“There’s more.” I skipped ahead. “Sixty pages later, Jakob goes back to confront his captain.
“You knew!” Never had Jakob come so close to physically attacking a superior officer, but even now discipline compelled him to add a grudging, “Sir.”
Captain Nichols didn’t say a word. He just stood there, his swarthy face a stone mask. The silence stretched on until Jakob couldn’t take it anymore.
“Well?” he shouted. “You knew these things, these vampires were out there. You knew what we were fighting. Why didn’t you warn us, sir? Why aren’t we sending patrols out with M2s to burn these bastards into ash?”
“Specialist Hoffman, are you suggesting you could run this war better than your superiors?”
Hoffman stiffened. “No, sir. I’m suggesting that if people were told the truth, that we could do a better job of implementing those orders. That if we had been warned, Mikey might still be alive. Sir.”
Nichols didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Nothing he could say would justify sending men out unprepared. Those men were Jakob’s brothers, and they were dying at the hands of German monsters. Nothing Nichols said could make that all right. Nothing could bring Mikey back.
Lena was looking at the house. “Charles saw something the day his brother disappeared, but he didn’t know what. He didn’t piece it together until years later, after he discovered the Porters and learned the truth.”
“After he learned what we keep hidden from the world,” I said. “He blames the Porters for his brother’s death, so now he’s sending vampires after us as punishment.”
She rubbed her arms together. “Margie said Charles was never right after he came home from Afghanistan. The doctors tried various medications, but he continued to hallucinate. He woke up screaming, and began showing signs of paranoia. They thought it was post-traumatic stress disorder. His memories were fragmented, and there was so much he had to relearn. He couldn’t even read when he first woke up from the attack.” She looked at me. “It was after he started reading that the hallucinations began.”
“They weren’t hallucinations. That was his magic.” I closed the book. “In the end, after they retrieve the Silver Cross, Jakob Hoffman discovers that Nichols and several other superior officers are under the influence of dark magic. He steals the cross and uses it to unleash the vampires against Nichols and the rest of the officers who betrayed them. It’s brutal, effective, and impossible to cover up. A two-page epilogue describes the public outrage. Whole governments are overthrown, and the world unites to wipe out the undead.”
“That’s his end game,” said Lena. “Use his vampires to attack the Porters, show the world what’s been kept from them, and start a war.”
“Please tell me his mother knows where we can find him.”
She passed me a piece of paper with directions. “Margie remembered him wiping her memory. He told her he was doing it to protect her, that she was better off not knowing what was happening to him. The last thing he did before casting that spell was to make her sign over the deed to the family hunting camp.”
I had just merged onto 127 North when Ponce de Leon misted onto the rearview mirror. Lena had put the top down before we left, and the air rushing past made it difficult to hear de Leon’s greeting.
“You know, I have a phone,” I shouted.
He glanced past me, and when he spoke again, his voice was amplified by the car’s speakers. “And which is more likely to be tapped, your phone or my magic?”
He had a point. I wondered which worried him more: that a murderer might listen in on our conversation, or that the Porters might do so. “Have you ever heard of someone gaining magical abilities as a result of an injury to the brain?”
“Not precisely, no.”
“So be precise.”
“Wouldn’t the Porters be a better resource for this sort of question, Isaac?” His question had only a shadow of his usual taunting, which worried me.
“What can I say? I seem to be running out of friends.”
With an opening like that, I would have expected a killer jab at my personality, but de Leon merely sighed and turned away. “Oh, Johannes. I warned him…”
“Warned him about what?”
“Do you know how to perform a locking spell, Mister Vainio?”
I wasn’t sure my efforts in Detroit counted. “I managed to seal off a book by-”
“I didn’t ask about books.”
I felt like he had punched me from inside my own rib cage. The car drifted onto the rumble strips to the right of the road as his words sank in. Lena grabbed the wheel, guiding us back into our lane.
“Sorry,” I said. “Are you saying you can lock people?”
He smiled and spread his hands. “The terms of my exile prevent me from divulging certain secrets. This is nothing but conjecture on your part.”
A locking spell to prevent someone from accessing his magic. “Why?”
“What would you do with individuals who became dangerous or unmanageable?” de Leon asked. “Magical imprisonment isn’t terribly cost-effective, and execution seems rather extreme.”
“Banishment works,” Lena suggested.
De Leon smirked. “Does it really? We’ll see.”
“Locking someone’s power wouldn’t be enough,” I said slowly. Maybe you could seal off a man’s magic, but that wouldn’t prevent him from returning the next day with a high-powered rifle and taking his revenge, or from simply going to the media to spill the truth about the Porters. “You’d have to erase his memories of magic, too.”
“Keep going,” said de Leon. “This is a fascinating mental exercise.”
It would need to be a selective wipe. Total amnesia would raise too many questions. But how? Gutenberg was a libriomancer. We couldn’t simply rewrite a human being, erasing whole chapters out of his life.
No, I assumed we couldn’t do it. It was becoming more and more clear how much had been withheld from my training. Had Ray Walker known about this? Did Pallas? “How often do they do it? Lock people?”
De Leon shrugged. “As you know, I’ve not been a member of your little club for many years.”
“Hubert’s injury broke that lock,” Lena said.
“How?” I asked.
“The brain can rewrite itself to some extent, bypassing damaged areas,” she said. “As he healed, his brain could have found a way around those spells. He would have started to remember what had been taken from him. That’s why he was lashing out at Porters. They stole his magic and his memories.”
Anger narrowed my vision as I yanked the wheel and sped past a semi. It was disturbingly easy to imagine myself in Hubert’s place. If things had gone differently two years ago, if Ray hadn’t been there to speak on my behalf, would they have stolen my magic, too? I had given up magic for two years, but to lose even the awareness of magic, to have those memories ripped away…
What had it been like for Hubert? First the explosion, then awakening in the hospital. The disorientation, the pain of his injuries, and the memories swelling free and floating to the surface. Had it been a gradual thing, or had his previous life returned to him in a single overwhelming flash?
“If Pallas and the other higher-ups know about this practice,” Lena said slowly, “why haven’t they pieced it together and gone after Hubert?”
“Excellent question.” De Leon sounded like a professor praising a favorite student.
“You couldn’t just erase Hubert’s memories,” I said, my heartbeat growing sharper as I worked through the implications. “They don’t want lowly field agents or catalogers knowing what they’ve done. They’d have to erase Hubert from our memories as well, to make sure we didn’t question the disappearance of a colleague. If Hubert has access to Gutenberg’s knowledge, he could have worked the same spell to hide himself from the memories of the Regional Masters.”
“What about the records?” Lena asked.
“Victor Harrison.” I glanced at the mirror, but de Leon neither confirmed nor denied my guess. “We thought the attack on Harrison was a way to tap into our communications, but that was only part of it. Harrison also had access to our databases. Hubert could have used him to wipe his records.”