Lena had found some of the missing books from the archive. I counted a total of thirty, carelessly stuffed into a pair of plastic milk crates. Given the empty shelf I had seen, there should have been at least fifty.
Each of us picked up a crate. “If I can get onto the Porter database, I should be able to pull a list of which titles were shelved where and figure out what else he took.”
“What about the tunnel to the library?” Lena asked.
I hesitated. There were a number of spells which could have collapsed the small passageway. I flexed my hands, feeling the magic coursing through my veins, crackling for release. When I had returned my weapon to its book, voices from another galaxy had insinuated themselves into my thoughts, just as had happened with Alice in Wonderland.
“I’ve got this,” Lena said, watching me with much the same focus as Doctor Shah used to. She returned to the wall where we had emerged and dropped to her hands and knees. I did my best not to stare at the way her jeans hugged her thighs and backside as she pushed her bokken into the tunnel.
I could just make out thin roots and branches sprouting from the end of the weapon. Dust and bits of concrete began to fall as the tendrils bored into the tunnel.
Lena rose and brushed her hands together. We avoided the grates, walking instead until we came to a locked door that, once Lena worked her lock-picking magic, opened into a basement hallway. We strode past what appeared to be grad student offices. Only a few of the old wooden doors were open, and none of the students gave us a second glance as we found our way to a stairwell and left, emerging about a block east of the library.
“Wait.” I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and closed my eyes.
“What are you doing?”
“Listening.” Searching beneath the clanking of construction equipment, the grumble of distant cars, for any trace of magical energy. “The more magic I use, the more… permeable I become to that magic. It can cause problems if I push too hard.” The whispers in my head were only the first symptom. “I’m hoping I can use it. If someone else was controlling this vampire, I might be able to sense them.”
“Permeable?”
“The more you reach into books, the easier it becomes for those books to reach back into you.” The past few days had left me hypersensitive to magic. The locked books gave off a cool, heavy pull that made me think of dead stars floating in space.
I opened my eyes and turned in a slow circle. I could feel the Triumph in the parking garage, which was an accomplishment all by itself. As long as I pushed myself to the brink of madness, I’d always be able to remember where I parked. But I heard no other magical whispers, no trace of another presence.
If someone else had destroyed that vampire, they had either done so from a distance, or else they were strong enough to hide from my amateur attempt to find them.
Gutenberg could have done so with ease.
“Ted told us other vampires had been taken,” I said. “That they had been turned against their sires. We need more information. Were there any commonalities in who was taken? Did they develop the cross-shaped pupils this one had? What’s the pattern?”
“What you need is to rest,” Lena said firmly.
She was right, and tomorrow would be better for what I had in mind anyway. But my body was wound too tightly for rest. I wanted to act.
“We passed an Internet cafe on the way in,” I said. “I should at least check our taxonomy of vampires to see if there’s any mention of those eyes.” Given how many vampire books I had read, the odds were slim I had missed such a thing, but it was better to be certain.
She shifted her crate to one arm and waved her remaining bokken under my nose. “Tomorrow.”
I raised my hands in surrender, then bent to pick up my crate of books. “All right,” I agreed. “But first thing in the morning, we head to Detroit and start questioning vampires.”
Lena drove us to a small motel off the highway, giving me time to think. I kept imagining the fight in the steam tunnels. Had the hatred and fury been the vampire’s own, or had it come from whoever was controlling him? Was he killer or puppet?
The young man at the front desk gave us a skeptical once-over, taking in the dirt and dust that made us look like vampires ourselves, freshly risen from the grave. “Can I help you?”
I reached for my wallet, but Lena was faster, slapping a credit card onto the desk.
“How many beds?” he asked mechanically.
Lena grinned. “Just one.”
My neck and cheeks grew warm, even though I knew it meant nothing. Lena would find a tree to sleep in, just as she had done last night.
Our room was about what you’d expect for a roadside motel, decorated in industrial beige with generic, vaguely floral artwork hanging on the wall above the bed. The air conditioner didn’t so much purr as gasp asthmatically, spitting out a faint musty odor.
I flipped on the television for Smudge, channel-surfing until I found SpongeBob SquarePants. I couldn’t stand the show, but Smudge liked the voices. I opened his cage, and he scurried up onto the screen, where he proceeded to dart to and fro in his endless quest to catch SpongeBob’s red tie.
Lena closed the curtains and sat lazily in a chair by the desk, her bokken leaning against the wall. She kicked off her sneakers and socks, then flexed her feet, a slow, luxurious movement that reminded me of a cat stretching. “Are you planning to spend the whole night pacing?”
“Considering the fact that I’m planning to beard the vampires in their den tomorrow, I think a little nervous pacing is warranted.” But I forced myself to stop, plopping down on the corner of the bed instead. “They have to play by Porter rules in the real world, but once we enter the nest, the rules change. It’s like a reservation, with its own sovereign law. If they believe the Porters are working against them…”
“So we take precautions,” she said.
“We’ll need to stop at a bookstore. Even if they don’t kill us, convincing them to listen could be a problem.” Particularly since the one vampire who might have proved my point had immolated himself.
Lena rose easily to her feet and strode toward the bathroom. “Do you mind if I grab a quick shower?”
I shook my head, mentally cataloging possible titles to buy tomorrow.
“You’re pretty filthy yourself, you know.”
I blinked and looked up. “What?”
She leaned against the bathroom doorframe, arms folded, watching me with a mischievous smile “You really need to work off some tension. And so do I.” Her grin grew. “With or without you.”
And just like that, I was no longer thinking about vampires. “Um.”
“It’s your choice, Isaac.” She slipped into the bathroom, but left the door open a crack. I heard the rustle of cloth, and my imagination filled in the details. The faint scratching of a zipper, the sound of jeans tossed carelessly to the floor. The elastic snap of a bra strap as she undid the hooks.
I took a deep breath and lay back on the bed, trying to clear my head. The spray started up in the shower, followed by the metal scrape of the shower curtain rings.
Back in the nineties, a Porter by the name of Ken Cassidy had used a bit of magic from a Piers Anthony novel to make women fall in love with him. To fall in lust, rather. Deb DeGeorge had been called in to deal with him, slipping some of his own potion into his drink so that he fell in love with the next creature he saw.
The last I heard, Ken had abandoned magic and devoted his life to caring for his Amazon parrot, Annabelle.
If I took advantage of Lena’s nature, was I any different from Ken Cassidy? Regardless of whether or not I was the one casting the spell, Lena was forced by magic to seek out a partner and mate, no different than any of Ken’s victims had been.
So what was the alternative? Do the “noble” thing and wait for her to find someone else?
Oh, hell. Now she was singing. A Madonna tune, from the sound of it. I could see her in my imagination, her thick black hair slicked down between her shoulder blades, the light gleaming on her wet skin.