Jim Hines - Libriomancer

“She took me in when the Porters found me. I watch her back, especially when she gets called in to consult on the ugly cases. Remember that big oil spill down south? We spent two weeks

down there, working with a displaced family. My job was to keep the family from eating Nidhi. You do not want to trigger a mermaid with full-blown PTSD.”

“So you’ve met a lot of Porters,” I said.

“Nidhi doesn’t share the details of her cases, but I see most of her clients at least in passing.”

“Then why come to me?” I glanced at the speedometer and eased back on the gas. Stress always seemed to weigh down my foot. “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the rescue at the library. But I’m a cataloger, two years out of the field.”

“You were the closest Porter I could trust to-”

“Nope,” I said. “I know what you told Deb, but the closest Porter to Dearborn, not counting Ray, would have been Nicola Pallas. Instead of a five-hour trip, you drove eight in order to-”

“Six.”

I ran the numbers in my head and winced to realize how fast she must have been going. “Six hours away from the vampires who had taken Shah, to find me. So either you knew the vampires were coming after me next-”

“I didn’t,” she said. “It’s possible they followed me. I didn’t see anyone, but that doesn’t mean much.”

Sparklers could have run alongside the highway, keeping pace until they figured out where she was going, then running ahead to Copper River to track me down. I didn’t know what kind of records the vampires kept, but it wouldn’t be too hard to find the lone libriomancer working in the U. P.

Lena had saved my life, and Smudge trusted her, but something still wasn’t adding up. “You said you could trust me. Why? We barely know each other.”

“I… read your file.”

“I see.” I stared at the road. “So you already knew about Mackinac Island.” About everything I had told Doctor Shah. The nightmares, the grief, the breakdown when they reassigned me.

“Not everything.”

“Does Shah know you had access to her files?”

Lena shook her head. “If she knew, she’d be even angrier than you are.”

“I doubt that.” We were doing ninety by the time we hit Highway 2. I forced myself to relax. “Did it occur to you that breaking into someone’s psych records wasn’t the best way to build trust?”

“I’m sorry, Isaac. I didn’t have a choice.”

“Bullshit.”

“That’s easy for a human to say,” she shot back. “I couldn’t go after Nidhi. I wanted to. More than you’ll ever understand. But I couldn’t. Not alone. I needed you.”

“Why?”

“To protect me.”

“Me?” I choked back a laugh. “From what?”

“From what I am. What I could become.” She looked away. “There are two kinds of magical creatures in this world. Those that arose ‘naturally,’ and those that were created. I’m one of the latter. I was born fifty years ago in the pages of a cheap paperback.”

The stiffness in her body and the numbness in her voice reminded me of myself, sitting in Doctor Shah’s office after Mackinac Island. “You can’t bring intelligent beings into our world from books.”

Aside from the problem of size, no book could truly capture the complexity of a sentient being. The fictional mind couldn’t handle the transition into the real world. They went mad.

One of my earliest jobs for the Porters had been at an elementary school, where I had been sent to repel an invasion of little blue men. An overly talented fourth grader had somehow managed to pull them out of an old book. Three apples high and batshit insane, every last one of them. I never had gotten the smell out of my steel-toed boots, and the deranged singing had earwormed me for weeks.

Even Smudge was rather neurotic. He had run endless laps in his cage for weeks after I created him, until he collapsed from exhaustion. He probably would have died from the shock if he hadn’t been written to be so loyal. I had needed his help, and that core loyalty gave him a lifeline, a mission that saved him from madness. “How could you have come from a book?”

“This was when the Gor novels first came out. Just like any other hot trend, authors scrambled to join the bandwagon.” She spoke in a monotone, reciting the story instead of telling it.

I knew the Gor books, a series by John Norman famed for its portrayal of sexual servitude. Tarnsman of Gor had been the first of dozens, back in the late sixties. The series had been popular enough to spawn an entire subculture.

“The book was called Nymphs of Neptune.”

I groaned. “Really?”

That got a quiet chuckle. “A terrible title for a terrible book. There were twenty-four nymphs, all of whom looked roughly the same. The author had a fondness for plump women, describing us as ‘the Grecian ideal of beauty and perfection.’ Our surface appearance changed, depending on the desires of our lovers. One of us was given to ‘a noble Nubian warrior,’ and she became ‘dark as the richest chocolate, to match her lord and master.’”

My fingers clenched tighter around the wheel. “And somebody published this crap?”

“Oh, it was quite popular for a time.” She sighed. “Central to a nymph’s nature is the inability to refuse her lover.”

“You’re not allowed to say no.”

“I’ll never know who reached into that book and pulled out an acorn from the tree of a dryad. They must have tossed it aside and forgotten all about it, but my tree grew with magical swiftness. Within a few years, I emerged naked and lost. I wandered for two days until I came to a farmhouse. The first person I met was a farmer named Frank Dearing. He took me in. I helped work the fields during the day, and by night-”

“I can guess.” My jaw hurt from clenching it.

I had always assumed Lena to be a natural-born dryad. The idea that she had been created, grown from a seed in a bad pulp novel… created to be someone’s plaything, like some kind of magical sex toy… I felt physically ill just thinking about it.

Lena touched my forearm. “It’s all right.”

“How the hell is it all right?”

“I was happy. Content. I didn’t know any better. Part of our nature is that we don’t want to say no. When Frank died and the Porters found me, they brought me to Nidhi. They thought I was suffering from Stockholm syndrome. They knew I was magical, but we didn’t discover my origins until later. By then… I had spent so much time with her.”

I looked at Lena, the black hair, the brown skin. “You and Doctor Shah?”

“We’ve been lovers for nine years.”

My mental clutch jolted and stalled as I tried to incorporate this information into my image of Doctor Shah.

“You only knew her as a therapist,” said Lena. “If you met her outside of the office, you’d probably like her. She’s a bit of a geek, too.”

“What do you mean, too?” I asked, but my heart wasn’t in the banter.

“Nidhi grew up reading comics, especially She-Hulk and Tank Girl. Those fantasies helped to shape me. The Nymphs of Neptune were able warriors, and there were plenty of scenes where we fought our sisters for the pleasure of men. I learned to fight for a better purpose.” She shrugged. “It could be worse. I’m smart, strong, and nigh indestructible.”

Being born from an acorn, she wouldn’t have experienced the shock of transition the way a more fully-fleshed character might. I suspected her nature helped there as well, just as Smudge’s had. Presumably both Frank Dearing and Doctor Shah wanted a sane lover, and Lena would have been shaped by those desires. “Is it strength if you exist to fulfill someone else’s fantasy?”

She flexed an arm. “Tell you what. Let’s arm wrestle, and you can tell me if that strength is real.” Her words were playful, but muted.