Codex Born (12 page)

“She?” I asked sharply.

“I heard a girl laughing.” She stared at me. “It might have been me. I was losing my mind, Isaac. I could feel myself going mad, losing my grip and slipping away.”

“I didn’t know. I’m so sorry. I never would have asked you to fight them like that.” Devourers infesting Victor Harrison’s experiment. A butchered wendigo and a man who could hide from my magic. What the hell was going on?

Jeneta folded her arms, visibly working to stuff the fear back into its bravado-lined cell. “You owe me a new e-reader.
Don’t even think about trying to pass off some secondhand clunker from last year. I want the newest model, and I want an orange case to go with it.”

“Fair enough.”

Jeneta looked at the fog rising off the crushed bugs and flowers. “What are they doing here?”

I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t even know what they were.

“Why do they hate us?” Jeneta asked. “Not just people in general. You and me. They know us, and they’re going to keep coming after us until we’re dead.”

“If they come after anyone, it should be me. I’m the one who pissed them off earlier this year.” With Lena’s help, I had destroyed their…host, for lack of a better word. If the devourers were capable of remembering, then they had good reason for coming after me or Lena, but why target a teenaged girl who knew next to nothing about magic? “Nidhi, could you take Jeneta to your place?”

“Of course.”

Jeneta said nothing, but her body sagged with relief. I doubted any of us would sleep well tonight, but she’d be somewhere safe, with a woman who knew how to deal with magic-induced trauma.

“I’ll watch over Lena’s tree,” I said. “Could you reschedule any appointments you have tomorrow? We need to take a road trip.”

Nidhi folded her arms. “Nobody has the energy for dramatic lead-ups tonight, Isaac. Get to the point.”

“Sorry. We’re going to check out Victor Harrison’s old house in Columbus, Ohio. I’ll need to call Deb DeGeorge down in Detroit first.”

Jeneta perked up slightly. “The vampire?”

“How did you know that?” Deb had been a libriomancer, and until recently, a good friend. Three months ago, the vampires in Detroit had turned her, hoping to use her as a spy within the Porters. When Gutenberg caught up with her, I had fully expected him to burn her to ash on the spot. Instead, he had begun using Deb as a liaison between Porters and vampires.

“The right poem can make people babble about all sorts of things,” Jeneta said sheepishly. “It was after the Porters found me. They sent a field agent to give me the Orientation to Magic lecture. I wanted the advanced course, and it’s possible I might have ‘encouraged’ her to talk about more than she was supposed to.”

I waved a hand. “Deb’s not technically a vampire, but yes. The important thing is that she’s scared of Gutenberg. Hopefully scared enough to cooperate with just about anything we ask for.”

“And you’re planning to ask for…?” Nidhi said impatiently.

“I’m hoping they’ll be able to help us talk to Victor.”

The glares began the day Frank brought me home. The whispered insults followed soon after. Tramp. Bitch. Slut. Freak. Over time, the whispers grew louder. Marion Dearing followed me into the woods one night, but I was faster. I vanished into my oak, laughing at our game as I left her wandering lost among the trees in the cold and the dark.

She tried to kill me two days after I made love to her husband for the first time. I was working in the chicken coop, an oversized jar of Vaseline in one hand. There was supposed to be a snowstorm that night, and I was coating the combs, feet, and wattles of each bird to help prevent frostbite.

I had heard Marion and Frank yelling after dinner. I had never understood why she hated me. I don’t think I even realized she hated me, any more than I realized how much Frank and I had hurt her. We belonged to Frank, and we each worked to make him happy. I smiled, remembering the weight of his body atop mine.

“What are you?”

I jumped, dropping the Vaseline. I broke the jar’s fall with my foot before it hit the floor. “Hello, Marion. I didn’t hear you.”

Marion might have been pretty once, a long time ago. She
was heavier than I was, with thin gray-brown hair and a perpetual frown. Wrinkles spread like cracks from her eyes and the corners of her mouth. Her skin was spotted from age, and she dressed in a way that hid her body, making her look like a misshapen sack. She was strong, though. Those thick hands could kill and dress a chicken or birth a calf.

Her eyes were red. She clutched a thick book in one hand, a Bible with a gold cross embossed on the cover. “You’re not human. Where the hell did you come from?”

“I don’t remember,” I said automatically.

She snorted and stepped closer. “Wandering naked and lost in the woods, with no memory where you’d been. Did the devil send you to us?”

I shook my head. “Why would you ask—”

“I know what you are. Sent to prey on the weakness of men. To seduce and corrupt them. I won’t let you have him.”

“But he wants me.” I was simply being honest. I didn’t mean to hurt her, but the truth of my words struck her harder than any physical blow.

She lunged forward, and her balled fist crashed into my jaw. I staggered against the cages. “Get out of my home, you whore!”

The blows didn’t hurt as much as I had expected. I raised my arms to protect my face. The next time she swung, I caught her by the wrist and tossed her away as easily as I flung bales of hay for the cows.

Marion bounced to her feet, the Bible forgotten on the wooden floor. Blood welled from scrapes on her face. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jacket. Fear flickered past her anger: a quickening of her breath, a widening of her eyes.

I shivered with anticipation. I was
enjoying
this, almost as much as I had enjoyed making love to Frank. Her fist cracked against my jaw, and my heart pounded harder. I laughed and slapped her arm aside.

She stepped back. “What are you?”

I was too far gone to answer. I buried the ball of my foot in her stomach, kicking her so hard she retched. She crawled away and seized the hoe we used to clean the bottom of the coop. She
thrust the end at my face, then swung the blade down. I twitched my foot out of the way, and the hoe gouged the floor.

She attacked again, more confident now. I allowed her to drive me back, then sidestepped, snatching the hoe with one hand. As my fingers curled around the old wood, I felt…a
memory
was the closest word I could find to describe it. An ash tree standing in the sun, roots gripping a grassy hillside. The ash that had been cut down and shaped into this tool.

The handle of the hoe reacted to my touch. Roots sprouted from the end, twining around Marion’s hand. She screamed and pulled away, but the roots bound her fingers.

I imagined Frank standing over us, watching us battle for his affection. Seeing proof of how much we loved him. Joy suffused my blood. My delighted laughter filled the barn, and I twisted the handle until the bones of Marion’s hand snapped like old sticks in winter.

O
NCE NIDHI AND JENETA had left, I returned to the house long enough to change into warmer clothes and fetch my sleeping bag from the closet. Even in August, the U.P. could get chilly at night. I stopped in the kitchen and searched the refrigerator, but nothing looked appetizing. I settled for grabbing a handful of vitamins, which I washed down with a Sprite. Even that was enough to make me queasy, but I clenched my stomach until the surges of nausea passed.

I tacked a makeshift curtain over the broken door, then picked a handful of books from the library and a small reading light, slung my laptop case over my shoulder, and returned to the garden. Attempting more magic so soon would be madness—literally, if I wasn’t careful—but I couldn’t stop thinking. Our enemy knew Lena’s tree, and that meant she was vulnerable. She had survived the loss of her tree before, but while she had never spoken much about the experience, I got the sense it had come closer to killing her than she wanted to admit.

She had transferred herself into this oak. Perhaps it would be wise to do so again, to find a tree deep in the woods that nobody knew about. But would that be enough? The insects had found her here. If they could sniff out the magic of her tree, what was to stop them from tracking her down no matter where she went?

Better to defend her tree, strengthen it against attack. There were plenty of books that described magical fertilizers and spells to empower plants. With the right combination, I could grow Lena’s oak as tall and strong as Jack’s beanstalk. Though given the end of Jack’s tale, perhaps that wasn’t the best plan.

Or I could grow Lena a new tree. Did she have to live within an oak? I could grow a whomping willow from Harry Potter, giving her tree the ability to defend itself. No, Gutenberg had locked Rowling’s work. Perhaps one of the ent knockoffs from various fantasy tales, a tree with the ability to uproot itself and move about.

What would happen if I planted Yggdrasil, the world tree from Norse mythology? I doubted such a seed would fit through the pages of a book, but if I could break off even the smallest twig for Lena to graft to her oak…

“Right,” I muttered to myself. “Because nobody would notice an enormous tree growing miles into the sky.” The roots would probably devour most of Copper River. I tried to imagine how much water a tree like that would consume. It could drain half of the Great Lakes, killing off most of the surrounding vegetation in the process.

I set the book aside, jumped up, and paced the length of the garden, doing my best to avoid stepping on the plants. At the rate the pumpkins were growing, we were going to have some amazing jack o’lanterns for Halloween.

What if Lena grafted branches from her oak onto multiple trees? Would spreading herself in such a way help to protect her from attack, or would it splinter her mind?

My thoughts were scampering about with all the frantic energy of Smudge in a rainstorm. I hadn’t even begun to consider
what Jeneta had done tonight. Why had my magic set things off like a rock to a wasp nest when hers merely lulled them to the flowers? I had watched her work with e-books and print alike, and as far as I could see, there was nothing unusual about her process.

I stopped in mid-step. I had been assuming it was something she was doing, a technique others could learn and master to take advantage of electronic books. What if, instead, it was something inherent in her? What if she was simply more powerful? True sorcerers could shape magic with their minds alone, and if she did possess that kind of power, it might explain why the devourers were drawn to her.

I forced myself to sit down, but couldn’t stop my legs from bouncing to an unheard beat. A bad case of post-magic twitchiness was essentially Restless Leg Syndrome for the whole body. Perhaps pleasure reading wasn’t the safest idea tonight. After ripping into so many books today, the barriers between myself and these books was dangerously thin.

Deb DeGeorge liked to describe spellcasting as shooting holes in a beer keg filled with magic. Shoot a single bullet through the keg, and you can fill your cup from a steady stream. Fire a few more, and the magic starts flowing faster than you can keep up with it. Blast the whole thing with a shotgun, and you end up soaked in the stuff.

It was an elegant trap, one which had claimed the sanity of many libriomancers over the years. As you exhausted yourself physically and mentally, your judgment eroded as well, leading you to make mistakes when you could least afford them.

Sleep was the best cure. Naturally, insomnia was a common side effect of magic use. As much as I loved being a libriomancer, sometimes magic was a pain in the ass.

I set my books aside, powered up the laptop, and began filling out a requisition form for my shock-gun. Porters were supposed to avoid carrying magical artifacts around long-term, but I thought the circumstances justified keeping the gun until this was over.