Codex Born

14

I held the cat carrier in one hand while an aging Siamese cat yowled in protest. Melinda Hill was strapping her one-year-old son into the car seat in the old minivan, while Hailey, the volunteer from the Dearborn domestic violence shelter, stuffed a hastily-packed bag of clothes, diapers, and formula into the back. Hailey and I had arrived ten minutes before, and Melinda hadn’t stopped shaking that entire time, but she didn’t let that stop her. She clicked the last buckle into place and stepped back.

By contrast, Hailey was completely calm. Her every movement was careful and deliberate. She took the cat carrier from me and set it into the back seat beside the boy.

Melinda jumped every time someone drove up the street. Thankfully, midmorning traffic had been relatively light. I heard another car approaching and offered her a reassuring smile.

Melinda stiffened, and then every muscle in her body seemed to turn to mud. I turned to see a red Jeep speeding down the block. Only a madman would do forty down a residential street. A madman or a pissed-off husband. He wasn’t slowing down, and I reached for Hailey, preparing to fling her onto the grass if the driver tried to ram us. He slammed on the brakes at the last minute, tires screeching against the pavement.

“Shit.” Hailey stepped in front of me. This was only the third time I had helped to escort a client. I was technically still a trainee and Hailey’s responsibility. “Get in the van with Melinda, lock the doors, and call 911.”

Melinda was whispering, “I’m sorry,” over and over. Her eyes were dry. It frightened me how quickly and thoroughly she had faded when her husband appeared, becoming a ghost of who she was.

I helped her into the van, then retrieved the oak cane I had tucked beneath the seat. “You’re going to be all right.”

I couldn’t tell if she heard me or not. By now, Hailey had pulled out a handheld radio and was holding it like a beacon. “Mister Hill, the PPO says you’re not allowed to be within one hundred yards of your wife. This conversation is being recorded. I know you’re angry, but please get back in your car and contact Mrs. Hill’s lawyer to resolve this.”

Christopher Hill didn’t look like an evil man, nor was he particularly imposing. He was in his mid-twenties, dressed in a bland gray shirt and paisley tie. It was his shoes that caught my eye, black and polished like glass. Perfectly clean, just as the house had been.

This wasn’t how I had imagined the man who had broken three of his wife’s ribs and cracked her left eye socket.

He didn’t say a word, probably hoping that would prevent the recording from being used against him. He strode toward Hailey and reached for the radio. I stepped between them.

“Dammit, Lena,” said Hailey. “I told you—”

“I’m all right.” I rested both hands on the cane. “Mister Hill, you need to leave.”

His mouth opened, and then his eyes twitched toward the radio. With a grimace, he reached out to shove me aside.

I bent my knees, rooting myself to the pavement, and smiled. He pushed harder.

Hailey’s composure was slipping. “Mister Hill, you’re committing an act of battery against Lena Greenwood. You need to return to your car.”

He scowled and tried again to shove past us. I moved with him, keeping my body interposed.

“This is my house,” he hissed in a low voice. “That’s my son. My wife.”

My smile grew. “Not for much longer, I think.”

His first punch was, frankly, disappointing. I don’t think he expected much from a heavyset Indian girl leaning on a cane. I shifted my stance and swung the cane with both hands to intercept his blow. Wood cracked against the bone of his forearm.

“Son of a bitch!” He jumped back, clutching his arm.

“Lena, don’t,” Hailey warned.

I was doing exactly what I had been trained not to do. We were supposed to deescalate conflict whenever possible, and to get away and call the police if we were in danger. But those rules had been written for human volunteers.

He rushed me again, and I struck his knee, dropping him to the road. I switched to a one-handed grip on the cane and reached down to twist my fingers into his shirt. I had never felt so strong, so powerful. I flung him onto the grass. He scrambled to his feet, but I rapped him on the side of the head with the end of the cane.

“Stop it!”

The shout had come from Melinda. She was crying. Hailey was holding her back, but she twisted free as I watched. She ran past me, interposing herself between me and her husband just as I had done seconds before when I tried to protect her.

I lowered the cane. “I don’t understand. He—”

“Get in the van, Lena.” Hailey’s face was red. She clipped the radio back to her belt. “Shut up and get in the goddamned van.”

I looked past her to Christopher Hill, silently daring him to get up. He groaned and sagged into the grass. Then I turned my attention to Melinda, who stood over her husband, ready to fight off anyone who tried to hurt him.

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.

BOTH 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.

Great-Grandaunt was not angry. Instead, she smiled and turned back to the star map. “Find them,” she repeated.

This time, when I looked to the clouds, I could see the stars burning beyond. “The Celestial Spear.” Despite the sunlight, I saw the constellation more clearly than ever I had before. I felt as though I could touch them, gather them to my breast like jewels. “How?”

“Through the [UNTRANSLATABLE] of your ancestor, Bi Sheng. This book was printed a hundred years ago. It and its sisters were shared and read by those with spiritual and magical strength. As each of Bi Sheng’s [UNTRANSLATABLE. SUGGESTIONS: DESCENDANTS, APPRENTICES] read the book, the words grew stronger. We read each book again and again, refilling the cup of its magic.”

Just as Guan Feng had done for Bi Wei. How many times had someone read this book over the years to sustain her? Thousands? How many hours did the students of Bi Sheng spend with these texts, fighting to keep their ancestors alive?

I laughed with delight, an outburst that would have earned disapproval from others, but Great-Grandaunt understood. This book had brought the night to life. I saw not just pinpoints of light, but the Emperor of Heaven, the Celestial Kitchen, the First Great One…I saw what they represented, the meaning we had painted on the sky throughout the ages.

“Why me?” I asked, not daring to hope that there might be more.

“Because you see beyond the words. They open your eyes to the world, and you give them power, just as Bi Sheng did. Just as I did. And it is time you learn to use those gifts.”

It was a connection I had felt with few others: the excitement of libriomancy, of magic. None but another libriomancer could understand the wonder and amazement of that discovery, the thrill of our first forays into magic. With Bi Wei, I relived that delight through the prism of her life. If anything, her joy had been even stronger than my own.

In that moment, I touched her mind.

Joy vanished, replaced by pain and confusion. Everything about this place and time was strange. The only constant was the violence and war that had followed her. She had fled the Porters centuries before, and had awakened to find herself threatened by them once again.

Or had she awakened at all? Was this the madness that had claimed the Lost Ones? Power clawed like a beast trapped within her chest, fighting to tear free. Even as she struggled to contain the beast, it slithered through her fingers, seducing her with the promise of magic. It had been so simple to use that power to grasp the words of those around her, the angry orders of the one called August Harrison, the broken-but-familiar words of the Bì de dú .

Her own descendants practically worshipped her. Whereas August Harrison treated her with derision, as if she were nothing but a Miáo slave. Guan Feng often cursed him under her breath, but she obeyed his wishes out of gratitude and respect. He had been the one to restore Bi Wei.

He was the one who could bring back Wei’s friends.

Feng held her hand as they walked alongside a palisade of sharpened poles that led to a square watchtower. The ground was hard-packed earth, bordered by old wood and stone buildings. Fireflies crawled over the walls—no, not fireflies. Those were Harrison’s insects. Bi Wei was seeing the magic in each one.

Wherever they were, Harrison was taking no risks. He had ordered everyone along this time: twenty-four of the twisted monsters he called wendigos, sixteen readers, and another twenty guardians, not counting Bi Wei and Guan Feng. Roughly half of the humans carried firearms. The handheld cannons were as frightening and disorienting as the metal cars they had stolen to get to this place, traveling at unimaginable speeds.

“The north wall,” said Harrison.

Bi Wei didn’t move.

“What is it?” asked Feng.

She looked around, searching. “We’re being watched.”

I slammed the book shut.

“What happened?” Lena asked, fully awake and alert.

“It worked.” I studied Lena more closely. Her eyes were red and shadowed, her hair a disheveled mess. “Are you all right?”

“I essentially tried to switch from sleeping on a king-sized bed to a little throw pillow.” She managed a pale smile. “I’m fine. This isn’t the first night I’ve spent away from my oak. What did you learn?”

“Not as much as I wanted. I think Bi Wei might have seen me. She’s disoriented, but determined to save the rest of her people. There are at least sixteen more of these books, and a bunch of people she called guardians. They must have had a second camp or base somewhere.”

“Did you see where they were? How close are they to finding us?”

“Harrison isn’t after us. They’re looking for something else. Something magical, I think.” I stared at the book, reconstructing what I had seen. That palisade was familiar. “Oh, shit.”

I grabbed my phone and called Nicola Pallas. The instant she answered, I said, “Harrison’s going after the archive at Fort Michilimackinac.”

“How long would it take you to get there?” Pallas asked calmly.

“Too long. He’s there now, and he knows where the archive is.”

To Pallas’ credit, she didn’t ask me how I knew. “Do you know what he wants?”

“Let me pull up the catalog.” I hurried toward the front desk and powered up the computer. I could connect to the Porter network and see what books and other toys were stored at the old fort. Hopefully something would jump out— “Wait. Nicola, did the Porters transfer everything from MSU to Michilimackinac?”

“Everything save a handful of books and artifacts that were destroyed when the building collapsed.”

I remembered the Michigan State University library, both as a student and as a field agent investigating the attack that crushed the entire building. I had cataloged some of the locked books the Porters used to store in the library’s secret subbasement. Of all the titles we had kept there, one would hold particular interest for August Harrison. “He’s going after Nymphs of Neptune.”

Lena had been discovered in lower Michigan. Until Lena, the Porters had thought it impossible to pull intelligent beings from books. You could infect humans from our world with vampirism and other afflictions. You could even yank something like Pixel the cat out of Heinlein. But a fully sentient mind? Impossible. Until it happened. Until an acorn from that book grew into a dryad’s oak, giving birth to Lena Greenwood.

Nidhi was the one who had discovered Lena’s origins in a secondhand copy of Nymphs of Neptune. Gutenberg had locked that book the very next day. I didn’t know how he did it, though I had heard whispers of an invisible inscription, a spell that spread out to affect every copy of a book. The locked book with Gutenberg’s enchantment had been moved to our archive in East Lansing for safekeeping.

“I can’t send another automaton,” Pallas said. “Gutenberg is still trying to repair the last one. Do you think Harrison has the ability to unlock books?”

I didn’t know how strong Bi Wei had become, but Harrison wouldn’t try to steal that book unless he thought he could use it, and that meant ripping open Gutenberg’s spell. “Probably. What about using an automaton to teleport someone else in?”

“The archive is magically shielded, remember?”

“How could I forget?” The Porters had chosen Michilimackinac because of its latent magical wards, spells placed more than three hundred years ago by French traders. Gutenberg had worked with Jane Oshogay, a historian and retired libriomancer who had moved here from Minnesota, to strengthen and build upon those wards. Wards I had foolishly volunteered to help test.

It had taken a day and a half for our healers to reverse the various curses, and another two weeks for my hair to finally start growing back.

“I’ll see what else I can do,” said Pallas. “And remember, I need your report on the Columbus incident.” She hung up without saying good-bye, which wasn’t unusual for her.

“He wants his own dryad,” Lena said tightly.

“It’s worse than that.” One dryad would allow him to restore the other students of Bi Sheng, but it would take time, and Harrison didn’t strike me as a patient man. “Why stop at one? He’s going to create an entire legion of dryad slaves.”