Codex Born (16 page)

“Power and control,” Lena said softly.

“Exactly,” said Nidhi. “August used violence to control his family, but that was only one tactic of many. He threatened Victor’s mother to control his son, and threatened the son to control the mother. He kept tight rein over the finances and their social connections, making them dependent upon him for everything. Magic would have been one more weapon in his arsenal. And Victor was a child. He loved his father. For that reason, and because he thought it would appease August’s temper, Victor tried to do as his father had asked.”

“An eleven-year-old trying to teach a grown man magic?” That couldn’t have ended well. Magical ability almost always manifested during childhood or adolescence. If August had the slightest potential for magic, it would have shown up long before
then. Victor had been untrained. He wouldn’t have known how he had controlled the car, let alone how to impart that understanding to others.

“He couldn’t do it,” Nidhi said. “Every failure enraged August further. He accused Victor of lying, of deliberately keeping his secrets to himself. He never again laid a finger on his wife, but he beat Victor three more times. The third time, Victor fought back.”

“How?”

Her lips twitched. “Do you remember Teddy Ruxpin?”

“Sure. My grandparents got me one when I was a kid. Stupid thing gave me nightmares.” I stopped when I realized where she was going with this. “Victor attacked his father with a talking teddy bear? All it did was move its eyes and mouth while it played cassette tapes.”

“Not when Victor was done with it,” Nidhi said. “That teddy bear climbed onto the mantel, leaped out, and garroted August with a length of mint dental floss. They left him unconscious on the floor.”

“Why would Victor reach out to
him
?” Lena shook her head in disbelief.

“Death is rarely rational,” Nicholas said absently. He appeared far more interested in the dead than the living.

I couldn’t hold Victor’s dying mistake against him. I just hoped we would be able to fix that mistake before August Harrison did any further damage. “Why didn’t the Porters wipe August’s memories?”

“In the beginning, they didn’t realize how much he had seen,” said Nidhi. “Victor refused to talk about the abuse. His parents told the Porters they thought Victor had been playing in the car, and the whole thing was an unfortunate accident. As far as we knew, neither of them suspected anything magical. We didn’t learn the truth until months later, when Victor told us how his father had cowed the family into silence. The Porters visited August Harrison and did their best to erase his knowledge.”

“That obviously didn’t work,” I said bitterly.

“It did for a time.” Nidhi sighed. “Victor was never as careful with magic as he should have been. Over the years, August must have seen enough to piece the truth back together.”

My parents and I hadn’t always gotten along, but I couldn’t imagine growing up as Victor had. I knew he had done time as a field agent, but I had never been able to imagine him facing off against monsters or magic-wielders gone bad. Now I understood. Monsters wouldn’t scare a man who had grown up with one.

“If August has no magic, how does he control the insects?” asked Lena.

“Nicholas—Victor—said something about a telepathic interface.” August couldn’t have built the insects, any more than he could have pulled my shock-gun from its book. But once I made that gun, anyone could point and shoot. Likewise, if the queen was telepathic, August didn’t need magic. “We know he has the queen. Who was the libriomancer with him?”

“August Harrison had no friends among the Porters,” Nidhi said. “The few people who knew of him felt nothing but contempt.”

“What happens if the queen dies?” asked Deb. “Do the rest of the bugs drop dead, or do they freak out and go after anything that moves?” When nobody answered, she punched Nicholas on the shoulder. “That was your cue to ask the dead guy.”

Nicholas scowled, but turned back toward the place where Victor had died. “Victor isn’t certain what will happen if the queen is killed. Her loss would stop them from breeding or evolving, but—”

“Breeding?” Three of us spoke at once.

“Victor used a fractal matrix for the core spells, allowing the queen’s magic to be passed on.” His eyes crinkled with amusement. “The insects aren’t the true danger. Victor says you should be more concerned about the knowledge they could hold. They were designed to interface with his personal computer network, to better share their findings.”

I sat down on the undersized pink desk chair and stared at the wall where Victor’s backup server had once sat. He had
disguised the machine as a potted cactus. I remembered the first time I sensed the power coming from Victor’s system, and his mischievous smile as he watched me try to figure out what I was looking at.

Jeff cocked his head and let out a sharp grunt, somewhere between a bark and a growl. Of us all, he was the only one who wouldn’t understand the implications.

I had no idea what a fractal matrix was, but that was the least of our problems. “Victor Harrison designed most of the security for the Porter network.” Anyone else who tried to hack our database would be lucky to survive in their natural shape, but if Victor had programmed his pets to avoid such traps, and if they had access to his system and software…

“August Harrison could have everything,” Nidhi whispered. “Personnel records. Histories.”

“Research reports.”
My reports.
“Oh, God.”

“What’s wrong?” Lena asked.

I swallowed to keep from throwing up. In my mind, I was back in the woods, standing over the broken body of the murdered wendigo. My throat felt like it had turned to stone.

Lena touched my arm. “Isaac?”

“He wanted their skins,” I whispered. “That’s why August had to butcher them while they were alive. Wendigos revert to human form when they die, and he needed the monster. He wanted to take their power. Their strength.”

“How do you know?” asked Lena.

“Because I wrote the paper explaining how to do it.”

They were all staring at me. “Explain,” Jeff snarled.

Eight years ago, I had never met a nonhuman. Ray had told me stories of vampires and werewolves, but they weren’t
real
. Not yet. “This was when I first started training with Ray Walker down in East Lansing. We were talking about the nature of magical creatures.”

I had come dangerously close to failing out of my first semester at MSU. I hadn’t cared about my introductory courses. Why waste my time in a lecture hall when I could be studying magic? My textbooks sat unopened while I tore through
magical theory and history. I skipped labwork in order to practice using my own powers.

“Libriomancy is an extrinsic magic. I use books to pull magic into myself before I can manipulate that magic. Werewolves and vampires use intrinsic magic. Your bodies use that energy automatically. You can’t control the process any more than I can consciously manufacture white blood cells. We’ve known for centuries that intrinsic and extrinsic magic couldn’t exist in the same person. It’s why Deb lost her libriomancy when she changed.”

“Get to the point,” Deb said.

“Back in the 1920s, a group of Porters were searching for a way to use intrinsic magic without losing their other abilities. They…they started by investigating werewolves.”

Jeff’s lips pulled back, and his hackles were up again.

“Werewolves show up in folktales throughout the world,” I said. “Armenian stories talk of God punishing women by wrapping them in cursed wolf pelts. The women are human during the day, but monsters at night, murdering and feasting on their loved ones. Other cultures tell of skin-walkers, humans who take on the power of wolves and other beasts by donning their fur. The Úlfhednar of Norway dressed in wolfskins and were said to be all but unstoppable. Countless fairy tales talk of enchanted belts that transform the unsuspecting into monsters.”

I was stalling, presenting background information instead of jumping to the heart of my confession. Nidhi knew it, too. I could tell from the crease between her eyebrows.

“They experimented to see if werewolf skins retained their magic, and if that intrinsic magic from…from freshly harvested samples…could be transferred to human beings.”

Jeff lunged at me, but Lena moved just as fast. She kicked him in the side, and his jaws clacked shut, missing me by inches. Jeff’s claws scraped the floor, but before he could recover, Lena was kneeling on his neck. She clutched her bokken in both hands, holding it like a quarterstaff, and ready to strike with either end.

“Their work wasn’t sanctioned,” I said. “When Gutenberg
found out, he put an end to it.” The researchers had been transferred to other regions. A slap on the wrist, considering what they had done.

“What did
you
do?” Jeff growled.

“Their experiments failed. The skins didn’t preserve the magic long enough to be useful.” When I read their papers eight years ago, I hadn’t thought about werewolves. I had been too busy thinking about the possibilities. What if infusing people with magic could be as easy as applying a nicotine patch?

“You thought wendigo skins might work better,” Lena said.

“Their results suggested a process of rapid magical and biological decay,” I said miserably. “I thought the cold might slow or even stop that process.”

Jeff had stopped struggling, but his ears were flat against his head.

“The Porters have…samples…from various species,” I said. “I requisitioned—Ray helped me to order a patch of wendigo hide. About two square inches, packed in dry ice. We used rats from the pet store, shaving their fur and applying a tiny square. Two didn’t respond at all, but the third showed increased strength and hostility. The changes lasted for several days.”

“How do you collect these
samples
?” Jeff snarled.

“When a werewolf goes feral, the pack hunts him or her down. Other magical creatures aren’t as self-regulating, so the Porters have to get involved.” I stared through the window. “The bodies are brought back for study and disposal.”

“You said wendigos revert to human form when they die,” Lena said.

“I know.” I couldn’t look at her. “I suspect they put the wendigo into some kind of stasis. It wouldn’t have felt anything.”

It had all been so logical eight years ago. Only a handful of intrinsically magical creatures were sentient. Most were closer to animals. The more we could learn, the better we’d be able to manage them, even protect them when necessary.

How much of our work had August Harrison been able to access? He must have found Victor’s notes, and he had obviously discovered my research papers. Had he been searching specifically for ways to gain power, or had he stumbled onto my reports by accident?

“Did you or anyone else proceed to human trials with wendigo skins?” Nidhi asked. Both her words and her expression were professionally neutral.

“Not that I know of.” The vampires appeared nonplussed by my revelations, but then, I wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t know. Deb might not have been familiar with every one of my projects, but she knew the Porters’ research practices, just as she knew our history was stained by those who occasionally traded ethics for results. No doubt she had shared everything with her new masters.

“Beat yourself up later,” Lena snapped. “Jeff, I’m going to let you up now. I’d thank you to not rip out my lover’s throat. Whatever those Porters did, they died years ago. Should I kill you because some other werewolf murdered innocent people a hundred years ago?”

She eased back, and Jeff clambered to his feet. His fur hadn’t flattened back out, but he didn’t try to kill me.

Lena turned to Nicholas. “Ask Victor if there’s another way to stop his creations. A self-destruct phrase, a backup queen, anything.”

Nicholas chuckled as he relayed Lena’s question. “Destroy the queen, and her death
might
spread through her children.”

Which would be perfect, if we had the queen. “Is there a way to duplicate her song?”

“Not by you. Victor took great care to make sure his creations could not be ‘hacked.’” Nicholas frowned at that last word, making me wonder how long he had been locked away from the world. “He believed that if anything were to happen to his queen, he would simply make another.”

“Can he tell us how?” I asked.

A sudden flare of heat seared my thigh. Banners of flame rippled from Smudge’s back as he darted to and fro in his cage.
Lena caught my eyes and gestured to the door. I checked the hallway while Lena moved toward the bedroom window.

The window cracked as if struck by a stone, and Lena jumped back.

“Ah,” said Nicholas. “The ghosts have found us at last, and they’ve brought Victor’s children home.”

I yanked out my shock-gun. “What ghosts?”

Two metal wasps were attacking the window, while another trio clung to the screen. I crossed the room, held the barrel of my gun six inches from the glass, and pulled the trigger.

I liked to tell myself I had chosen the shock-gun to practice with because it was a practical, multi-purpose weapon. At its highest setting, it could take down a zombified elephant, and at its lowest it would knock a human unconscious with no long-term damage. Nor would it draw undue attention, being designed to mimic an ordinary twenty-first-century handgun.

Those were all good and valid reasons, but the truth was, I picked this one because I got to shoot evil with lightning bolts.

The discharge etched a jagged line across my vision, and the smell of ozone filled the room. The sound was nowhere near as loud as natural thunder, but it was enough to make my ears ring. The blast shattered the window, leaving blobs of melted glass around the edges of the frame. A single insect glowed orange in the molten glass. I peered outside and spotted two men on the patio below. No, not men.

I jerked back as more wasps flew toward us. I fired again, but this time what emerged was little more than a spark of static electricity. “Oh, come on,” I shouted. This gun was supposed to have enough ammo for more than a hundred shots.

The insects buzzed through the window and converged on Nicholas. He ripped two away even as more began to burrow into his chest. He crushed one between his fingers and tried to dig out the next, but he wasn’t fast enough.