Jim Hines - Libriomancer

With my mind working once more, my eagerness grew… and that made me nervous. It was exactly that excitement and determination, the thrill of magic and the need to charge out and avenge the fallen, that had gotten me into trouble before.

“Everything okay back there?” Deb called.

“I’ll be out in a sec.” My face grew hot as I recalled the things I had said to Lena. I glanced back at the office shelves. I had a hundred-year-old copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and a sip from the River Lethe would effectively erase her memory of my oversharing. Or maybe I’d be better off drinking it myself.

I banished that thought and headed to the bedroom to retrieve Smudge, who was racing back and forth, kicking up gravel as he went. The air above his cage was noticeably warmer. “What’s wrong, partner?”

One of these days, someone would write about a magical ring that allowed the wearer to read the mind of a fire-spider. Until then, I was stuck with vague warnings. I opened the blinds and checked outside: nothing. “Deb, is there any chance you could have been followed?”

“I doubt it, but anything’s possible. Why?”

I stared at the cricket box. A cop friend downstate had once described what he called the “pucker effect,” the body’s automatic response when something just wasn’t right. He wasn’t talking about the lips; the puckering happened farther south, and every cop learned to trust that instinct.

I closed the blinds and turned around. Most of my books were in the office or the library, but I could work with what was stacked around the bedroom for late-night reading. A copy of Dune, an urban fantasy by Anton Strout… I skimmed the latter, and soon held the protagonist’s favorite weapon: a heavy metal cylinder that extended to a full-sized bat at the press of a button.

I read Dune next, hoping with each sentence that I was imagining things. Smudge could simply be running hot after the day’s excitement. I certainly was. But he had been calm and cool earlier in the night, before Deb arrived.

I kept the bat in its collapsed state and tucked it into a pocket of my robe, creating a rather embarrassing bulge. If pressed, I could always blame that on my exchange with Lena. I pulled the other side of the robe over the front and cinched the belt tight, hoping neither of my guests would notice.

Finally, just before leaving the room, I opened the small screened-in box with Smudge’s crickets and snatched a fat one from the end of a half-devoured cardboard tube.

When I returned to the library, I found Deb whispering to Lena. Deb glanced up, asking, “How’s your head?”

“Better.” I stopped a short distance away, looking through the glass door behind her and hoping to spy something, anything lurking outside that would explain Smudge’s reaction. The backyard was empty. “Are you ready to hunt some vampires?”

“At least there are no dinosaurs this time,” she answered.

I forced a chuckle. “Damn Michael Crichton. Do you know how much it cost me to fix my car? State Farm doesn’t cover acts of dinosaurs.” I stepped closer. “We should have kept a few eggs. If Smudge can survive in this world, so could they. We could send trained velociraptors out to fight vampires. The movie rights alone would make us rich.”

I relaxed my right hand, allowing the cricket to squirm free. It dropped to the floor and took a single hop before freezing.

I had hoped I was wrong, that Deb would make some scathing comment about my insect-infested home, or simply step forward to crush the cricket under her heel. Instead, she tensed like a cat preparing to pounce. It lasted only a second, maybe two, but it was enough.

I pulled the bat from my pocket and pressed a button. The weapon sprang to its full length with a satisfying metallic clunk.

“Freud would have a field day with that.” Deb backed away. Her tongue flicked over her lips, and her eyes kept darting toward the cricket.

“How long since they turned you?” I checked Lena, who wasn’t moving. She watched Deb with glazed eyes, as if drugged.

“Three weeks.” Deb reached into her jacket. “I’m sorry, hon. I really wanted to bring you back in one piece.”

I slapped the power pack clipped to the back of my belt. A translucent wall of energy shimmered to life around my body, courtesy of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Bullets ripped directly from the pages of Deb’s book into my shield, but none penetrated. It was the same defense I had used against the Iced Z dealer’s guns two years ago.

Deb must have prepared the book earlier, opening its magic to a scene of gunfire and leaving it ready in case she needed a quick, silent weapon. It was difficult, dangerous, and illegal as hell. I would have loved to know exactly how she had pulled it off.

The sharp metal scent of gunpowder filled the room as bullets spat silently from the page and ripped into the shelves behind me. I jumped forward, trying to protect Lena and the books with my body. I swung the bat with both hands, striking the book hard enough to knock it up and away from me. The shield only stopped high-velocity impacts, which meant I could still use old-fashioned weapons like knives and bats.

Bullets gouged the wall and ceiling, raining chunks of plaster down on my head. My backswing smashed Deb’s wrist. Had she been human, that blow would have shattered bone. I did jar her enough to make her drop the gun, which was little comfort as she stepped in, caught the bat, and twisted it away from me. She slammed her other hand into my chest, sending me staggering into the shelves.

Pain radiated from the center of my rib cage, but I did my best to keep it from showing as I brushed myself off. “Wallacea, right?”

The full species name was Muscavore Wallacea, informally known as the Children of Renfield. They weren’t technically vampires, but they ran in the same circles. Deb wouldn’t be as fast or strong as the sparklers I had faced in the library. She was more than a match for a human, though. For a dryad, too, from the look of things. Lena still hadn’t snapped out of her trance.

“War is coming,” said Deb. “The Porters aren’t going to win this one. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

“You fired a machine gun at me!”

“I was aiming for your legs.” She shrugged. “If you’d have let me into your mind like your friend here, I wouldn’t have needed the gun.”

That was where the headache had come from. I grinned and tapped my head. “Blame that on the fish in my brain.”

Deb stared. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Telepathic fish.” I shrugged, using the movement to scan the closest shelves. What kind of weapon would take out a Renfield? “You need to read more Douglas Adams. The fish translates other languages by eating incoming thought waves. Turns out it provides a bit of a buffer against mental assaults, too. Gobbles up psychic attacks like candy. I wrote a paper on it three years ago.”

“You put a fish in your brain.” Her fingers inched toward her jacket. “You’re an odd man, Isaac Vainio.”

“Why are the vampires really attacking us, Deb?”

“I didn’t lie to you. Someone, probably a Porter, has been working against the vampires. But we didn’t attack the library, and we didn’t take Gutenberg.” She snatched a book from her jacket.

I kicked the cricket across the floor, then lunged for the copy of Starship Troopers on the closest shelf. Deb had a head start, but as I had hoped, the cricket broke her concentration long enough for me to find the scene I wanted.

A chittering sound filled the room, and Deb froze. Between the buzz of enormous wings and the click of chitinous bodies moving together, it was like I had ripped a hole in the side of a giant insect hive.