by Jim C. Hines
Lena turned to Nicholas. “Ask Victor if there’s another way to stop his creations. A self-destruct phrase, a backup queen, anything.”
Nicholas chuckled as he relayed Lena’s question. “Destroy the queen, and her death might spread through her children.”
Which would be perfect, if we had the queen. “Is there a way to duplicate her song?”
“Not by you. Victor took great care to make sure his creations could not be ‘hacked.’” Nicholas frowned at that last word, making me wonder how long he had been locked away from the world. “He believed that if anything were to happen to his queen, he would simply make another.”
“Can he tell us how?” I asked.
A sudden flare of heat seared my thigh. Banners of flame rippled from Smudge’s back as he darted to and fro in his cage. Lena caught my eyes and gestured to the door. I checked the hallway while Lena moved toward the bedroom window.
The window cracked as if struck by a stone, and Lena jumped back.
“Ah,” said Nicholas. “The ghosts have found us at last, and they’ve brought Victor’s children home.”
I yanked out my shock-gun. “What ghosts?”
Two metal wasps were attacking the window, while another trio clung to the screen. I crossed the room, held the barrel of my gun six inches from the glass, and pulled the trigger.
I liked to tell myself I had chosen the shock-gun to practice with because it was a practical, multi-purpose weapon. At its highest setting, it could take down a zombified elephant, and at its lowest it would knock a human unconscious with no long-term damage. Nor would it draw undue attention, being designed to mimic an ordinary twenty-first-century handgun.
Those were all good and valid reasons, but the truth was, I picked this one because I got to shoot evil with lightning bolts.
The discharge etched a jagged line across my vision, and the smell of ozone filled the room. The sound was nowhere near as loud as natural thunder, but it was enough to make my ears ring. The blast shattered the window, leaving blobs of melted glass around the edges of the frame. A single insect glowed orange in the molten glass. I peered outside and spotted two men on the patio below. No, not men.
I jerked back as more wasps flew toward us. I fired again, but this time what emerged was little more than a spark of static electricity. “Oh, come on,” I shouted. This gun was supposed to have enough ammo for more than a hundred shots.
The insects buzzed through the window and converged on Nicholas. He ripped two away even as more began to burrow into his chest. He crushed one between his fingers and tried to dig out the next, but he wasn’t fast enough.
He spasmed as if he was the one who had been hit by lightning. His eyes bulged, and then his features eased into a smile. “Exquisite,” he whispered. He took a single step and exploded into dust.
One of the wasps flew up from the ground, trailing dust like tiny contrails. Deb’s hand shot out, trapping the insect between thumb and forefinger. She had it halfway to her mouth before she stopped and seemed to realize what she was doing. She caught me staring and shrugged. “Instincts.”
“Yeah.”
She made a face, popped the bug into her mouth, and chomped. Blood dribbled from her lip, but she kept chewing, and soon spat out bits of broken metal.
Lena stomped the other two, grinding them into the carpet with a vicious twist of her heel. Behind her, Nidhi was carefully lifting the girl in her arms.
The vamp with the glasses, Rook, scaled the wall like a spider, rifle in one hand as he peeked out the upper corner of the window. “I’m heading for the roof to get a better look—”
He squawked in surprise as he lost his grip and fell, landing hard on a LEGO castle and a green pony.
At the same time, the girl Nidhi was holding squirmed and mumbled, “Don’t wanna get up.”
“Focus, Sarah,” Deb snapped. “Keep them under.”
The vampire stared at the girl. “I’m trying,” she said. “It’s not working.”
Lena grabbed Nidhi, dragged her and the girl into the hall, and shoved them in the closet. “Stay there,” Lena said, shutting the door.
I heard the girl screaming, “No! Stranger! Let go of me!” as Nidhi tried to calm her.
Rook remained behind to watch the window while the rest of us made our way downstairs. Deb and Sarah simply vaulted over the railing, landing silently on the carpet below. “We’ve got more out front,” Sarah called.
In the family room, the three-legged Lab had woken up and started barking. From the kitchen, a woman—presumably the mother—called, “Estrella?”
The baby was crying, too, and I saw the father stirring. I reduced the setting on my shock-gun. Maybe it just needed time to recharge? I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it on the family. Or their dog.
The father jumped to his feet, then froze. He raised his hands and stepped back, round eyes locked on my gun. “Estrella!”
“Daddy!”
“Estrella is safe.” I kept the shock-gun pointed at the floor as I hurried down the steps.
“Who are you people?” he demanded in Spanish. “What did you do to my daughter?” The three-legged black Lab was doing his best to add to the chaos, barking and jumping and trying to bite Smudge, which put him in the same intellectual league as Nidhi’s cat.
Jeff stepped past me and snarled. The Lab immediately backed away, tail tucked so far between his legs that when he started peeing on the floor, he managed to soak his tail in the process.
“Was that really necessary?” I asked. To the father, I said, “Está a salvo. She’s safe.”
He paled. “Please don’t hurt them.”
Something slammed through the front door hard enough to send splinters of wood flying into the house. Sarah and Lena caught whatever it was by the arms and hurled it right back out, but a second attacker raced through on all fours and knocked Sarah to the ground. A group of metal insects flew at Lena’s face, driving her back.
“Con permiso, Señor Sanchez.” I shoved the father toward the stairs, ducked behind the couch, and swore. Every once in a while, I really hated being right.
The man standing over Sarah was naked from the waist up. A fine layer of white fur covered his skin, and an Ace bandage was wrapped around his upper arm. His lips were blue, and his fingers were blackened from frostbite. Sarah had jabbed one of her stakes into his thighs, but it wasn’t slowing him down.
This time when I pulled the trigger, the shock-gun did exactly what it was supposed to. Electricity cracked through the air, enough to put an ordinary human out for a good twenty-four hours. The partially-transformed wendigo roared in pain, then jumped away before I could fire again. I had blackened the fur on his chest and pissed him off, but that was all.
From the staircase, Mister Sanchez whispered, “Who are you people?”
Before I could come up with an even halfway convincing lie, Deb emerged from the kitchen cradling the baby in one arm and dragging the woman by the wrist. “Isaac, would you mind?”
The mother had a paring knife, and was stabbing it into Deb’s back. I caught her arm, holding her long enough for Deb to grab the knife and snap the blade with one hand. After that demonstration, they allowed Deb to lead them upstairs.
“What’s happening?” the woman demanded, her voice weak. “My daughter—”
“Nidhi, move them all into the bathroom and lock the damn door,” Deb shouted. When she returned, she was clutching her shoulder. Her blood flowed more slowly than it would have in a human, but those cuts had to hurt. “Sarah, whoever’s out there, put them down now!”
“You think I haven’t been trying?” Sarah shot back.
My phone buzzed, startling me and setting Smudge off like a tiny hydrogen bomb. The screen said “Unknown Caller.”
The insects fell back to the doorway. Sarah and Lena kept an eye on the door while Deb, Jeff, and I watched the front window. Keeping my gun ready, I brought the phone to my ear. Harrison had hacked my computer and the Porter network
. Why wouldn’t he have my cell phone number, too? “Hello, August.”
“You want to tell me what the hell you’re doing in my son’s house?”
Through the window, I could see a muscular, blocky-looking man with a cell phone to his ear, standing in front of a silver SUV. He was clean-shaven with close-cut graying hair. His silhouette matched Victor’s, from the squat build to the flat ears.
He wore an unbuttoned black plaid shirt over what looked like old-fashioned Japanese scale armor, except that the metal scales were alive and moving. Loose khaki pants and brown leather shoes completed the look. If not for the insects, he could have been someone’s crotchety old grandfather.
I couldn’t make out the queen amidst the rest of the insects clinging to his body, but she had to be there. I lowered my gun and turned the chamber to setting five. One shot should be enough to take him down. The man was essentially a walking conductor.
“How did you know we were here?” I asked. If my guess was right, neither I nor the vampires were going to like his answer.
“Your friend Moon,” he said, confirming my gut feeling. “He overheard you talking, and we persuaded him to share. If we’d gotten to your house a little faster, we would have caught you before you left and saved everyone time.”
I studied his companions, trying to figure out how they had overpowered a sparkler. Sanguinarius Meyerii weren’t invulnerable, but they were awfully close.
Three more wendigos stood around Harrison. Their features were too distorted to guess what they had originally looked like. Flattened noses sat atop protruding jaws. Their lips were chapped and bloody, stretched between human and animal. They blinked too much, a side effect I remembered from my research. In rats, the fluids of the eyes had never fully adapted to the change.
Behind them stood a man and a woman who appeared fully human. Each one held an oversized book in their hands. Both were Asian, and looked to be roughly my age, or perhaps a little younger. The woman had a single lock of green-dyed hair framing the left side of her face. The man wore an awful sweater with a piano keyboard design, which was utterly insane for this time of year, but made sense if you had been stuck in a car with a wendigo for ten hours.
“Who are your friends, August?” I didn’t recognize either one, but that meant little. I was familiar with most of the Porters from the Midwest, but Harrison could have recruited help from overseas. But if they were truly libriomancers, why bring only a single book into battle?
“Why don’t you and Lena come out and I’ll introduce you? This doesn’t have to get bloody. The rest of you are welcome to leave.”
“What’s he waiting for?” Deb’s voice was strained. She sat on the bottom step; her head drooped over her knees. The knife must have done more damage than I thought. I was strangely relieved. The fact that Deb hadn’t broken the woman’s neck, despite pain and provocation, meant my friend hadn’t been completely lost to the monster.
“I’m not sure.” I watched Harrison, trying to read his face. Speaking into the phone again, I said, “A minute ago, you used one of your son’s bionic fruit flies to kill one of our companions. Now we’re supposed to just trust you?”
“He was dead long before I got here, and you know it.” Harrison stepped into the middle of the street. “I know all about you, Isaac. I know you’ve got a vampire upstairs watching us, and two more with you and Lena. I know you’ve stuffed the family into the hall closet. And I know that right now you’re trying to figure out some clever plan to stop me.” His voice dropped. “You’re not as smart as you think. Now, you and Lena are going to come with us, unarmed, or my metal friends will kill every family on this street.”
“That’s a bit dark, even for you. Rationalizing the killing of wendigos is bad enough, but these are human beings. You’re an asshole. You’re not a murderer.” I covered the phone. “Lena, get Nidhi down here.”
“There’s an elderly couple two houses down,” Harrison said. “They were playing cards together when your pet vampire knocked them out. How many people will you make me kill before you take this seriously? Do you think the sensation of steel pincers digging through skin and bone will wake them from their trance?”
Interesting. The Sanchez family was awake, but if Harrison was telling the truth, Sarah’s power over the rest of the street hadn’t broken. Assuming it was Harrison’s ersatz libriomancers who had broken Sarah’s hold, that suggested a limit to their range. Or it might mean they had selective control over the magic they countered, and like us, they preferred not to be interrupted.
Lena returned, keeping Nidhi behind her. Assuming Lena had filled her in, I got straight to the point. “Will he do it?”
“I don’t know,” said Nidhi. “I knew the man only through his son.”
“Why does he want the two of us?” Lena asked.
She spread her hands in a silent shrug.
Harrison’s voice buzzed through the phone. “Go ahead and shoot, Isaac.”
“What?” He must have spotted the gun through one of his insects. I switched the phone to speaker so everyone could hear.
“I assume that’s what you’re discussing?” said Harrison. “Whether or not you can take me down before I command my insects to attack? Be my guest. This might be the fastest way for you to learn what you’re facing.”
Nobody bothered pointing out that it was a trick. Some things were too obvious for words. On the other hand, he had seen me holding what looked like an ordinary revolver. Maybe he assumed his metal insects would be strong enough to stop a bullet.
I stood up and walked slowly toward the door, trying to project confidence. Harrison didn’t move. I raised the shock-gun with both hands. He smiled and spread his arms.
With a shrug, I pulled the trigger.
One downside to shooting lightning bolts was that everything happened far too quickly to see. I wasn’t terribly surprised to see Harrison still standing. He wasn’t smiling, though. It looked like he had jumped back a good three feet, which gave me some satisfaction.
I blinked, trying to see the afterimage to reconstruct why the shock-gun had failed. It looked like the bolt had stopped a short distance in front of Harrison. I frowned and tried again.
“Look at the ones with the books,” Nidhi said.
I took a third shot, this time keeping my attention on the woman with the green hair. Before, she and her friend had just been standing there, but now they were chanting. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but their eyes were closed.
If they were libriomancers, they could—in theory—open up the magic of their own books, then use them to absorb my attack. Any shots striking their books would be dissolved back into magic. But they would have had to move in front of Harrison to intercept my incoming fire, and they would have needed to make sure they held their books in exactly the right spot.
“Are you satisfied, Isaac?” Harrison asked. “I’ve been more than patient.”
Deb crawled across the family room floor until she reached the pile of clothes Jeff had discarded when he changed. “Harrison’s friends can mess with people’s magic. How nice.” She dug out Jeff’s pistol and pulled herself up onto the couch.
The crack of gunfire was even louder than my shock-gun, and the metallic scent of gunpowder joined the ozone smell. August Harrison scampered around behind the SUV, but Deb hadn’t been aiming for him. She fired again, and this time Rook joined in from upstairs, sending the libriomancers fleeing for cover.
“What the hell, Deb?” Three wendigos charged toward the house. Rook dropped one, and I sent a lightning bolt into the next. It crackled over the frost and fur, then arced to his friend.
Wasps flew through the hole in the door to swarm over Deb, concentrating on her hands. She shrieked and flung the pistol away, then did her best to crush the bugs drilling into her skin. From the commotion upstairs, they were going after Rook as well.
“Congratulations, Isaac,” Harrison shouted. I could barely hear him over the ringing in my ears. “
You’ve just killed two innocent people.”
I shouted into the phone. “Wait! You win! We’re coming out. Everybody stop shooting!” I glanced at Lena, who nodded.
“Get your bugs off of the vampires,” I said.
The wasps stilled, then retreated to the door. “Leave your books and other weapons,” he said. “That goes for the dryad, too.”
I slid my arms from my sleeves and set the jacket carefully on the floor. Smudge’s cage followed, and then the shock-gun.
Lena tossed her bokken onto the floor beside my things. She took my hand in hers and pulled my head down as if to give me a quick kiss. “What now?”
I glanced down at my phone and began to tap out a text message. “Now we take this bastard down.”
8
I slept for five days before they found me. At first, I thought the pressure on my roots was a dream, but the pain of the metal ax biting into my roots shocked me awake. I curled my injured root close and flexed the rest, toppling my attacker onto the ground. As my awareness moved closer to the surface, I began to make out their words.
“Ha! Pay up.” A man’s voice.
“Okay, you were right,” said a second man. “The tree’s magic.”
“What do you think, Mike?” asked the first. “Wizard of Oz?”
“Nah. The fighting trees were more willowy. The branches bent down like vines to wrap around the scarecrow, remember. This is oak. Narnia, maybe?”
“I don’t recall C. S. Lewis’ trees killing random farmers and burying their bodies.”
They thought I had murdered Frank. I started to withdraw again, retreating deeper into the heart of the wood. It didn’t matter what they believed. Frank was gone. Let them cut down my tree.
“If you ask me, we should be looking into the ex,” said Mike. “Maybe she never got over losing Frank. ‘If I can’t have him, no one can,’ and all that. She sounded crazy enough to do it.”
“I’m more interested in that girl, Lena. The one Frank was shacking up with. Marion said Lena tried to kill her once. Wouldn’t surprise me if she killed him, too. If she was a witch, it would explain the magic we picked up.”