All total, I was packing sixteen titles when I finished, including a hardcover in the front that should provide a little extra protection for the heart.
“What about Deb?” Lena asked softly. “Shouldn’t you let the Porters know?”
“She’s not completely turned,” I protested weakly. Deb had tried to recruit me. Why would she bother unless something of our friendship remained? But when that failed, she had also tried to shoot holes in me.
“How do you know?”
“Someone can do magic or they can be magic, but not both. As Deb’s transformation continues, she’ll lose the ability to perform libriomancy.” She had to know the cost of her transformation. No libriomancer would willingly sacrifice their magic.
“We could go after her. If there’s any way to save her…”
I shook my head. Deb wasn’t like a drug addict who could check into rehab and get her life back. This kind of magical transformation was irreversible. I didn’t want to turn her in, but I had no choice. Given her access to the Porters, the damage she could do was too great.
I turned away and picked up the phone. Pallas wasn’t answering, so I left a brief voice mail letting her know our friend Deb had been “poached by a competing firm.”
“What will they do to her?” asked Lena.
“Knowing Pallas, she’ll assign someone to hunt and destroy her. Destroy the thing she’s become, I mean.” My words sounded distant. Mechanical. Deb was already lost. Knowing that didn’t ease the guilt for signing her death warrant.
“They’ll kill her for what someone else did to her?”
“Whatever bug-eater wormed their way into Deb’s mind killed her.”
“Isaac, she’s a victim.”
“I know that.” Just like Nidhi Shah. If Shah was alive, would the Porters have to destroy her as well? I slammed the phone back into its cradle. “I’m sorry, Lena.”
She peered out the broken door without answering.
“Of course, until Pallas says otherwise, Deb’s still an agent of Die Zwelf Porten?re. As such, I’m obliged to follow her orders.”
Lena raised her eyebrows at my logic, but didn’t argue. I retrieved Smudge, who climbed up my sleeve to take his familiar place on my right shoulder.
Despite being out of the field for two years, I still kept a go bag packed with clothes, money, a small folded cage for Smudge, a handful of books, and a few other essentials. I stopped long enough to duct tape a bed sheet over the broken glass door to keep the mosquitoes out, then headed outside with Lena.
The Dalmatian a few houses down was barking madly from the fenced-in yard. I glanced up and down the street, but the houses out here were built with plenty of space and trees between them. Aside from the dog, nobody appeared to have noticed our little battle.
Deb’s car sat abandoned in the driveway. The doors were locked, but when I returned to the living room, I found the keys in her jacket pocket.
The instant I opened the car door, the stench of stale, rotting food poured out, making me gag. Fast food wrappers, pizza boxes, and crumpled cups filled the back seats, along with half-eaten crusts and spilled fries. Flies buzzed angrily at the intrusion.
“She was using the mess to attract insects,” I said, feeling ill. “The more she ate, the stronger she became.”
Smudge had perked up at the sound of the flies. He crept down to my wrist, crouched, and pounced. His forelegs snapped out to catch a black fly from midair. He landed on the side of the car, cooking the hapless fly in his legs and stuffing it into his mouth.
I opened the door and searched the front. A printout from the Lansing State Journal Web site described the destruction of the MSU library. Deb had told the truth about that much. If anything, she had understated the damage. A color photo showed yellow police tape around a low hill of rubble. The nearby buildings appeared untouched.
I found several books tossed carelessly onto the passenger seat. A pair of bloody brown feathers were stuck to the floor mat. Apparently Deb was starting to move up from insects to birds. I picked up a well-worn field guide to Michigan insects and fanned the pages.
Lena looked over my shoulder, her body brushing mine. “She was using libriomancy to create her own snacks?”
“Magically created insects wouldn’t give her the same strength or power, but they might have helped her control the hunger.” I studied the pages, noting the faint signs of char, like rot or mold eating the paper from the binding outward. “She’s been overusing this book, probably trying to stave off the change and hold on to her magic as long as she could.”
“And that’s bad?”
“Ray once told me magic was like electricity. Pump too many amps through a cord that’s not rated for it, and you risk melting it or starting a fire. Books can channel a lot of magic. So can people, for that matter. But there are limits.”
Smudge had crawled into the back seat, where he was digging into a writhing pile of maggots. He settled down and began to gobble them like popcorn.
“That is beyond gross,” I said, using a Jelly Belly to lure him out. I slammed the door shut. Lena started toward her motorcycle, but I shook my head. “We’re safer together.”
“We’re also an easier target.”
“Whoever targets my car deserves what they get.” I keyed in the code to the garage door opener. The door lurched upward, squealing in protest, to reveal the gleaming curves of a black 1973 Triumph convertible. Despite having sat untouched for more than two years, not a speck of dust marred the paint.
“It’s cute,” Lena said, tracing her fingers over the red pinstriping.
“It’s not cute.” I climbed into the driver’s seat. “The body’s mostly steel, so it’s tougher than a lot of modern cars. And it’s been modified for the field.”
Lena grabbed a small pack from her motorcycle’s saddlebag and squeezed it into the back, along with her two bokken. She waited while I backed out of the garage, then wheeled her bike in beside the old snow blower.
“I approve,” she said when she joined me in the car. She reached out to touch the wood-paneled interior, then poked the tiny blue TARDIS that hung from the rearview mirror. “That’s the flying phone booth from Doctor Who, right?”
“It’s a police box. It was a gift from Ray, when I came back from my first solo mission in the field.” Ray had taken me out to the local pizza place to celebrate. I was pretty sure he had been even more excited about my success than I was.
Smudge raced down my sleeve, over the steering wheel, and onto the dash. Driving fascinated him. I had never figured out exactly why, but the old iron-and-ceramic trivet secured to the middle of the dash was his favorite spot in the world. As a bonus, in cold weather, he did a great job of keeping the windshield defrosted.
Lena pointed to the lower edge of the rearview mirror, where tiny symbols were etched into the glass. “What does this say?”
“It’s Spanish. The spell gives the driver a form of night vision. You’ll see the same characters on the windshield.”
“Nice. And that gray rock tied to the steering wheel?”
“A piece of hoof from a mountain goat. For traction control. We could take this thing snowmobiling on a frozen lake if we wanted, and we’d never lose control.”
“I didn’t think libriomancers could do that kind of magic.”
“We can’t.” I sped toward Highway 41. “I kind of stole it.”
“From who?”
“Ponce de Leon.”
I could see her staring at me from the edge of my vision. “As in Ponce de Leon the conquistador?”
“He wasn’t using it anymore.” I kept my attention on the road, especially the wooded areas to either side. Tough as the car was, a deer leaping out at the wrong moment could still inflict a fair amount of damage. I had deer whistles on the bumper, but I had seen too many wrecks and too many suicidal deer to trust them. “Besides, is it really stealing if you’re stealing from an asshole?”