by Jim C. Hines
“I wouldn’t have hurt her.” But even as I protested, I remembered staring at Lena with no memory of who she was. If that darkness had caught me . . . “What was it? Ray described the consequences of magical screw-ups in great detail, and he never mentioned anything like that. None of the Porter texts or reports I’ve read—”
“Your antics with the vampires have had consequences as well,” Pallas said, as if I’d never spoken. “Attacks worldwide have increased over the past four days. I spent this morning on the phone with Luis Quenta in Bolivia. They had to firebomb the Santa Cruz nest to keep the vampires contained. They’re testing us. And with Gutenberg and his automatons gone, we’re failing that test.”
“They gave me a week to find this killer,” I protested. One week, more than half of which I had now wasted, lying unconscious in Nicola Pallas’ apartment.
“Granach gave you a week. She said nothing about the rest of the world, nor are all vampires bound by a deal made by Alice Granach.” Pallas picked up an enormous dog bone that appeared to be made of some sort of woven black material. “My animals are beautiful, but they will always be part monster. I have their toys custom-made from Kevlar. Anything else they destroy within minutes. If I ever forget, if I expect them to be other than what they are, then whatever happens to me will be my own fault as much as theirs.” She threw the toy across the room, starting a riot of growling and fighting. “Magic is the same way. If you forget the rules, it will turn on you.”
“We’d know even less if I hadn’t broken the rules.” I shivered, remembering my flight through the book. “How could someone get so powerful without the Porters knowing?”
For the first time, Pallas looked uncertain. She turned toward the window, staring out at the field. “That is something we’ve been asking ever since these attacks started.”
“And?” I pressed.
“And the Porters will continue to investigate until we have answered that question.”
“He’s possessed, but it’s more than that, isn’t it?” I pressed. “Possession would drive him mad, force him to lash out. It wouldn’t give him the power to rip open locked books, or to send that thing through a book after me. He’s killing Porters, enslaving vampires . . . why?”
Pallas reached down to scratch one of the puppies on the belly. “This matter is no longer your concern.”
“No longer my concern?” I stood and turned to face her. “He tried to kill me!”
“He tried to do far worse than that.” She raised a hand, her ring pulsing a warning. “You have been touched by something you don’t understand.”
“So explain it to me!”
“When the immediate crisis is resolved, we will speak more about what you saw.”
“What about Nidhi?” Lena asked quietly. “What happens to her while you continue to investigate?”
“We will not turn Isaac over to the undead. Nor will this rogue libriomancer be delivered to their laboratories, where who knows what power they might try to extract from him.” Pallas rubbed her temples. “I’m struggling on three fronts. Our first priority is finding this libriomancer. If what you saw is true, he will soon destroy himself, but who knows what damage he’ll cause in the meantime. We’re also speaking with the vampires, doing what we can to maintain peace and persuade them to return Nidhi Shah unharmed.”
“What’s the third front?” I asked.
“Politics. At least vampires don’t bother to mask their hostility in pointless pleasantries.” Her laughter had always sounded forced to me, and this was no exception. She knelt to scratch Pac-Man’s ears as he gnawed the Kevlar toy he had triumphantly stolen from the other animals. “Gutenberg may yet live, but we can’t wait for him to return. He built the Porters to function after his death, but there are . . . differences of opinion as to who should take his place. We’ve established a temporary ruling council, twelve regional masters from throughout the world. In magical affairs, I now speak for most of North America.”
“Which means you’re overwhelmed and understaffed. Let me help! I have copies of the books he stole from the archive. I can show you—”
“Those books have been shipped to Philadelphia, where they are being examined by two of the most skilled libriomancers we have.”
I stopped to survey the other magical trappings Pallas had prepared. Etchings in the windows reminded me of the spells worked into the windshield and mirrors of my car. An ornate brass padlock hung on the front door, like something out of a medieval fantasy novel. And then there was her music collection. “Am I a prisoner?”
“For the time being, the council prefers you both remain here,” Pallas said. “We will, of course, complete a full review of your actions before a final decision can be made as to your status.”
“Nice,” I said. “Yank the guy who actually found your rogue libriomancer out of the field.” My tone earned a growl from Pac-Man.
“Don’t exaggerate. Had you found this man, we’d be having a very different conversation. You heard a name. Three field agents have wasted their time trying to follow up on that lead. They’ve found nothing.”
“So how can it hurt to let me try?” I asked, trying charm instead.
Charm proved as futile as anger. “In thirty years, I’ve only had to put down one of my animals before its time,” Pallas said. “A bitch named Peaches. She was aggressive, but I’ve dealt with worse. Her problem was single-mindedness. Once she sighted prey, she had to have it. She chewed through the barn to kill one of my goats. When a deer approached the fence, she scaled it and escaped. That fence is electrified, with enough power to stop a bull, but Peaches didn’t know how to stop. She tore her leg to the bone on the barbed wire, but she caught her deer. She was a beautiful creature, with hazel eyes, soft fur, and gently curved spines that rattled like maracas when she ran.”
I tilted my head. “Are you calling me a bitch?”
“I’m telling you that your part in this investigation is over.”
“You’re hiding something,” I said. “Do you know what happened to Gutenberg? To the automatons? Do you know what Jakob Hoffman is trying to do?”
“Stand down, Isaac.” The speakers began to buzz as bass thrummed through the house. “I prefer not to use force against another Porter, but you will remain here. This is for your own protection.”
I was no match for Pallas, especially here on her home turf, with her pets ready to eat me.
Lena hadn’t spoken at all. How much of this same argument had she already had with Pallas? Lena wouldn’t sit here and wait for the vampires to murder her lover. She couldn’t. She would set out alone if she had to, single-handedly challenging the entire nest, and they would kill her. I doubted Pallas would stop her. Lena wasn’t a Porter, after all.
I sucked a long, slow breath through my teeth. If I stayed here, both Lena Greenwood and Nidhi Shah would die. I couldn’t change Pallas’ mind. She was far too rule-bound for that.
“Then I quit,” I whispered numbly.
Lena straightened.
Pallas turned to stare at me, her forehead crinkled in confusion. “Excuse me?”
“I resign from the Porters. You want it in writing? Give me a pen.” I would have said more, but I was having trouble finding words.
“What are you doing, Isaac?” Lena whispered.
I felt like I was struggling to swallow a rock. I kept my focus on Pallas. If I looked at Lena, I’d lose it. “You’re the Regional Master of the Porters. So be it. If I’m no longer a Porter, then you have no right to hold me here.”
“There are laws governing the use of magic—” Pallas began.
“And if I break them after I leave, you’re welcome to haul my ass back here,” I snapped. “Until then, I’d appreciate it if you and your dogs got the hell out of my way.”
My car was parked on the edge of the dirt driveway. My jacket and books were in the back, save those Pallas had shipped to Philadelphia. It wasn’t until I settled the familiar weight onto my shoulders that I realiz
ed how vulnerable and naked I had felt without it.
Smudge started running laps on the dashboard the instant I let him out of the cage. “Sorry, partner. I’m not too happy about being locked up for four days, either.”
Lena retrieved her bokken from the trunk and climbed into the passenger’s seat. “Do you have an actual plan?”
“Find the libriomancer. Save Nidhi. I’m working on the details.” I was also trying very hard not to think about what would come next. About what I had just thrown away. I jammed the key into the ignition and started the engine. “Tell me what happened after I passed out.”
“I tried to wake you. So did Smudge.” She reached out to touch the burnt hole on my shirt. “When that didn’t work, I called Nicola. She said to bring you here. You heard the rest.”
“That’s it?” I shook my head, not buying it. “You’ve just been waiting for four days while Nidhi—”
“I thought you were dying, Isaac. You were cold, sweaty, and shivering, muttering to yourself in a language I couldn’t understand.”
“What would you have done if I didn’t wake up?”
She looked away. “I couldn’t leave you, but if you didn’t recover soon and the Porters didn’t find the other libriomancer . . .”
“You meant to take me back to Detroit. To trade me for Nidhi Shah.”
She raised her chin. “That’s right.”
It was the logical choice. Trade the comatose libriomancer who might never awaken for the lover who was very much alive. Logic did nothing to alleviate this new emotional sucker punch to my gut. “How exactly did Pallas react when you told her how I had found the other libriomancer, and the thing that came through the book after us?”
“I have a harder time reading autistics, but—”
“What?”
She blinked. “You didn’t know?”
“I don’t have access to her files.”
“Neither do I,” Lena said sharply. “But I’ve learned a thing or two living with Nidhi. I’ve been here for four days, long enough to get a sense of Nicola Pallas. She doesn’t express her emotions the same way you or I do. I think she’s frightened, though. When I first described what happened, she walked away from me in mid-sentence and started making phone calls. When she finished, she was playing with her bracelets and moving about like she wanted to run but didn’t know where.”
“She knows something,” I muttered. “Why wouldn’t she tell me?”
“Maybe because she knows how close you came to dying,” Lena said sharply.
I had no answer to that.
I stopped at the end of the driveway, which emerged onto a dirt road bordered by maple trees on either side. “One more question. Which way do I go to get back to Michigan?”
Chapter 15
IF I HAD TO CHOOSE the single most important moment of my life, the turning point that determined who and what I would become, it would be the day Ray Walker invited me to join the Porters. He had changed everything. Even as a cataloger, I had been a part of something magical. And now I had thrown that away.
I relived my conversation with Pallas again and again as I drove. I knew she was doing what she felt was right. She was playing by the rules, pulling me off the investigation until they could be certain I hadn’t been contaminated by whatever it was I had seen in Detroit. Or maybe, as Lena suggested, she was genuinely trying to protect me.
I stopped at a gas station to ask for directions to the nearest library, which turned out to be a small white building squeezed between the post office and the police department. I pulled into the parking lot and spent the next five minutes trying to bribe Smudge back into his cage. He was not happy about going back there, but leaving him loose in the car wasn’t a good idea, and I didn’t want to try to explain his presence to the local librarian.
“The Porters have spent four days looking for Jakob Hoffman,” Lena said as she followed me inside.
“I’m sure they’re doing the best they can.” I sat down in front of a public computer terminal and opened up the library’s catalog in one screen and an Internet browser in another. “But I know the other libriomancers in this area. One’s a mechanic. Another works for a museum. None of them are librarians.”
I flexed my fingers, doing everything I could to ignore the hollowness in my chest. “I need you to do me a favor.”
Lena settled into the chair beside me. “What is it?”
“Time me.” I attacked the keyboard, clicking between windows. An Internet search pulled up more than a thousand results for “Jakob Hoffman,” including a character from a 2010 movie and a rather embarrassing YouTube video. I clicked through page after page of results, but found nothing.
The library database was no better. Not that I had expected it to be quite that easy. The Porters had already looked for Hoffman and come up short.
I cleared the screen. I couldn’t count the number of times I had helped patrons track down ancestors on genealogy sites or locate long-lost classmates, and I had found books with far less information than a character’s name. I was a pretty good libriomancer, but I was a damn good librarian.
I pulled up online book distributor sites next. No luck. If Hoffman was a character, he wasn’t important enough to be included in the book’s summary. The bookstore databases didn’t give me any results either.
I sat back, steepling my fingers and glaring at the computer as if I could will it into giving me the information I wanted.
“Ten minutes.” Lena said, smiling oddly.
“What?”
“Did you know you bite your tongue when you’re concentrating?”
I very deliberately closed my mouth and tried the fanfiction sites next. Fanfic writers often wrote about secondary characters, but once again I came up empty.
“All right, let’s cheat.” I removed my necklace and placed the stone in the middle of the keyboard. The screen flickered, and then a new window appeared, giving me access to the Porters’ database. Not only could I search through our catalog, but the site gave me a back door into various other organizations’ data. I could check law enforcement to see if “Jakob Hoffman” had ever been used as an alias, or— “Shit!”
Black smoke poured out of the front of the computer. The screen popped and fizzed, the image shrinking to a single line of white light. The hard drive made a sound like someone had jammed a screwdriver into the spokes of a bicycle wheel.
The man behind the front desk hurried toward us. “What happened?”
The Porters had locked me out of the database. I picked up my necklace and stared at the orange stone which had been created specifically for me, giving me access to centuries of knowledge and records.
“Sir?” The man, whose ID card read “Ro,” leaned past me to try the keyboard.
“I don’t know what happened,” I said numbly. “It just died.”
“Did you spill anything?” He dropped below the desk and yanked the power cord, but foul-smelling black smoke continued to rise from the box. He leaned back and raised his voice. “Stacy, would you call J. J. and tell him to get up here?”
Pallas would have known I’d head straight to the library. She had probably killed my access before I even left the driveway . . . just as the rules required.
I blinked, ashamed to realize how close I was to tears. I stood and backed away, leaving the staff to worry about the now-useless computer. Useless unless you needed a boat anchor, maybe.
Lena touched my arm. “Porters?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I jammed the necklace into my pants pocket and moved to another machine. With each breath, I pushed the grief back down until I could focus on the screen.
“Time?” I asked, my voice tight.
Lena glanced at the clock on the wall. “Fourteen minutes.”
The U.S. copyright database was no help. Nor were various social media sites. I checked phone directories as well, but my gut told me Jakob Hoffman wasn’t a real person. I had felt the different voices in that li
briomancer’s head, lost and incomplete, struggling to survive in a world utterly different from the ones they were used to.
If Hoffman was a character, he had to be important enough for readers to identify with him, to believe in him. But he didn’t come up in any of the bookstore or publisher listings . . .
What if the author hadn’t used a regular publisher? I opened up a new window and began searching for blogs and review sites that specialized in self-published titles. “Bingo.”
“Twenty-four and a half minutes,” said Lena, leaning over my shoulder.
I was getting rusty. “Jakob Hoffman is the hero of a self-published World War II fantasy called V-Day. He’s an American soldier in Germany who discovers that Hitler is raising an army of vampires.” I jabbed a finger at the screen. “Hitler enslaves the vampires using a mystical silver cross.”
“Who wrote it?”
“The review doesn’t say. There’s no link, no ISBN or other information.” I couldn’t find a single copy available for sale online, new or used. The title wasn’t registered with the copyright office, the Library of Congress, or anywhere else. “This isn’t right. It’s like the author went out of their way to make it hard to track down a copy of the book.”
“Like they’re trying to hide it?”
Few self-published titles sold well enough to create the communal belief necessary for magic. This one obviously had, and had done so while bypassing traditional sales and distribution channels. That couldn’t be a coincidence. I sent a copy of the review to the library printer. “He wrote this book himself.”
“The other libriomancer?”
“To create a weapon.” I pulled up the library catalog again. “It breaks one of Gutenberg’s cardinal rules.”
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it had been common for libriomancers to double as writers, trying to create weapons and artifacts they could use. That experience had taught the Porters two important lessons. First, writing was harder than it looked. Second, and more importantly, the dangers of possession increased exponentially with books written by libriomancers. Something about our own magic infused the text, weakening the barriers between story and reality, and endangering any reader with the slightest bit of magical ability.