Codex Born

7

Frank Dearing died in late autumn, after the trees had shed their leaves, but before the snow arrived to freeze the earth.

I was asleep in my oak when he died. The shock felt as though lightning had split my tree, blackening the exposed heartwood. I ran to the house as quickly as I could, but even before I reached the bedroom, I knew he was gone.

He looked little like the man I loved. His eyes were open, and his lips were pale and dry. He had been sleeping in red long johns, which smelled of urine. His upper body was bare, and the skin on his chest was unnaturally pale.

I scooped him into my arms. His limbs hung limp. Even his skin sagged loosely, emphasizing the bones beneath.

My thoughts were clouded as if I had been drinking, though I had spent much of the night in my oak, and time in my tree usually cleansed alcohol and its effects from my body. I didn’t know what to do. I had no other friends, nor had I ever wanted or needed any. Frank was my world.

I acted on instinct, carrying him from the house. I wove carefully through the trees, making sure not a single branch snagged my lover’s hair or scratched his skin. I hated the coolness of his body against me. My tears dripped onto his chest.

When I reached my oak, my first impulse was to bring him into the tree with me and never emerge, but that felt wrong. Disrespectful and wasteful.

I knew human burial customs, but I couldn’t let Frank be locked away in a box, buried forever in the earth while the ex-wife who had turned her back on him waited impatiently to scavenge through his belongings.

I rested him gently at the base of my tree and drew a blanket of leaves over his body. Only then did I retreat into my tree, where I could feel his weight pressing down on my roots.

This was proper. This was love and respect for the dead.

I reached deeper into the wood of my oak. The roots curled inward, digging through the cold, hard dirt to peel open the earth. Other roots eased Frank into the newly dug hole, curling around him like a blanket and sliding him closer to the taproot.

Frank and I had been together for so many years. I couldn’t lose him. I wouldn’t. His body would sustain my tree, becoming part of me and giving me the strength to survive his loss.

I MIGHT HAVE BEEN the only one in the room who understood Nidhi’s curses, the Gujarati words she spat so quickly I could barely keep up.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Victor’s insects went to find his father. How do we get from that to killing wendigos and attacking Lena’s tree?”

Nidhi watched the sleeping girl, her face unreadable. “Does your family know about your abilities, Isaac?”

I shook my head. “My brother walked in on me once while I was practicing pulling coins from Treasure Island, but I don’t think he saw anything.”

Deb’s lips pursed like she had eaten something sour. “My family doesn’t, but the Porters cost me a fiancé about fifteen years back.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“You don’t know everything about me, hon.”

“Victor’s father is a monster.” Nidhi turned to face us. “August Harrison beat his wife for years. That lasted until Victor was eleven years old. Two days after August broke his wife’s nose, Victor was watching through the window as his father mowed the lawn. He enchanted the family car, which smashed through the garage door and tore across the yard. August tried to get away, but he wasn’t fast enough. The car broke his femur. He spent more than a month in traction.”

I gave a low, soft whistle. Victor had always seemed so pleasant and easygoing, with half his attention permanently lost in his work. “And that’s the guy he wanted when he was dying?”

“Victor’s mother died eight years ago,” said Nidhi. “He had no siblings, no spouse. August Harrison was the only family he had left. And their relationship was…complex.”

Jeff snarled. “Doesn’t sound complex to me. Rip the bastard’s throat out and be done with it.” I relayed his comment for the others.

“When August finally returned from the hospital, he acted like he had changed,” Nidhi continued. “He apologized to his wife and son, and promised to make things better. Two days later, he took Victor out to dinner, bought him several new toys, and asked Victor to teach him magic.”

“Power and control,” Lena said softly.

“Exactly,” said Nidhi. “August used violence to control his family, but that was only one tactic of many. He threatened Victor’s mother to control his son, and threatened the son to control the mother. He kept tight rein over the finances and their social connections, making them dependent upon him for everything. Magic would have been one more weapon in his arsenal. And Victor was a child. He loved his father. For that reason, and because he thought it would appease August’s temper, Victor tried to do as his father had asked.”

“An eleven-year-old trying to teach a grown man magic?” That couldn’t have ended well. Magical ability almost always manifested during childhood or adolescence. If August had the slightest potential for magic, it would have shown up long before then. Victor had been untrained. He wouldn’t have known how he had controlled the car, let alone how to impart that understanding to others.

“He couldn’t do it,” Nidhi said. “Every failure enraged August further. He accused Victor of lying, of deliberately keeping his secrets to himself. He never again laid a finger on his wife, but he beat Victor three more times. The third time, Victor fought back.”

“How?”

Her lips twitched. “Do you remember Teddy Ruxpin?”

“Sure. My grandparents got me one when I was a kid. Stupid thing gave me nightmares.” I stopped when I realized where she was going with this. “Victor attacked his father with a talking teddy bear? All it did was move its eyes and mouth while it played cassette tapes.”

“Not when Victor was done with it,” Nidhi said. “That teddy bear climbed onto the mantel, leaped out, and garroted August with a length of mint dental floss. They left him unconscious on the floor.”

“Why would Victor reach out to him?” Lena shook her head in disbelief.

“Death is rarely rational,” Nicholas said absently. He appeared far more interested in the dead than the living.

I couldn’t hold Victor’s dying mistake against him. I just hoped we would be able to fix that mistake before August Harrison did any further damage. “Why didn’t the Porters wipe August’s memories?”

“In the beginning, they didn’t realize how much he had seen,” said Nidhi. “Victor refused to talk about the abuse. His parents told the Porters they thought Victor had been playing in the car, and the whole thing was an unfortunate accident. As far as we knew, neither of them suspected anything magical. We didn’t learn the truth until months later, when Victor told us how his father had cowed the family into silence. The Porters visited August Harrison and did their best to erase his knowledge.”

“That obviously didn’t work,” I said bitterly.

“It did for a time.” Nidhi sighed. “Victor was never as careful with magic as he should have been. Over the years, August must have seen enough to piece the truth back together.”

My parents and I hadn’t always gotten along, but I couldn’t imagine growing up as Victor had. I knew he had done time as a field agent, but I had never been able to imagine him facing off against monsters or magic-wielders gone bad. Now I understood. Monsters wouldn’t scare a man who had grown up with one.

“If August has no magic, how does he control the insects?” asked Lena.

“Nicholas—Victor—said something about a telepathic interface.” August couldn’t have built the insects, any more than he could have pulled my shock-gun from its book. But once I made that gun, anyone could point and shoot. Likewise, if the queen was telepathic, August didn’t need magic. “We know he has the queen. Who was the libriomancer with him?”

“August Harrison had no friends among the Porters,” Nidhi said. “The few people who knew of him felt nothing but contempt.”

“What happens if the queen dies?” asked Deb. “Do the rest of the bugs drop dead, or do they freak out and go after anything that moves?” When nobody answered, she punched Nicholas on the shoulder. “That was your cue to ask the dead guy.”

Nicholas scowled, but turned back toward the place where Victor had died. “Victor isn’t certain what will happen if the queen is killed. Her loss would stop them from breeding or evolving, but—”

“Breeding?” Three of us spoke at once.

“Victor used a fractal matrix for the core spells, allowing the queen’s magic to be passed on.” His eyes crinkled with amusement. “The insects aren’t the true danger. Victor says you should be more concerned about the knowledge they could hold. They were designed to interface with his personal computer network, to better share their findings.”

I sat down on the undersized pink desk chair and stared at the wall where Victor’s backup server had once sat. He had disguised the machine as a potted cactus. I remembered the first time I sensed the power coming from Victor’s system, and his mischievous smile as he watched me try to figure out what I was looking at.

Jeff cocked his head and let out a sharp grunt, somewhere between a bark and a growl. Of us all, he was the only one who wouldn’t understand the implications.

I had no idea what a fractal matrix was, but that was the least of our problems. “Victor Harrison designed most of the security for the Porter network.” Anyone else who tried to hack our database would be lucky to survive in their natural shape, but if Victor had programmed his pets to avoid such traps, and if they had access to his system and software…

“August Harrison could have everything,” Nidhi whispered. “Personnel records. Histories.”

“Research reports.” My reports. “Oh, God.”

“What’s wrong?” Lena asked.

I swallowed to keep from throwing up. In my mind, I was back in the woods, standing over the broken body of the murdered wendigo. My throat felt like it had turned to stone.

Lena touched my arm. “Isaac?”

“He wanted their skins,” I whispered. “That’s why August had to butcher them while they were alive. Wendigos revert to human form when they die, and he needed the monster. He wanted to take their power. Their strength.”

“How do you know?” asked Lena.

“Because I wrote the paper explaining how to do it.”

They were all staring at me. “Explain,” Jeff snarled.

Eight years ago, I had never met a nonhuman. Ray had told me stories of vampires and werewolves, but they weren’t real. Not yet. “This was when I first started training with Ray Walker down in East Lansing. We were talking about the nature of magical creatures.”

I had come dangerously close to failing out of my first semester at MSU. I hadn’t cared about my introductory courses. Why waste my time in a lecture hall when I could be studying magic? My textbooks sat unopened while I tore through magical theory and history. I skipped labwork in order to practice using my own powers.

“Libriomancy is an extrinsic magic. I use books to pull magic into myself before I can manipulate that magic. Werewolves and vampires use intrinsic magic. Your bodies use that energy automatically. You can’t control the process any more than I can consciously manufacture white blood cells. We’ve known for centuries that intrinsic and extrinsic magic couldn’t exist in the same person. It’s why Deb lost her libriomancy when she changed.”

“Get to the point,” Deb said.

“Back in the 1920s, a group of Porters were searching for a way to use intrinsic magic without losing their other abilities. They…they started by investigating werewolves.”

Jeff’s lips pulled back, and his hackles were up again.

“Werewolves show up in folktales throughout the world,” I said. “Armenian stories talk of God punishing women by wrapping them in cursed wolf pelts. The women are human during the day, but monsters at night, murdering and feasting on their loved ones. Other cultures tell of skin-walkers, humans who take on the power of wolves and other beasts by donning their fur. The Úlfhednar of Norway dressed in wolfskins and were said to be all but unstoppable. Countless fairy tales talk of enchanted belts that transform the unsuspecting into monsters.”

I was stalling, presenting background information instead of jumping to the heart of my confession. Nidhi knew it, too. I could tell from the crease between her eyebrows.

“They experimented to see if werewolf skins retained their magic, and if that intrinsic magic from…from freshly harvested samples…could be transferred to human beings.”

Jeff lunged at me, but Lena moved just as fast. She kicked him in the side, and his jaws clacked shut, missing me by inches. Jeff’s claws scraped the floor, but before he could recover, Lena was kneeling on his neck. She clutched her bokken in both hands, holding it like a quarterstaff, and ready to strike with either end.

“Their work wasn’t sanctioned,” I said. “When Gutenberg found out, he put an end to it.” The researchers had been transferred to other regions. A slap on the wrist, considering what they had done.

“What did you do?” Jeff growled.

“Their experiments failed. The skins didn’t preserve the magic long enough to be useful.” When I read their papers eight years ago, I hadn’t thought about werewolves. I had been too busy thinking about the possibilities. What if infusing people with magic could be as easy as applying a nicotine patch?

“You thought wendigo skins might work better,” Lena said.

“Their results suggested a process of rapid magical and biological decay,” I said miserably. “I thought the cold might slow or even stop that process.”

Jeff had stopped struggling, but his ears were flat against his head.

“The Porters have…samples…from various species,” I said. “I requisitioned—Ray helped me to order a patch of wendigo hide. About two square inches, packed in dry ice. We used rats from the pet store, shaving their fur and applying a tiny square. Two didn’t respond at all, but the third showed increased strength and hostility. The changes lasted for several days.”

“How do you collect these samples?” Jeff snarled.

“When a werewolf goes feral, the pack hunts him or her down. Other magical creatures aren’t as self-regulating, so the Porters have to get involved.” I stared through the window. “The bodies are brought back for study and disposal.”

“You said wendigos revert to human form when they die,” Lena said.

“I know.” I couldn’t look at her. “I suspect they put the wendigo into some kind of stasis. It wouldn’t have felt anything.”

It had all been so logical eight years ago. Only a handful of intrinsically magical creatures were sentient. Most were closer to animals. The more we could learn, the better we’d be able to manage them, even protect them when necessary.

How much of our work had August Harrison been able to access? He must have found Victor’s notes, and he had obviously discovered my research papers. Had he been searching specifically for ways to gain power, or had he stumbled onto my reports by accident?

“Did you or anyone else proceed to human trials with wendigo skins?” Nidhi asked. Both her words and her expression were professionally neutral.

“Not that I know of.” The vampires appeared nonplussed by my revelations, but then, I wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t know. Deb might not have been familiar with every one of my projects, but she knew the Porters’ research practices, just as she knew our history was stained by those who occasionally traded ethics for results. No doubt she had shared everything with her new masters.

“Beat yourself up later,” Lena snapped. “Jeff, I’m going to let you up now. I’d thank you to not rip out my lover’s throat. Whatever those Porters did, they died years ago. Should I kill you because some other werewolf murdered innocent people a hundred years ago?”

She eased back, and Jeff clambered to his feet. His fur hadn’t flattened back out, but he didn’t try to kill me.

Lena turned to Nicholas. “Ask Victor if there’s another way to stop his creations. A self-destruct phrase, a backup queen, anything.”

Nicholas chuckled as he relayed Lena’s question. “Destroy the queen, and her death might spread through her children.”

Which would be perfect, if we had the queen. “Is there a way to duplicate her song?”

“Not by you. Victor took great care to make sure his creations could not be ‘hacked.’” Nicholas frowned at that last word, making me wonder how long he had been locked away from the world. “He believed that if anything were to happen to his queen, he would simply make another.”

“Can he tell us how?” I asked.

A sudden flare of heat seared my thigh. Banners of flame rippled from Smudge’s back as he darted to and fro in his cage. Lena caught my eyes and gestured to the door. I checked the hallway while Lena moved toward the bedroom window.

The window cracked as if struck by a stone, and Lena jumped back.

“Ah,” said Nicholas. “The ghosts have found us at last, and they’ve brought Victor’s children home.”

I yanked out my shock-gun. “What ghosts?”

Two metal wasps were attacking the window, while another trio clung to the screen. I crossed the room, held the barrel of my gun six inches from the glass, and pulled the trigger.

I liked to tell myself I had chosen the shock-gun to practice with because it was a practical, multi-purpose weapon. At its highest setting, it could take down a zombified elephant, and at its lowest it would knock a human unconscious with no long-term damage. Nor would it draw undue attention, being designed to mimic an ordinary twenty-first-century handgun.

Those were all good and valid reasons, but the truth was, I picked this one because I got to shoot evil with lightning bolts.

The discharge etched a jagged line across my vision, and the smell of ozone filled the room. The sound was nowhere near as loud as natural thunder, but it was enough to make my ears ring. The blast shattered the window, leaving blobs of melted glass around the edges of the frame. A single insect glowed orange in the molten glass. I peered outside and spotted two men on the patio below. No, not men.

I jerked back as more wasps flew toward us. I fired again, but this time what emerged was little more than a spark of static electricity. “Oh, come on,” I shouted. This gun was supposed to have enough ammo for more than a hundred shots.

The insects buzzed through the window and converged on Nicholas. He ripped two away even as more began to burrow into his chest. He crushed one between his fingers and tried to dig out the next, but he wasn’t fast enough.

He spasmed as if he was the one who had been hit by lightning. His eyes bulged, and then his features eased into a smile. “Exquisite,” he whispered. He took a single step and exploded into dust.

One of the wasps flew up from the ground, trailing dust like tiny contrails. Deb’s hand shot out, trapping the insect between thumb and forefinger. She had it halfway to her mouth before she stopped and seemed to realize what she was doing. She caught me staring and shrugged. “Instincts.”

“Yeah.”

She made a face, popped the bug into her mouth, and chomped. Blood dribbled from her lip, but she kept chewing, and soon spat out bits of broken metal.

Lena stomped the other two, grinding them into the carpet with a vicious twist of her heel. Behind her, Nidhi was carefully lifting the girl in her arms.

The vamp with the glasses, Rook, scaled the wall like a spider, rifle in one hand as he peeked out the upper corner of the window. “I’m heading for the roof to get a better look—”

He squawked in surprise as he lost his grip and fell, landing hard on a LEGO castle and a green pony.

At the same time, the girl Nidhi was holding squirmed and mumbled, “Don’t wanna get up.”

“Focus, Sarah,” Deb snapped. “Keep them under.”

The vampire stared at the girl. “I’m trying,” she said. “It’s not working.”

Lena grabbed Nidhi, dragged her and the girl into the hall, and shoved them in the closet. “Stay there,” Lena said, shutting the door.

I heard the girl screaming, “No! Stranger! Let go of me!” as Nidhi tried to calm her.

Rook remained behind to watch the window while the rest of us made our way downstairs. Deb and Sarah simply vaulted over the railing, landing silently on the carpet below. “We’ve got more out front,” Sarah called.

In the family room, the three-legged Lab had woken up and started barking. From the kitchen, a woman—presumably the mother—called, “Estrella?”

The baby was crying, too, and I saw the father stirring. I reduced the setting on my shock-gun. Maybe it just needed time to recharge? I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it on the family. Or their dog.

The father jumped to his feet, then froze. He raised his hands and stepped back, round eyes locked on my gun. “Estrella!”

“Daddy!”

“Estrella is safe.” I kept the shock-gun pointed at the floor as I hurried down the steps.

“Who are you people?” he demanded in Spanish. “What did you do to my daughter?” The three-legged black Lab was doing his best to add to the chaos, barking and jumping and trying to bite Smudge, which put him in the same intellectual league as Nidhi’s cat.

Jeff stepped past me and snarled. The Lab immediately backed away, tail tucked so far between his legs that when he started peeing on the floor, he managed to soak his tail in the process.

“Was that really necessary?” I asked. To the father, I said, “Está a salvo. She’s safe.”

He paled. “Please don’t hurt them.”

Something slammed through the front door hard enough to send splinters of wood flying into the house. Sarah and Lena caught whatever it was by the arms and hurled it right back out, but a second attacker raced through on all fours and knocked Sarah to the ground. A group of metal insects flew at Lena’s face, driving her back.

“Con permiso, Señor Sanchez.” I shoved the father toward the stairs, ducked behind the couch, and swore. Every once in a while, I really hated being right.

The man standing over Sarah was naked from the waist up. A fine layer of white fur covered his skin, and an Ace bandage was wrapped around his upper arm. His lips were blue, and his fingers were blackened from frostbite. Sarah had jabbed one of her stakes into his thighs, but it wasn’t slowing him down.

This time when I pulled the trigger, the shock-gun did exactly what it was supposed to. Electricity cracked through the air, enough to put an ordinary human out for a good twenty-four hours. The partially-transformed wendigo roared in pain, then jumped away before I could fire again. I had blackened the fur on his chest and pissed him off, but that was all.

From the staircase, Mister Sanchez whispered, “Who are you people?”

Before I could come up with an even halfway convincing lie, Deb emerged from the kitchen cradling the baby in one arm and dragging the woman by the wrist. “Isaac, would you mind?”

The mother had a paring knife, and was stabbing it into Deb’s back. I caught her arm, holding her long enough for Deb to grab the knife and snap the blade with one hand. After that demonstration, they allowed Deb to lead them upstairs.

“What’s happening?” the woman demanded, her voice weak. “My daughter—”

“Nidhi, move them all into the bathroom and lock the damn door,” Deb shouted. When she returned, she was clutching her shoulder. Her blood flowed more slowly than it would have in a human, but those cuts had to hurt. “Sarah, whoever’s out there, put them down now!”

“You think I haven’t been trying?” Sarah shot back.

My phone buzzed, startling me and setting Smudge off like a tiny hydrogen bomb. The screen said “Unknown Caller.”

The insects fell back to the doorway. Sarah and Lena kept an eye on the door while Deb, Jeff, and I watched the front window. Keeping my gun ready, I brought the phone to my ear. Harrison had hacked my computer and the Porter network. Why wouldn’t he have my cell phone number, too? “Hello, August.”

“You want to tell me what the hell you’re doing in my son’s house?”

Through the window, I could see a muscular, blocky-looking man with a cell phone to his ear, standing in front of a silver SUV. He was clean-shaven with close-cut graying hair. His silhouette matched Victor’s, from the squat build to the flat ears.

He wore an unbuttoned black plaid shirt over what looked like old-fashioned Japanese scale armor, except that the metal scales were alive and moving. Loose khaki pants and brown leather shoes completed the look. If not for the insects, he could have been someone’s crotchety old grandfather.

I couldn’t make out the queen amidst the rest of the insects clinging to his body, but she had to be there. I lowered my gun and turned the chamber to setting five. One shot should be enough to take him down. The man was essentially a walking conductor.

“How did you know we were here?” I asked. If my guess was right, neither I nor the vampires were going to like his answer.

“Your friend Moon,” he said, confirming my gut feeling. “He overheard you talking, and we persuaded him to share. If we’d gotten to your house a little faster, we would have caught you before you left and saved everyone time.”

I studied his companions, trying to figure out how they had overpowered a sparkler. Sanguinarius Meyerii weren’t invulnerable, but they were awfully close.

Three more wendigos stood around Harrison. Their features were too distorted to guess what they had originally looked like. Flattened noses sat atop protruding jaws. Their lips were chapped and bloody, stretched between human and animal. They blinked too much, a side effect I remembered from my research. In rats, the fluids of the eyes had never fully adapted to the change.

Behind them stood a man and a woman who appeared fully human. Each one held an oversized book in their hands. Both were Asian, and looked to be roughly my age, or perhaps a little younger. The woman had a single lock of green-dyed hair framing the left side of her face. The man wore an awful sweater with a piano keyboard design, which was utterly insane for this time of year, but made sense if you had been stuck in a car with a wendigo for ten hours.

“Who are your friends, August?” I didn’t recognize either one, but that meant little. I was familiar with most of the Porters from the Midwest, but Harrison could have recruited help from overseas. But if they were truly libriomancers, why bring only a single book into battle?

“Why don’t you and Lena come out and I’ll introduce you? This doesn’t have to get bloody. The rest of you are welcome to leave.”

“What’s he waiting for?” Deb’s voice was strained. She sat on the bottom step; her head drooped over her knees. The knife must have done more damage than I thought. I was strangely relieved. The fact that Deb hadn’t broken the woman’s neck, despite pain and provocation, meant my friend hadn’t been completely lost to the monster.

“I’m not sure.” I watched Harrison, trying to read his face. Speaking into the phone again, I said, “A minute ago, you used one of your son’s bionic fruit flies to kill one of our companions. Now we’re supposed to just trust you?”

“He was dead long before I got here, and you know it.” Harrison stepped into the middle of the street. “I know all about you, Isaac. I know you’ve got a vampire upstairs watching us, and two more with you and Lena. I know you’ve stuffed the family into the hall closet. And I know that right now you’re trying to figure out some clever plan to stop me.” His voice dropped. “You’re not as smart as you think. Now, you and Lena are going to come with us, unarmed, or my metal friends will kill every family on this street.”

“That’s a bit dark, even for you. Rationalizing the killing of wendigos is bad enough, but these are human beings. You’re an asshole. You’re not a murderer.” I covered the phone. “Lena, get Nidhi down here.”

“There’s an elderly couple two houses down,” Harrison said. “They were playing cards together when your pet vampire knocked them out. How many people will you make me kill before you take this seriously? Do you think the sensation of steel pincers digging through skin and bone will wake them from their trance?”

Interesting. The Sanchez family was awake, but if Harrison was telling the truth, Sarah’s power over the rest of the street hadn’t broken. Assuming it was Harrison’s ersatz libriomancers who had broken Sarah’s hold, that suggested a limit to their range. Or it might mean they had selective control over the magic they countered, and like us, they preferred not to be interrupted.

Lena returned, keeping Nidhi behind her. Assuming Lena had filled her in, I got straight to the point. “Will he do it?”

“I don’t know,” said Nidhi. “I knew the man only through his son.”

“Why does he want the two of us?” Lena asked.

She spread her hands in a silent shrug.

Harrison’s voice buzzed through the phone. “Go ahead and shoot, Isaac.”

“What?” He must have spotted the gun through one of his insects. I switched the phone to speaker so everyone could hear.

“I assume that’s what you’re discussing?” said Harrison. “Whether or not you can take me down before I command my insects to attack? Be my guest. This might be the fastest way for you to learn what you’re facing.”

Nobody bothered pointing out that it was a trick. Some things were too obvious for words. On the other hand, he had seen me holding what looked like an ordinary revolver. Maybe he assumed his metal insects would be strong enough to stop a bullet.

I stood up and walked slowly toward the door, trying to project confidence. Harrison didn’t move. I raised the shock-gun with both hands. He smiled and spread his arms.

With a shrug, I pulled the trigger.

One downside to shooting lightning bolts was that everything happened far too quickly to see. I wasn’t terribly surprised to see Harrison still standing. He wasn’t smiling, though. It looked like he had jumped back a good three feet, which gave me some satisfaction.

I blinked, trying to see the afterimage to reconstruct why the shock-gun had failed. It looked like the bolt had stopped a short distance in front of Harrison. I frowned and tried again.

“Look at the ones with the books,” Nidhi said.

I took a third shot, this time keeping my attention on the woman with the green hair. Before, she and her friend had just been standing there, but now they were chanting. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but their eyes were closed.

If they were libriomancers, they could—in theory—open up the magic of their own books, then use them to absorb my attack. Any shots striking their books would be dissolved back into magic. But they would have had to move in front of Harrison to intercept my incoming fire, and they would have needed to make sure they held their books in exactly the right spot.

“Are you satisfied, Isaac?” Harrison asked. “I’ve been more than patient.”

Deb crawled across the family room floor until she reached the pile of clothes Jeff had discarded when he changed. “Harrison’s friends can mess with people’s magic. How nice.” She dug out Jeff’s pistol and pulled herself up onto the couch.

The crack of gunfire was even louder than my shock-gun, and the metallic scent of gunpowder joined the ozone smell. August Harrison scampered around behind the SUV, but Deb hadn’t been aiming for him. She fired again, and this time Rook joined in from upstairs, sending the libriomancers fleeing for cover.

“What the hell, Deb?” Three wendigos charged toward the house. Rook dropped one, and I sent a lightning bolt into the next. It crackled over the frost and fur, then arced to his friend.

Wasps flew through the hole in the door to swarm over Deb, concentrating on her hands. She shrieked and flung the pistol away, then did her best to crush the bugs drilling into her skin. From the commotion upstairs, they were going after Rook as well.

“Congratulations, Isaac,” Harrison shouted. I could barely hear him over the ringing in my ears. “You’ve just killed two innocent people.”

I shouted into the phone. “Wait! You win! We’re coming out. Everybody stop shooting!” I glanced at Lena, who nodded.

“Get your bugs off of the vampires,” I said.

The wasps stilled, then retreated to the door. “Leave your books and other weapons,” he said. “That goes for the dryad, too.”

I slid my arms from my sleeves and set the jacket carefully on the floor. Smudge’s cage followed, and then the shock-gun.

Lena tossed her bokken onto the floor beside my things. She took my hand in hers and pulled my head down as if to give me a quick kiss. “What now?”

I glanced down at my phone and began to tap out a text message. “Now we take this bastard down.”