How much had he remembered? His anger toward the Porters suggested he knew what had been done to him. Gutenberg had taken away that part of his life once before. He would have wanted to find a way to protect himself. V-Day gave him a weapon, but books took time to write and publish.
The Silver Cross wouldn’t be enough to overpower Gutenberg. Nor should it have worked on automatons, not if they were constructed to absorb magic. I flipped through the first book, an old copy of Dracula. Vampire research, perhaps.
The next book was Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris. This was probably how Hannibal Lecter had crept into Hubert’s mind. I set it aside and reached for the next. The cover was gone, and the first few pages fell away when I opened them. I flipped to the middle of the book and froze. This was Albert Kapr’s biography of Johannes Gutenberg.
We had assumed Hubert’s possession was an accident, a side effect of reckless magic use. We had assumed wrong. “You did it on purpose, didn’t you?”
The automatons were built to protect their creator. To protect Gutenberg. So the best way to defend against them was to become Gutenberg.
It wouldn’t have been perfect. The Gutenberg of this book was a creation of the author, a character built by historians. Transporting that character’s mind from the pages into our world would have resulted in a flawed, deranged copy of Gutenberg: a madman, but one who retained enough of Gutenberg’s identity to confuse the automatons.
And then, once Hubert had opened himself to one book, removing the barriers between himself and the magic, other characters began to seep into his thoughts. Had any of those been deliberate? Had he welcomed Moriarty as a genius who could help him to stay one step ahead of the Porters?
It was a desperate, brilliant move, one that would ultimately destroy him.
I was so lost in the possibilities that I almost missed the movement from the tree. Alertness jolted through my nerves, and I grabbed the sword as slender brown fingers poked through the trunk.
I waited, barely breathing, but the arm reaching toward me was unmistakably Lena’s. Wood and bark seemed to flow around her, flexible and fluid as the tree birthed her back into this world. I dropped the sword and stepped forward to catch her as she fell.
For one horrible moment, I thought she was dead, her body expelled by the tree. And then her arms tightened around my shoulders.
I lowered her to the ground, leaning her against the tree. She started to smile, then hissed and touched her swollen, bloody lip. “Remind me not to do that again.”
“The automaton?”
She wiped her chin. “He’s not coming back.”
I snatched the gaming book and created another healing potion. The instant she swallowed, some of the tension began to ease from her body. The swelling on her face diminished, and the bones of her arm knit together with an audible crackling sound. “Thanks.”
Smudge scrambled down my arm and jumped to the ground. I tensed, but he wasn’t setting anything on fire. He was simply creeping after a large, bright green luna moth that had fluttered onto another tree.
“You destroyed one of Gutenberg’s automatons,” I said softly.
Lena shrugged.
“You’re not supposed to be able to do that.”
“So noted.” She leaned into me, her head resting on my shoulder. “Tell you what. You take care of the next one, okay?”
“Fair enough.” I put my arms around her, trying not to jostle her injuries.
“You’re not going to break me, you know.” Amusement and more warmed her voice, and her breath brushed the skin beneath my jaw.
“It was after me,” I said. “You didn’t have to-”
“Actually, I did.”
Of course. She couldn’t free Nidhi Shah without trading either Hubert or myself, and since we still hadn’t found Hubert… “We’ll get her back.”
She pulled back, leaving her hands on my knees. “That’s not what I meant.” She lifted her head and looked me in the eyes. “I’ve never taken a beating like that before. I thought I was dying. But when I saw you fall… it wasn’t about saving Nidhi. I couldn’t let you die.”
“Why?” The word escaped despite my best efforts. I had always had a problem with asking too many questions, even when I knew better. Especially when I knew better.
Lena reached up to cup my face in her hand, her fingers brushing the hair back from my ear, and pulled me close. Her lips found mine, and for a moment I forgot about automatons and possessed libriomancers.
She broke away. “It’s what I am.” Her attention slipped past me to Smudge, and her lips quirked. “To use a metaphor your spider might appreciate, nymphs can be quick to heat up, but once they do, they smolder for a long time.”
I had no response to that, and Lena didn’t give me time to ponder. She stood and pulled me to my feet. “I’m thinking we might not want to hang around here.”
“We can’t go quite yet.” I pointed to the broken automaton, trying to focus. “If it’s my turn to face the next one, I want to know exactly what makes these things tick.”
Chapter 18
I stood over the automaton, an untrained coroner about to perform the world’s oddest autopsy. The trouble was, even “dead,” the automaton was all but invulnerable. Hubert might have been able to impale this thing, but so far I had failed to pry even a single metal block from its wooden body. Smudge watched warily from my shoulder. He had calmed enough to join me, but shifted to and fro, ready to flee at the slightest provocation.
As eager as I was to uncover the automaton’s secrets, I couldn’t stop thinking about Lena.
It had been one kiss, and a relatively brief one at that. We had fought an automaton and survived. Who wouldn’t get swept up in the relief and excitement after living through that? Whatever she might feel for me, it didn’t change the fact that she was in love with Nidhi Shah.
But what happened to that love the longer she was separated from Shah? The more time she spent with me…?
I turned away from that train of thought. Lena wasn’t a thing to be stolen. She had made her choice. She didn’t need me, not with Shah alive and human.
Despite the past week, I knew so little about her power. The way she entered her tree reminded me of my own magic, of reaching into the pages of a story. The tree was her portal to magic. But how could Lena pass into and out of that magic at will? Did the tree absorb and hold her physical body? There was no way that tree had been large enough to contain both Lena and the automaton, suggesting their bodies somehow transformed, becoming a part of the tree.
“What happened when you pulled the automaton in with you?” I asked. “How did you fight it? How do you know it won’t escape?”
“It’s hard to describe,” she said. “It fought against me, and against the tree itself. As its strength waned, it tried to steal mine.” She touched the ground, as if reaching for the roots below to touch those memories. “That’s why it lost. It didn’t understand the tree’s magic.”
“I don’t understand either.”
“I didn’t fight it, Isaac.” She gestured toward the trees. “Do they fight the wind? Do they fight the snow and ice in winter? They endure. They live. They grow. Fire a bullet into the trunk, and it will heal, growing to encompass that bullet within itself. Chop off a branch, and the bark will seal the wound.”
“Unless you chop the whole thing down,” I said.
She glanced away. I wondered if she was remembering her own tree, killed by vampires. “The automaton tried to take my strength. I let it. The more I flowed through it, the more it became a part of us. A part of the tree.”
“The bulk of the automaton’s body is wood,” I mused. That might have made it easier for Lena to absorb it into the tree. I tried again to pry the letters free from the broken body in front of us. “Can you soften this one enough for me to pull these loose?”
Lena put her hand over mine. She grimaced when she touched the body, but the rigid splinters gradually bowed beneath our grasp. I wiggled one of the letters like a loose tooth, back and forth until it finally twisted free. More letters followed. I set each one down in order and studied the indentations in the wooden body.