Deb must have prepared the book earlier, opening its magic to a scene of gunfire and leaving it ready in case she needed a quick, silent weapon. It was difficult, dangerous, and illegal as hell. I would have loved to know exactly how she had pulled it off.
The sharp metal scent of gunpowder filled the room as bullets spat silently from the page and ripped into the shelves behind me. I jumped forward, trying to protect Lena and the books with my body. I swung the bat with both hands, striking the book hard enough to knock it up and away from me. The shield only stopped high-velocity impacts, which meant I could still use old-fashioned weapons like knives and bats.
Bullets gouged the wall and ceiling, raining chunks of plaster down on my head. My backswing smashed Deb’s wrist. Had she been human, that blow would have shattered bone. I did jar her enough to make her drop the gun, which was little comfort as she stepped in, caught the bat, and twisted it away from me. She slammed her other hand into my chest, sending me staggering into the shelves.
Pain radiated from the center of my rib cage, but I did my best to keep it from showing as I brushed myself off. “Wallacea, right?”
The full species name was Muscavore Wallacea, informally known as the Children of Renfield. They weren’t technically vampires, but they ran in the same circles. Deb wouldn’t be as fast or strong as the sparklers I had faced in the library. She was more than a match for a human, though. For a dryad, too, from the look of things. Lena still hadn’t snapped out of her trance.
“War is coming,” said Deb. “The Porters aren’t going to win this one. I don’t want to see you hurt.”
“You fired a machine gun at me!”
“I was aiming for your legs.” She shrugged. “If you’d have let me into your mind like your friend here, I wouldn’t have needed the gun.”
That was where the headache had come from. I grinned and tapped my head. “Blame that on the fish in my brain.”
Deb stared. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Telepathic fish.” I shrugged, using the movement to scan the closest shelves. What kind of weapon would take out a Renfield? “You need to read more Douglas Adams. The fish translates other languages by eating incoming thought waves. Turns out it provides a bit of a buffer against mental assaults, too. Gobbles up psychic attacks like candy. I wrote a paper on it three years ago.”
“You put a fish in your brain.” Her fingers inched toward her jacket. “You’re an odd man, Isaac Vainio.”
“Why are the vampires really attacking us, Deb?”
“I didn’t lie to you. Someone, probably a Porter, has been working against the vampires. But we didn’t attack the library, and we didn’t take Gutenberg.” She snatched a book from her jacket.
I kicked the cricket across the floor, then lunged for the copy of Starship Troopers on the closest shelf. Deb had a head start, but as I had hoped, the cricket broke her concentration long enough for me to find the scene I wanted.
A chittering sound filled the room, and Deb froze. Between the buzz of enormous wings and the click of chitinous bodies moving together, it was like I had ripped a hole in the side of a giant insect hive.
Disturbing as the noises were to me, I was human. Deb, on the other hand, had become a creature who lived by consuming the strength of insects and small animals. Her book forgotten in her hands, she reached toward mine, toward the enormous insectoid aliens within the pages.
I sidestepped to pick up the book she had used to fire at me. Her magic was still active. I set Starship Troopers on a shelf and gripped Deb’s book with both hands. “Let Lena go and drop your books. The jacket, too. Then we’ll talk.”
She wrenched her attention away from the sound long enough to glance at Lena, who started as if woken from a dream.
“Good. Now drop them.”
Deb stared at the pages of her book, and for a moment I thought she was going to try magic. Her knuckles whitened with pressure.
I raised the book, and my fingers sank into the paper, touching Deb’s magic. I could feel the staccato concussions of gunfire within the text, waiting to be released. “Please don’t make me do this.”
She relaxed, tossing the book to the ground. She slipped off her jacket as well. “Could you please shut that?”
I reached over to close Starship Troopers, muffling the alien bugs. “Are you all right, Lena?”
“I will be.” Lena pressed a hand against the wall for balance. “She was trying to persuade me you had been turned. She wanted me to make sure you came quietly, so we could ‘help’ you.”
“Lena has a stronger mind than I expected, and I’m still figuring out these new powers,” Deb said. “If you’d given me another five minutes-”
“Tell me about Ray,” I interrupted. “The truth. Were you involved?”
“I’d never hurt Ray. I wish I knew who murdered him.” She slunk backward until she reached the glass door. “I told you, hon. We didn’t start this.”
“You’re saying we did?”
“Be careful who you trust, Isaac,” Deb said. “Gutenberg is over six hundred years old. Is he even human anymore? Does anyone really know him?”
“I know he wouldn’t destroy his own archives.” I tried to say more, but my throat constricted, and I began to cough.
“I’m sorry, Isaac.”
The book she had dropped lay on the floor. Wisps of yellow-green gas seeped from the edges of the pages. Chlorine. My shield would stop bullets, but not air. A shield that suffocated the user wasn’t terribly helpful.
Deb swatted my book away hard enough to rip the binding, and then Lena’s right hook slammed her back. The follow-up punch was hard enough to knock Deb through the door and onto the deck out back.
I staggered toward the broken door. If I could get outside…
The cloud thickened around me, clinging to my body. I might have admired that trick, if the gas hadn’t been burning my lungs from the inside out. Lena grabbed my arm, trying to help me outside, but that only brought her into the worst of the chlorine. I pointed to Deb’s book.
Lena grabbed it and drew back to throw.
“No!” The word grated the inside of my throat, but Lena lowered her arm. I snatched the book and squinted as gas continued to rise from the paper. I tried to hold my breath, but my lungs and throat hurt too much, and the muscles wouldn’t obey.
I wiped my eyes and glanced at the cover. This was an annotated history of World War I. I flipped the pages until I found Deb’s spell, which resembled a jagged tear down the center of the book, rimed in green frost. Pressing my hand over the rip did nothing to stop the flow.
My nose dripped, and my vision blurred. I could barely hear over the pounding in my head. Pulling the hem of my bathrobe over my mouth and nose, I leaned closer, trying to make out the text. This chapter described the use of chlorine gas against the British in 1915. The Germans had deployed more than a hundred tons of the gas. Enough to wipe out a good chunk of Copper River.
“Get out of here!” The words triggered another coughing fit, as if my body were trying to expel my lungs from my chest.
Lena caught my shoulders to keep me from falling. I closed my eyes, rereading the words in my mind. I could see Deb’s spell, but I couldn’t manipulate it. If I was going to stop this thing, I needed to use my own magic.
Lena braced me as I bore down, straining my fingers against the page until I ripped into that April battlefield. I expanded the rip until it devoured the hole Deb had created. The book was now mine, as was its magic. Magic that continued to pour out.
At the library, I had dissolved my weapons back into their texts. I did the same thing here, treating the chlorine as a single magically-created artifact. My vision flashed and sparked as I struggled to draw the gas back into the pages.
Slowly, the chlorine thinned. I collapsed against Lena and did my best to keep from vomiting. I brought the book to my face like a gas mask. My coughing grew worse as it pulled out the chlorine that had pooled in my lungs.
I couldn’t talk, so I turned around and raised the book to Lena. She nodded, putting her hand over mine and
