I swung at another pillar, then grabbed Lena’s arm. She did her best to keep up as I all but dragged her away.
The first pillar shifted and ripped free of the roof, showering metal and rust as it slammed to the ground with an impact that swayed the whole building, but the roof remained standing.
I cut through several more pillars from the doorway, then flicked off my weapon. “This would probably be a good time to get the hell out of here.”
What followed sounded like a drawn-out explosion. I stopped only long enough to grab Smudge as we hobbled away, taking shelter in an open doorway of the next building. The center of the ceiling collapsed first, steel and concrete and tarred roof crumbling inward. The ground shook, and dust shivered down from above.
I glanced around, wondering if I had miscalculated. None of these structures were terribly stable, and if they came down, I doubted we would be able to escape. Lena apparently had the same thought. She grabbed my arm and pulled me down, sheltering me with her body the best she could. She was tough enough to endure falling glass and debris, but if the whole place collapsed, we were both squashed.
Slowly, the cracking and rumbling quieted. Dust clouded the air like brown fog. It looked like about half of the building had fallen, and there was no sign of whatever the other libriomancer had sent after us.
Lena’s arm and leg were both bleeding. I wasn’t sure what would happen if she became infected. Her magic defined her; could a magical disease rewrite what she was? But the cold hum of the book’s magic was absent. I hoped and prayed that meant she was safe.
I started to dissolve my weapon back into the book. I stared at the pages, momentarily confused. I didn’t have time to read old novels, not with a potential Category A bioterrorism event. I should be back in the lab, not… what was this place?
“Isaac?” A heavyset woman touched my shoulder.
“What are you doing out here without a biosuit?” I started to back away, and the woman reached out to grab my arm. An electric shock jolted my nervous system.
No, not an electric shock; a magical one. Lena. This was an old auto plant in Detroit, not a quarantined lab in Phoenix. I staggered back, gasping for breath.
Lena caught my elbow. I slipped the book and handle into my pocket. Dissolving a magically-created object was simple enough, but right now I couldn’t risk it. “Sorry. Spaced out for a moment, that’s all.”
“Bullshit. What just happened?”
“Monofilament sword,” I said, deliberately misinterpreting the question. “Maximum length of twenty meters. Cuts through almost anything.”
“Isaac-”
“Later, once we’re safe.”
She glared, but didn’t press me. “You think that thing is still alive under there?”
“Yep.” I could feel it underneath the ruins, an open book leaking magic into our world. “That was the easy part.”
I started toward the source of that magic, but Lena grabbed my collar and hauled me backward. “Give it a minute to make sure the rest of the building isn’t about to come down. You can use the time to tell me who or what we’re up against.”
I fought the urge to flee, uncertain whether the impulse was my own or an artifact of the characters fighting to take hold in my head. “This isn’t Gutenberg’s work. I got his names. Some of them, at least.”
“How many do most libriomancers have?”
“Shah was right. He’s possessed. James Moriarty, from Sherlock Holmes. Hannibal Lecter, a serial killer from Thomas Harris’ books. Ernst Stavro Blofeld is a James Bond villain, and Norman Bates comes from Robert Bloch’s Psycho.”
“Lovely company.” Another chunk of the roof crashed down, making her whirl. She stood unmoving, attention fixed on the mess, before lowering her bokken. “Doesn’t anyone ever get possessed by Mary Poppins?”
“That wouldn’t help. The transition from the book would destroy the mind, and you’d end up with one mad nanny. But you’re right, possession tends to involve more aggressive minds.” I wondered who would be first to take up residence in my head if I kept pushing. “I heard one name I didn’t recognize: Jakob Hoffman. It might be the libriomancer’s true name, or it could have been another character. Either way, I’ve never heard of him.”
“All of them live inside his head?”
“Mad as hatters. And once possession takes hold, it becomes easier for other characters to sneak in. You become the doorway for the book’s magic.” Given what I had seen, it wouldn’t be long before that magic burned him out completely. The problem was the damage he could do in the meantime. “Whoever he is, he hated me.”
“He knew you?”
“Even through the book.” The thing he had sent after me could have been the manifestation of his madness, the raw, out-of-control hunger and fear.
I pushed the memory aside and clasped my trembling hands together, trying to think. Every libriomancer had a specialty. Deb DeGeorge did history. I was a sci-fi geek. The characters he had named were from mysteries and thrillers… but nobody local fit that pattern.
“Can possession be cured?”
“I wouldn’t know how. People like Doctor Shah are supposed to make sure it never gets to this point.” There was nothing physical to dissolve back into the book. You’d have to use magic to try to unravel the original mind from the characters, but how? You couldn’t reach into a man’s mind like he was a book and pull out what you needed.
I blinked and turned that thought over in my head. Slowly, I climbed to my feet. “Time to take care of that thing.”
“We should call the Porters,” Lena said. “Let someone else deal with the aftermath so you can rest.”
“We don’t have time. How long do you think this will hold it?” I made my way inside, testing every step. Lena stayed with me, using her remaining bokken as a cane to support her injured knee. Roughly four feet of rubble covered the spot where she had pinned the thing like an insect. One of the walls creaked, making me jump. “I need to examine the body.”
Lena scowled. “Of course you do.”
Digging a hole through the mess would have been hard enough without the characters shouting in my head, warning me to don protective gear, to call in a team to sterilize the entire place. I was constantly jumping at imagined noises and movement that vanished as soon as I turned to look.
Bricks shifted, and a blackened hand reached for Lena’s wrist. She fell backward. “There you go.”
I crawled over to where she had been working. I could just make out part of the face and left arm. The skin had changed. The charring was worse, and black dust fell away from the fingers every time it moved, reaching unerringly toward me.
I picked up a metal bolt and poked the back of the hand. It felt like burnt leather.
Was this my fault? Had I damaged the book so badly in my attempt to find the killer that I had allowed him to send this twisted, unfinished creature back after me?
“I could try to finish what he started,” I mumbled. “Separate it from the book and fix it in this form long enough to destroy it.” But even if I knew how to do that, who was to say the character I created wouldn’t carry the virus? “You think the vampires would let me borrow their dungeon to study this thing?”
Lena didn’t answer.
I couldn’t heal a book, and ultimately, that was all this was: a burnt, pissed-off book oozing magic all over the place. “I need to lock it.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know how to do that.”
“I don’t.” I sat back and rubbed the dust from my eyes, remembering hastily scrawled Latin reaching out to constrict me. “But Gutenberg figured this out centuries ago. All I have to do is duplicate his work.”
“He probably wasn’t sitting on top of a killer book at the time.”
I forced a chuckle at that. Gutenberg probably hadn’t been so burned out that the simplest spell could have cost him his sanity, either.
I pulled a paperback from my pocket and brought it toward that blackened hand. Instead of a lock, maybe I could simply dissolve it into another book?