Codex Born (4 page)

I stepped into too-white snow and dead leaves that crunched beneath my bare feet. I covered my face with my hands. The sun was too large. It burned my eyes, making me want to retreat into my tree.

The surface was death. I needed shelter. How had I come here? Where was the closest ice cave?

I backed against the tree, letting the comforting roughness of the bark rub my bare skin. I curled my toes into the frozen earth, gripping the roots and reaching instinctively for the warmth of my grove-sisters.

I felt nothing. There were many trees, more than I had ever imagined, but they were empty shells. How could they survive the cold without their dryads to give them strength?

I had never been alone before. Not like this. I had never been lost.

Tears warmed my cheeks. How long had I slept?

I shivered then, not from cold, but from fear. I remembered Neptune. I remembered my sisters. I remembered fighting in the arena, the excitement of combat as my wooden sword slammed against my opponent’s spear. I remembered the pleasure of the bedchamber.

I remembered all these things, but I couldn’t remember
being
there. It was as though my memories had been ripped away, replaced by someone else’s dreams.

This place, wherever I was, felt too real, too bright, too much. Too many sensations. Too many thoughts. I dug my fingers into the skin of my thighs and twisted, trying to focus on the pain, using that sensation to drive out the rest. I sagged to the ground and rocked back and forth, losing myself in the movement.

I could return to the oak. I could sleep and be safe. Choose the long death, as the very first dryad was said to have done when her lover was murdered. Her tree had lived on for centuries, guarded by the grove of her children.

If I followed her example, I would be surrounded not by my sisters, but by mindless trees, only half-alive.

After a while, the sunlight began to fade. I blinked and looked around. Every leaf, every stick was so vivid. I picked a half-buried acorn from the ground and turned it in my hand, marveling at the detail. The tiny scales of the cap, the pale line where cap met seed, the hard protrusion at the bottom that made the acorn look like a miniature wooden breast.

I climbed to my feet, off-balance. This world was wrong. Nothing was as it should be. I needed my sisters. I needed my lovers. I needed—

I slammed my head against the tree to break the spiral of my thoughts.

There were trees here. Were there people as well? Tears spilled freely as I stepped away from my tree, from the one thing that felt safe.

If I stayed here, I would die. I would sleep forever. I would lose myself.

I picked up a fallen branch and hugged it to my chest. I could feel it responding to the life within me. Threadlike roots crawled from the broken branch, twining around my fingers. Gleaming buds poked from the other end. I cradled the branch in my arms as I stumbled away from my tree.

Grass whispered as Lena came to stand behind me. She said nothing, but rested her hand on my shoulder.

I needed to focus on the job at hand. I rooted through my book bag until I found a handheld infrared thermometer. I switched it on and pointed it at Smudge. The screen read 109 Fahrenheit, which was only a degree or two higher than normal for him.

In humans, core body temperature fell at about a half a degree per hour. For a wendigo, the calculation went in the opposite direction. Given a standard body temp of twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit, we should be able to get a rough window on the time of death. Although I had no idea how trauma and blood loss might affect things.

Lykanthropos anthropophagos was well-suited to life in the U.P. Wendigo blood worked as a kind of magical supercoolant. Even the marrow was cold as ice. Their fur literally froze the moisture from the air, forming a protective layer of frost and ice.

Like werewolves, wendigos were born human. But once the transformation took hold, they remained in their monstrous form until death. The Ojibwe legends I had studied described them as gluttonous, cannibalistic spirits. In one story, a wendigo’s mere presence caused the river to freeze and the trees to split from the cold.

A lone girl had set out to fight the wendigo, using a pair of sumac sticks with the bark peeled away. Until I met Lena, I had always found that a poor choice of weapon. But the girl defeated the wendigo, crushing its skull. The villagers chopped away the ice, eventually freeing the body of a man.

“Are you ready?” Lena asked.

I took a slow breath, then nodded. “I’m all right.”

“I know.”

We returned to the fence. Lena took the camera from Nidhi and tucked it into her pocket, then gripped the rail in both hands. The muscles in her arms tightened as she bent the fence lower to the ground. Keeping one hand on the rail, she stepped over and studied the drop-off. It wasn’t completely vertical, but
nothing short of a mountain goat would be able to climb that slope. Moss clung to the dark brown stone. Roots poked through like the coils of sea serpents.

Lena blew Nidhi and me a kiss, took two steps, and dropped out of sight.

“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.”