rebuilding the scene until it was as real as I could make it. The story surged through me, threatening to drag me down. I did my best to walk the line between magic and madness. I needed that connection to the story, but if I lost myself, we were all screwed.
Without looking, I reached out and grabbed its wrist.
“Isaac!”
Dry fingers clamped around mine. But even as it tried to crush my bones, my hand sank through its skin as easily as the pages of the book. “Part one: access.”
I lay flat, reaching deeper. It couldn’t hurt me now, though it certainly tried. The arm passed through my throat and face without effect.
“I don’t care what Nidhi’s files say,” Lena whispered. “You are completely insane.”
“Not yet.” I don’t think she heard me, but the voices surged in response, screaming for me to get away. I touched what felt like burnt cardboard. My fingers closed around a book, the pages wrinkled and brittle like autumn leaves. “Part two: manifestation.”
I carefully closed my hand around the book, leaned back, and pulled out the thing’s heart.
The creature collapsed into black smoke and dust. As its mass dissolved, the rubble shifted beneath me. I squawked and tumbled onto my side, bruising my elbow and scraping my hip. I rolled down like a child on a hill, and likely would have brained myself on the cement if Lena hadn’t caught me.
She held my elbow as we limped back into the clearing, where I examined my prize. The lower part of the book’s cover was completely illegible, but I could make out a bit of the red-and-gray artwork in the upper right corner. When I opened the book, more of the cover flaked away. The interior pages were ash black.
“It’s still leaking,” I said quietly. The dust on my hands charged my skin with magical pseudolife, trying to re-form. “Not as quickly as before, but given enough time, we’ll have to fight that thing all over again.”
“So have Smudge finish destroying it,” Lena suggested.
“Every copy of this book is damaged. Eliminating this one could protect us, but it could also shunt the other libriomancer’s magic elsewhere.” I grabbed Feed from the sack, studying the lock. Gutenberg had locked these books using a quote from the Bible. He was a libriomancer, after all. It made sense his magic would come from books.
And how was I supposed to concentrate on magic when I needed all of my focus just to cling to sanity, to hold on to who I was? Voices had broken down into screams, and they were getting stronger.
The lock I had seen was a fragment of Biblical magic. Which would have been useful information if I had a copy of that Bible on hand, and Gutenberg looking over my shoulder to tell me how to use it.
“Isaac?”
The screams drowned Lena’s words. Only the shape of her lips told me she was speaking my name. Shouting. The world beyond was a blur. I squinted at Lena, then at the blazing ball that was Smudge. I was out of time.
I shoved my hand into Rabid, and the world around me vanished. I couldn’t see my hands, but I felt them, the jagged magic of the unlocked book flaying one, and the cold heaviness of the locked text in the other. Praying this worked, I thrust the locked book into the heart of Rabid, willing that lock to expand and encompass them both.
The screaming stopped. The world snapped into focus, and Rabid fell away. Lena was shouting at me. I pushed myself up and started to speak, but my legs gave way. I watched the ground approach with all the inevitability of an oncoming plow, sweeping consciousness to the curb like the first slush of winter.
Chapter 14
I AWOKE IN A BEDROOM that smelled like muddy dog.
The queen-sized bed was uncomfortably soft, with blue satin sheets and thick pillows. Cracks of sunlight snuck around heavy patterned curtains. I was wearing nothing save brown sweatpants.
The room was silent. More importantly, so were my thoughts. I touched my fingers to my neck, checking my pulse. A little quick, but better than it had been for days. My respiration seemed normal as well, though my breath was rather foul. Either I had somehow recovered from my near-possession at the old auto plant, or else I had gone completely mad.
I sat up and wished I
hadn’t. Pain tore my stiff back, every vertebra protesting loudly. I bit back a gasp and, moving more cautiously, reached for the lamp on the bedside table to my left. The lamp responded to my touch, bulbs brightening beneath a stained-glass shade to illuminate a room with patterned wallpaper and a sloped ceiling.
The skittering of tiny feet on metal bars pulled my attention to Smudge. His cage sat on a potholder atop a heavy oak dresser by the wall. He was hyper, running laps as if to celebrate my awakening, but he wasn’t on fire. I crossed the hardwood floor and pulled back the curtains to reveal a field dotted with pine trees and bordered by a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. A brown barn stood near the back. I counted four dogs sleeping in the shade beside the barn.
My jacket was nowhere to be found, but the rest of my clothes were waiting for me in the closet. My shirt and jeans hung on wooden hangers, and my socks and underwear were neatly folded on a shelf. My boots were so clean I hardly recognized them.
As I dressed, I discovered a number of healing, yellowish bruises scattered over my body. I twisted in front of the mirror on the closet door, checking the damage. I looked like I had lost a fight with a pickup. I touched the mottled bruise on my right cheekbone. I must have gotten that one when I passed out.
I also found several small puncture wounds inside my left elbow, along with a relatively fresh burn mark on my chest, none of which I remembered. The burn lined up nicely with a crisp-edged hole in the front of my shirt.
I tossed the sweatpants across the rumpled bed, grabbed Smudge’s cage, and opened the door. I stepped into a narrow hallway, then jumped back as a pair of black-furred creatures raced past. They resembled clumsy, oversized puppies, though they weren’t dogs. Both animals skidded to a stop in front of me. One raised a row of black spines on its back. The other whimpered and proceeded to piss on the floor.
“And now I know where I am.” I had never been in this house before, but I knew the location, I was roughly a half-hour south of Chicago, in the home of one of the most powerful bards in the world.
The more aggressive animal pounced on my boot. Oversized fangs were no match for the leather-covered steel toes. I let him play for a few seconds, then shoved him away. He tumbled into his companion, which set off a new round of mock-growls, and then they were off again.
I followed them into a large, open room with wood paneling and a bay window looking out on the yard. Circular white speakers in the ceiling piped out a steady stream of jazz. The walls were lined with shelves, but where my shelves back home were overflowing with books, this collection included CDs, old audio tapes, vinyl, and even a selection of 8-track tapes, all meticulously organized by artist and release date. I clasped my hands behind my back, resisting the urge to reshelve them based on the ANSCR standard we used at the library.
Lena sat barefoot on a brown couch covered in animal fur. Nicola Pallas was pacing behind the couch, followed closely by a strange-looking beast with curly white fur that looked like a cross between a dog and a nightmare. The animal glanced over at me, its black tongue lolling to one side.
“How do you feel?” asked Lena.
“Like a mummy freshly risen from the dead.” I stretched again, grimacing as various joints popped in protest. There were no other chairs, so I joined her on the couch. I didn’t know the proper distance for people-who-were-almost-lovers-until-the-dryad’s-girlfriend-turned-up-alive, so I settled awkwardly onto the opposite end and rested my feet on the coffee table, earning myself a pointed glare from Pallas.
“The attitude is familiar, at least.” Nicola Pallas, Regional Master of the Porters, looked exhausted. Her tan, ruddy face drooped, and the bags beneath her eyes were darker than I remembered. She wore a rumpled denim jacket over a tight turtleneck. A silver ring glowed faintly blue on her right index finger. She pointed that finger at me. “What is your name?”
I raised my hands, making the movement as slow and nonthreatening as I could. I didn’t know what that ring could do, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to find out. “Isaac Vainio. It’s just me. No fictional hitchhikers in my head, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“That was one of our concerns.” Pallas studied me a moment longer. The magical glow of her ring dimmed, but didn’t entirely go out. “Lena brought you to me four days ago.”
“Four days?” That would explain the dry mouth and the rumbling in my stomach. “Did anyone remember to feed Smudge?”
“I have,” said Lena. “Nicola said he had to stay in his cage, but I’ve been giving him bits of hamburger and some butterscotch candies I found in the other room.”
“I wanted him caged for his own protection.” Pallas reached down to scratch her pet behind the ears, carefully avoiding the black spines that lay flat along the middle of the animal’s neck and back. “Pac-Man eats pretty much anything.”
“Pac-Man?” The beast looked up at me, oversized fangs giving it an expression that straddled the line between deadly and dopey. A string of drool waved pendulum-like from the jaw, pushing it firmly into the latter category.
“When he was a puppy, he tried to eat a ghost,” Pallas explained.
I had never been able to tell when she was joking. Another puppy bounded through the room. “How many animals do you have here?”
“Four pureblood chupacabra, six poodles, and three crossbreeds, not counting the eleven puppies. I also keep goats in the barn. Louis is the pack leader, but he’s locked in the kennel right now. He has a fungal infection, and I don’t want him spreading it to the other animals. Bessie’s upstairs. Chupacabra get vicious when pregnant. I can’t even go near her without using magic, so it’s hard to make sure she’s getting enough goat blood. The little one who just went by is Pumbaa. My niece named him. He tends to be rather flatulent. I’m trying to adjust his diet to see if it helps, but so far—”
“What’s happened since Lena brought me here?” I interrupted. I had the feeling Pallas could go on all day about her pets.
“I kept you sedated for the first forty-eight hours. I couldn’t risk any sort of magical healing, not in your state. I estimated we had at best a fifty-fifty chance of getting you back. We roused you every twelve hours to give you food and drink, and to allow you to use the bathroom.”
“I . . . don’t remember that.” I glanced at Lena.
“This wasn’t how I had planned to get you out of your pants,” she said wryly.
Pallas continued as if she hadn’t heard. “You may experience nausea, dry mouth, and constipation as the rest of the drugs work through your system.”
“Good to know.”
Pallas whistled a countermelody to the trumpet and piano riff playing over the speakers, and I felt her magic pass through me. Pallas was one of four known bards with the ability to shape magic through music. I had no idea what she was doing with that magic now, though. Using magic on another Porter without permission violated both rules and politeness, and while Pallas had never worried about politeness, she tended to be rather hard-assed about the rules. “Lena told me what you did.”
My hackles rose at the implicit disapproval. “What I did was find the libriomancer who killed Ray. I saw him. It’s not Gutenberg. I need to look up the name Jakob Hoffman. If we can track him down—”
“You had a vision, and you heard voices. That’s not the same thing as finding a killer. Our database has no record of any literary character named Jakob Hoffman. We’ve contacted thirteen Jakob and Jake Hoffmans so far, but none have any magical abilities, nor do they appear to have any connection to this murderer.” Her rings clinked as she fidgeted. In all the time I’d known Pallas, I don’t think I had ever seen her still. “You’ve given us a lead, nothing more. A lead that may or may not pay off.”
“When I spoke to you on the phone the other day, you said there was a magical attack in London. Did it hit Baker Street, by any chance? Anywhere near Sherlock Holmes’ fictional residence? You mentioned Afghanistan as well. Watson, Holmes’ partner, was a veteran from Afgh
anistan. Those attacks could be coming from the various personalities struggling for control of our killer.”
“A rather elementary conclusion, Isaac.” Though her expression never changed, I was pretty sure that was a joke. “We’re looking into the connection and trying to tie the other attacks to specific literary characters.” She tilted her head toward one of the speakers and stared out the window. “Lena also brought me the book you destroyed. Do you have any idea what that level of char can do? To the libriomancer, and to this world?”
“I know what it almost did to me,” I said.
“I doubt that.” She moved closer, and the clinking grew faster. “Lena says you barely escaped that book, that you were like a gibbering child when your awareness returned.”
“Not true. I was like a gibbering grown-up.” But the memory of those moments undermined my attempt at humor. “He tried to lock me into the book. When that failed, he sent . . . something after me. I’ve never experienced anything like it before. It was like—”
“Like a single disharmonic note, growing in volume until it overpowered the melody that defines you.”
“Sure.” I suppose, to a bard, that was as horrific a description as any. “You know what it was?”
“It was proof that I erred in allowing you to investigate this matter. Isaac Vainio, you are forbidden from practicing magic until further notice.”
Her tone never changed, so it took me a second to understand what she was saying. I jumped up from the couch. “I found the man who killed Ray Walker!”
She hummed quietly, and her stereo switched to a faster-paced song. The magic in the air grew stronger as well, like a magnetic current through my bones. Her animals were less subtle. As one, they growled and raised their spines.
“What would have happened if you hadn’t managed to cling to your sanity back there in Detroit?” Pallas asked. “If you had lost yourself to possession? Instead of one rogue libriomancer, you would have forced us to fight two. Imagine yourself terrified and insane, your body flowing with uncontrolled magic. What do you think you would you have done to Lena?”