Codex Born

5

For as long as Frank and I were together, I never questioned my actions. I never asked why Marion Dearing wept when she thought nobody could hear. I gave her husband happiness. How could she object to that if she truly loved him?

I saw nothing wrong in fanning the embers of Frank’s lust. He wanted to be seduced, pushed over the edge until nothing existed but desire and satisfaction.

For myself, I knew only joy. I lived for those moments when my body entwined with his, the urgent grunts of his exertions blending with my quiet moans, but there were other pleasures as well. The burn of my muscles when I was out working the farm. Devouring the meals Marion prepared for us.

In the beginning, the other farmhands tried to flirt with me. I tolerated their overly familiar comments and “accidental” touches. Frank wanted others to appreciate what he had, but he was unwilling to share. So when one man tried to take things further, I broke his arm in two places.

I knew I was stronger than the others, but that was the first time I had used my strength against another person. Through that confrontation, I discovered that violence could be just another source of pleasure.

Only years later, long after I had buried Frank in the dirt, did I begin to recognize what I had done. What I had become.

Only then did I begin to understand how dangerous I was.

I SPENT THE NEXT hour on my laptop, lost in Porter databases and old research reports. I rarely used the laptop, which might have been why the insects spared it. Magic provided an amazing connection with the Porter network, but even magic couldn’t force the outdated hardware to process information at a faster rate.

In one window, I scrolled through various weapons we had cataloged over the years, looking for ideas to clear the rest of the bugs from Lena’s tree. I found nothing that looked like it would destroy metal while leaving her oak intact. The sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who might have worked, having been canonically established as being ineffective on wood, but nobody had ever figured out how to use the controls on the blasted thing.

I was also reading abstracts of every paper and report Victor Harrison had ever filed. I didn’t expect to find a description of a secret self-destruct code that would blow up his six-legged creations, but I had hoped to find something that might help us.

“You’re a librarian. Can’t you do some sort of keyword search to speed this up?” Nidhi stood by the window where she could peer out at Lena’s tree in the backyard. Lena had returned to the garden, asking to be left alone.

“Sure, and that would help if he’d filed his paperwork correctly.” I fought the urge to throw the laptop against the wall. “Even if he had, the real problem is figuring out what he didn’t document. Half the things Victor built could have gotten him kicked out of the Porters.” He had won twenty grand one year by betting on the outcome of the Super Bowl, a game he had recorded on his illegally-modified VCR a week before it aired.

“He was as bad as you are in some ways,” Nidhi said. “Rules were never a priority. Once you start playing God, nothing else matters. You’re incapable of walking away from an idea, no matter how bad an idea it might be.”

I glanced away, thinking of certain reports and experiments I had failed to file with the Porters. “I know, I know. ‘If you really want to kill a libriomancer, hook a bomb up to a big red button and tell him not to press it.’”

For the first time that night, Nidhi almost smiled. “That sounds like Doctor Karim.”

“She knows her clientele,” I admitted. Regular appointments with a Porter-approved shrink were one rule you didn’t get to break. Even Gutenberg had his own personal therapist, though rumor had it she was a hundred and thirty years old and preserved on a heavily fortified computer system, courtesy of a brain download performed using a Richard Morgan cyberpunk novel. “Doctor Karim’s worried about post-traumatic stress after the mess downstate. I’m pretty sure she’s also screening me for signs of bipolar disorder.”

“A manic period is normal after magic use.” She looked pointedly at my legs, and I forced myself to stop drumming my heels on the floor. “Lena has been worried about you. She says you’re not sleeping well, and when you do, you have nightmares.”

I shoved the laptop away and rubbed my eyes. “What other things has she shared?”

“That Doctor Karim has prescribed stronger pills to help you sleep, and you’ve gone through two refills already.” She sighed. “Are you surprised that Lena and I talk about you, Isaac?”

I was, a little. My relationship with Lena had brought Nidhi Shah into my life in a new and unexpected way, but I found it easier not to think about that when I was with Lena. “What else does she say?”

“That you’ve been cutting back on your work at the library, and you spend hours locked away in your office. She says you and Gutenberg haven’t had the smoothest time working together. No surprise there. Anyone with his centuries of experience will have trouble making allowances for those of us with mere decades.”

“I am but an egg,” I said ruefully. She just stared at me. “Don’t tell me you’ve never read Stranger in a Strange Land?”

“Heinlein?” She made a sour face. “No thank you.”

I had reread several Heinlein titles earlier this summer, trying to get a better framework for our three-way relationship. Unfortunately, the free love fantasies of Heinlein’s work hadn’t provided much insight into making such a relationship work in the real world. I had tracked down a few nonfiction titles that were more useful, though my boss had given me a very odd look when she saw my interlibrary loan request go through.

“Those computer chips have to be important,” Nidhi said. “Could you use an EMP to wipe them clean? Even a strong enough magnet—”

“Magnets won’t touch a boson chip.” I jumped up and began to pace. “Those things can survive a nuclear blast at close range. We need to lure the bugs out of the tree and destroy them all at once, and we need to do it quickly. You’ve known Lena longer than I have. How much time do you think she has before she has to return to her tree?”

“When her oak is healthy, she can stay away for up to a week if she absolutely has to. But with these things weakening her, I’m not sure.”

I glared at the laptop “Why the hell would Victor make something like this?”

“The same reason you keep drawing up plans for magic-based space exploration. Victor loved his toys. He loved to create, but he wasn’t always good at thinking through the consequences.”

I thought back to what we had seen that afternoon. “The man we saw was wearing metal armor of some sort.” I picked up the decapitated ladybug. “Imagine a swarm of these things clinging to you.”

“They could serve as armor and weapons both,” Nidhi said, nodding. “We thought the wendigo’s wounds had been made by bullets, but they were roughly the size of the holes these insects drilled through your door and ceiling.”

I shivered, remembering the insects landing on my body, biting into my skin. I imagined them burrowing deeper, through flesh and bone. “He’s got to be controlling them. When we showed up in Tamarack and began snooping around, he sent his insects to attack Lena’s tree.”

“How did he know where to find it?” Nidhi asked.

“One question at a time.” I steepled my fingers and tapped them against my chin. “Instead of destroying them, what if we overrode their orders?”

“How?”

I grabbed the phone and dialed the line for Jeneta Aboderin’s camp. I spent the next five minutes explaining that I was her internship supervisor, and yes, this really was a crisis.

The counselor on the other end sounded about fifteen. “It’s eleven o’clock. Curfew was an hour ago. Everyone is supposed to stay in their cabins until reveille.”

“Dammit, man, this is an emergency. We’ve got a burst water pipe here, and more than two thousand books that have to be bagged and frozen immediately!”

“You’re…you want to freeze the books?”

“I want to save them. Freezing minimizes the damage while we get them shipped off to be vacuum dried.” I talked over his protests, channeling a particularly obnoxious and arrogant Art History professor from Michigan State University. “That’s just the first step. If we don’t get this place dried out quickly, we’ll end up with mold, fungus, and possibly even…” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Silverfish.”

The counselor stammered an apology and went to fetch Jeneta. He must have been running, because she picked up only three minutes later.

“Do you have any poems that could draw insects out of a tree?” I asked the moment I heard her voice.

“Seriously? You dragged me out of bed for a termite problem?”

“I called because I need your help.”

“Oh, really?” I could hear her grin through the phone. “Before I agree to anything, does this mean you’ll take me with you next time you run off to do something interesting? Because if I’m going to be—”

“It’s Lena,” I said. “It’s her tree being attacked.”

Jeneta hesitated. “How serious is this? If you’re calling now instead of waiting until morning…”

“They’re killing her tree. Killing her.”

“Oh.” In that single syllable, I heard fear evict the excitement and bravado of moments before. “I’ll try, but I’ve never done anything like this before, Isaac. I’m not sure it will work.”

“I’ve seen what you can do, Jeneta. You can handle this. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” When I hung up, I found Nidhi watching me with a flat, expressionless look I remembered from our sessions together. “You disapprove.”

“She’s fourteen years old. What happens if she can’t control these things? What if they attack her like they did you?”

“Do you have a better suggestion?”

She turned away. “If I did, I’d have stopped you.”

“I don’t like it either,” I admitted. “If you see another one of those things, get the hell out of here. I’ll leave Smudge in his travel cage. He should give you enough warning if anything goes wrong. Keep him with you, but don’t let him get into another scuffle with the bugs.”

I looked through the window. Lena sat in the archway of the garden, her back to the house. Even from here, I could see tension and weariness in the set of her shoulders, the slump of her head. “Call me if anything—”

“I will.”

Jeneta wore an oversized blue sweatshirt with the moose-and-lake logo of Camp Aazhawigiizhigokwe on the front. She spent the drive reading, and the soft light from her e-reader cast odd shadows over her face.

“How do you stand it up here?” she asked. “There’s only one building at camp with a decent Internet connection. The wireless signal doesn’t even reach the cafeteria, and the cell reception sucks.”

“It’s like working with stone knives and bearskins, I know.” The Triumph’s traction spells kicked in as we rounded a curve. It felt like an invisible lead blanket had settled over my body, stopping me from sliding into the door. “You’d think they were trying to get you to talk to each other instead of spending all your time checking your phones. Total madness, I know. Someone should file a complaint with protective services.”

“Your jokes get worse when you’re worried.” She didn’t look up from her screen. “What happened to that rule about no magic for twenty-four hours?”

“Your nightmare was last night. In another ten minutes, it will be midnight, and I’ll be able to tell Nicola Pallas that I didn’t ask you to do anything magical until the following day.”

“Uh-huh.” She packed whole paragraphs worth of skepticism into those two syllables, as only a teenager could.

“I’ll be right there with you,” I said.

“Will you be in my nightmares if the devourers come back?” she demanded.

“You can stay with—” My brain caught up with my mouth at the last second. My house had been attacked once today, and there was no guarantee it wouldn’t happen again. Not to mention the creepiness factor of a grown man inviting a fourteen-year-old girl to spend the night. “With Doctor Shah. If anything happens, she’ll be able to help.”

By the time we reached the house, Jeneta had donned a cloak of pure confidence. I all but dragged her through the house to show her the headless ladybug and the other melted insects. “This is what we’re dealing with.”

“Cool,” she said, studying the broken bug. She picked up the head and poked the mandibles with her fingertip. “Nasty, too.”

“Can you get them out of Lena’s tree?”

She tapped her reader on her palm. “I’ve got an Emily Dickinson poem I think should do the trick.”

I stopped to grab a few more books from the library.

“Whoa, what happened to your back door?”

“I’m remodeling.” I stepped carefully through the broken doorframe, then crossed the yard to the garden. The roses muted the light from the back porch. Within the garden, we found Lena and Nidhi resting on a hammock made of interwoven grapevines. Smudge’s portable cage hung from a higher loop of vine.

Nidhi’s hair was disheveled, and her clothes appeared rumpled. She was sweating, and her shoes and socks had been tossed in among the pumpkins. I stopped in the archway. Nidhi and Lena had been together for years, but I had never walked in on them during or immediately after the act.

I knew Lena’s nature. I knew she drew strength from her lovers. It made perfect sense for her to turn to Nidhi for comfort. It was a smart move. But it still felt like I’d been punched in the esophagus.

“When did you plant grapevines?” I asked, stammering slightly.

“Tuesday morning.” Lena climbed out of the hammock and grabbed my free hand, pulling me in for a quick kiss. “I’m glad you’re back.”

“You’re really a dryad?” Jeneta asked.

Lena smiled and picked up her bokken. At her touch, a single green bud sprouted from the wood. “The tree behind us is as much my body as this flesh. And right now, something’s trying very hard to kill it.”

“No problem.” Jeneta sat cross-legged on the ground and switched on her e-reader. “Do you have any clover growing around here? The flowers would be perfect, but even if it’s not in bloom, it will help.”

“Give me a minute.” Lena walked from the garden. Nidhi followed, leaving her shoes and socks behind.

Jeneta watched them go. “Were they just…?”

“Focus on your magic,” I said.

“But I thought you and Lena were—”

“We are.”

I waited for her to digest this, and wondered which reaction it would be. Jeff DeYoung’s werewolf-style acceptance of whatever steams your sauna, or the confused condemnation I had received from Pete Malki. Pete lived down the street, and had stopped by a couple of weeks ago to tell me he thought my girlfriend might be making time with that new Indian doctor in town. I guess, “Yeah. Want a drink?” hadn’t been the response he was expecting.

Jeneta landed somewhere in the middle. “That sounds really complicated.”

“It can be challenging,” I admitted.

“Does that mean you and Doctor Shah are together, too?”

“No.” How many times was I going to have to answer that question? I was half-tempted to make a brochure I could hand out.

“There’s this kid at camp, Terry, who’s always talking about sex. He’s been hitting on me and the other girls from day one. Like if he’s persistent enough, if he cracks enough jokes or gives me enough compliments about my hair, one of us will let him into our pants.” She pushed her braids back, then shook her head in annoyance. “If he keeps it up, I’m gonna make him fall in love with a groundhog.”

Lena and Nidhi returned before I could come up with a response to that. Nidhi carried a handful of purple clover.

“Perfect,” said Jeneta. “Clear a spot by the tree and spread them on the ground.”

Lena examined her garden, no doubt studying both the plants on the surface and the roots of her oak below. She finally uprooted four cornstalks and moved them to the side of the garden. The roots immediately began to burrow back into the earth. Nidhi arranged the clover in a small mound.

Jeneta waved us back and began to read.

“There is a flower that Bees prefer—

And Butterflies—desire—

To gain the Purple Democrat

The Humming Bird—aspire.”

It was as if she had transformed into another person. Her voice was slower, more confident, and the cockiness that normally infused her words disappeared. When I looked at the clover, the flowers seemed brighter. The scent was stronger, overpowering the roses until my eyes watered.

“And Whatsoever Insect pass—

A Honey bear away

Proportioned to his several dearth

And her—capacity.”

“Whatever you’re doing, they’re reacting to it.” Lena swallowed, and I could see her skin twitching. Smudge’s cage turned into a miniature lantern as a ripple of flame spread across his back.

I double-checked my book, a novel by David Gerrold that featured a liquid nitrogen weapon. The gun itself was too large to pull through the pages, but I should be able to use the same trick I had tried with the microwave. I skimmed a scene which described the weapon in action. I didn’t need the gun, just the stream of liquid nitrogen. Hopefully I could do this without freezing my fingers off.

The first insect emerged from the tree in a puff of sawdust, about ten feet up. Lena raised her bokken. I took a deep breath and readied my book. This appeared to be a bee or wasp of some sort. It crawled down the tree, glassy wings twitching, then flew toward the clover.

“Her face be rounder than the Moon

And ruddier than the Gown.”

Lena’s own rounded features were tight with pain. A second bee flew out of the oak, following the first. Lena gripped her weapon by the blade and smashed the pommel down on the closest bee. She gave it a vicious twist, and when she pulled back, only broken scraps of metal remained.

Other insects were making their way out of the tree now. I stepped back, book ready, but they didn’t care about us. They were drawn to the clover, entranced by the power of Jeneta’s words.

“Thank you,” Lena whispered. She stepped closer to the oak and pressed her face against the wood. Her eyes closed, and her fingertips sank into the tree. Her hair wisped forward, clinging to the bark as if static held it in place.

I waited to make sure no more insects would emerge, then aimed the book at the flowers. I dared to hope this might be as simple as it appeared…thus proving that even after close to a decade with the Porters, I still hadn’t learned from experience.

The instant I touched the book’s magic, the bugs went berserk. They rose from the pile of clover as frigid air poured forth, and liquid nitrogen splashed into thick white fog. A brass-and-steel grasshopper leaped out of the cloud, wings a blur as it flew toward Jeneta. Lena spun from her oak and snatched up her bokken. She knocked the grasshopper back like a tiny baseball, but more were emerging from the fog, stunned but not yet dead.

Jeneta screamed. A metal earwig had landed on her e-reader. She flung it away. More insects clung to the screen, digging through glass and plastic as easily as clay. Nidhi grabbed Jeneta’s arm and hauled her out of the garden.

“Whatever works,” I muttered, aiming the book at Jeneta’s reader. Two more metal bugs had joined the earwig on the screen. When the next stream of nitrogen cleared, they looked like tiny frost sculptures. They shattered beneath my shoe, as did the e-reader.

I poured more liquid nitrogen onto the clover, then closed the book while Lena destroyed the rest of the insects. Plants and bugs alike crunched beneath her feet.

“Is that all of them?” I asked.

“Yes. Thank you.” Lena stepped back and sagged against her tree. “Do you think whoever did this will send more?”

“Probably.”

Jeneta was crying like a child half her age. Nidhi sat with her in the grass, whispering and running her hands through Jeneta’s hair while they rocked back and forth. Jeneta buried her head in Nidhi’s shoulder.

“What happened?” I asked. “Was she hurt?”

Before Nidhi could answer, Jeneta jumped to her feet and ran at me. “Why in the name of ever-loving God would you do that to me?” Her fists slammed into my chest, hard enough to bruise. “Was this some kind of messed-up test? Is this why you were asking about my nightmares?”

I stepped back and did my best to fend off her punches. “Jeneta, I didn’t know they’d come after your e-reader.”

She wiped her sleeve over her eyes and stared at me. “You think I’m upset about my reader?”

I looked past her to Nidhi, but she appeared to be as confused as I was. Nidhi stepped closer, hands out like she was approaching a wild animal, and said, “Can you tell us what happened to you, Jeneta?”

“You said you needed me to help kill magic bugs. You never said they were devourers.”

It was like she had turned the liquid nitrogen on me, chilling my body from the inside out. “What do you mean?”

She swallowed. “You didn’t hear them?”

“What is it you heard, Jeneta?” Nidhi asked.

“They weren’t attacking my reader. They were trying to attack me, through the spell.” She started to shiver again. “Dragging me under. Climbing through my bones and chewing me up, and all the while she’s laughing—”

“She?” I asked sharply.

“I heard a girl laughing.” She stared at me. “It might have been me. I was losing my mind, Isaac. I could feel myself going mad, losing my grip and slipping away.”

“I didn’t know. I’m so sorry. I never would have asked you to fight them like that.” Devourers infesting Victor Harrison’s experiment. A butchered wendigo and a man who could hide from my magic. What the hell was going on?

Jeneta folded her arms, visibly working to stuff the fear back into its bravado-lined cell. “You owe me a new e-reader. Don’t even think about trying to pass off some secondhand clunker from last year. I want the newest model, and I want an orange case to go with it.”

“Fair enough.”

Jeneta looked at the fog rising off the crushed bugs and flowers. “What are they doing here?”

I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t even know what they were.

“Why do they hate us?” Jeneta asked. “Not just people in general. You and me. They know us, and they’re going to keep coming after us until we’re dead.”

“If they come after anyone, it should be me. I’m the one who pissed them off earlier this year.” With Lena’s help, I had destroyed their…host, for lack of a better word. If the devourers were capable of remembering, then they had good reason for coming after me or Lena, but why target a teenaged girl who knew next to nothing about magic? “Nidhi, could you take Jeneta to your place?”

“Of course.”

Jeneta said nothing, but her body sagged with relief. I doubted any of us would sleep well tonight, but she’d be somewhere safe, with a woman who knew how to deal with magic-induced trauma.

“I’ll watch over Lena’s tree,” I said. “Could you reschedule any appointments you have tomorrow? We need to take a road trip.”

Nidhi folded her arms. “Nobody has the energy for dramatic lead-ups tonight, Isaac. Get to the point.”

“Sorry. We’re going to check out Victor Harrison’s old house in Columbus, Ohio. I’ll need to call Deb DeGeorge down in Detroit first.”

Jeneta perked up slightly. “The vampire?”

“How did you know that?” Deb had been a libriomancer, and until recently, a good friend. Three months ago, the vampires in Detroit had turned her, hoping to use her as a spy within the Porters. When Gutenberg caught up with her, I had fully expected him to burn her to ash on the spot. Instead, he had begun using Deb as a liaison between Porters and vampires.

“The right poem can make people babble about all sorts of things,” Jeneta said sheepishly. “It was after the Porters found me. They sent a field agent to give me the Orientation to Magic lecture. I wanted the advanced course, and it’s possible I might have ‘encouraged’ her to talk about more than she was supposed to.”

I waved a hand. “Deb’s not technically a vampire, but yes. The important thing is that she’s scared of Gutenberg. Hopefully scared enough to cooperate with just about anything we ask for.”

“And you’re planning to ask for…?” Nidhi said impatiently.

“I’m hoping they’ll be able to help us talk to Victor.”