Codex Born (22 page)

I
LEFT SMUDGE BEHIND with Jeff and Nidhi. Without his cage, I didn’t trust him on the back of a motorcycle. I waited while Lena strapped her spare helmet over my head, then climbed onto the back of the bike. I tucked the bottom of my jacket between us to keep it from getting caught in the wheels.

“Hold tight,” she said, and then we were darting onto the road.

I felt her laughter as she wove through traffic. On another day, I might have shared it. Lena had the irrepressible ability to not only find joy in life, but to express it without fear or self-consciousness. She loved without fear. It was one of the things that made me crazy about her.

But even as I clung to her waist, feeling her body pressed against mine, breathing in the woodsy smell of her hair, I couldn’t stop thinking about August Harrison. About how casually he had threatened to murder innocent people. About the anger I had seen when he murdered that wendigo in Tamarack. About his willingness to transform human beings into monsters, using techniques
I
had developed.

Where had he found his would-be wendigos? Were these allies who had volunteered to be transformed, or were they more victims? They had dragged the unconscious bodies away, leaving nobody who could answer those questions.

The magic in Harrison’s two pelts wouldn’t last forever. The rat had reverted to normal after three days, though that had been a smaller sample of skin, one which had been preserved for years before use. We didn’t know how long the magic of a fresh skin might endure.

I kept an eye out for insects, but either Harrison hadn’t noticed Lena’s bike, or else I had stung him too badly when I swatted his last batch.

Another possibility taunted me. Maybe this was what Harrison wanted. He had tried to get the two of us to surrender back in Columbus, and here we were, speeding down the highway to find him. Victor had been a genius. I couldn’t afford to underestimate his father.

The GPS led us to a small Baptist church. Scorch marks covered the parking lot. Streaks of black rubber showed where someone had swerved around a car parked by the main entrance. The van was here, having smashed into a basketball hoop on the far side of the lot. Tire tracks on the grass suggested the truck had kept going into the field behind the church, where a row of pine trees stood like a living fence.

Lena parked her bike on the side of the road. I tugged my helmet off with one hand and clipped it to her bike. As we approached, I heard shouts from the field.

“Oh, shit.” Lena took off running toward the front door. A body lay slumped against the brick wall, half hidden by the bushes alongside the walk. Lena pushed the bushes aside, and from the way the urgency drained from her movements, I knew we were too late.

Sharp claws had opened the woman’s throat and shoulder. Her eyes were wide. Blood dribbled from the wounds, soaking into the gravel. Whoever she was, she didn’t look like she could have presented a threat. Thick glasses, a close-permed frizz of brown hair, and a round face gave her a vaguely jovial appearance, even in death. She had died clutching her purse to her chest. I knelt and opened her purse.

“What are you doing?” Lena whispered.

“I’m not sure.” I just wanted to know her name. This murder struck harder than the others. Maybe the still-warm body just felt more
real
than vampires who turned to dust or ash, or the wendigos who had been hacked apart until they were nothing but meat. Or maybe it was my own human prejudices, the idea that a human death meant more than the others. After all, wasn’t I the one who had experimented with old wendigo hide like it was nothing more than a toy?

I pulled out a leather wallet. The driver’s license identified
her as Christina Quinney, age fifty-three. Killed by monsters because she was in the way. I returned the wallet and closed her eyes. As I stood, I ripped the blanket away from my hand and stretched the armored fingers, then donned my enchanted sunglasses. “Come on.”

Lena tested the edges of her bokken, then nodded. I debated preparing an additional weapon or two of my own, but I didn’t want to push it. Not yet. Smarter to wait until I knew exactly what would be most effective at ending August Harrison.

We made our way around the back of the church, keeping close to the wall. The pickup had driven through a small flower garden, overturning a bench and smashing a birdbath before coming to a stop by the trees. A starburst of blackened grass and the smell of sulfur showed where the automaton had taken another shot at the truck. Through my glasses, the charred grass shimmered as if someone had spilled gold glitter: the remnants of the automaton’s magic.

The battle had moved to the edge of the woods, where three people stood around the automaton. Insects lay dead and scattered, like flickering embers. Harrison and his wendigos formed a second ring, but only those inner three were actually fighting. Each held a book, and with the sunglasses, I could see three ghosts circling the automaton, draining the life from its body.

What the hell were they? I had seen possession before, where fictional characters crept into the mind of a careless libriomancer. If I kept pushing things, I’d see it a lot closer. But that was a known and somewhat understood magical phenomenon. Like possession, these beings appeared to come from books, but they behaved like the
absence
of magic.

“How long do you think we have before the police show up?” Lena asked.

“They won’t. Not until this is over. Automatons can become invisible when necessary, but they also divert the attention of anyone who doesn’t know what they are. Call it an apathy field, for lack of a better term.” The automaton stumbled. A patch
of metal fell away from its wooden body, and three of the spells woven into its shell went dark. “Anything magic I throw their way, they can intercept.”

Lena stepped away, returning a short time later with several chunks of broken blacktop. “So we hit them hobbit style. Nothing magical about a flying rock.”

“I don’t know what’s sexier,” I said. “Watching you prepare to take on bad guys, or the fact that you’re making
Lord of the Rings
references as you do it.” I pulled out a copy of
The Marvelous Land of Oz
. “If we hit them from two directions, we should be able to draw off their attack enough for the automaton to start smacking heads.”

The automaton staggered, and the others closed in. More of its armor dropped into the grass. Two more insects flew in and burrowed into the exposed wood.

I set the Oz book aside and grabbed Plato’s
The Republic
. Reading was tricky with only one working hand, but I soon held the Ring of Gyges. I had done an honors paper as an undergraduate, arguing the similarity between Plato’s tale and Tolkien’s One Ring. I shoved
The Republic
back into my pocket and started in on
The Marvelous Land of Oz
.

“Dare I ask what you’re planning to do with a ring and an old pepperbox?” Lena asked when I was done.

I beamed. “It’s a surprise. Give me two minutes to get ready.”

I slipped the ring onto my finger and vanished. In theory, true invisibility should have left me blind. Vision relied on the interaction between light and the cells at the back of the eye, but thanks to the ring, the light passed through me as if I wasn’t here.

Fortunately, libriomancy obeyed belief over physics, and few modern-day readers thought about invisibility on a cellular level. I ran back to Christina Quinney and took a lipstick from her purse, then hurried toward the garden. Once there, I dropped behind the overturned bench.

The seat and back were slabs of polished black granite. The engraving along the back read,
In memory of Annette Butler
.
Had the truck hit this thing head-on, it probably would have broken both the bench and the truck, but it looked like they had struck it at an angle.

“I’m sorry about this, Annette.” I uncapped the lipstick and drew two red eyes and a large mouth. I wasn’t much of an artist, especially since the lipstick had turned invisible when I picked it up, but it left visible, waxy lines on the granite. I added a pair of angry eyebrows as well, along with uneven ears to either side.

I put the lipstick away and pulled out the pepperbox. Creating the powder of life from
The Marvelous Land of Oz
had been the easy part. The challenge was getting through the ritual to use it. I opened the box and sprinkled the powder over the bench, then raised my left pinky and said, “Weaugh.” Next was the right thumb. “Teaugh.” Finally, I raised both arms and waved them like a dancer doing jazz hands. “Peaugh.”

L. Frank Baum wrote some weird magic. I just hoped I had pronounced it correctly.

Through my glasses, the powder looked like white sparks melting into the metal and granite. The whole contraption gave a shiver. Lipstick eyes blinked, and the ears perked up.

“Hello there,” I said. “I need you to do me a favor…”

A wendigo was the first one to spot the bench bounding toward them. With a snarl, it broke away from the circle to meet this new threat.

The bench didn’t even slow down. It charged with a straight-on waddle, as if it wanted nothing more than for that wendigo to plop down and enjoy a nice, comfy seat. Instead, the wendigo grabbed the bench and lifted one end into the air.

It was an impressive display of strength, one which did the wendigo no good whatsoever as the seat and back clapped together like enormous granite jaws. The wendigo let out a high-pitched yowl of pain.

Lena used the distraction to sprint toward the trees. Two of the wendigos spotted her, but a chunk of brick downed one before it could react. A lucky shot with my shock-gun
took care of the second. I was a lousy shot with my left hand, but the nice thing about the shock-gun was that even grazing the target was enough to drop it.

Harrison whirled, but thanks to the Ring of Gyges on my hand, he stared right through me.

He recovered quickly, ordering the wendigos back. A ghost flew from the automaton and swooped through the bench, weakening my spell.

My gun spat lightning at the three mages, but it fizzled into nothingness without reaching them. With everyone worrying about me and the bench, Lena was able to race out from between the trees, slip an arm around a wendigo’s throat, and haul it backward.

The wendigo’s choked cry was enough to attract attention. Two more wendigos bounded after Lena. I almost felt bad for them. Attacking Lena among the trees was a particularly bad idea.

I moved to the corner of the church and braced my arm against the bricks, sighting in on August Harrison, but one of the ghosts swooped into my line of fire. It could see me, even if Harrison couldn’t.

In the field, the bench staggered as another ghost continued to siphon its magic. Cartoonish eyes drooped, and its movements turned sluggish. But when another wendigo approached, the bench valiantly reared up and kicked it in the chest.

The ghost in front of me closed in. I pointed over its shoulder, uncertain whether it would see or understand the gesture. “Too late,” I said, grinning.

With two of the three ghosts focused on us while Harrison and the wendigos chased after Lena, the remaining book-mage was left alone to try to contain the automaton. It wasn’t enough. Wooden hands creaked, and a blast of hellfire shot outward. The woman with the green hair tried to jump out of the way, but the flames caught her in the side. She spun away, protecting her book even as she screamed in pain.

She tried to run, but the automaton struck a wendigo hard
enough to knock its body into her. They both went down, and her book flew into the grass. The ghost in front of me peeled away, streaking back toward the automaton.

I didn’t stop to think. I simply ran. I held my shock-gun ready, but my attention was on that book. The wendigo who had been hit was very dead, but Green was groaning and trying to pull herself free from beneath the body. She was reaching for her book.

I got there first. The book disappeared when I snatched it up with my armored hand. The woman screamed again, fury overpowering pain as she struggled to follow.

I retreated to the church to study my prize. It became visible again as soon as I set it down. White silk cords bound wooden boards covered in red cloth. I opened the cover, then pulled my hand back. “Rice paper,” I whispered.

Strong and smooth, the paper held the ink far better than most modern paper. The columns of brown Chinese characters were as clear and sharp as the day they had been drawn. The pages were folded and pasted together, like a long scroll flattened accordion-style and bound into a single book. There were illustrations, but no color.

Based on what I had seen, this book was more than seven hundred years old. Give or take a century. That made it significantly older than Gutenberg himself. Of course, I was no expert, and I couldn’t know anything for certain without further research.

I turned carefully to the front pages and frowned. The first few pages were printed, either woodblock or movable type. But the inner pages appeared to have been written by hand.

I moved the book out of sight behind me and returned my attention to the fighting. Only two of the ghosts remained, and all but three wendigos were unconscious or too injured to make a difference. Harrison was red-faced, his angry shouts growing shrill with panic. My animated bench was limping and the automaton was in bad shape, but we were winning. Harrison launched another small swarm at the automaton, only to have their magic sucked away before they reached their target.
Harrison cried out again, this time in pain. I grinned and started shooting, and he dove for cover behind the truck.

“Guan Feng?”

The voice belonged to a woman, and it had come from the book. I had heard whispers from books before, but this was different. It didn’t feel like misplaced snippets of dialogue sneaking into my thoughts. Whoever had spoken sounded more aware, more
here
.

At the tree line, roots broke through the earth to twine around a wendigo’s ankles. I aimed at the two remaining book-mages and pulled the trigger.

The book behind me screamed. The words were in another tongue—one of the Chinese languages, I thought…possibly Mandarin—but I understood them perfectly as they tore through my skull.