Kyle had accompanied us as well, but he refused to look at me, standing sullenly in one corner with his arms folded.
“If I start to…” Lena’s voice trailed off.
“I’ll do what I can.” Whatever monstrous path Granach had led Doctor Shah down, I had to keep Lena from following.
The doors opened into a cramped corridor, barely wide enough for two to walk abreast. The ceiling was so low I could touch it without straightening my arm.
“This way.” Granach led us past thick Plexiglass doors built into either side of the white-painted hallway. In one room, a young boy sat huddled in the far corner. “The doors are thick enough to withstand even our strength. Should one ever break, it would trigger an array of ultraviolet lasers strong enough to vaporize flesh. Each cell is also airtight, a necessity when some of your prisoners can dissolve into mist.”
I peered more closely at the rubber-sealed edges. A smaller, similarly-sealed metal square was built into the wall to the right of each door, like miniature air locks. “Who are these people?”
“Anyone too dangerous to roam freely through our home who, for whatever reason, we’ve chosen not to eliminate. Yet.” Granach pointed to a middle-aged woman in another cell. “She tried to feed on her own kind, hoping to absorb their powers. We’d have destroyed her on the spot, except it seems to have worked. We’re studying her blood to learn why. The boy we just passed was conspiring with a vampire hunter from the Catholic Church, hoping for redemption. He lives until we know exactly how many people he told of our existence. Naturally, this hasn’t made him terribly cooperative.”
“What about him?” I asked, pointing to a skinny black-haired vampire sleeping on a stone-carved bench.
“He hacked our servers. I lost four years’ worth of e-mail.”
We turned right, and Lena froze. Up ahead, a single figure sat in a wooden chair in front of another cell, talking to someone within. A tall, broad-shouldered man with a gun stood guard behind her. The dim lighting made it hard to discern any details, but I heard Lena’s slow, indrawn breath. She took a single step, then spun around and grabbed my shoulders.
“Whatever they did, there will be consequences,” I promised, pulling her close. “We’ll find a way.”
“I know.” Her hand slid up my neck, into my hair. She kissed me once, inhaled deeply, then turned to face Nidhi Shah.
Shah rose from the chair and stepped toward us. Even from here I could see her confusion and disbelief. She halted in midstep when the guard behind her readied his gun.
“It’s all right,” said Granach. “Isaac is a Porter. He and his friend Lena have come to lend us their expertise.”
“Lena? How…?” Shah looked exhausted. Behind the rectangular lenses of her glasses, her eyes were shadowed. Her lower lip was swollen and bruised. Her clothes were filthy. The embroidered collar of her blue shirt was low enough to see her neck. The exposed skin was undamaged, and her shirt was free of bloodstains. “What are you doing here, love?”
Lena whirled toward Granach, her eyes wide with disbelief.
“Yes, she’s human,” Granach said, sounding amused. “Once she understood the threat we faced, she cooperated willingly. It’s for the best, as this leaves her mind intact.”
Shah gave us a tentative smile, revealing the slight gap between her front teeth that I remembered from our sessions. Her hair hung about her face in dirty wisps, and I could just make out the faint blue tattoo on her left temple, a series of Gujarati characters that meant balance.
Lena pulled away from me. I glanced at Smudge, who continued to glow like a coal, but he didn’t noticeably react to Shah’s presence. “I think she’s telling the truth.”
Lena ran down the hall, wrapped her arms around Doctor Shah, and kissed her hard. For her part, Doctor Shah returned the embrace with enthusiasm.
“So nice to see young lovers reunited,” Granach purred, her cold breath tickling my neck. I hadn’t even heard her approach. She was smiling, not at Lena and Doctor Shah, but at me, as if she was the one who had jabbed a knife into my chest and twisted.
I did my best to swallow the jealousy and forced a smile of my own. “I’ve never met a vampire with dentures before. What kind of cream do you use to keep them in?”
“You have a good eye,” she said, but the amusement was gone from her voice. “These are specially designed. Would you like to see?” Her smile tightened, and tiny triangular blades slid from the canine teeth.
“Don’t tease her, Isaac,” said Shah. “Alice doesn’t take well to challenges.”
“Isaac.” Lena stared at me, her mouth round with confusion. She kept a possessive arm around Shah’s waist. I had the feeling she had completely forgotten my presence until Shah mentioned my name.
Doctor Shah looked from Lena to me and back. “I see.”
“I thought you were-” Lena began.
“I understand.” Shah was breathing hard, and her face was darker than usual. She wiped her brow and studied me more closely. “You’ve been overdoing your magic again, Isaac.”
There was the calm, clinically detached tone I remembered from the last time I walked out of her office. “I haven’t had much of a choice.”
Granach let out a melodramatic sigh. “Perhaps you could sort out your tangled little human emotions at a later time? I believe Isaac was going to try to help us find a rogue libriomancer.”
“She thinks Gutenberg is behind this,” said Shah.
“What do you think?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I’ve learned my way around Porter minds, but Gutenberg is a breed apart. The only thing I know for certain is that I don’t know or understand what goes on in that man’s head.”
Granach gestured toward the glass door. Lena didn’t meet my eyes as I stepped past her to examine the prisoner inside.
The woman in the cell was short and slender. Her skin had a strange blue-gray pallor. She wore green hospital scrubs covered in bloodstains, especially at the waist. Heavy scars covered her wrists, as if they had been repeatedly clawed open. Her fingernails were glassy with a bluish tinge, and there were faint lesions on her skin.
“You’ve been helping them?” Lena asked.
“Not at first.” I had rarely heard Doctor Shah angry before. She tapped the tattoo on her temple. “The Porters’ protections kept them from reading my mind, but they found other ways to batter my will. They took my files, forced me to decrypt and translate them so they could study every patient I’d ever worked with.”
The fury in her words reminded me of my own when Deb had first told me about the destruction of our library. Forcing Doctor Shah to break confidentiality was a violation far worse than the attack on her home.
Granach rapped a knuckle on the glass, earning a snarl from the creature within. “Her name is Chesa. She staked one of the elders and secreted him away, torturing him for two days before we found them.”
“How?” I asked.
“A rosewood stake through the heart to immobilize him. After that, she used knives.”
Just like the vampire who had killed Ray Walker.
“She’s a sociopath,” said Doctor Shah. “Though that particular diagnosis doesn’t mean as much down here. She cut off the victim’s head when she heard the others coming.”
I moved to the far edge, trying to make out Chesa’s eyes.
“She’s tried four times to kill herself with her bare hands,” Shah continued. “But her body heals too quickly. Those scars on her arms will be gone within an hour. The guards pass blood into the cell through here to feed her.” She tapped the small square panel, which was connected to a flexible hose leading to a heavy green air tank. “I suspect Chesa would starve herself if she could, but her nature works against her. She can’t fight the bloodlust. She drinks her own after each suicide attempt, even licking the floor in her hunger.”
“So what stops her from going up in flames like the others?” I asked.
“Flame requires oxygen.” Granach pointed to the tank. “Pure nitrogen and carbon dioxide.”