Libriomancer (27 page)

“Not fair.” It was one thing to absorb magical attacks, but nobody had ever told me they could reach out and drain the magic from others. I dove toward the trees, trying to reach something solid. I stretched out my hands, reaching for a branch—

The last of the fairy dust dissolved. Lena shouted my name, though the air rushing past my ears made it hard to hear. The branch I had hoped to catch struck my palms like a baseball bat and tore out of my grasp. The impact spun my legs over my head, and another branch hit me in the back. Something sliced the side of my face. Wood cracked and split, and then the earth slammed into me.

I tried to sit up, but a wave of pain and nausea crushed that idea. I could see the automaton striding toward me. Two of them, actually, though I assumed my doubled vision was a side effect of the impact. Blood pooled inside my cheek, along with a shard of something sharp that might have been part of a tooth.

“Isaac!”

I tried to wave Lena off, but my arm wouldn’t work. I looked down, and the sight of my dislocated shoulder made me queasy. I spat and looked up at the automaton. “I don’t suppose I could interest you in a bribe?”

Wooden fingers reached for me, and then Lena hit the automaton with a tree. The force of her one-handed swing knocked the thing off its feet, a good six feet into the clearing.

“Stay down,” she said as she limped past me. Her face was swollen and bloody. Her weapon was a five-inch-thick maple tree. She had sheared away the roots and branches, creating what was essentially an enormous wooden club.

The automaton was already coming toward her. She shifted her grip, braced herself, and smashed the legs out from beneath it. The tree whooshed through the air overhead as she twirled and slammed the end down on the automaton’s face.

“Lena, you can’t—”

“Shut up, Isaac.” She swung again. The automaton blocked, and the tree cracked against its arm. The broken end fell away, and she stepped back, adjusting her grip. “I couldn’t save Nidhi. I’m not losing you.”

I tried to stand, but the effort made me throw up. I had probably given myself a concussion with that landing.

Lena thrust the broken tree like a sword. The automaton caught it in both hands and crushed it to splinters, then backhanded Lena into the woods, a blow that would have killed a human being instantly. I saw her push herself to her knees and prayed she would stay down.

But she wouldn’t, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to help her. The automaton turned back to me.

We should have fled the moment I found that book . . . though once an automaton had your magical scent, they were supposed to be able to find you anywhere. I wondered briefly why Hubert hadn’t used them more often. Why bother with vampires when you had unstoppable mechanical soldiers?

I saw Lena hobbling toward us again. I shook my head. “Get out of here!”

“No.” She crouched at the base of a large maple tree and shoved her fingers into the dirt. A short distance away, roots punched out of the earth and coiled around the automaton’s feet.

It ripped free without apparent effort and strode toward her. She swore and stood, back against the tree.

“Over here,” I shouted, but it ignored me. Wooden hands reached for Lena’s throat.

Her lips pressed into a tight smile. Her eyes met mine, and she blew me a quick kiss. With her good hand, she grabbed the automaton’s wrist.

And then both Lena and the automaton fell backward into the tree.

I could hardly move, let alone reach the tree where Lena had vanished. If my body hurt this much with adrenaline still pumping through me, I didn’t want to know what I would feel like later.

I had left the Narnia book behind, not wanting to overuse its magic. I had swapped it for a gaming tie-in novel, one which came with potions of healing. Unfortunately, that novel was in one of my back pockets, meaning I had to sit up or roll over to reach it.

I braced myself with my good arm and pushed onto my elbow. My eyes watered, and I cursed in three different languages until the pain receded enough for me to sit up the rest of the way. Sweat was dripping from my forehead by the time I managed to tug the bottom of the jacket out from beneath me.

“Right,” I gasped. “From now on, the healing book goes in the
front
pocket.”

I wiped my eyes and did my best to ignore the buzz of fictional minds reaching for mine as I thrust my hand into the book and plucked a healing potion from a halfling thief. I downed the entire thing, then gasped as my shoulder wrenched back into place.

It wasn’t quite as effective as Lucy’s Narnian potion, but it fixed the worst of the damage. Cuts faded to red lines, and bruises dulled somewhat. Between crashing through branches on the way down, then landing on my books, my skin remained a mottled mess of black and blue. My tooth was still chipped, too.

I was more worried about internal injuries. I pressed my abdomen, feeling for firmness and pain, but found nothing worse than bruises.

Blackened weeds showed where Smudge had fled into the woods. I found him cowering in the dirt in a circle of charred pine needles. I waited for him to scramble back up to his customary spot on my shoulder, then turned to the tree where Lena had vanished.

I pressed a sweaty palm to the tree. The bark was undamaged and cool to the touch. Their feet had dug deep into the dirt, gouging the earth. I could see where she had braced herself for that one final pull.

So why hadn’t she emerged? I didn’t fully understand Lena’s magic, or the automaton’s for that matter. They could have both been killed, or they could still be battling within the tree. And if Lena lost that fight, could the automaton claw its way back into our world?

I picked up the rifle and walked toward the cabin. I kept seeing Lena’s face right before she vanished: pain tightening the lines of her neck and jaw, eyes narrowed with determination. Again and again, I watched in my mind as the automaton beat the hell out of her. Her broken arm, her cries of pain ripping free even though she was obviously trying to hold them back.

By the time I spied the discarded copy of
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, I was too pissed off to think. I raised the rifle to my shoulder. “Let’s see if your little peephole works both ways, you son of a bitch.”

I switched the rifle to full auto and pulled the trigger, emptying the magazine into the book in a mere four seconds.

That might not have been the best move. Magical backlash surged through the gun like an electrical shock, flinging me backward. The rifle dissolved in my hands, leaving nothing but a coating of greasy black dust on my palms. I landed on my back hard enough to knock the wind from my lungs.

Smudge skittered off my shoulder to the ground, flame rippling on his back as he turned around to glare at me accusingly.

“Sorry about that.” I wiped my hands on my jeans and sat up. I had dug a smoking hole at least twenty feet deep and five feet wide. The book was gone. I retrieved my sunglasses. One lens was shattered, but the other worked well enough. I searched the hole, making sure no trace of magic remained.

“Come on, Smudge.” The smart thing would be to get the hell out of here. If Lena hadn’t destroyed the automaton, if it managed to escape the tree, then at any moment I could find myself face-to-face with a mechanical nightmare, with no dryad bodyguard to save my ass this time around. Or Hubert could send another one after me.

But Lena was in that tree, too. She hadn’t left me, and I’d be damned if I was going to abandon her.

I gathered up every book I could find from the cabin and brought them to the tree. Back at my house, Lena had said she knew I was home because she sensed my arrival through the trees, meaning she retained some awareness of the outside world. I leaned against the trunk, wondering if she could feel my hands and forehead against the bark. “Thank you.”

I sagged to the ground, surrendering to the aftermath of so much magic, but there was one precaution left to take. If the automaton won whatever battle it was waging within the tree, it would try to escape. I re-created the monofilament sword I had used in Detroit. The blade should cut through the tree as quickly as I could swing.

I might not be able to use magical weapons against the automaton, but if it killed Lena, I’d slice the whole damn tree to pieces before I let it back into the world.

I tried to concentrate on the books, sorting those that showed the worst signs of magical char. Those were the books Hubert had used the most. “What were you doing here?”

Practicing, yes. But what else? He had come here, to a place that was quiet and familiar and safe. I thought back to the Copper River Library and the sparklers who had attacked me. Had magic come as naturally to Hubert as it had to me? Had he felt the same excitement, the same joy? Even as I had been certain I was about to die at the hands of those vampires, I had been grateful for the chance to use magic one last time.

How much had he remembered? His anger toward the Porters suggested he knew what had been done to him. Gutenberg had taken away that part of his life once before. He would have wanted to find a way to protect himself.
V-Day
gave him a weapon, but books took time to write and publish.

The Silver Cross wouldn’t be enough to overpower Gutenberg. Nor should it have worked on automatons, not if they were constructed to absorb magic. I flipped through the first book, an old copy of
Dracula
. Vampire research, perhaps.

The next book was
Silence of the Lambs
, by Thomas Harris. This was probably how Hannibal Lecter had crept into Hubert’s mind. I set it aside and reached for the next. The cover was gone, and the first few pages fell away when I opened them. I flipped to the middle of the book and froze. This was Albert Kapr’s biography of Johannes Gutenberg.

We had assumed Hubert’s possession was an accident, a side effect of reckless magic use. We had assumed wrong. “You did it on purpose, didn’t you?”

The automatons were built to protect their creator. To protect Gutenberg. So the best way to defend against them was to
become
Gutenberg.

It wouldn’t have been perfect. The Gutenberg of this book was a creation of the author, a character built by historians. Transporting that character’s mind from the pages into our world would have resulted in a flawed, deranged copy of Gutenberg: a madman, but one who retained enough of Gutenberg’s identity to confuse the automatons.

And then, once Hubert had opened himself to one book, removing the barriers between himself and the magic, other characters began to seep into his thoughts. Had any of those been deliberate? Had he welcomed Moriarty as a genius who could help him to stay one step ahead of the Porters?

It was a desperate, brilliant move, one that would ultimately destroy him.

I was so lost in the possibilities that I almost missed the movement from the tree. Alertness jolted through my nerves, and I grabbed the sword as slender brown fingers poked through the trunk.

I waited, barely breathing, but the arm reaching toward me was unmistakably Lena’s. Wood and bark seemed to flow around her, flexible and fluid as the tree birthed her back into this world. I dropped the sword and stepped forward to catch her as she fell.

For one horrible moment, I thought she was dead, her body expelled by the tree. And then her arms tightened around my shoulders.

I lowered her to the ground, leaning her against the tree. She started to smile, then hissed and touched her swollen, bloody lip. “Remind me not to do that again.”

“The automaton?”

She wiped her chin. “He’s not coming back.”

I snatched the gaming book and created another healing potion. The instant she swallowed, some of the tension began to ease from her body. The swelling on her face diminished, and the bones of her arm knit together with an audible crackling sound. “Thanks.”

Smudge scrambled down my arm and jumped to the ground. I tensed, but he wasn’t setting anything on fire. He was simply creeping after a large, bright green luna moth that had fluttered onto another tree.

“You destroyed one of Gutenberg’s automatons,” I said softly.

Lena shrugged.

“You’re not supposed to be able to do that.”

“So noted.” She leaned into me, her head resting on my shoulder. “Tell you what. You take care of the next one, okay?”