Jim Hines - Codex Born

She lowered her sunglasses and raised her eyebrow in a motion so smooth she had to have practiced it in the mirror. “You believe in aliens?”

“I’m dating a dryad, and you pulled a snake out of your phone. You’re going to draw the line at aliens?”

“If you try to tell me aliens built the pyramids, I am so out of here.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I waited a beat, then added, “The pyramids were built by mummified elves.”

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but her eyebrow climbed even higher. “Mummified elves?”

I was a lousy liar, but for once I managed to keep a straight face. “A friend of mine fought one of the things once. Damn thing was like a nightmare straight out of a Keebler commercial.”

“I think you’re right.”

“Of course I am. Elven magic is nasty stuff.”

From the look she shot me, the only thing in the world worse than devourers was an adult trying to be funny. “About the devourers. They hated me too much. It was personal.”

“What happened when you woke up?”

“I snuck out to the showers. The water’s always too cold, but I didn’t care.”

“Like you’d scrape your own skin off to feel clean again,” I said, remembering my own dreams after Detroit.

“Yeah.” She plucked a weed growing through the boards at the edge of the deck and poked it at Smudge. Smudge crouched, then jumped forward to set the end on fire. “Try reading the Whitman poem again. ‘Pour softly down night’s nimbus floods.’ Visualize it.”

I picked up my e-reader, letting her change the subject. Though she tried to hide it, I could see she was fighting tears. I pulled up the poem, read it yet again, and imagined clouds lit from within as they drifted slowly over the full moon. It was a cool, damp night. The poem stressed the contrast between the sky’s beauty and the horror of the Civil War dead strewn over the battlefield.

“‘Bathe this scene,’” Jeneta sounded different when she read. More confident. Powerful. “‘Pour down your unstinted nimbus, sacred moon.’ Twice he uses images of water, of cleansing and baptism. The washing away of sin. Why?”

She sounded like a teacher. I wondered if she was channeling her mother. I touched my fingers to the screen. “He was pleading.”

“Exactly.” This was familiar ground for her, much safer than whatever had invaded her mind. “Wash this ugliness from our souls and memories. Wash this horror from our world. Forgive us. Redeem us. ‘On the dead, on their backs, with their arms toss’d wide.’ Why are they on their backs, Isaac?”

“They’re looking to the sky, to God.”

“That’s the heart of the poem. Grief. Shame. Hope. That’s your connection. Touch those feelings, and you can use this poem to bring an entire crowd to tears.”

I tried again, imagining the emotions and reaching for their echo within the e-reader, but as before, I felt nothing.

“Maybe Whitman’s not your thing.” She tapped her own screen, scrolled through a long list of books, and shoved it into my hands.

“Shel Silverstein?”

She tilted her head to glare at me over her sunglasses. “If you diss Silverstein, I will hurt you. I’m talking chainsaws, machetes, and a fire-spider in a very uncomfortable place. Smudge has my back on this. Right?”

Smudge turned toward me and rubbed his forelegs together.

“Traitor.” I skimmed the poem. “Whatif?”

“You never get the whatifs? Never worry about your house burning down or Smudge getting eaten by an owl?”

My cell phone buzzed before I could answer. I grinned like an idiot when I saw who it was. Sticking with the theme of the afternoon, I adopted my most somber poetry-reading voice and said, “I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.”

“Why thank you,” said Lena Greenwood. “Spending time with Jeneta has been good for you. And how is the world’s sexiest librarian doing today?”

“He spends too much time thinking and not enough time feeling,” Jeneta said loudly.

I stuck out my tongue and turned down the volume on the phone.

Lena chuckled, but there was an edge to her usual playfulness. Her laughter cut off too quickly, and she didn’t come back with a joke about finding ways of getting me to stop thinking.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nidhi got a call from Chicago. They’re sending her to Tamarack. I’m about to head over to pick her up.”

“Another feral werewolf?” The Upper Peninsula had three of the largest werewolf packs in the world, but it had been eight years since the last known attack against a human. The pack did a very good job keeping its members in line.

“Wendigo. One of the weres found him dead last night.”

I sat up straighter. “How did he die?”

“We’re not sure yet, but the weres said whoever dumped the body smelled human.”

“Damn.” This wouldn’t be the first time a mundane had killed a magical creature. It didn’t happen often, and it rarely ended well for the human. If this had been an accident or an act of self-defense, that was one thing, but a wendigo was hard to kill even if you knew what you were up against. That suggested either a rogue magic-user or else someone who had stumbled onto the existence of magic and decided to play monster-slayer. Either way, we needed to find whoever had done this. Gossip traveled fast, and every intelligent nonhuman in the U.P. would be on edge by the end of the week. If the Porters didn’t resolve this quickly, it would only escalate. “Let me drop Jeneta off, and I’ll meet you at the old schoolhouse in Tamarack.”

“I’ll see you there. Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

As soon as I hung up, Jeneta said, “I can help.”

“No.”

“I heard her say it was a wendigo. I’ve read about them, but I never—”

“Nein. Non. Nyet. Naa. Gaawiin.” I gathered Smudge onto the palm of my hand and transferred him to my left shoulder.

Jeneta cocked her head. “What was that last one?”

“Ojibwe.” I looked pointedly at her e-reader until she sighed and stuffed it into her worn camouflage backpack. “Nothing in the papers your parents signed gives us permission to drag you into a murder investigation. Especially when there could be more wendigos in the area. Do you know how much paperwork I’ll have to do if my intern gets eaten by a cannibalistic monster?”

“My parents didn’t sign anything about me teaching magic to old people, either,” she shot back.

“I’m only twenty-six, and shut up.” I waved her inside. “Give me a minute to grab my books. Besides, it’s not like I haven’t been teaching you, too.”

“Whatever, grandpa.” She shouldered her backpack, then hesitated. When she spoke again, she sounded younger. “Be careful.”

“I’ll do my best.”

And then she was her normal self again, head held high as she strode through the house. “Hey, since you won’t let me come with you, the least you should do is let me drive the convertible.”

I grinned. “Let me dig up my Ojibwe dictionary. I need to look up how to say ‘No way in hell.’”

Smudge crouched by the corner of the windshield and watched the pine trees rush past. Walls of jagged rock rose and fell to either side of the road as we cut through the hills.

Old railroad tracks and an abandoned depot marked Tamarack’s eastern boundary, roughly thirty miles out from Copper River. Back at the start of the twentieth century, both towns had been booming. Booming for the U.P., at least. When the silver mine here in Tamarack shut down in 1934, the town had been home to more than two thousand people. These days, the place made Copper River look like the big city. The population was closer to two hundred, a sizable minority of whom were members of the local werewolf pack.