I yelped. “They came here?”
“Only one. He got a lot more cooperative after I cut off his right hand. He said the others were planning to jump Isaac at the library.”
“What did you do to the sparkler?” Deb asked.
“I sent him home.”
“You let him go?” I demanded. “How do you know he won’t come back?”
Lena smiled innocently. “Because I said if I saw him again, I’d use his hand for fertilizer, but if he went away like a good boy, I’d mail it to him later this week. Which reminds me, there’s a vampire hand in your freezer’s ice maker.” Seeing my aghast expression, she added, “Don’t worry. I double-bagged it.”
“This is not how I used to fantasize about you showing up on my doorstep,” I protested.
Lena’s brows rose.
“Relaxed inhibitions,” Deb reminded her.
“Yep.” Which I suspected I would regret later, but at the moment I couldn’t bring myself to care. “I always imagined you as the outdoors type, and the two of us rolling around in the grass together. Maybe in the rain. Definitely barefoot, though.”
“Or taking a rowboat out after hours and making love on the river?” Lena suggested. To Deb’s exasperated look, she said, “What? I work part time for Parks and Recreation. I’ve got the keys to the boat sheds.”
“That would be good, too,” I said, shifting position. “See, it’s that kind of talk that explains why men used to go wild over nymphs.”
Her lips quirked. “Not just men.”
“Ooh. Now that’s just the kind of information that would have spiced up those fantasies.”
Deb gave me a gentle smack on the arm, pulling my attention back to the immediate crisis. “I’m sorry, hon. I didn’t believe you could be involved, but I had to be certain.”
“I understand.” I’d probably be pissed later, but for now I didn’t care. “I’m curious, what were you going to do if it turned out I was working for the bad guys?” I peeked at her jacket, trying to see what books she might have hidden away.
She swatted me back. “Be grateful you’ll never know.” She tensed suddenly, her attention focused past me to a yellow cricket the size of a small paper clip that had jumped into the room from the kitchen.
I stooped to grab the cricket, but it hopped away. “They’re for Smudge. I keep them in a screen-covered bucket in the office, but occasionally one sneaks out.”
“Sure,” Deb said, her muscles tight. She tracked the cricket’s motion as it retreated beneath one of the bookshelves. “I need help, Isaac. Someone I can trust. I’m officially reassigning you back to the field.”
The words were a sucker punch to the gut, smashing through my drug-induced high to steal the breath from my lungs. Hope, fear, and excitement duked it out behind my rib cage. Under normal circumstances, only the Regional Masters could reassign someone, but with Gutenberg gone and the Porters in a state of crisis, this would fall under a field agent’s emergency powers. Barely. “What about Lena?”
“Hm?” Deb wrenched her attention back to the two of us. “I can’t do anything for her officially, but you took out four vampires between the pair of you. That’s good enough for me. If you vouch for her, I want her along, too.”
Uncomfortable as I was with fieldwork, this could put me back on the path toward magical research. With one simple sentence, Deb had rekindled a dream two years dead. Pallas would have to sign off on everything, but if we could stop these attacks on the Porters, how could she refuse?
If I could stay focused. If I kept from losing control of my magic this time.
I pulled Deb into a hug. Her surprised squawk relaxed into laughter, and she pushed me away, grinning.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, rubbing my temples. “I’m going to take something for this headache, and then we can get out of here.”
I hurried back to the office. Whatever her drug had done to me, it was definitely getting worse. The light sent needles into my brain, and every beat of my pulse was a tiny explosion in the front of my skull. I grabbed a copy of Homer’s Odyssey and flipped to book ten, where Odysseus conversed with his great-grandfather Hermes.
“There you are,” I muttered, skimming the text. The virtue of the herb that I shall give you will prevent her spells from working.
The herb was called Moly, described as “a talisman against every sort of mischief.” I had once written a paper about its nullifying effects on magic. Unfortunately, nobody had yet found a way to preserve its potency. Drying the herb merely resulted in a rather pungent and magically useless potpourri. But if I could earn a research position, I could look into alternate means of preservation, perhaps pressing and freeze-drying the plant, or saturating it in a glycerin solution…
I checked the pages to make sure they were clean of char. Excitement and pain interfered with my concentration. It took close to a minute to finally reach into the book and grasp the herb, a small black-rooted plant with a round flower, the five petals so white they appeared bleached.
As I held it in my hand, the throbbing in my skull eased, and my head began to clear. The petals wilted as the Moly’s magic fought off Deb’s drug. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, then checked the book again. The pages were clean, so I dissolved the expended Moly back into the pages, clapped the book shut and returned it to the shelf.
With my mind working once more, my eagerness grew… and that made me nervous. It was exactly that excitement and determination, the thrill of magic and the need to charge out and avenge the fallen, that had gotten me into trouble before.
“Everything okay back there?” Deb called.
“I’ll be out in a sec.” My face grew hot as I recalled the things I had said to Lena. I glanced back at the office shelves. I had a hundred-year-old copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and a sip from the River Lethe would effectively erase her memory of my oversharing. Or maybe I’d be better off drinking it myself.
I banished that thought and headed to the bedroom to retrieve Smudge, who was racing back and forth, kicking up gravel as he went. The air above his cage was noticeably warmer. “What’s wrong, partner?”
One of these days, someone would write about a magical ring that allowed the wearer to read the mind of a fire-spider. Until then, I was stuck with vague warnings. I opened the blinds and checked outside: nothing. “Deb, is there any chance you could have been followed?”
“I doubt it, but anything’s possible. Why?”
I stared at the cricket box. A cop friend downstate had once described what he called the “pucker effect,” the body’s automatic response when something just wasn’t right. He wasn’t talking about the lips; the puckering happened farther south, and every cop learned to trust that instinct.
I closed the blinds and turned around. Most of my books were in the office or the library, but I could work with what was stacked around the bedroom for late-night reading. A copy of Dune, an urban fantasy by Anton Strout… I skimmed the latter, and soon held the protagonist’s favorite weapon: a heavy metal cylinder that extended to a full-sized bat at the press of a button.
I read Dune next, hoping with each sentence that I was imagining things. Smudge could simply be running hot after the day’s excitement. I certainly was. But he had been calm and cool earlier in the night, before Deb arrived.
I kept the bat in its collapsed state and tucked it into a pocket of my robe, creating a rather embarrassing bulge. If pressed, I could always blame that on my exchange with Lena. I pulled the other side of the robe over the front and cinched the belt tight, hoping neither of my guests would notice.
Finally, just before leaving the room, I opened the small screened-in box with Smudge’s crickets and snatched a fat one from the end of a half-devoured cardboard tube.
When I returned to the library, I found Deb whispering to Lena. Deb glanced up, asking, “How’s your head?”
“Better.” I stopped a short distance away, looking through the glass door behind her and hoping to spy something, anything lurking outside that would explain Smudge’s reaction. The backyard was empty. “Are you ready to hunt some vampires?”