Libriomancer

Chapter 23

I looked up at the ceiling, imagining the sky beyond. The automaton was battered and possibly dying, but surely I had enough strength to make it back to the moon. Could I reach Mars in the time I had left?

Lena reached for the exposed wood of my face. I pushed her aside. “You’d be risking your life.”

“I heard the old man, too,” she snapped. “And I’m not interested in any noble bullshit. I’m not letting you die in that thing. Now shut up and hold on.”

She grabbed my forearm in one hand and cupped my face in the other. Chunks of black wood crumbled away as she tightened her grip on my arm, but she simply squeezed harder. It was a gruesome sight, and I thanked Gutenberg again for not giving his creations a sense of pain.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m not sure.”

I heard her voice inside me, even as the automaton’s senses picked up her words. Her warmth infused the cold, dead wood of my body. Her emotions twined with mine, hot and passionate. Metal blocks fell away, ringing against the floor as she pressed deeper into my body.

Whatever magic had created Lena Greenwood, her emotions were as genuine and powerful as any I had ever felt. Perhaps more so. It shamed me that I had ever believed otherwise.

I saw her love for Doctor Shah. Through Lena’s eyes, I saw not the calm, detached psychiatrist who had oh-so-coldly signed the papers that once ended my dreams of magic, but a passionate, devoted woman who walked the border between magic and mundane, giving everything she could to try to help those who fought the demons and the darkness.

I saw Shah’s grief when a Porter named Jared killed himself four years ago: the deep, shaking sobs she had refused to let anyone but Lena see. I shared Lena’s helplessness as she tried to comfort her lover. In the end, Shah’s grief transformed to determination. Shah worked even harder to help those she could, like a libriomancer whose husband was killed by a spell gone wrong.

I also saw Lena’s memories of the attack a week before. I heard the crash of furniture from inside the house, where Shah struggled against impossible foes to try to give Lena a few more seconds, and I felt Lena’s anguish as her own strength failed her. I shared her fear, her despair at the death of her tree, and the seductiveness of its death. A part of her had wanted to give up then, to enter her tree and never emerge.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. To Lena. To Nidhi Shah as well.

“I told you to shut up.”

As Lena focused her attention on me, I touched new memories. I saw myself as she saw me, practically glowing with excitement as I worked over the fallen automaton at Hubert’s cabin. I watched my passion and joy turn to outrage as I realized what Gutenberg had done.

I saw my grief over Ray’s death as we examined his apartment, and my pathetically transparent attempts to keep that grief and pain to myself, to project an aura of strength.

I saw everything. Lena’s earliest memory, stumbling forth from a tree with no awareness of who or where she was. Her first kiss with Nidhi Shah. A trip they had taken to Wyoming so Lena could try to climb Devil’s Tower, and the nights they had spent in their tent together.

I had always known Lena was strong enough to break me like a twig, but I had never comprehended her strength as a person. She understood exactly what she was. She knew that someday she would lose Nidhi Shah, and when that happened she would lose herself as well. She knew, and she wasn’t afraid.

Even the murder of her tree and the loss of her lover hadn’t broken her. She had grieved as deeply as anyone, but like Shah, she turned that grief into another source of strength. She had sought me out, determined to live, to choose what she would become.

As I explored Lena Greenwood, she did the same, seeing me from within.

“Wait, you went to the moon?” I felt Lena’s amazement and laughter, her pride as she relived those memories with me, sharing my delight at fulfilling a childhood dream, my sense of wonder as I stared up at our world overhead. My awe at what I had done, and my excitement as I realized how much more magic could accomplish.

It was in that moment, as I saw myself through her eyes, that Lena reached deeper and pulled.

I clamped my fingers around her hand without thinking. My true fingers: flesh and blood, and cold like winter snow as they left the emptiness of the automaton’s body and emerged into the night air.

For several seconds I existed in two bodies at once. The automaton stumbled, and my awareness jolted backward, trying instinctively to recover my balance.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” Lena’s grip tightened hard enough that my knuckles popped. She pulled harder.

Metal letters dropped like rain. Pain exploded in my side. I gasped and fell into Lena’s arms. Blood flowed down my side. I had been dying when I crawled into the automaton, and the wound remained. I felt her scoop me up and carry me to the cot. I curled my body into a ball and clutched my side, barely able to think beyond the pain.

It radiated out from where Lena had stabbed me. I couldn’t breathe. Lena’s bokken must have punctured a lung.

“Don’t move.” Lena stood over me, examining the metal sword Gutenberg had left. I pointed to my wound, pantomiming what needed to be done. She gripped the hilt in one hand and the blade in the other, aiming the tip at the center of the blood pooling on my side.

I closed my eyes. I knew the sword was made to heal, but that didn’t mean I wanted to watch her stab me with it.

Warmth spread through my ribs, and I gasped, filling my lungs for the first time in what felt like weeks.

I looked up to see Lena dragging the sword through my body like an oar, sweeping away injuries both old and new. Not only had I retained the injuries I had suffered before I joined with the automaton, I had somehow managed to gain new ones while trapped within that body. My mind immediately began picking through competing theories as to how that could have happened, but the result was burnt, blistered skin, bruised flesh, and several broken bones.

One by one, Lena sliced my wounds away. I had to close my eyes when she brought the blade to my face. After this, I’d never worry about visiting a dentist again. Nothing they did could compare to Lena fixing my battered jaw with a broadsword.

“That should do it.” The cot shifted as Lena sat down beside me.

I tested my limbs. I felt the same. I looked the same. She had even fixed the scar on the back of my right hand where I had cut myself on Captain Hook’s sword seven years ago. “Um… I don’t suppose I could trouble you for clothes?”

Lena’s eyes sparkled. “Where’s the fun in that?”

Tiny, hot feet tickled my leg as Smudge climbed my body. I held perfectly still, torn between relief and nervousness. He made his way to my shoulder and settled down, watching the door.

“I believe they’re ready,” came Gutenberg’s voice from outside.

I yelped and pulled my knees to my chest as the door swung open and Gutenberg entered, followed by Nicola Pallas and Deb DeGeorge. Pac-Man and another of Pallas’ animals snarled at me, straining at the chains Pallas gripped in her fist. Four automatons stood behind them. I also saw what was left of the automaton I had commandeered.

It stood motionless, the metal blocks scattered in a circle on the floor. Roots had sprouted from the feet, punching into the cement floor. Green buds clung to the fingertips. Tiny branches like shiny brown spikes protruded from the neck and head.

“Not bad,” said Gutenberg. He held one of the buds in his fingertips.

“Not bad at all.” Lena was still looking at me. My neck grew warm.

Gutenberg’s brows rose, but he said nothing as he picked up both Excalibur and the sword Lena had used to heal me. Pallas stepped past him, studying me from one angle after another, all the while humming the Linus and Lucy theme from Charlie Brown. Pac-Man sniffed my feet. The other animal growled, but Pac-Man nipped it on the ear, and the growl changed to a yip of pain.

“Sit,” Pallas snapped. Both animals dropped to their haunches. Blood matted Pac-Man’s side. The other one trembled, as if it could barely restrain itself from ripping out my throat.

Deb stood in the doorway, looking like she wanted nothing more than to flee. She was covered in dust and dirt, and her skin was paler than before. She kept one hand to her hip, and her face was taut with pain. “Good to see you in one piece, hon.”

“What’s going on?” asked Lena. Her attention was on Pallas’ animals. She kept her fingers spread, ready to seize them both.

Gutenberg held up a hand, waiting for Pallas to finish whatever she was doing. She took her sweet time, getting far too up close and personal for my taste, before straightening. Only then did the humming stop. She had gone for at least five minutes without pausing for breath.

“It’s him,” she said, hauling her beasts back. “ Only him.”

“In the flesh,” I said weakly.

It was Deb who finally took pity on me. She unzipped her jacket and handed it to me.

I hesitated. “No offense, but the last time I saw you, you shot up my living room and then tried to poison me.”

“That will not happen again,” Gutenberg said firmly. “I took a page from your book, Isaac. Nothing so crude as the bomb you implanted in Ted Boyer, but I promise you Ms. DeGeorge will not act against us in the future.”

Deb scowled, but didn’t say anything.

I wrapped the jacket around my waist like a makeshift kilt, tying the sleeves together at the hip. “How did you get back so quickly? Wait, how long were we in there?”

“Long enough for us to begin cleaning up the damage Hubert did.” Gutenberg returned the sword to its book. “I left you three hours ago.”

Three hours. It had felt like minutes.

“It’s a disaster,” Deb said quietly. “Like a bomb went off at the daycare center.”

“We have people working the perimeter,” Gutenberg went on. “They’ll keep the mundanes out and the vampires in until we can cover up the most obvious signs of magic.”

“Signs like a big freaking elevator shaft into the center of the Earth?” Deb asked. “Yeah, people might have a few questions about that.”

“How many…?” Lena asked quietly.

“Our preliminary count is between thirty and forty humans dead,” said Pallas. “Most were killed by vampires in the chaos. We won’t have a verified casualty list for at least a week. We’ll be monitoring the morgues to make sure everyone stays dead. At least a hundred more saw the fighting. Information on vampire casualties is rougher, since few of them leave corpses behind. We estimate that the automatons slaughtered at least fifty. It will be days before anyone can figure out how many more might have fled.”

Close to a hundred lives, maybe more, snuffed out in a single night by one deranged libriomancer.

“The vampires have telepaths among their kind,” Gutenberg said. “They’ll gather up any of their number who might have strayed.”

“And do what with them?” asked Pallas. “They murdered innocent people-”

“They were running for their lives,” Deb shot back. “Running from your killer mannequins.”

“Enough,” Gutenberg interrupted. “I’m not prepared to escalate the war Charles Hubert worked so hard to try to create.”

“So it’s contained?” I stared at them, trying to believe it. Trying to focus not on the death, but on how much worse things could have been. “We stopped Hubert in time?”

“You did,” said Gutenberg. “Though it will take months to fully contain the damage. I’ll be diverting one automaton to Taipei, where the vampires are currently engaged in a full-fledged civil war. Another will go to Kaliningrad to deal with a libriomancer who, in my absence, has been offering his services to the Russian mob.”

“What about Nidhi?” Lena hadn’t left my side. I felt her tremble slightly as she spoke.

“Alive, and human,” said Gutenberg. “Alice Granach has accepted personal responsibility for making sure Doctor Shah is returned to us unharmed.” His voice hardened, making me suspect Granach had been given little choice about that responsibility. “Ms. DeGeorge will escort you to Detroit to meet her.”

“Great, now I’m running an escort service,” Deb muttered.

Gutenberg’s words twisted in my chest. I did my best to keep my reaction from showing. Lena had made her choice the moment she learned Shah was alive and human. I turned to her. “Thank you.” I gestured down at myself. “For this, and for everything else.”

She gave me a halfhearted smile. “I figure it was the least I could do. After stabbing you, and all.”

I chuckled and stared at the ground, wanting to stall, to keep her here a few minutes more.

She looked away, tracking something I couldn’t see. Her fingers shot out to trap a mosquito hovering in the air. She offered the buzzing bloodsucker to Smudge, who cooked and gobbled it down in one quick movement. “You keep him safe, okay?”

I wasn’t sure which one of us she was talking to, but I nodded. I forced myself to release her other hand. “I’m sure Gutenberg will want me to check in with Doctor Shah to make sure my brain’s working properly. I’ll see you then?”

It sounded weak. What were you supposed to say in a situation like this, when it was time for the most amazing woman you’d ever met to return to her lover?

She leaned in and kissed me one last time, her arms tightening around my bare skin. Her forehead pressed against mine. I breathed in, holding the scent of her as long as I could.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered as she pulled away. She followed the others out of the office without looking back, as if she were afraid of what she would do if she hesitated. I watched through the doorway as they vanished with one of the automatons.

Gutenberg stooped to pick a handful of metal letters from the floor. “Now then,” he said. “I believe you had a question for me…”

I swallowed. “I want to know what I saw in Hubert’s mind.”

He picked up another book from the floor and pulled out a pair of pressed black pants, like a magician pulling scarves from his sleeve. Within seconds, he had created an entire tuxedo, which he handed to me without looking, one piece at a time. It was too tight, and didn’t include socks or underwear, but it was a step up from wearing Deb’s jacket.

“James Bond you aren’t,” Gutenberg commented.

I left the top shirt buttons undone and pulled on the jacket while he gathered up the rest of the books from the desk. “You founded the Porters to keep that thing out of our world, didn’t you?”

“In part, yes.” He began stacking books on the desk. “The truth, Isaac, is that I don’t know precisely what they are.”

“They?”

He shrugged. “I believe so, but I know only four things for certain. Whatever they are, they have existed at least as long I have, though they could be far older. As old as the universe itself, perhaps, though I doubt it. In these past centuries, they have grown stronger. They hate with a fury unlike any other. And sooner or later, they will find a way to fully enter our world.” He scowled at me. “Sooner, if idiots like you and Hubert keep flinging magic about with abandon and weakening the boundaries of our world!”

“How many people know about this?” I whispered.

“Twenty-three, now. The risk has always been that shortsighted madmen would work to summon and command these things. It’s happened before.” He opened the office door and walked out into the parking lot, where he stared into the sky. “The first time they struck at me, I thought they were the host of Hell itself. I’ve broadened my theories considerably since then, though I’ve found nothing to either confirm or disprove that original belief.”

“How do you fight them?”

“The same way you fight any enemy. With knowledge.” He smiled. “As I recall, you once expressed interest in a research position…”