Libriomancer

Chapter 16

Margaret Hubert lived in southern Jackson, in a small white house with an enormous silver maple growing alongside the driveway. An orange “Beware of the Dog” sign hung beside the front door.

I checked Smudge in his cage. He was calm enough, meaning Charles probably wasn’t here. I clipped him to my hip, pulled my jacket over the cage and knocked on the door.

“I’ll take the lead on this one,” Lena said as footsteps approached from the other side.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because she’s not a wizard or a vampire, and your people skills aren’t quite as polished as your research skills.”

The door opened before I could come up with a suitable response. An older woman wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt for a local 5K run studied us through the screen door, while an arthritic-looking bulldog tried to push past her knees. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Hubert?” asked Lena.

The woman nodded.

“My name is Lena, and this is my partner Isaac. We were hoping we could take a few minutes of your time to talk to you about your son.”

She stiffened, and her lips pressed into thin lines. The door moved forward slightly, as if she were fighting the urge to slam it in our faces. “Who are you?”

“Private detectives, contracted by the city to look into old missing persons reports and other cold cases.” Her words blended compassion and professionalism, like a kindly schoolteacher. “We have a lead on your son, and were hoping you could help us find him.”

I had never seen anyone turn so pale so quickly. Lena lunged forward, arms extended, but Mrs. Hubert caught herself on the doorframe.

“I’m all right. I just didn’t expect… come inside, please.”

I followed Lena through the door. The bulldog tried to nose its way into my jacket, then jumped back as if burned. I made sure Mrs. Hubert wasn’t looking, then glared down at Smudge. “Stop that,” I whispered sternly.

The house was the very definition of cluttered. Running trophies and medals filled the mantel over the fireplace. Quilts hung on the walls, and a pile of half-finished quilting squares covered the dining room table. Handmade candles hung from pegs on another wall like pastel-colored wax nunchucks. A scrapbook and supplies lay open on the kitchen counter. This was a woman who kept herself busy.

“Thank you, Margaret,” said Lena. “I’m sorry for intruding unannounced, and I promise we won’t take up too much of your time.”

“That’s all right. And please, call me Margie.” She led us into the living room, where a half-finished puzzle covered a wooden coffee table. “Would you like something to eat? I’ve got applesauce bread.”

“No, thank you,” said Lena, sitting down in an overstuffed love seat while I examined the room.

A dusty television sat in an entertainment center which had seen better days. The wooden laminate was beginning to peel away, and several of the shelves sagged. I studied the framed photographs crowded together along the top. Most of the pictures showed either an older, heavyset man or a teenager with shaggy brown hair. I didn’t see a single photo or newspaper clipping of Charles Hubert.

No, there was one. I picked up a silver-framed shot in the back. Charles Hubert and the brown-haired teen stood proudly in front of a nine-point buck. Both kids wore orange camo and held deer rifles in their hands. “First buck?” I asked.

Margie nodded. “Mike was so proud. We ate venison for a month because he wouldn’t let us give any of it away. The antlers are still in his room.” She sat down and began to fidget with the puzzle pieces. “What is it you’d like to know?”

“When was the last time you saw Charles?” Lena asked.

Margie looked taken aback. She blinked and played with a diamond ring on her right ring finger. “I’m not sure. It’s been a while… wait, do you think he could have been involved with what happened to Mike?”

I opened my mouth, but a quick glare from Lena shut me up before I could speak. “We’re not sure,” she said cautiously. “We’re trying to explore every possibility.”

“Charles and Mike used to go hunting every year with my husband, rest his soul. After Mike was-” Her shoulders shook. She looked up at Lena, her eyebrows bunched together. “I’m sorry, what was I saying?”

It was possible we were seeing the early signs of dementia, but I had heard no sign of confusion or uncertainty when she talked about Mike’s buck. Only when Charles was mentioned had Margie begun to stumble.

“You were telling me about Charles,” Lena said gently. “Have you seen him at all since he returned from Afghanistan?”

“Afghanistan?” She looked at Lena, her eyes glassy with tears. “I don’t… what did he do? Did Charles take my son?” Tears broke free, running down her cheeks, but her words were flat.

“We just need to ask him some questions,” Lena reassured her.

“Do you mind if I use the bathroom?” I asked. Margie looked up at me, her face blank, then nodded. I retreated down the hall into a bathroom decorated in orange and black, the colors of the local high school. I sat down and pulled out a paperback copy of The Odyssey.

When I returned, Margie seemed calmer. She was describing the disappearance of her son Mike. “We had gone to see a Tigers game. We went to the first home game every year. Mike always brought his glove. He wanted to catch a home run ball, but he never did.”

She shuddered and dabbed her eyes. “He had gone ahead to start the car. The police found no evidence of foul play.”

“You let a twelve-year-old boy run off by himself?” I asked.

Lena glared at me.

“We wouldn’t-we didn’t…” She trailed off, staring into the distance.

“What happened to Mike wasn’t your fault,” said Lena.

I leaned over, holding a sprig of Moly in one hand. “I found this on the floor. From one of your crafts?”

The moment she touched the magical herb, her entire demeanor changed. “He wasn’t alone. Charles had just gotten his driver’s permit. He and Mike-” Her eyes went round, and the white petals began to wilt as they battled whatever spell had rewritten her memories. She stared at me. “Who… what did you do to me? Where is Charles?”

“You remember him now?” I asked.

“Of course I remember him! I-” She clutched her head. “Who are you people? I want you to leave. Get out of my house!”

Lena touched her arm. “Margie, you’re safe. We’re trying to help you.”

Margie didn’t shake her off, but she glared at me like I was the devil come to take her soul.

I retreated toward the door. “I’ll be in the car.”

Back in the Triumph, I let Smudge out of his cage. He scurried up to the windshield, then turned around to look at me as if waiting impatiently for the drive to start.

“Charles Hubert comes back from Afghanistan with magic,” I said slowly, trying to fit the pieces together. “He overdoes it and ends up possessed. That much makes sense. An amateur libriomancer with nobody to guide him… but why was he alone? Why didn’t the Porters find him?”

I took out my phone and called Ponce de Leon. If anyone would know about operating under the Porters’ radar, it was him. He might also have an idea how someone could suddenly develop magical abilities. His phone went to voice mail. I left a brief message, then turned back to Smudge. When he wasn’t setting things on fire or running laps, the fire-spider was a pretty good listener.

“Two years ago, Margie was there to meet her son when he came home from Afghanistan. Between then and now, someone wrote him out of her memories.” Possibly Charles himself, building another roadblock to anyone who might try to find him. “And then he started killing Porters.”

No, first he had written V-Day. I picked up the book and began to read more closely, losing myself in the story.

Lena emerged from the house an hour later and handed me a withered, blackened flower. “She’s back to the way she was. As far as Margie remembers, she had only one son. She’s pissed as hell at you, but doesn’t know exactly why.”

“I think I know what happened to her other son.” I folded the corner of the page I was reading and flipped back to an earlier chapter. “Listen to this. It’s immediately after Jakob Hoffman’s first encounter with a vampire. He’s being debriefed and still doesn’t understand what it was he saw.”

The captain’s words were like flies buzzing in the stables back home. Discipline and training compelled Jakob to respond. “Yes, sir!” “No, I didn’t see anything, sir.” “I don’t know, sir.”

But he had seen something. He simply didn’t understand what it was he had seen. Not yet.

The first to die had been Private Sterling, a young-faced kid fresh from the States. Bright-eyed and bare-chinned, he made Jakob feel like an old man. Jakob remembered Sterling calling out a challenge, though he hadn’t seen anyone.

“You’re jumping at ghosts, Mikey,” Jakob teased. But Mikey insisted someone was out there. He slid his rifle from his shoulder and stepped away to investigate.

Jakob closed his eyes. Mikey was just a kid. The older soldiers were supposed to keep an eye on the new ones, to keep them out of trouble. It was his duty, and he had failed.

He remembered seeing movement behind the fence that marked the edge of their temporary base. Barbed wire snapping like guitar strings. Mikey’s shout, choked off as quickly as it began. Jakob raised his weapon, but by the time he had taken a single step, Mikey was gone, along with whoever… with whatever had taken him.

And then all hell had broken loose.

“You think vampires killed Hubert’s brother?” asked Lena.

“There’s more.” I skipped ahead. “Sixty pages later, Jakob goes back to confront his captain.

“You knew!” Never had Jakob come so close to physically attacking a superior officer, but even now discipline compelled him to add a grudging, “Sir.”

Captain Nichols didn’t say a word. He just stood there, his swarthy face a stone mask. The silence stretched on until Jakob couldn’t take it anymore.

“Well?” he shouted. “You knew these things, these vampires were out there. You knew what we were fighting. Why didn’t you warn us, sir? Why aren’t we sending patrols out with M2s to burn these bastards into ash?”

“Specialist Hoffman, are you suggesting you could run this war better than your superiors?”

Hoffman stiffened. “No, sir. I’m suggesting that if people were told the truth, that we could do a better job of implementing those orders. That if we had been warned, Mikey might still be alive. Sir.”

Nichols didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Nothing he could say would justify sending men out unprepared. Those men were Jakob’s brothers, and they were dying at the hands of German monsters. Nothing Nichols said could make that all right. Nothing could bring Mikey back.

Lena was looking at the house. “Charles saw something the day his brother disappeared, but he didn’t know what. He didn’t piece it together until years later, after he discovered the Porters and learned the truth.”

“After he learned what we keep hidden from the world,” I said. “He blames the Porters for his brother’s death, so now he’s sending vampires after us as punishment.”

She rubbed her arms together. “Margie said Charles was never right after he came home from Afghanistan. The doctors tried various medications, but he continued to hallucinate. He woke up screaming, and began showing signs of paranoia. They thought it was post-traumatic stress disorder. His memories were fragmented, and there was so much he had to relearn. He couldn’t even read when he first woke up from the attack.” She looked at me. “It was after he started reading that the hallucinations began.”

“They weren’t hallucinations. That was his magic.” I closed the book. “In the end, after they retrieve the Silver Cross, Jakob Hoffman discovers that Nichols and several other superior officers are under the influence of dark magic. He steals the cross and uses it to unleash the vampires against Nichols and the rest of the officers who betrayed them. It’s brutal, effective, and impossible to cover up. A two-page epilogue describes the public outrage. Whole governments are overthrown, and the world unites to wipe out the undead.”

“That’s his end game,” said Lena. “Use his vampires to attack the Porters, show the world what’s been kept from them, and start a war.”

“Please tell me his mother knows where we can find him.”

She passed me a piece of paper with directions. “Margie remembered him wiping her memory. He told her he was doing it to protect her, that she was better off not knowing what was happening to him. The last thing he did before casting that spell was to make her sign over the deed to the family hunting camp.”

I had just merged onto 127 North when Ponce de Leon misted onto the rearview mirror. Lena had put the top down before we left, and the air rushing past made it difficult to hear de Leon’s greeting.

“You know, I have a phone,” I shouted.

He glanced past me, and when he spoke again, his voice was amplified by the car’s speakers. “And which is more likely to be tapped, your phone or my magic?”

He had a point. I wondered which worried him more: that a murderer might listen in on our conversation, or that the Porters might do so. “Have you ever heard of someone gaining magical abilities as a result of an injury to the brain?”

“Not precisely, no.”

“So be precise.”

“Wouldn’t the Porters be a better resource for this sort of question, Isaac?” His question had only a shadow of his usual taunting, which worried me.

“What can I say? I seem to be running out of friends.”

With an opening like that, I would have expected a killer jab at my personality, but de Leon merely sighed and turned away. “Oh, Johannes. I warned him…”

“Warned him about what?”

“Do you know how to perform a locking spell, Mister Vainio?”

I wasn’t sure my efforts in Detroit counted. “I managed to seal off a book by-”

“I didn’t ask about books.”

I felt like he had punched me from inside my own rib cage. The car drifted onto the rumble strips to the right of the road as his words sank in. Lena grabbed the wheel, guiding us back into our lane.

“Sorry,” I said. “Are you saying you can lock people?”

He smiled and spread his hands. “The terms of my exile prevent me from divulging certain secrets. This is nothing but conjecture on your part.”

A locking spell to prevent someone from accessing his magic. “Why?”

“What would you do with individuals who became dangerous or unmanageable?” de Leon asked. “Magical imprisonment isn’t terribly cost-effective, and execution seems rather extreme.”

“Banishment works,” Lena suggested.

De Leon smirked. “Does it really? We’ll see.”

“Locking someone’s power wouldn’t be enough,” I said slowly. Maybe you could seal off a man’s magic, but that wouldn’t prevent him from returning the next day with a high-powered rifle and taking his revenge, or from simply going to the media to spill the truth about the Porters. “You’d have to erase his memories of magic, too.”

“Keep going,” said de Leon. “This is a fascinating mental exercise.”

It would need to be a selective wipe. Total amnesia would raise too many questions. But how? Gutenberg was a libriomancer. We couldn’t simply rewrite a human being, erasing whole chapters out of his life.

No, I assumed we couldn’t do it. It was becoming more and more clear how much had been withheld from my training. Had Ray Walker known about this? Did Pallas? “How often do they do it? Lock people?”

De Leon shrugged. “As you know, I’ve not been a member of your little club for many years.”

“Hubert’s injury broke that lock,” Lena said.

“How?” I asked.

“The brain can rewrite itself to some extent, bypassing damaged areas,” she said. “As he healed, his brain could have found a way around those spells. He would have started to remember what had been taken from him. That’s why he was lashing out at Porters. They stole his magic and his memories.”

Anger narrowed my vision as I yanked the wheel and sped past a semi. It was disturbingly easy to imagine myself in Hubert’s place. If things had gone differently two years ago, if Ray hadn’t been there to speak on my behalf, would they have stolen my magic, too? I had given up magic for two years, but to lose even the awareness of magic, to have those memories ripped away…

What had it been like for Hubert? First the explosion, then awakening in the hospital. The disorientation, the pain of his injuries, and the memories swelling free and floating to the surface. Had it been a gradual thing, or had his previous life returned to him in a single overwhelming flash?

“If Pallas and the other higher-ups know about this practice,” Lena said slowly, “why haven’t they pieced it together and gone after Hubert?”

“Excellent question.” De Leon sounded like a professor praising a favorite student.

“You couldn’t just erase Hubert’s memories,” I said, my heartbeat growing sharper as I worked through the implications. “They don’t want lowly field agents or catalogers knowing what they’ve done. They’d have to erase Hubert from our memories as well, to make sure we didn’t question the disappearance of a colleague. If Hubert has access to Gutenberg’s knowledge, he could have worked the same spell to hide himself from the memories of the Regional Masters.”

“What about the records?” Lena asked.

“Victor Harrison.” I glanced at the mirror, but de Leon neither confirmed nor denied my guess. “We thought the attack on Harrison was a way to tap into our communications, but that was only part of it. Harrison also had access to our databases. Hubert could have used him to wipe his records.”

“That could be why he stole those books from the archive,” Lena said. “Not to use their magic, but to figure out how to reverse a magical lock. If there are others like Hubert, he could be planning to help them.”

“Or he could be trying to reverse engineer the process, to find a way to do to Gutenberg and the rest of the Porters what they did to him.” I needed time to process everything, to sort through the various pieces, but one significant question remained unanswered. “I reached through one of those books, trying to find Hubert. He sent something back after me. Something that felt alive, made of hatred and desperate hunger. I’ve never felt magic like that, powerful enough to wipe me out of existence as casually as you or I might slap a mosquito.”

The last traces of humor vanished from de Leon’s face. When he spoke, he was as cold and sober as I had ever seen. “You are a very fortunate man, Isaac Vainio. Do the Porters know about this?”

“We told Nicola Pallas what happened,” said Lena.

I saw comprehension in his eyes. “She forbade you from leaving, didn’t she? And you defied her.”

“You know what that was. What Hubert conjured up to destroy me.”

The muscles in de Leon’s jaw twitched, like he was struggling to speak. He shouted in frustration, then threw back his head and laughed bitterly. “Johannes, you fool!” His hands seemed to grab the sides of the mirror, and he leaned in close. “I would tell you what it is you face, and perhaps even help you to survive your next encounter long enough to save Gutenberg’s life. Only Gutenberg’s own geis prevents me.” Another laugh, this one softer. “He would have appreciated the irony, I think.”

“So why aren’t the Porters doing more?” Lena asked.

“‘Why do the other pieces stay behind?’ ask the pawns.” De Leon chuckled and brushed his mustache with thumb and forefinger. “The Porters are doing what they have always done. They are preparing to eliminate the threat and contain the damage, once you or another of their pawns flush out their quarry. Only I’m afraid they underestimate the danger. With Gutenberg gone, there’s not a single one who remembers…”

“Remembers what?” I demanded.

“Find Gutenberg,” de Leon said urgently. “If the thing you saw enters his mind, then what you experienced will be a mere hint of the suffering to come.”

“What is it?” I asked. “Where did it come from, and if the Porters know about this threat, why hasn’t that information been shared?”

“Those, Isaac Vainio, are some of the many questions that led to my eventual departure from the Porters.” He moved closer, until his eyes filled the mirror. “If you fail to rescue Gutenberg,” de Leon said softly, “then I promise whatever is left of you will answer to me.”

He disappeared before I could respond.

“It isn’t right,” Lena said. “Rewriting a man’s mind. Stealing his memories.”

“We don’t know what Hubert did.” It was little more than a token protest. Punish me, imprison me, even kill me if the crime warranted it. But don’t strip away the very thing that defines me.

“I won’t let the Porters do that to you,” Lena said, as if reading my thoughts.

“Given what de Leon said, that might be a moot point.” I pushed the gas pedal, and the needle jumped past eighty. “How long until we reach the camp?”

“About a hundred miles or so.”

My knuckles were white on the wheel. “Plenty of time to see what Ponce de Leon’s custom-spelled car can do.”

It took most of the afternoon to find our way to the dirt back roads leading to Charles Hubert’s hunting cabin in the woods. The little convertible jolted and lurched through ruts and canyons left by spring rains. Birch trees leaned together on either side, their branches forming a canopy that blotted out the sky.

Hubert wasn’t the only one with property in these woods. We passed four other hand-painted signs before reaching the turnoff another mile or so down the road. I shifted into first gear. Tree roots jabbed the tires, and exposed rock scraped the underside of the car, making me cringe.

We had to stop twice so that Lena could clear fallen branches from the road. They had been there for a while, judging from the dead leaves, which meant nobody had driven this road for weeks.

The air over Smudge rippled with heat, though whether that was due to whatever waited for us at Hubert’s cabin or to my own driving, I couldn’t say. I checked my directions, then killed the engine. “The camp should be another quarter mile up ahead.”

“I’ll check it out.” She retrieved her bokken from the back and thrust them through her belt. She walked to the nearest birch and climbed it like a ladder, her fingers sinking into the wood as she pulled herself higher. Once she was about twenty feet up, she strode from branch to branch, holding the trunks for support. The leaves soon hid her from sight.

I checked my books, mentally reviewing which weapons would be best against a possessed libriomancer. The Odyssey was starting to show signs of char, but I should be able to get more Moly, and I needed to be able to counter whatever Hubert might throw at us. A stun grenade would be good if we could get the drop on him.

I thought back to what de Leon had said. Whatever Hubert had inside of him, it was enough to frighten one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world. If de Leon was nervous, my chances were pretty dismal. But if we could sneak in long enough to find and rescue Gutenberg…

Invisibility. Speed. Silence. We needed to be magic-enhanced ninjas. I picked out a few more titles, then looked over my books for healing magic. Possession couldn’t be cured, not once it had gone this far. There was nothing I could do to save whatever remained of Charles Hubert.

Lena rapped on the window. I yelled and dropped the books I had been studying. Okay, I needed some ninja magic. Lena seemed to be doing fine on her own.

“It’s abandoned,” Lena said as I climbed out of the car. “Looks like he left a while ago.”

“Dammit.” I lifted Smudge to my shoulder. He was hot to the touch. “Are you sure? This is not a happy spider.”

“The place is a wreck, Isaac. Nothing lives there now except maybe the raccoons.”

I gathered my books and followed her down the road. A short distance on, it branched to the left into an overgrown clearing beside a plain-looking wooden cabin. What was left of it, at any rate.

“Automatons?” asked Lena.

“Maybe.” Something had smashed its way into the cabin. Only two of the four walls remained. Half of the roof had splintered and fallen in, and the rest sagged dangerously. A wooden staircase on the far side led downhill toward a small stream.

The interior walls that remained were unfinished, and the floorboards were bare plywood. A flannel jacket hung from a peg on the wall. A set of shelves had collapsed, spilling canned food beside a rust-dotted refrigerator that looked to be at least forty years old. Torn, moldy books were strewn through the wreckage, along with something metallic.

I stepped closer, testing the floor. An ominous cracking made me back away. “Could I borrow a sword?”

Lena handed me one of her bokken. I used it to poke at the books, searching for the glint I had spied. After a few attempts, I uncovered a gold coin slightly larger than a quarter. I slid it close enough to pick up and brushed it off on my sleeve. Though worn, I could make out the image of a stern-looking woman and the words “Dei Gratina.”

“What is it?”

“A two-guinea coin.” I flipped it to Lena. “A piece of treasure from Treasure Island. It’s a training exercise. Ray had me create and dissolve that same coin time and again in our first year working together.” I stared at the ruined books. “Hubert was practicing.”

“You think the Porters noticed?”

“And sent an automaton to deal with him? Maybe.” I turned in a slow circle. A clear, grassy area the width of a two-lane road led down to the stream. On the other side of the clearing, a pair of pine trees had toppled over, the trunks splintered like matchsticks. Most of the needles had fallen off, forming a brown carpet on the ground.

“Hubert walked away from this,” said Lena. “So what happened to whoever or whatever attacked him?”

I took Heart of Stone from my jacket and pulled out the enchanted sunglasses I had used before. Beneath one of the fallen trees, the air rippled slightly, like a cloaking device from an old SF flick.

Smudge grew hotter as I approached. I heard the telltale puff as his body ignited, and leaned my head to the left to avoid singeing my ear. I pointed to the distortion. Lena readied her bokken and moved downhill, approaching from the other side.

Something clinked underfoot. I held up a hand for Lena to wait. I couldn’t see anything in the dirt or grass. I crouched, moving my hands slowly through the knee-high weeds until I found what I had stepped on: a pair of invisible metal blocks, each one the size of a small LEGO brick. Both were smooth on all but one side, where small ridges formed the letters I and W.

I clutched them in my fist and continued toward the magical distortion. Lena extended one of her bokken, giving whatever it was a gentle poke. “It’s heavy,” she said. “Feels like metal.”

Ponce de Leon would have yanked the concealment spell aside like a stage magician pulling a tablecloth from beneath a vase. I had to do it the hard way.

I went through six sprigs of Moly, setting them around whatever it was and watching each flower wilt and die as it leached away the magic hiding this thing from our sight.

I removed the sunglasses and hung them from a belt loop. Even without them, I could now make out a dark shape, larger and broader than a man. Smudge ran down my body, igniting dead pine needles as he scurried away. I stomped out the small flames he left behind. Smudge scrambled up an old beech tree, where he turned around and refused to come back down.

“That’s not a good sign.” I pulled out a blaster and aimed it at the shape, just to be safe.

I had always thought the dissolution of magic should have more pizzazz: swirling lights, colored smoke… even just a loud popping sound. Unfortunately, the universe didn’t share my taste in special effects. I saw the shine of metal, and then-

“Shit!” I scrambled back, tripping over fallen branches.

Sprawled before us, pinned face-up by a four-inch-wide branch that speared it to the earth, was one of Gutenberg’s automatons.