“Really? Can you feel your tree even when you’re separated from it? Does distance change- Never mind.” I hauled my attention back to the book. “Possession occurs when characters from a book reach into the Porter’s mind. I need to do the opposite, to push my mind, my self into the book.”
Voices whispered in my ear. I recognized them all. Georgia McCain, the dedicated doctor who worked to track the virus from the university back to its source. Brad Ryder, the agent whose investigation brought him to Georgia’s front door. I felt their fear, their anger, their unspoken attraction, and their desperation to save the world. But those emotions weren’t their own. The characters were nothing but words on a page. Whatever pseudolife I felt had been created by readers and magic.
My boundaries were weak from the exertions of the past several days, and the longer I maintained my connection to the book, the more those voices would push through the cracks in my mind.
“Isaac?” Lena touched my shoulder. Her words sounded slurred and distant.
“I’m all right.” I shoved her hand away, concentrating on those voices, immersing myself in the spell laid out by Shaffer, a spell as magical as anything cast by the sorcerers of old. I could feel the book’s potential power, a tingle that ran just beneath my skin, waiting to be shaped. Wanting to be shaped.
The voices were louder now: panicked screams and furious arguments. A politician’s cool, calming speech. The grief of a parent mourning a child.
I couldn’t see Lena or the factory anymore. Images flickered, taunting me from the edge of my awareness. I waited impatiently as they gradually came into focus, if “focus” was the right word for the collage of shifting figures that surrounded me. I stared at one, trying to will it into clarity, but my efforts merely made my head hurt. It was as if someone had taken a thousand photographs of similar-looking women and layered them atop one another, until you lost all but the rough suggestion of a woman in a white lab coat.
Every one of those layers was a reader’s mental image of Georgia McCain. I was seeing their belief. Excitement surged through me, followed by a single question. Now that I’m here, how do I get out again?
My body felt numb and heavy. I tried to flex my hands, but there was no way of telling whether I succeeded. I hesitated, but if I tried to escape now, I’d have accomplished nothing. I tried to relax, to calm my thoughts, even as more figures shuffled toward me.
In the real world, thousands of copies of Rabid were spread across the globe; magically speaking, every one of those copies coexisted here. But only one of those books had been used recently to manipulate magic. I searched for any lingering trace of magic, trying to let the current guide me.
Pain returned. I welcomed it. This was the first physical sensation I had felt since losing myself in the book. The shattered lock cut deeper this time, and I could see the text more clearly, both the Latin, laid out in neat blocks and rows, and a second spell made up of broken scrawls, all but illegible.
Both the lock and that second spell had been placed upon the physical copy of the book I was looking for. I clung to them, letting the pain flow through me as I reached out to touch that physical book.
Darkness. Cold air that smelled like oil and gasoline. The heavy, dead magic of locked books. This wasn’t from my copy of Rabid; I was sensing wherever that other book was being kept.
My mind leaped at the implications. Could two libriomancers communicate this way? Could messages be passed through matching books? If so, would there be a delay, or would the process be instantaneous? What about physical objects? Could I transport something from one book to another?
A new voice caught my attention, not a character from the book but a man arguing with himself. He spoke in sharp, angry sentences that jumped and fell in volume like a broken radio. I tried to see, and was rewarded with the image of a vague, manlike shape. I had to concentrate to fill in each detail. He was white. Slender, wearing a filthy coverall and heavy boots. A jagged scar ripped the side of his head and face.
“You think I don’t hear you?” He grabbed a handful of books, snarled, and threw them aside with a careless disregard that made me cringe. No true libriomancer would treat books so harshly. “Always watching. Always spying. Ripping out the pages of my brain.”
This wasn’t Johannes Gutenberg. The voice was unfamiliar. I couldn’t yet focus well enough to identify the speaker.
His fingers closed around Rabid, and his tone shifted, becoming deeper. “I see you, Isaac.”
My mind ran at a manic pace. This is awesome I’m talking to someone through a book oh shit he’s going to kill me how the hell do I get out of here?
He muttered in Latin, and I saw his words, like hastily scrawled ropes shooting outward. He was trying to lock the book again, with me inside.
“Who are you?” I demanded, projecting the question with everything I had.
He hesitated, and I heard… I felt different voices trying to respond. James Moriarty. Jakob Hoffman. Doctor Hannibal Lecter. Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Norman Bates.
There were more, but the original voice shouted them down, struggling to make himself heard. More Latin snaked toward me. He grabbed a pen, scribbling the words onto the pages as he spoke.
I fled, seeking the magic of the story. If I could follow the killer’s magical current to him, I should be able to follow whatever trail I had left for myself when I reached into the book. But before I could find it, another presence crashed into me from below.
I screamed, only to have my fear devoured and spilled back over me, increased a thousandfold. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I clung to myself as that tide dragged away everything I was. Memories, dreams, everything crumbled like a sand castle on the beach.
“Isaac!”
The syllables meant nothing, but I reached out instinctively, like an infant grabbing for his mother.
My eyes snapped open. My brain rebelled as it tried to reorient to a physical world of light and matter. My throat was hoarse. Lena sat beside me, shaking my shoulders and shouting, but I couldn’t hear her over my own screaming. My vision faded, and I felt myself topple sideways.
Strong hands caught me, easing me down. My body was rigid, muscles cramping in pain, but I couldn’t relax. I could feel that other presence following me through the book. I didn’t know what he had sent after me, or how. All I knew was that I had to get away; I had to stop it from following.
My hands were empty. Where was the book?
There, discarded on the ground. Smudge stood to one side, covered in orange fire. I pointed and screamed something I never would have imagined myself saying. “Burn it!”
Smudge couldn’t understand English, but he was perfectly fluent in terror. He raced to the book and jumped onto the cover, turning and dancing and igniting the pages.
“Isaac, look at me!” Lena cradled my face, her eyes wide as she searched mine. “What happened?”
I shuddered. Sobs ripped through me. I clung to her, trying to shut out the memory of being consumed, of the inhuman rage and hatred that would have drowned me.
She held me, one hand combing through my hair. “You’re safe,” she whispered, over and over.
I shook my head and closed my eyes. I don’t know how long I might have stayed there if I hadn’t sensed the magic leaking from the book, brushing my bones. I yelled and jumped to my feet.
Smudge scurried toward us, leaving blackened weeds in his wake. Behind him, burnt pages fluttered in an unseen breeze: pages damaged both by fire and by magical char.
Lena grabbed her bokken, raising them both in a defensive stance. “Tell me what happened, Isaac.”
“I found him.” The words hurt my throat. “He tried to trap me in the book.”
Only whatever that last attack had been, it hadn’t felt like a magical lock. It was more like… hunger. Desperate, furious, raw hunger. The memory started me trembling again. I doubled over and grabbed my knees, squeezing hard so the pain would prove I was still real. That I still existed.