The Triumph appeared untouched. I had no doubt someone had attached a tracking device, but I could find that later with a bit of magic from James Bond. Lena moved stiffly, avoiding eye contact.
“It’s all right,” I said quietly.
She glanced up.
“We’ll find Gutenberg, and we’ll get Shah back.” I shivered, the aftereffects of too much magic and too many people trying to kill me. Trying to fight it only made the trembling worse. I leaned against the car and worked to slow my breathing. I felt like I had spent the past few days mainlining espressos. “Then you and Doctor Shah can go back to your lives.”
“I’m sorry.” The vampires had returned Lena’s bokken. She hugged them both to her chest. “I thought Nidhi was-”
“I know.” My words came out more clipped than I had intended. I should have been preparing for what was to come next, and instead I found myself thinking back to the magic flowing from her tree through us both, the happiness in her eyes as we left the restaurant this morning, the feel of her lips on mine. “You did… you’re doing what you have to.”
I stared at the car, trying to assess whether or not I was up for driving. Reluctantly, I fished out my keys and handed them to Lena, trying to ignore the way her fingers brushed my palm.
“Can you really find Gutenberg?” she asked.
“That depends on how well Plan B works.” I climbed into the car and tried to settle my mind. “We didn’t recover all of the stolen books from the archive. In theory, I might be able to use those missing books to find whoever has them.”
“In theory?”
“I’ve never done it before.” I knew of only one person who had. “We’ll need a quiet place to work, away from people.”
“One quiet, isolated place in the middle of Detroit. Not a problem.”
“Not the middle. We’re off to one side.” My head was throbbing, but I resisted the urge to use magic to heal the damage Granach had done. Doctor Shah was right. I was overdoing it, and if I was going to find our killer, I couldn’t afford to weaken my barriers any further.
“Do you believe they’ll return Nidhi?” she asked quietly as we pulled out of the parking lot.
“I believe that if we can find Johannes Gutenberg, we’ll be in a much better position to demand they hold up their end of the deal.”
I closed my eyes, thinking about everything we had learned. Chesa had tortured an elder vampire for two days, but hadn’t enslaved him. An elder would have made a valuable slave, suggesting she couldn’t do so. The libriomancer probably had to do that in person.
I was more worried by the fact that Chesa wasn’t a true vampire by most standards. A libriomancer who could control vampires was bad enough, but this one could control other magical creatures as well. I glanced at Lena, imagining her brown eyes tightening, pupils shifting into pointed crosses.
“What did Nidhi mean at the end?” Lena asked. “What’s so special about a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder?”
“Remember what I said to you about the dangers of libriomancy and the way books could reach back into you? It’s possible Shah was seeing different people fighting to control Chesa’s body. It’s also possible those shifts in Chesa’s behavior all came from the same mind. From Gutenberg’s mind.” I hugged my jacket tighter around my body. “Magically speaking, dissociative identity disorder looks a lot like possession.”
Chapter 12
Neither of us spoke much after that. Not that I could blame Lena for her silence. Thanks to me, her lover was still trapped underground.
I had planned it all out. The love magnet, the extra weapons to hand over, convincing anyone watching that I had been disarmed…
Smudge had known. He had tried to warn me, but I was convinced I knew what I was doing. That I was smarter than the bloodsuckers in their nest, smarter than the killer. And because of that arrogance, the killer had used me to infiltrate the nest and destroy our one potential lead.
At Mackinac Island two years ago, I had at least managed to stop my enemies before almost destroying myself. This time, all I had accomplished was to help a murderer. If Lena hadn’t been there and given me time to retrieve that detonator, I’d probably be dead by now.
“I should have called Pallas,” I said quietly. “Asked her to send a real field agent to question the vampires.”
“You could call her now,” Lena suggested.
I shook my head. Having helped to eliminate the one person who might have led us to Ray Walker’s murderer, I could think of only one other option, and there was no way Pallas would sign off on it.
I closed my eyes, remembering Shah’s expression as we were dragged away. Shah had the best poker face of anyone I knew, but she had been trapped down there for days, surrounded by creatures who considered her little more than livestock. She hadn’t been able to hide her despair.
“It doesn’t make sense. Gutenberg knows the dangers of possession better than anyone.” Gutenberg had written the laws of libriomancy. But Chesa had been enslaved by libriomancy, and who else could command Gutenberg’s automatons? Ponce de Leon was powerful, but he was no libriomancer. Nicola Pallas used bardic magic. Deb DeGeorge’s power was fading, and she had shown no symptoms of possession. I mentally reviewed the other libriomancers I knew, but not one of them was strong enough to challenge Gutenberg.
“Power makes people believe they’re invulnerable,” said Lena.
“But why now, after so many lifetimes of practicing magic? And why didn’t anyone notice the signs?” I sagged back in the seat.
“Maybe someone did. Maybe they pointed it out to him, and he brushed their concerns aside until it was too late.” Her words were pointed, and she still didn’t look at me.
“I’m all right,” I said. For the moment, anyway. What I was planning could change that all too easily.
Within two more miles, we had traded the busy streets for an old neighborhood that felt like a ghost town. Abandoned houses watched over the road through empty, jagged-edged windows. Up ahead, a maple tree had fallen through the roof of a two-story house with faded siding. Weeds and shrubs were well on their way to reclaiming driveways and sidewalks.
“What is this place?” I asked.
She pointed to a large brick complex up ahead. The closest building was twice as long as a football field. A broken sign over the entrance read:- motive Plant of Detroit. “This is one of the largest abandoned factory complexes in the country. It was shut down decades ago. The city wants to bulldoze the whole place, but attorneys from both sides are still duking it out in the courts.”
The car lurched drunkenly as we passed beneath the old sign. The road looked like it had been bombed back to the Stone Age. Lena downshifted and did her best to avoid the worst of the gaping cracks and potholes.
The whole place had a post-apocalyptic feel. Graffiti covered the walls of the main plant and the various connected buildings. I spotted everything from simple gang tags to a full mural showing a stylized George Washington gunning down a field of robots, which was actually pretty awesome.
We passed what might have once been a warehouse, but was now little more than a blackened patch of cement surrounded by weeds. A few metal support beams jutted from the ground at the edges.
Weeds brushed the underside of the car as Lena pulled into a crumbled blacktop parking lot. I retrieved Smudge and climbed out. The movement reawakened the throbbing pain in my neck and head.
I adjusted the familiar weight of my armor-laden jacket, then grabbed the paper bag full of books out of the back of the car. The air here smelled like dandelions, clover, and urine. I strode past the nearest building. The outer wall was long gone, and the pillars within the three-story structure made it feel like a parking garage.
An old, wooden boat with a cracked hull and peeling paint had been dragged inside. It looked like someone had dumped it here, where it had been repurposed into a makeshift shelter.