Codex Born (31 page)

I hadn’t understood until then. Christopher Hill had bound his wife to him. He had twisted who she was, making himself the
core of her being. She couldn’t leave him. Not without first freeing herself from his power.

She was like me.

Without another word, I retreated into the van.

B
OTH MY PLACE AND Nidhi’s were on Harrison’s hit list. After a brief debate, I drove to the library instead. It was as secure a location as any to spend the night, and if Harrison did come after us, I’d have plenty of books on hand.

I parked around back, out of sight from the street. I checked through the windows, then unlocked the back door. The alarm system beeped at me until I punched in the six-digit code to deactivate it.

Lena walked through the darkened library, bokken in one hand, the branch from her oak in the other. I set my books down, then returned to the car to fetch an old blanket from the trunk. I re-armed the alarm as soon as I was back inside. It wouldn’t do much against a pack of wendigos or whatever constructs Harrison sent after us next, but maybe it would give us a few seconds’ warning.

She set the branch in a corner. “Do you have anything to drink here? I get dehydrated when I’m away from my tree.”

“There’s water in the break room, and we might have some juice boxes left from the picnic last week.”

By the time Lena returned, I had cleared floor space in the children’s section and dragged three battered beanbag chairs together to serve as pillows. The lights from the street filtered through the windows to silhouette the curves of her body. She stood there, sipping juice through a too-small straw and watching me.

“I never used to understand what you loved about libraries.” She crumpled the box and tossed it in the trash. She disappeared between the shelves, and I heard her fingers passing over the plastic dust jacket protectors. When she emerged
again, she leaned against the shelves, clasped her hands over her head, and stretched, the movement slow and luxurious. Cats throughout the world could have taken lessons.

I settled into the beanbags. “And now?”

“The doors are locked, everything’s powered down for the night. This place should feel empty, but it doesn’t. That’s what you found here, isn’t it?” She spun on one foot like a ballerina. “Libraries kept you from being alone.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Don’t.” I could hear her smiling. “Books were your friends growing up. Your companions, your teachers.”

“I had friends.” I tried not to sound too defensive.

“How many of those friends understood you as well as the books did?” she teased. “Every book opened your mind, showed you the infinite paths that lay before you. Each one connected you to another soul.”

“When did you get so poetic?”

“Tell me I’m wrong.” She stepped closer. “I dare you.”

“You’re not wrong.” I breathed in the familiar smells of the library. Paper and ink, cloth-bound books and binding glue, magazines and old newspapers. A faint scent of coffee. Even steam cleaning had failed to completely remove that stain after Jenn accidentally knocked her travel mug off of the desk. Then there was the underlying smell of the hundreds of people who passed through the library every month.

“Thank you for sharing this with me, Isaac.” She leaned down, and her lips brushed mine. Then, with a mischievous smile, she straightened and backed away until the soft light from the exit sign painted her a deep red.

Moving with exquisite slowness, she peeled off her shirt and tossed it onto a nearby table. She pulled off her shoes and socks next, then slid her jeans down over her hips and kicked them aside.

The lines of her body flowed so beautifully, one curve leading to the next. My eyes traced her neck and shoulders, then moved inward to the swell of her breasts, straining slightly against the confines of her bra. From there to her stomach,
where softness concealed the steel beneath, and down to the muscular curves of her hips and thighs.

She stood there a moment longer, then picked up her bokken and grinned. “All right, now that I’m comfortable, why don’t you go ahead and get some sleep while I keep guard?”

I groaned and thumped my head into the beanbag. “The alarm is on. I think we’re safe.”

“Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to take any chances.” She twirled her bokken, then settled into a low stance, weapon ready.

“If you’re trying to get comfortable, why not go all the way?” I said. “Or are you afraid to fight evil naked?”

“When you’re built like me, a good-fitting sports bra is non-optional for battling wendigos and other nasties.” She tilted her head, and her tone turned serious. “What is it? What’s that look for?”

“You.” I couldn’t stop staring. She shifted her weight and rested the sword on her shoulder, simultaneously strong and sexy and dangerous and so damned beautiful it hurt. I imagined my fingers stroking the outer curve of her leg, then tracing up the softer skin of her inner thigh. Her toes curled, as if even the feel of the old carpet beneath her bare feet was a source of pleasure.

She laughed. “That’s all you have to say? Are you just going to lie there and stare at me all night?”

“Works for me.”

“Mm. But then you wouldn’t get any sleep,” she teased.

“I’m willing to accept the consequences of my choice.”

“Are you, now?” she whispered. Placing her hands on her hips, she surveyed me and made a disapproving
tsk
sound. “My dear Isaac, I do believe you’re overdressed.”

By the time I tugged off my T-shirt, Lena had set her bokken on the floor and joined me in the beanbags. She brushed her fingernails down my chest and stomach, then lower.

I slid a hand through her hair. The other cupped her breast, my thumb teasing her nipple through the spandex. Her hips
pressed into me as I slipped my fingers beneath the elastic and slowly pulled off her bra.

“What is it about libraries?” she whispered, her breath tickling my ear. She took the lobe gently in her teeth. “You used to work at the MSU library. Did you have many students sneaking into the stacks to study biology?”

“A few. I think it was the excitement. The fear of getting caught.”

“I can understand that.” She grinned and rolled on top of me, and I pulled her mouth to mine. Lena might be a dryad, but tonight my hunger matched hers. We rolled across the floor until we bumped into a shelf.

She broke away, laughing. Before I could draw her back, she jumped to her feet and stripped off her underwear. Then she walked toward the front of the library. At first, I was content to simply watch, but she wasn’t stopping.

I followed her into the front room. “What are you doing?”

“Do you ever get tired of hiding, Isaac?” She stood three feet from the main window, hands on her hips, looking out at the street. Gods, she was gorgeous.

I hurried and grabbed her hand, trying to pull her back to the relative seclusion of the children’s section. Instead, she spun around and kissed me. Her fingers clamped my head like iron, and her tongue danced with mine. One of her hands undid the button of my jeans, then tugged the zipper down.

Headlights played through the library, and I swore. This time, she let me pull her down, out of view. We didn’t move until the car had passed.

Lena covered her mouth with one hand, but it wasn’t enough to hide her laughter. Laughter which proved to be highly contagious. The fear and pain and dread of the past two days gradually poured out as we collapsed on the carpet. I could feel her body shaking beside mine. I rolled on top of her and kissed her neck, right beneath the jawbone.

Slowly, her laughter changed to moans of pleasure. “I love you, Isaac Vainio.”

“I love you, too.”

“Good.” She broke away and grinned. “Because there’s something I’ve wanted to do since the first time I came to Copper River, and it involves you, me, and that circulation desk.”

Lena and I had been together since the start of summer, but we had never truly slept together.

We had done plenty of
not
-sleeping together, but when it was time to retire for the night, she always returned to her tree. On the nights she spent with Nidhi, I’d hear the growl of her motorcycle around midnight as she returned home, not to my house, but to the oak tree out back.

Tonight was different. We lay naked on the blanket, nested among the beanbags. Her thigh rested atop mine, and her body pressed against my chest. The warmth of her skin was a comfortable contrast to the cool air.

Despite my exhaustion, both magical and physical, it took me a long time to drift off to sleep. Once I did, my dreams jerked me awake throughout the night. The third time, I rolled over to find myself alone.

Lena had moved to the corner of the room, where she lay curled around the branch from her oak Her fingertips disappeared into the wood. “It’s four in the morning,” she murmured. “Go back to sleep.”

It was good advice, and I tried to follow it, but my body was abuzz like I had mainlined an entire pot of coffee. After tossing fitfully for another fifteen minutes, I gave up and pulled on my pants. I walked to the break room and grabbed a granola bar from the cabinet. I had no appetite, but forced it down anyway. I picked up Bi Wei’s book on the way back, along with a portable reading light from my bag.

The light was designed to clip directly to a book, but I didn’t want to risk damaging the cover. I settled for clipping it to my jeans pocket.

As I opened the book, I found myself missing Smudge, who would have been trying valiantly to blister my skin and warn
me away. But we needed information, and I couldn’t think of another way to get it.

I switched on my glasses and skimmed from one section to the next, trying to decide where to start. A description of Bi Wei’s first encounter with magic caught my attention, and I flipped to the beginning of the story. It was her great-grandaunt who introduced her to Bi Sheng’s teachings. They had spent most of the day hiking to the top of a rocky hill outside of their village. Bi Wei could have made the walk in half the time had she been alone, but she was happy to match her great-grandaunt’s pace, and wouldn’t have dreamed of complaining.

They talked of trivial things along the way, but Bi Wei knew this was no ordinary outing. She longed to ask what awaited them and why her parents had been so somber the night before, but she suppressed her curiosity.

The clouds blazed that evening. A glowworm clung like a beacon to a stalk of grass, bobbing in the warm breeze. Great-Grandaunt unrolled a reed mat on the grass. Atop the mat, she opened an atlas of star charts. Times and seasons were written into the margins, while pictures of familiar stars spread across the rest of the page.

“Find them,” she said.

I looked skyward. Clouds and splintered sunlight hid the night sky from view. The stars wouldn’t be visible for some time yet. “How?”

“Read with me.” She turned the page, and we read a description of the northern stars. The author had written both of the stars’ usefulness in navigation and of their beauty, for shouldn’t the most useful things be also pleasing to behold?

As we read, it was as though the starlight he had looked upon—and I somehow knew both that he had watched the stars as he wrote, and that the writer was a man—it was as if that same light brightened within me. Shock tore my manners asunder, and I cried out.