Codex Born

3

The oak is ever divided. Reaching deeper, to the cool waters of Earth’s lifeblood. Reaching skyward, to the warm breath of the sun.

Within this tree waits home.

Within this tree waits solitude.

She is my mother. My twin. My center, cleaved in two.

Yearning to be one. Yearning to be my own.

I was born into winter. Yearning to sleep through the cold. Yearning for one whose warmth would awaken me.

Within his need, I found myself.

Within his desire, I found joy.

His body takes root within mine.

I reach inward to safety. I reach outward to his need.

I bring my Creator to his knees and receive his prayers.

—In memory of Frank Dearing

I AWOKE ON A low cot, gasping for breath. My feet and legs were tangled in an old wool blanket. The pillow was damp from sweat, as was the side of my face. The lights were out, but the safety-glass window in the door provided a hint of fluorescent illumination from the office outside.

“You’re safe.” Nidhi had a hand on my shoulder, holding me down with more strength than I would have expected. “What do you remember?”

The flickering magic of the chronoscope. A wendigo twisted in agony. An armored man hidden by the shadow of a woman. I remembered resting while Jeff and Helen discussed what to do with the body. They had decided to bury it in an unmarked grave behind the church. I had stood up too quickly. “Did Lena…she carried me here, didn’t she.”

“That’s right. We were worried at first, but then you started snoring. Do you know where you are?”

“Tamarack. We’re inside the school, right?”

“What’s your name?” Nidhi asked in that calm, clinical tone I remembered from our sessions. She kept her hands folded over the black leather purse in her lap.

“Isaac Vainio.”

“What’s the date?” She was firing questions faster now, and I found myself responding in kind.

“August fourth. Unless I was out longer than I thought?”

She ignored me. “What’s my name?”

“Nidhi Shah.” I shook my head before she could continue. “It’s me. Just me.” I closed my eyes, listening for the whispers that were the first sign of possession, but my mind was my own. Whatever other damage I might have done, I hadn’t ripped Asimov’s story open that badly. Not that I could blame Nidhi for her fears. She had seen libriomantic possession close-up, as well as the damage that kind of madness could cause. “Where’s Lena?”

“With the werewolves. I wasn’t sure what was going on in your head.”

“So you sent her away. Smart.” I sagged back into the pillow. Lena’s personality adjusted to the desires of her lover. Or lovers, as we had discovered earlier this year. The process wasn’t supposed to be immediate, but who knew what it would do to her if any fictional characters moved into my brain?

An orange glow pulled my attention to Smudge, who climbed down the wall and stopped on the metal frame of the cot. The tips of the hairs along his back glowed like embers, and from the way he was watching me, I was the one who had spooked him. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a box of Red Hot candies. I shook one into my left hand and held it out.

The allure of hard cinnamon candy was enough to overcome his nerves. The burning glow had dimmed, but his feet were uncomfortably hot as he crept forward onto my fingers. He hesitated, then snatched the candy. His body cooled as he ate.

“That can’t be healthy for him,” Nidhi said.

“I pulled him out of a sword and sorcery novel. Who knows what fictional spiders are supposed to eat? He seems healthy enough to me.” I waited as Smudge climbed up my arm and settled onto my shoulder. “You were using him to keep an eye on me. A warning system?”

“Isn’t that what you use him for?”

“That’s not fair. I also use him to repel mosquitoes.” I stretched my arms, grimacing at the tension in my back and shoulders. My jaw ached, too. I must have been clenching it in my sleep. “How long?”

“You’ve been asleep five hours.”

The good news was that I had successfully cast a spell I would have thought was impossible only a few months ago. The bad news was that it had kicked my ass. “Gutenberg tosses magic like that around all the time.”

“Gutenberg has been practicing for more than five hundred years. You’ve had what, a decade?”

“Exactly. I’m young and spry and energetic.” I winced and rubbed my neck. “Young and energetic, at least.”

“You seem to have survived the experience with your mind intact. Which means you should be able to tell me what the hell you were thinking out there!”

I could think of a few things more surprising than Nidhi Shah losing her temper and shouting at me. Smudge spontaneously breaking into a tap-dancing routine, for example. Gutenberg giving up magic and devoting himself to competitive macramé.

I couldn’t even remember the last time Nidhi had raised her voice, let alone yelled at anyone. “I was trying to find out who killed that wendigo.”

“By experimenting with magic you couldn’t control?” She started to say more, but caught herself before she could speak. She clasped her hands tightly together, and took three deep breaths. Her body visibly relaxed. “I’m not your therapist anymore, Isaac. I’m your…I’m trying to be your friend.”

“I know that.” Friend was as good a word as any. The closest term I had come across for “my girlfriend’s other lover” was “metamour,” but the word suggested an uncomfortable level of intimacy between Nidhi and me.

Her lips pursed. “As your friend, I will call your therapist and have you yanked off this investigation if I think you’re endangering yourself or the people around you.”

Every Porter was required to see a therapist on a regular basis. It seemed a wise precaution for people who routinely rewrote the laws of existence to suit their whims. “We just saw a man who might be a libriomancer help slaughter a wendigo. I don’t think I’m the one we should be worrying about right now.”

Nidhi didn’t even blink. “The closest Porter therapist would be Doctor Karim. I assume Pallas assigned you to her when I was removed from your case?”

My silence was confirmation enough.

“I’ve got her on speed dial. I consulted on one of her cases last year, a bakeneko with bipolar disorder who was living as a barn cat in Ohio. In her manic phase, she liked to reanimate dead mice and chase them through the house.”

“Wait, how do you treat a shapeshifting cat for bipolar disorder?”

“Stress management techniques, a light box for winter, lithium when she’s in her human form, and diet control. Particularly the catnip tea. Don’t change the subject. I’ve lost Porters before because they didn’t respect their magic. They didn’t understand the risks. I’m not going to lose you.” Her gaze slipped away. “I won’t let Lena lose you.”

I tightened my fist. “I understand the risks.”

“You understand the dangers,” she said. “You don’t believe in the risks. Not to you. You think you’re too clever, just like every other Porter who ended up destroying themselves.”

“Three vampires tried to kill me in my own library earlier this summer. Then a possessed Porter sent an automaton after me. If that wasn’t enough, I ended up ripping open a book that almost consumed Lena and me both.” I stared at the wall, remembering the charred pages of that damaged book ripping free like a dam crumbling from the weight of its magic. Unformed power trying to escape, followed by a presence Gutenberg had described as Hell itself, ripping me into nothingness, devouring my very core.

“And every time, you survived. You reinforced your own deluded belief that you’re immortal, exempt from the dangers. I’ve seen it before. The things you can do are amazing, but with great power comes great responsibility.”

“You did not just quote Spider-Man at me.”

She leaned closer, both her words and her demeanor softening. “What’s going on, Isaac? Ever since Detroit, you’ve been on edge. Angry.” She looked me up and down. “You’ve lost what, five pounds? Ten?”

“No.” It was twelve, according to my last weigh-in at Doctor Karim’s office. Magic burned a lot of calories, and overuse sent the sympathetic nervous system into overdrive, effectively destroying your appetite. In the beginning, magic sounded like the ultimate diet plan, up until you ended up hospitalized for dehydration and malnutrition.

“Lena’s noticed it, too,” she said gently. “You’ve spent more and more time locked up with your books. Does this have anything to do with your discomfort about the three of us? Anger and confusion are normal reactions to a kind of relationship you never expected.”

“I’m not mad,” I said, a little too quickly. “Yeah, it’s a little weird, but I’m getting used to it.”

Her response simmered with skepticism. “If that’s true, then what’s driving you, Isaac?”

“Gutenberg.”

“Ah.” She nodded.

“He chose to hide magic from the world. I can understand that.” I understood, but I didn’t always agree. How many diseases could we have eliminated through the open use of magic? How many tragedies could have been averted? Not to mention the potential exploration. Magic could create livable habitats in the deepest crevasses of the ocean, in the hearts of active volcanoes, not to mention outer space. So what if NASA had never given us the moon base we wanted. Science fiction had provided all the tools we needed to build one ourselves.

“But,” Nidhi prompted.

“We both know he’s been hiding things. Lying about the rules and limitations of libriomancy.” Not to mention the devourers.

“Would you teach a middle school science class how to mix thermite?” She raised her hands before I could answer. “I’m not suggesting you’re a child. But Gutenberg is more than six hundred years old. To him, we’re barely out of infancy.”

“If those infants already have the ingredients to make thermite, I’d damn well teach them how to make and handle it safely instead of waiting for them to accidentally burn down the school.” I stood up and searched the room for my satchel. Nidhi had tucked it beneath the foot of the cot. I yanked out the Asimov collection and opened it to “The Dead Past.” Dry petals of Moly fell from the pages. I tried to catch one, and the blackened petal broke apart like ash at my touch.

The pages looked like someone had lit a fire in the center of the book’s spine, blackening all but the outer edges. The damage had rendered the book useless for libriomancy, like a cracked lens in a laser. I would need to update our database. Magical resonance treated identical copies of a book as a single point, which was why we could touch the belief of all readers of a given title. But those same principles meant every copy of Asimov’s collection now carried the same magical charring, though only libriomancers would see it. Every copy of this book would be useless for years, even decades. Depending on the severity, the damage could even creep into other editions of the same book.

“You’re angry at Gutenberg for keeping secrets from you.” Nidhi cocked her head to the side. “Yet every time Lena or I ask you about your secret research project for the Porters, you change the subject.”

I drew a tally mark in the air, acknowledging the point. “You saw what I’ve been working on,” I said softly. “The shadow that tried to claw its way out of my spell.”

“The woman?”

“Or something like her. Jeneta called them ‘devourers.’ They’ve been trying to break through to our world. Gutenberg assigned me to figure out what they were and how to stop them.”

“That would explain the stress. How far have you gotten?”

“I’m not even close.” I carefully closed the Asimov book and tucked it back into my bag. I’d need to write up a report for Pallas. She would not be happy. “I don’t even know if what we saw through my spell is the same thing that tried to kill me in Detroit. The manifestation was similar, but not identical.”

“Helen believes a libriomancer was behind this,” Nidhi said. “She’s scared whoever it is will come after the werewolves next.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.” Tension lined her eyes and forehead. “There are libriomancers who enjoy power more than they should, but if anyone were capable of this kind of violence, it should have been caught and dealt with long before reaching this point. As for your devourers, we screen for symptoms of possession.”

“You can’t screen for what you don’t know about,” I countered. The Porters hadn’t yet recovered from the last libriomancer to turn against us. I didn’t know how the organization would survive a second betrayal. “How much trouble are Jeff and Helen going to give us?”

“None for now. I convinced them to let us look for the killer on our own.”

I glanced up. “How did you manage that?”

“I reminded them that the Porters are a pack. If one of us did this, it’s our responsibility to stop that person. Just as Jeff and Helen would personally hunt down any of their people who broke pack law.”

“Nice.” I ran my fingers over the rest of my books. “I’ll look up any wendigo encounters from the past decade. Maybe this is a simple revenge thing.”

Nidhi said nothing, but I had worked with her long enough to recognize the tilt of her head and the slight compression of her mouth. She didn’t buy that any more than I did.

A knock at the door made me jump so hard Smudge had to grab my ear to keep from being dislodged. I held very, very still until he released me.

Lena opened the door and peeked inside.

Nidhi jumped to her feet. “What’s wrong?”

Sweat beaded Lena’s brow, and her face was pale. The muscles in her neck were taut. She gripped the doorframe so tightly her knuckles were white. “We have to leave.”

I started toward her, but Nidhi was faster. She slipped an arm around Lena for support. Lena accepted gratefully, resting her head against Nidhi’s.

I waited in awkward silence until Lena kissed Nidhi and pulled away.

“Are you hurt?” I asked. “Did someone—”

“It’s not me.” She frowned and shook her head. “It’s not this body, I mean. It’s my tree. Something’s wrong.”

“I’ll drive,” I said. There was no way I was letting her ride a motorcycle on these roads in her condition. I might have burned through a little too much magic today, but I was in far better shape than Lena.

“I’ll be right behind you,” said Nidhi.

Lena didn’t protest. She tossed Nidhi the keys to her bike while I shouldered my bag.

“Isaac.” Nidhi directed a pointed look toward my bag. “Be careful.”

“Of course,” I said, but I was already thinking beyond the weapons in my book bag. If someone was hurting Lena’s oak, I intended to bring my entire library down on their head.

A 1973 Triumph convertible wasn’t the most practical choice of car for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Setting aside Michigan’s attitude toward foreign-made cars, the little two-seater was simply too small and unreliable for the no-holds-barred assault winter launched on the U.P. each year. Up here, the ideal winter vehicle was anything you could mount a snowplow to. When I first brought the car up, more than one person had offered wagers on how many times I’d put it into a ditch or get myself stuck at the bottom of an icy hill.

I had pocketed close to four hundred bucks from those bets. This thing was far safer than my old pickup truck. The previous owner had installed a number of magical modifications, including traction spells strong enough for me to do a slalom course at full speed across a frozen lake. Or in this case, to swerve around gravel roads at speeds somewhere between insane and suicidal.

Lena’s body was rigid, her eyes closed. She kept her hands clamped around her bokken. She gasped occasionally, tight breaths that hissed through her teeth, but otherwise made no sound.

I was fairly certain the loss of her tree wouldn’t kill her. Not immediately, at least. She had survived the death of her previous oak earlier in the year by grafting branches from that tree onto the one in my backyard, but it hadn’t been an easy transition.

Besides Nidhi and myself, only a handful of people knew the location of Lena’s tree. Of those, I couldn’t think of anyone with reason to harm her. But the timing couldn’t be a coincidence. “Did anyone else see you this afternoon?”

Lena shook her head. “Jeff and Helen would have known if we were followed.”

I turned off the headlights when we reached my street, so as not to alert anyone at the house. The porch and garage lights had come on automatically at sundown. I saw nothing unusual, but as I drove past the driveway to park on the side of the road, Smudge dropped into an alert crouch on the dashboard. Heat rippled over his body.

“Stay here.” I grabbed Smudge and my books. Smudge climbed onto the leather strap of the book bag and clung there, all eight eyes watching the house. I leaned over and opened the glove box, using its light to skim a copy of H. Allen Conrad’s Time Kings.

“Like hell.” Lena pulled herself out of the car, leaning on her bokken for support.

Thankfully, she waited for me to finish creating a fully charged and loaded shock-gun. I had been practicing with this particular gun since July, though it wasn’t always easy to find a secluded enough space for target practice. The shock-gun was a two-stage weapon. Pulling the trigger fired a tiny, electrically charged pellet at supersonic speed. A split-second later, the gun’s power source triggered an electrical discharge that followed the path of ionized air particles.

In layman’s terms, I had a pistol that shot lightning. The charge could be adjusted from “Low-grade Taser” to “Barbeque a Medium-sized Dinosaur,” and had a range of up to one mile. From a distance, it was designed to look like an ordinary revolver. Best of all, unlike so many fictional ray guns, this one had usable sights.

“Just don’t point that thing at my oak,” Lena said.

I rotated the cylinder to setting two, which should drop anyone we encountered without killing them. Keeping the gun pointed to the ground, I crept around the garage to the back of the house, Lena pressing close behind. Clouds curtained the moon, making it difficult to see anything beyond the silhouette of her tree, but it appeared undisturbed. I crouched by the corner of the house, searching the yard and the trees beyond, but found nobody.

“It feels diseased,” Lena whispered. “Like rot spreading through my bones.”

“Could someone have poisoned it?”

“It wouldn’t work this quickly, or hurt this much.”

From inside the house came a sharp thud, followed by the sound of breaking glass. Lena pulled me back.

“Front door,” I whispered. The sliding door leading in from the deck was locked from the inside, and smashing through glass doors tended to alert whoever you were trying to sneak up on.

We circled around to the front. The storm door had a hole drilled through the aluminum frame, which was odd, as it hadn’t actually been locked. The twenty-year-old wooden door had three holes, as if whoever was trying to break in hadn’t been able to figure out how to disable the deadbolt. I readied my weapon, waited for Lena’s nod, and turned the knob.

It didn’t budge. Whoever was inside must have gotten the door locked again behind them. I slid the key into the lock, turned until it clicked, and opened the door.

The hinges creaked faintly. I held my breath, but heard no movement from inside. The brass plate on the doorframe was scraped and bent, like someone had held an oversized drill against it. What kind of incompetent break-in was this?

Lena grabbed my arm before I could step inside. “Look down.”

The drill had left sawdust scattered over the tile floor. I stared for several seconds before I realized what had caught her attention. There were no footprints in the sawdust.

“The hell?” I mouthed silently.

Lena’s bokken flattened in her hands, each sword taking on a perfectly honed edge sharp enough to cut through one and a half vampires in a single strike. She slipped past me to check the kitchen. I waited for her signal, then moved into the library.

I had read far too many books about this scenario, not to mention all the monster movies, to be happy poking through a dark house. I gripped the shock-gun in both hands, half expecting a chainsaw-wielding zombie or alien slime-monster to leap out at me as I checked between each of the shelves.

A grinding sound made me whirl. Lena put her back to the counter and gestured toward the hallway. I moved through the kitchen to cover her as she crouched by the hall and stretched her fingers to touch the hardwood floor. She would be able to feel if anyone or anything was crouching around the corner, waiting to pounce. After a moment, she rose and stepped into the hall.

The noise was coming from my office. From my computer, to be specific. It sounded like the hard drive was trying to spin up, but kept stuttering out. The office itself was empty.

“I’ll check the bedroom,” Lena whispered.

“Be careful.” The prospect of catching whoever had attacked her tree appeared to have given her a second wind, but I didn’t know how long that would last.

The monitor was blank except for a blinking cursor prompt. I switched on the desk lamp. Books were scattered over the floor. My heart thudded against my ribs when I spotted a two-hundred-year-old Spanish diary with a freshly-cracked spine and pages pulled loose. It took all my willpower to keep from switching the shock-gun to setting six. Busting into my house was one thing, but someone would pay for this.

The framed space shuttle print on my wall had fallen, and triangles of glass littered the floor. Both the commander and the pilot from that mission had autographed the picture for me. That must have been the crash we heard from outside.

“Nobody’s been back here, either,” Lena called. “The house is empty.”

I picked up the diary and carefully placed it on the desk. There was a bookbinder over in Presque Isle who should be able to repair the damage. I found my new e-reader on the floor beneath the chair. Small electronics were some of the most common targets for burglars, but they had destroyed the reader instead of taking it. The screen looked as if it had been shot at close range.

I sat down in front of the computer. Smudge scurried over to perch on a Petoskey stone paperweight I had gotten for my one-year anniversary at the library. He was still antsy, and I moved several books out of reach of his flames.

I wasn’t worried about my data. Gutenberg himself would have trouble getting past the safeguards Victor Harrison had installed in our networks, and most of my research was backed up on the Porter network. But why take the time to destroy the computer?

Bits of broken plastic peppered the floor. A hole the width of my index finger was bored through the case. I held down the power key, then cycled the computer back on. I wasn’t hoping for much, but the screeching clatter from inside made me jump back.

It wasn’t the hard drive this time. A large silver beetle crawled out of the hole. Gleaming wings buzzed, and it zoomed past my ear before vanishing into the hall.

“What was that?” Lena asked from the doorway.

“Some sort of scarab beetle, I think.” Except that scarab beetles from Michigan would be darker in color, and were unlikely to be nesting in my computer. I crouched on the floor and peeked into the hole, keeping my eye back in case there were more. When nothing attacked my face, I popped the side off of the case to study the machine’s guts. Ordinary beetles wouldn’t have chewed through both plastic and metal, either. “Did you see which way it flew?”

Something buzzed within the computer. I dropped it and jumped back as a second, smaller beetle crawled out from between the hard drives. This one flew straight for the window, striking hard enough to chip the glass. Smudge raced across the desk in hot pursuit.

By the time I reached the window, the thing had chewed its way outside, right through the double-paned glass and the metal screen.

Lena sagged against the wall. “I think I know where it’s going.”

I swore as I realized what she meant. If these things had bored through glass and plastic, how much damage could they do to an oak, even a magically strengthened one?

Smudge circled the hole in the window, as if searching for the best way to squeeze through. I tapped the window, trying to get his attention before he decided to melt his way through the glass. A piece of candy brought him scurrying back to my shoulder.

By the time I flipped on the lights out back, Lena was heading for the garden she had planted two months ago. Rosebushes walled the garden, all save an archway in the front. The branches and thorns were strong enough to repel deer and other creatures. Two varieties were in bloom, one a deep, smoky purple, the other yellow. Most of the flowers were as large as my hand.

In the very back, protected by climbing rose vines, Lena’s oak stood on the boundary between my yard and the woods beyond. The leaves were thicker than any of the surrounding trees, and smaller branches shone with new bark where they had sprouted in the past months. I followed her outside and ducked through the arch of thorns, stepping carefully between the corn and the red peppers.

Lena reached for me with her free hand. Taking mine in hers, she pressed my palm to the rough bark, avoiding the rose thorns that could have pierced my hand. Lena’s fingertips slipped between mine, sinking into the bark as if it were soft clay. “What do you feel?”

Most days, I couldn’t distinguish between Lena’s tree and any other. My magic simply wasn’t strong enough. Few Porters had that kind of power, which was why libriomancy had spread so quickly. Books gave us a crutch, allowing us to draw on the belief and will of others to supplement our own power.

Today was different. I was raw and exposed from my spells in Tamarack. My barriers were down, meaning I was better able to feel and manipulate magic.

I felt her connection to the oak, the sense of stability and timelessness. The roots ran deep, and while the tree might sway with the wind, it was so much stronger than any human. Much like Lena herself.

This wasn’t the first time I had felt the magic of Lena’s tree, but never before had I wanted so badly to pull away. An itching sensation spread through my skin, as if something were squirming and burrowing through my muscles. I fought the urge to scratch until I bled. If it was this unpleasant for me, what was Lena feeling?

She swore and yanked her hand back. Her fingertips were bleeding. I spotted tiny metal pincers snapping from a small hole in the wood, but the insect retreated before I could get a closer look.

“Whatever they are, they’re killing my tree.”