Jim Hines - Libriomancer

“I’m sorry.” The words felt utterly inadequate, but she gave a tiny nod of thanks. “Are you… with your tree gone-”

“I’ve survived the loss of a tree once before.” She stared past me, her eyes wet. “It takes time for life to leave a fallen tree. The leaves wither and fall away. The wood dries and cracks. Insects bore through the bark.” She shuddered. “I’ll need to find a new home for that part of myself, but your oak will do for today. It’s not the same, but it’s enough.”

For once, I managed to suppress any tactless questions about her nature.

“They ruined my garden, too,” she said distantly. “Uprooted my rosebushes and my grapevines. I guess they were afraid I could use the plants as weapons.” She twirled her spoon, digging a pit into her ice cream. “Nidhi shouted for me to get away. I crawled into the closest tree that was big enough to hold me, a thirty-year-old maple. I stayed only long enough to keep myself from following my oak into death, but when I emerged, they were long gone.”

I had met with Doctor Shah several times, though rarely by choice. I understood the logic of making people who warped reality on a regular basis check in with a professional psychiatrist, but given how that had turned out for me, my feelings toward Shah were mixed at best. None of which mattered now. I could only imagine what Lena must be feeling. As far as I knew, Doctor Shah was the closest thing she had to a family. “You did everything you could.”

“There was no body.” Lena’s fingers sank into the wood of the table as she spoke. “The only blood I could find came from me and one of the vampires. I don’t know where they went or why they took her. She might already be dead, or they might have turned her. So I sought out the nearest help I could find.”

“I’m just a cataloger these days.” If the vampires wanted to turn Shah, she might have a chance. For some species, the process could take days. But why torture and murder the others and not her? “What are the Porters doing about this?”

“They won’t say. They’re strictly a humans-only club, remember?”

Guilt made me turn away, though I had no control over our policies. “Who was the second victim?”

She hesitated. “I’m sorry, Isaac. They found Ray Walker’s body yesterday night.”

Pop psychology described five stages of grief. I went through all five in less than a minute as I struggled to accept the death of my friend.

Walker was no danger to anyone. There was no reason for any vampire to go after him… but there was no lie in Lena’s gaze. My body tightened, fists clenched, stomach taut. My mind flipped through its mental catalog, searching for magic that would allow me to bring back my friend. But books with such power were locked, and trying to reverse death would accomplish nothing except to earn my exile from the Porters.

I sagged into a chair and wiped a fist across my eyes. “How?”

“Like the others.”

Ray Walker had brought me into the world of magic. The Porters found me when I was in high school, and arranged for me to attend Michigan State University where I could work with Ray. For four years, I had spent every free night in his bookstore or apartment, reading handwritten texts on magic, examining artifacts, and discussing the possibilities of magic.

Ray had personally recommended me for a research position in Die Zwelf Porten?re. He had given me purpose and a goal. When I screwed that up, he helped to arrange my job here. While he had never said anything, I had no doubt he had argued on my behalf, to keep Pallas from booting me out altogether.

My cell phone buzzed. I dug it out of my pocket. The caller ID read UNKNOWN. My fingers moved mechanically, accepting the call and bringing the phone to my ear.

“Isaac? Thank God. Are you all right?”

I recognized the faint New York accent at once. “Three sparklers tried to kill me this afternoon, and now I find out Ray’s dead? What the hell is going on, Deb? Why aren’t the Porters doing something?”

Deb DeGeorge was a fellow libriomancer and librarian, but whereas I worked for a small public library, she held a position with the Library of Congress in Washington DC. She had a pair of Master’s degrees, spoke and read five languages and could spout obscenities in six more, and worked as a self-described “cataloger of weird shit.”

“I’m sorry about Ray, hon. I only learned about him a few hours ago. You said you were attacked? The vampires-”

“Are ash.”

She gave a disbelieving snort. “Three sparklers? Damn, Isaac.”

“I had help. Lena Greenwood showed up and did her ass-kicking thing. Deb, I couldn’t get through to Pallas either.”

“She’s alive,” Deb said quickly. “You’ve heard about Harrison? Whoever killed him found a way to hack the spells he cast protecting our communications. We’re still working to secure everything, and until we do…”

Until then, our murderer could be listening to every word we said. “I understand.”

“Stay put, Isaac. I’ll be there soon.”

“But what-”

“Stay!” The phone went dead before I could respond.

“What did she say?” asked Lena.

“Not much, but she sounded nervous.” This was a woman who had faced down a homicidal Chilean mummy and walked away without a scratch.

Between Smudge, Lena, and my personal library, we should be safe for the moment. I looked out the kitchen window. Trees secluded the houses from one another, and this part of town was quiet enough the neighbors’ kids down the street sometimes played an entire set of tennis in the road without having to move for cars.

Lena reached over to touch my arm. “What is it?”

“I’m not a field agent.” Deb and the others would investigate Ray’s death. They would figure out who took Doctor Shah. They would stop whoever had done this, while I… filed paperwork and stayed out of the way. “Ray was my friend.”

We sat in silence for a time. My thoughts were manic and uncontrolled, jumping from the attack at the library to Ray to the other deaths. “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Individual vampires are tough, but in an all-out war, they wouldn’t stand a chance. More than half of them are helpless during the day, and at last count, humans outnumbered them a million to one.”

“Some sort of civil war among the vampires?” Lena scooped up the last of the ice cream.

“The Porters would have heard.” Though whether or not they would have bothered to tell me was another question entirely. “Have there been similar attacks in other countries?”

“Not that I know of.”

Most vampires were perfectly content to live in peace, but plenty of them were still monsters at heart. If they were attacking Porters with impunity here, it wouldn’t be long before others followed suit.

Meaning if this wasn’t stopped soon, we could be looking at a worldwide war with the undead.

Magic had always messed with my dreams. According to years of Porter research, brainwave excitation during REM sleep immediately following the use of magic tended to mimic the patterns seen in active magic use. And according to Porter gossip, Nicola Pallas had once awoken following a day of intensive spellcasting to find that she had transformed herself into a two-hundred-pound green rabbit in her sleep.

I wasn’t powerful enough to suffer such problems. Instead, I simply endured surreal, too-vivid dreams in which my magic failed me when I needed it most. Sometimes I reached into my books, only to find myself unable to pull my hand free. Or I would fling the book away and watch in horror as what remained of my arm slowly dissolved, consumed by the book. The worst nightmares were when I fell through the magical portal I had opened in the pages, or worse yet, something on the other side of that portal pulled me in.