We passed two other bodies before reaching the elevator. The doors had crumpled open. Normally, the Porter archive in the hidden subbasement could only be accessed by entering a nine-digit code with the elevator buttons. But the assault on the library had pinned the elevator car overhead and ripped open the bottom of the shaft, exposing the archive.
The Porters kept six archives in the US, hidden rooms protected by security both magic and mundane, where locked books could be stored along with hard copies of our files and records. At last count, this archive should have held more than a thousand books, including the forty-one titles I had flagged over the past two years.
Smudge crawled upside down to the side of the shaft, then climbed down one of the thick steel cables on the wall. My legs were sweating, and I could feel Smudge shivering as we descended, as if he was fighting his own instincts. Something else was down here.
I had hoped the archive might have survived intact, given the additional protections the Porters had set up, but our first steps through the crushed elevator doors squelched that hope. If anything, this area had been hit worse. Four stories of debris had smashed through the ceiling like it was made of tissue paper. It took several minutes just to find a path out of the elevator shaft.
“Aren’t you worried about someone discovering this place when they clear out the wreckage?” Lena whispered.
“The Porters will insert someone into the reconstruction efforts to bulldoze over the basement and adjust the memories of anyone who might raise questions.” Once Smudge reached stable ground, we stopped so Lena and I could dismount, a process that involved a great deal of messy struggle. Each strand had to be peeled away like double-sided duct tape. After freeing ourselves from Smudge, we spent several more minutes ripping the rest of the spider stuff off of each other.
Smudge had an easier time of it. The instant we stepped away, his bristles began to glow red. The webbing on his body soon vanished in a puff of smoke.
Lena handed me the flashlight and readied her bokken, one in each hand. We had gone only a few steps when waves of flame whooshed to life on Smudge’s back. I searched the darkness, but the tiny flashlight beam found nothing more dangerous than a lone rat. Lena raised her weapons, and the rat scurried away.
“If any part of this place survived, it would be the vault where the books are kept. Toward the center.” I pulled out another book, retrieving a nasty-looking microwave pistol. According to the author, it should vaporize flesh without harming anything else… like books or the still-shifting debris.
Whispers from the book tickled the boundaries of my mind. Too much magic plus too little sleep was an equation for eventual madness, but I had time yet. I silenced the voices the best I could and concentrated on following Lena, who was climbing over a broken ceiling tile.
Down here, insulated from the chaos aboveground, every noise was magnified. My nerves were humming, and each creak and groan made me jump.
My flashlight was supposed to illuminate darkness up to seventy meters away, but shrinking had diminished the beam, so I could barely discern shapes two meters out. Nor was there enough space for us to return to our normal size.
The vault had withstood the damage better than the rest of the library. A single line of three-foot-high bookshelves ran down the center of the room. These shelves were built of reinforced steel, the fronts covered with magically strengthened safety glass: inch-thick windows which were supposed to be unbreakable.
The glass was shattered, and the shelves bowed under the weight of the fallen beams and rafters. We moved into the triangular tunnel formed by the debris leaning up against the shelves. I shone my light through the ragged line of glass teeth. Many books remained, but the bottom row was conspicuously empty. “That’s not good.”
Had the vampire managed to steal some of our books before the library collapsed? To what end? Nobody, with the possible exception of Gutenberg himself, could unlock a book. That thought seeped down into my gut, churning like a stone.
“To your left,” Lena whispered.
I spun, playing my beam over the shelves until I spied our friend the rat, his glowing eyes watching us. A second pair of eyes joined the first, then another. Smudge’s flames flared higher, illuminating our surroundings in red.
I almost wished he hadn’t. Four more rats watched us from atop the shelves. Others peeked through the rubble. Two crawled out of a shelf farther down, dragging a copy of Prey by Michael Crichton.
Smudge scurried toward them, and they dropped the book, retreating from the flaming spider. But as he moved away, more rats closed in on Lena and me. Rows of shining eyes appeared up above as well. There could be close to two hundred… roughly enough to add up to one good-sized vampire.
“I hate shapeshifters,” I said, raising my gun. “What we need is the Pied Piper’s flute. We could march these things out of here and hold them entranced for as long as we needed.”
“So get it,” Lena said tersely, pressing her back to mine.
“Two problems. I didn’t bring the right book, and I don’t know how to play the flute.”
The rats crawled toward us. I squeezed the trigger, and a white beam speared the nearest one, sizzling it into nothingness. “Really?” I said, my fear momentarily forgotten. “A visible beam for a microwave weapon? That doesn’t even make sense.”
Another rat scampered toward Lena. I heard the thud of wood on bone, and the rat squealed in pain. “Maybe you could critique the bad science fiction toy later?”
Three more darted in from different sides. I blasted the front leg off of one rat, while Lena clobbered another with both of her wooden swords. The third nearly caught us, but Lena spun, catching it in the jaw with the butt of one bokken, then swinging them both together. She struck hard enough to knock the stunned rat toward Smudge. Smudge pounced, setting the rat alight.
“You’re in a library, remember?” The last thing we needed was a panicked animal running about on fire, igniting everything it touched. I waited for Smudge to back away, then vaporized the rat. The stench of burnt fur lingered in the air. “I wish I knew what species this thing was.”
“You want to ask it for its pedigree?” Lena wasn’t even breathing hard.
“Some species obey the law of conservation of mass, meaning the more rats we kill, the more we hurt it. Others simply regenerate when they shift between forms.” The rats had backed away, but I could see their eyes glinting in the light. I raised my voice. “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. If you rush us, we won’t be able to stop you all. Fortunately, this little gun comes with a self-destruct. I flip the switch, and the battery goes critical, vaporizing us all.”
The rats didn’t move.
“You killed Ray to learn about the archive, but you couldn’t bypass the protections on this place.” A vampire couldn’t, but an automaton could. It had smashed the entire library, shattering the spells shielding those books and allowing the vampire to sneak in as mist or rats or whatever. Only one person could have commanded an automaton to do that. “What have you done with Gutenberg?”
Tiny claws scraped wood, glass, and cement as the rats turned in unison and fled into the darkness. I swore and chased after them, following the clicking of their nails and firing at every rat I spotted. I took out four more before we reached the end of the vault.
Rats poured through the rubble, disappearing into a gap in the wall. I continued to shoot, trying to clog the hole with their bodies, but it wasn’t enough.
Lena tossed dead rats aside, exposing a neatly drilled tunnel roughly six inches in diameter. “Where would this lead?”
We were at the edge of the library. I frowned, trying to orient myself and visualize the other buildings on campus. “I’m not sure.”
Lena moved cautiously into the hole. I followed her through the sloping tunnel, which emerged at the base of a rectangular corridor. Light from grates overhead revealed steel pipes running along the wall. I flipped off my flashlight and grabbed my copy of Alice. A quick drink from chapter four, and both Lena and I were expanding to our normal size. I pressed a hand to the wall, trying to stifle the mad banter of the Queen of Hearts. I definitely needed to stop using this book for a while.