Jim Hines - Codex Born

“Dammit, Lena!” I pressed closer to the fence and spotted her clinging with one hand to a clump of tree roots, about four feet to the left of the spruce tree holding the body. She pulled herself sideways and began to scale the spruce. Her fingers sank into the trunk of the tree, letting her climb as easily as a spider.

“She used to be more careful.” Nidhi’s unspoken message was louder than her actual words. She gets this from you.

“Where’s the fun in that?” I said automatically. I leaned out and aimed the thermometer at the wendigo’s remains. Cold air swirled up past my arms, pimpling the skin. The body’s temperature read twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit, meaning death had occurred roughly eight hours ago, give or take. A core reading would have been more accurate, but wendigos maintained a fairly uniform temperature throughout their bodies.

There was no shell of ice around our victim. He would have reverted to human form upon death, but the flesh would take time to thaw.

Light flashed as Lena snapped photos. “He’s got what might be a bullet hole in his forehead.” She climbed higher and took another batch of photos from her new angle, then called out, “Send me the tarp.”

Jeff and Helen lowered a blue tarp with nylon rope strung through the corners. While they worked on retrieving the body, I turned away to think. Normal ice shattered when struck by a bullet, but the ice covering a wendigo’s body had a significantly greater tensile strength, thanks to the fur mixed through it. A high-caliber bullet might penetrate, but most of the time, trying to shoot a wendigo would only piss it off.

“Watch the fence,” Jeff said as he and Helen pulled the ropes up, hand over hand.

“Watch yourself, Chihuahua brain,” Helen snapped.

The cold had minimized the stench of decay, as well as keeping most of the flies away. I waited for them to peel back the tarp, then walked over to help Nidhi examine the body. Without a word, Nidhi handed me a pair of latex examination gloves.

In death, the wendigo resembled a pale, gaunt man with wrinkled blue-tinged skin and thin white hair. The limbs were stiff, preserving the doubled-over position in which he had died. Much of the skin had been cut away, and shallow gashes marred what remained. Most of the damage looked like it had been done with a knife, or possibly a sword.

Nidhi pointed to a dark hole in the forehead. “There’s the entry wound.”

It was smaller than I would have expected. With every muscle frozen, Nidhi had to turn the whole body to examine the back of the head. There was no exit hole.

I swallowed bile. “They skinned and butchered him like an animal.”

“No.” Nidhi didn’t look up. “You butcher an animal cleanly. Carefully. This kind of overkill comes from rage.”

“You think the wendigo killed someone he cared about?” asked Jeff. “This might have been about revenge.”

“If so, it wasn’t recent,” said Nidhi. “The stomach isn’t distended.”

My own stomach tried once again to rebel. I managed to force my lunch back down. “Most of the damage was done while he was alive.” I dropped to one knee and pointed to the forehead. “Look at the ring of dry blood around the wound. Wendigos turn human again when they die, but their entire circulatory system freezes solid.”

The wendigo had bled profusely. The blood would have frozen on the surface of the skin, sealing the cuts. Those frozen clots had broken away when the wendigo shrank back to human form, but thin outlines remained, showing where the body had tried to heal itself.

“He was tortured.” Lena looked at me, her jaw tight. We had seen this kind of viciousness before, from a madman infested with what Jeneta called devourers.

I peeled off the gloves and flung them away. “I need to see where he died.”

Jeff stayed with the body, while Helen guided us through the woods. “You have something in that bag to track whoever did this?” she asked.

“It depends on whether or not he left anything behind.” Muddy ruts and broken ferns marked the path of the killer’s four-wheeler. When we came to the top of the hill where the vehicle had stopped, I searched for footprints, but found nothing. The ground up here wasn’t damp enough.

“Down here.” Helen climbed over a fallen tree and gestured to a patch of pale mushrooms growing in the indentation at the base of a thick birch.

Black blood spattered the ground and the plants. Broken branches and gouged earth told the story of the wendigo’s death. He had fought like an animal. Four parallel claw marks slashed the birch tree at chest height. Crushed ferns showed where he had thrashed back and forth.

“What are you planning to do?” Helen asked warily. She had never been as comfortable with Porters as her husband was. Most magical creatures resented the laws Gutenberg had set to restrict their habitats and activities. To many of the nonhuman residents of Tamarack, I was about as welcome as an FBI agent stopping by a militia compound. Helen wasn’t as paranoid as some, and she liked me, but that didn’t mean she liked what I was or who I worked for.

“That depends on whether or not I can make this work.” I set down my satchel and pulled out The Best of Isaac Asimov .

For five years, I had studied libriomancy with a man named Ray Walker down in East Lansing, learning the full range and limits of my magic. Or so I thought, up until I saw Johannes Gutenberg in action, watched him pull weapons from books without reading them, or steal Smudge’s flames to use against an enraged Volkswagen Beetle that had been trying to kill us. That encounter showed that I had barely moved beyond Libriomancy 101.

When the amazement passed, anger stepped in. Had Ray known how much more there was to learn? How much had Gutenberg hidden from the rest of us, and why? Was he trying to make sure nobody ever challenged his power? Or, like an overly strict parent, did he simply not trust us?

I had gone back to reread every libriomantic tome I could find, searching not for what the books said, but what they omitted. I looked for the gaps, for the experiments we should have performed, but didn’t. For discussions that dismissed certain theories a little too quickly. I pushed myself to move beyond the rules Ray had drilled into me.

As it turned out, some of those rules were there for very good reasons. In early July, I accidentally conjured up a two-day thunderstorm that knocked out power to most of Copper River and flooded most of Depot Street. Then there was the stray disruptor beam that took out Spencer Mussell’s truck. But I had confirmed that certain rules were rather fuzzy around the edges, and I had figured out several new tricks.

I flipped to a story called “The Dead Past” and started reading. “A lot of science fiction authors wrote up toys to let them see the past,” I said. “Time portals and chronoscopes and temporal lenses, almost none of which are small enough to pull through the pages.”

“Why not make a bigger book?” she asked.

“The books need to be physically identical in order to anchor reader belief.” Though Jeneta’s magic threw that rule into doubt. If we built an e-reader the size of a parking lot, could she pull a spaceship through? What if we projected an e-book onto an IMAX screen? Maybe I could finally make my own X-wing fighter. I tucked that thought aside for later. “In order for me to use it, you’d need to distribute thousands of copies of those oversized books.”

“Be careful,” Nidhi said quietly, though I had no doubt Helen heard her warning as clearly as I did.

“Aren’t I always?” Nidhi had been my therapist for several years, and she knew better than most the trouble I had gotten myself into when I was younger. I turned the pages and skimmed the story. “You might want to back up a little.”