Libriomancer (3 page)

Flame whooshed through Mel’s hair. She shrieked and spun, launching Smudge through the air into the computers. I grabbed the top shelf, lifted both feet, and shoved hard.

Vampires might be strong, but Mel’s mass was merely human, and I had physics on my side. She stumbled back, and then Lena’s bokken smashed her forearm, shattering bone.

Mel’s good hand twisted into the leather of Lena’s jacket. The two of them seemed to fly through the library. Mel slammed Lena to the ground by one of the spiral book racks, which toppled over with a loud crash. Mel reached for Lena’s throat.

Lena grabbed the vampire’s arm at the wrist and elbow, then twisted.

Undead or not, Mel could still feel pain. I winced at the loud pop that signaled a dislocated elbow. Behind them, Green Bay let out an animalistic snarl and strained to free himself. The wall behind him cracked.

I retrieved
Vulcan’s Mirror
, skimming the pages until I reopened the magic I had used before. I picked up the disruptor with my other hand and thrust it into the book, letting the text re-form the damaged weapon to its original shape and function before pulling it free once more. Not the safest move, but homicidal vampires qualified as “extenuating circumstances.”

Green Bay finally broke free with an animalistic scream, taking a good chunk of the wall with him. As he staggered toward Mel and Lena, I sighted and pulled the trigger. He vanished in a flare of green energy.

Lena hauled Mel upright. “Your turn. Who ordered the attack in Dearborn?”

“What attack?” I asked. Lena lived in Dearborn, making me wonder what exactly had brought her to my library.

“Shut up, Isaac.”

Mel clenched her fist and swung, connecting with Lena’s jaw. From the way Mel cried out, the blow hurt her as much as it did Lena, but it was enough to let her break free. She spun toward me.

I fired one last time, and Mel vanished.

Lena picked up her remaining bokken. I had vaporized the other along with Green Bay. Keeping her back to me, she ran her fingers over the wood. “What did you do that for?”

Her flat tone took me aback. “Why did I shoot the woman who tried to cut my throat?”

“She was beaten. You didn’t have to kill her.”

“You ran her buddy through with one of your swords!”

“I stopped him. I would have stopped her.” With a sigh, she turned to face me. “They used to be human, until magic changed them into something else. Do you think that girl truly understood what she would become?”

I picked up the butterfly knife Mel had dropped. With the immediate threat passed, I was feeling rather shaky. “I’d have more sympathy if not for the part where she tried to cut my throat.”

“What did they say to you?”

“They thought someone from the Porters had been hunting vampires, and wanted me to tell them who was involved.” I dropped to my knees and crawled beneath the computer desks, searching through tangled cords for any sign of Smudge. I found him hiding in a nest of blue network cables. From the smell of burnt plastic, we’d have to call the computer guy in the morning, but Smudge appeared unharmed. He scurried up onto my shoulder, searing tiny black dots on my sleeve.

“So what did you tell them?” asked Lena.

“Nothing. I’m retired, remember? Nobody tells me anything.” I picked up
Vulcan’s Mirror
again and flipped to chapter eight. I searched the inner edges for char, but this was a new release, and the pages were clean of magical decay. I dissolved the disruptor back into the text and set the book on its cart. “Thank you.”

She picked up one of the overturned tables. “Any time.”

I hadn’t seen Lena since I moved back up north two years ago. The last I knew, she was the only dryad living in North America, and was currently serving as live-in bodyguard for Doctor Nidhi Shah, a downstate shrink who worked with a number of “unusual” clients. Myself included, back in the day.

“You mentioned another attack. What’s going on, Lena?”

She returned to the doorway to check outside. “From what I can tell, the vampires have declared war on the Porters.”

Chapter 2

T
HE IDEA OF VAMPIRES DECLARING WAR
on the Porters was about as ridiculous as the Upper Peninsula marching to war against Canada.

Originally known as Die Zwelf Portenære or The Twelve Doorkeepers, the Porters had been around for roughly half a millennium. The original twelve had consisted of nine libriomancers, a sorcerer, a bard, and an alchemist. All save two were long dead, but the organization had grown over the centuries, and now numbered between four and five hundred members worldwide.

Its mission was unchanged. Every Porter took an oath to preserve the secrecy of magic, protect the world from magical threats, and work to expand our knowledge of magic’s power and potential.

“Vampires get stronger every year,” Lena commented as she examined the wall where the Green Bay vamp had ripped himself free, exposing the studs. Chunks of plaster littered the carpet.

“I blame Anne Rice. She helped start this whole vampire resurgence back in the late seventies. Then Huff and Hamilton and a few others helped it build . . .” And of course, in more recent times, you had Stephenie Meyer.

Supernatural creatures came about in one of two ways. A handful were natural-born, having evolved alongside Homo sapiens with whatever magical gifts or abilities helped them survive. These days, survival meant concealing their existence, like the deepwater Pacific merfolk or the handful of naga living in Laos.

But the majority of such species were created, thanks in part to the magic of libriomancy.

There were only twenty-four known libriomancers in this country, and we knew better than to go sticking our hands into a vampire scene where we might brush against an exposed fang. But there were always others with potential, readers with natural talents who didn’t understand what they were doing.

Had Mel reached into her book and felt the vampire’s teeth sink into her arm, the magic searing through her veins? Or had she been turned the old-fashioned way by another Meyerii? Lena was right that she couldn’t have truly known what she was getting into, even if she had been given a choice.

“What happened in Dearborn?” I asked. “Is Doctor Shah all right?”

Lena’s eyes tightened as she turned away. “You’ve got company.”

I stepped to one of the wire spinner racks and grabbed an old pulp adventure. I flipped to a familiar page, and my fingers sank into the yellowed paper until I brushed the chrome-and-steel handle of a good old-fashioned laser gun. The weapon was cool to the touch, a quirk of the built-in coolant system that prevented the tiny nuclear battery from going critical.

I tried not to think about that too hard.

“Another gun?” Lena’s eyebrows rose. “Kind of a one-trick libriomancer, aren’t you?”

Outside, a heavyset man with a sweat-slick brow hurried toward the library steps clutching a bolt-action deer rifle in both hands. Damp clumps of hair clung to his worn denim sleeves like tiny brown slivers. “Everyone okay in there?”

“We’re fine, John.” I flipped the metal switch on the laser to power it down before sliding it into my pocket. John and Lizzie Pascoe ran the barbershop across the street. They were great neighbors, always willing to pitch in and help a friend . . . exactly what I didn’t need right now.

John carefully kept his distance as he peered between us. He had never said anything to me, but I knew Smudge made him nervous. “Damn, Vainio. That is one busted library. What the hell were you doing, hosting an open bar for itinerant hockey players?”

I turned around, and it finally began to sink in just how thoroughly we had wrecked the place. Broken shelves spilled piles of books onto the carpet. Cracked and broken monitors lay beside upended tables. The door looked like it had lost a fight with a pissed-off grizzly, and then there was the smashed wall.

“Lizzie called the cops when we heard the commotion,” said John.

“Thanks.” Explaining this to the police was going to be almost as hard as explaining to my boss. “We had a wolf.”

“A wolf?” John repeated, his skepticism as thick as the smell of pipe tobacco on his breath.

“Someone must have left the back door open last night,” I said. “I figure it came inside to get out of the rain and hid in the basement. Squeezed up onto the furnace to keep warm. When I went down to investigate, it freaked.”

John’s face screwed up in a scowl. “And the hippies down in Lansing want to protect the damn things.”

I doubted John would be happy to know which side I had been on during the last battle over keeping wolves on the endangered species list. The DNR was right that the wolf population had returned to healthier levels, but the Porters continued to fight to regulate the hunting and killing of wolves . . . and more importantly, to help protect the werewolf packs living in the wilds of the U. P. “It didn’t hurt anyone. Just made a little mess, that’s all.”

“A little mess?”

I forced a grin. “It knocked over some shelves and tables, and toppled Smudge’s cage. Scared the poor thing half to death. But all the wolf wanted was to get away.”

“You’re a lucky man, Isaac.”

“Believe me, I know.” I glanced at Lena, who had thrust her bokken through her belt and was standing with folded arms. “Lena here chased it off.”

She took that as her cue, holding out her hand. “Lena Greenwood. I heard the commotion from outside. I found Isaac trying to fend the wolf off with some old science fiction book.”

“That sounds like Isaac,” John said with a laugh. He looked her up and down before returning the handshake. “So you went after the wolf with a stick?”

“Bokken,” Lena corrected. “I’m a second dan in kendo, and I’ve also studied gatka—Indian stick fighting. I figured I had a better chance than he did.”

John grunted. “You’re a friend of his?”

“I worked with him once or twice, downstate.”

“Isaac doesn’t talk much about his life as a troll,” he said.

Lena shot me a quizzical glance.

“Folks who live in lower Michigan,” I clarified. “Below the bridge.”

Sirens screamed in the distance. I stepped past John and checked the street. We had acquired a few gawkers, but there was no sign of more vampires. Smudge had cooled off, so I trusted we were safe for the moment.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” John clapped my arm, making sure to grab the side away from Smudge. “You look like you’re about two seconds from passing out.”

“Adrenaline.” That and the normal aftereffects of magic. It would be several hours before my heart slowed to its normal rate. It would take even longer for the emotional thrill to fade. “I’m just a little shaken.”

The police were getting closer. If they started questioning Lena or looking into her background, I’d be in even more of a mess than I was. “Lena, why don’t you wait for me at my place? I’ll be over as soon as I’m finished here. I’m on Red Maple Drive, on the east edge of—”

“I know.” She pulled me into a quick hug that probably looked spontaneous to John. Her fingers laced behind my neck, and her breath tickled my ear. “Be
careful
this time. Keep Smudge and your books with you, and watch your back.”

She nodded to John and hopped down the steps, where she strode toward the motorcycle parked a short way up the street. She tucked the bokken into a case strapped to the side of her bike, pulled a green helmet over her head, and pulled away.

John’s lips quirked. “You’ve been holding out, boy. How long have you and she—”

“Lena’s just a friend.” A friend I barely knew, and hadn’t seen in several years. A friend whose woodsy smell lingered pleasantly in my nose. I could still feel the heat of her body pressing against mine.

“Right, ’cause all of my ‘friends’ hug me like that.”

“Jealous?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.” John grinned and glanced over his shoulder, as if to make sure his wife hadn’t overheard.

“You know, you might not want to be standing here with a rifle when the cops start asking questions,” I said gently.

He chuckled and pulled back the bolt of his gun, ejecting a bullet, which he slid into his shirt pocket. “You let us know if you need anything,” he said over his shoulder as he left. “I can talk to my brother about fixing that door if you want. He’s a damn good carpenter, though I’ll deny it if you tell him I said so.”

“Thanks, John.” I headed back inside as the police car stopped in front of the library, lights flashing. I reached up to pet Smudge, gently brushing the bristles along his back, then returned him to his cage. I had just enough time to dissolve the laser pistol back into its book before the police officer knocked on the doorframe.

I barely heard. Other books called to me from the shelves, their long-lost whispers as sweet and seductive as Lena’s fingers trailing over my neck. There were items in those pages that would hypnotize the police and my boss both, letting me speed through the inevitable questions and get back home to find out what the hell was going on.

“Sir, are you all right?”

I gripped the edge of the desk and nodded. Using magic to protect my life was one thing, but the emergency had passed, at least for the moment. As I turned my back on the shelves, I felt the same aching despair in my gut that I had experienced two years ago after walking away from all things magical.

Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods and suffered the consequences. I had returned the gift of the gods, and the price had been my dreams.

“I’m fine.” I forced those memories down and walked over to talk to him and his partner.

For the rest of the day, I recited essentially the same story I had given John, while passersby stared and gossiped from the sidewalk. A fire truck showed up at one point, sirens screaming. I overheard enough to know I had Mrs. Trembath to thank for that one.

“We’ll have someone from DNR stop by to check the basement,” another officer said as she walked out of the library. “You might want to talk to an exterminator, too. We found small holes bored through some of those studs by the door.”

I swallowed, remembering Lena’s comment about her living bokken putting out roots. “Thanks.”

“Isaac!” The shout came from a forty-something woman making her way up the sidewalk.

“That’s my boss,” I said. “Do you mind if I go fill her in?”

The cop gave me a sympathetic smile. “Good luck.”

Jennifer Latona had moved to Copper River shortly before me, taking over for the previous library director after he retired. She wasn’t completely comfortable with small town life yet, and it often felt like she was trying to prove herself.

She climbed the stairs to look inside, then spun back around. The steps gave her almost a foot of height over me. “The police said there was a wolf in my library.”

“Nobody was hurt, and the insurance company should cover the damage.” Just as long as nobody found out what had
really
done this. Few policies covered acts of vampires.

“There was a wolf. In
my
library.” She ran her fingers through her frazzled hair.

“The spider doesn’t seem so bad now, does he?”

That earned a glare. I was saved by a passing fireman who commented, “Could have been worse, eh? Eight years back, we had a bear get into the corner store down the street. Gorged himself on chocolate and smashed the Slushee machine to pieces.”

“I want new doors on this place,” Jenn said firmly. “Steel doors, with deadbolts.”

“John said his brother could do the work. I’ll give him a call. I can also get that insurance paperwork started, if you want.”

She nodded, glaring at the library as if trying to will the damage to repair itself. There was a witch down in El Salvador who could have done exactly that, but she charged way too much for this kind of job.

I gestured at the crowd and the flashing lights. “I’ll have an easier time of it if I work from home . . .”

“There was a wolf in my
library
.”

I took that as permission. A minute later, Smudge and I were in my truck speeding toward home, Lena, and—hopefully—some answers.