“We both know he’s been hiding things. Lying about the rules and limitations of libriomancy.” Not to mention the devourers.
“Would you teach a middle school science class how to mix thermite?” She raised her hands before I could answer. “I’m not suggesting you’re a child. But Gutenberg is more than six hundred years old. To him, we’re barely out of infancy.”
“If those infants already have the ingredients to make thermite, I’d damn well teach them how to make and handle it safely instead of waiting for them to accidentally burn down the school.” I stood up and searched the room for my satchel. Nidhi had tucked it beneath the foot of the cot. I yanked out the Asimov collection and opened it to “The Dead Past.” Dry petals of Moly fell from the pages. I tried to catch one, and the blackened petal broke apart like ash at my touch.
The pages looked like someone had lit a fire in the center of the book’s spine, blackening all but the outer edges. The damage had rendered the book useless for libriomancy, like a cracked lens in a laser. I would need to update our database. Magical resonance treated identical copies of a book as a single point, which was why we could touch the belief of all readers of a given title. But those same principles meant every copy of Asimov’s collection now carried the same magical charring, though only libriomancers would see it. Every copy of this book would be useless for years, even decades. Depending on the severity, the damage could even creep into other editions of the same book.
“You’re angry at Gutenberg for keeping secrets from you.” Nidhi cocked her head to the side. “Yet every time Lena or I ask you about your secret research project for the Porters, you change the subject.”
I drew a tally mark in the air, acknowledging the point. “You saw what I’ve been working on,” I said softly. “The shadow that tried to claw its way out of my spell.”
“The woman?”
“Or something like her. Jeneta called them ‘devourers.’ They’ve been trying to break through to our world. Gutenberg assigned me to figure out what they were and how to stop them.”
“That would explain the stress. How far have you gotten?”
“I’m not even close.” I carefully closed the Asimov book and tucked it back into my bag. I’d need to write up a report for Pallas. She would not be happy. “I don’t even know if what we saw through my spell is the same thing that tried to kill me in Detroit. The manifestation was similar, but not identical.”
“Helen believes a libriomancer was behind this,” Nidhi said. “She’s scared whoever it is will come after the werewolves next.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Tension lined her eyes and forehead. “There are libriomancers who enjoy power more than they should, but if anyone were capable of this kind of violence, it should have been caught and dealt with long before reaching this point. As for your devourers, we screen for symptoms of possession.”
“You can’t screen for what you don’t know about,” I countered. The Porters hadn’t yet recovered from the last libriomancer to turn against us. I didn’t know how the organization would survive a second betrayal. “How much trouble are Jeff and Helen going to give us?”
“None for now. I convinced them to let us look for the killer on our own.”
I glanced up. “How did you manage that?”
“I reminded them that the Porters are a pack. If one of us did this, it’s our responsibility to stop that person. Just as Jeff and Helen would personally hunt down any of their people who broke pack law.”
“Nice.” I ran my fingers over the rest of my books. “I’ll look up any wendigo encounters from the past decade. Maybe this is a simple revenge thing.”
Nidhi said nothing, but I had worked with her long enough to recognize the tilt of her head and the slight compression of her mouth. She didn’t buy that any more than I did.
A knock at the door made me jump so hard Smudge had to grab my ear to keep from being dislodged. I held very, very still until he released me.
Lena opened the door and peeked inside.
Nidhi jumped to her feet. “What’s wrong?”
Sweat beaded Lena’s brow, and her face was pale. The muscles in her neck were taut. She gripped the doorframe so tightly her knuckles were white. “We have to leave.”
I started toward her, but Nidhi was faster. She slipped an arm around Lena for support. Lena accepted gratefully, resting her head against Nidhi’s.
I waited in awkward silence until Lena kissed Nidhi and pulled away.
“Are you hurt?” I asked. “Did someone—”
“It’s not me.” She frowned and shook her head. “It’s not this body, I mean. It’s my tree. Something’s wrong.”
“I’ll drive,” I said. There was no way I was letting her ride a motorcycle on these roads in her condition. I might have burned through a little too much magic today, but I was in far better shape than Lena.
“I’ll be right behind you,” said Nidhi.
Lena didn’t protest. She tossed Nidhi the keys to her bike while I shouldered my bag.
“Isaac.” Nidhi directed a pointed look toward my bag. “Be careful.”
“Of course,” I said, but I was already thinking beyond the weapons in my book bag. If someone was hurting Lena’s oak, I intended to bring my entire library down on their head.
A 1973 Triumph convertible wasn’t the most practical choice of car for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Setting aside Michigan’s attitude toward foreign-made cars, the little two-seater was simply too small and unreliable for the no-holds-barred assault winter launched on the U.P. each year. Up here, the ideal winter vehicle was anything you could mount a snowplow to. When I first brought the car up, more than one person had offered wagers on how many times I’d put it into a ditch or get myself stuck at the bottom of an icy hill.
I had pocketed close to four hundred bucks from those bets. This thing was far safer than my old pickup truck. The previous owner had installed a number of magical modifications, including traction spells strong enough for me to do a slalom course at full speed across a frozen lake. Or in this case, to swerve around gravel roads at speeds somewhere between insane and suicidal.
Lena’s body was rigid, her eyes closed. She kept her hands clamped around her bokken. She gasped occasionally, tight breaths that hissed through her teeth, but otherwise made no sound.
I was fairly certain the loss of her tree wouldn’t kill her. Not immediately, at least. She had survived the death of her previous oak earlier in the year by grafting branches from that tree onto the one in my backyard, but it hadn’t been an easy transition.
Besides Nidhi and myself, only a handful of people knew the location of Lena’s tree. Of those, I couldn’t think of anyone with reason to harm her. But the timing couldn’t be a coincidence. “Did anyone else see you this afternoon?”
Lena shook her head. “Jeff and Helen would have known if we were followed.”
I turned off the headlights when we reached my street, so as not to alert anyone at the house. The porch and garage lights had come on automatically at sundown. I saw nothing unusual, but as I drove past the driveway to park on the side of the road, Smudge dropped into an alert crouch on the dashboard. Heat rippled over his body.
“Stay here.” I grabbed Smudge and my books. Smudge climbed onto the leather strap of the book bag and clung there, all eight eyes watching the house. I leaned over and opened the glove box, using its light to skim a copy of H. Allen Conrad’s Time Kings.
“Like hell.” Lena pulled herself out of the car, leaning on her bokken for support.
Thankfully, she waited for me to finish creating a fully charged and loaded shock-gun. I had been practicing with this particular gun since July, though it wasn’t always easy to find a secluded enough space for target practice. The shock-gun was a two-stage weapon. Pulling the trigger fired a tiny, electrically charged pellet at supersonic speed. A split-second later, the gun’s power source triggered an electrical discharge that followed the path of ionized air particles.