My mental clutch jolted and stalled as I tried to incorporate this information into my image of Doctor Shah.
“You only knew her as a therapist,” said Lena. “If you met her outside of the office, you’d probably like her. She’s a bit of a geek, too.”
“What do you mean, too?” I asked, but my heart wasn’t in the banter.
“Nidhi grew up reading comics, especially She-Hulk and Tank Girl. Those fantasies helped to shape me. The Nymphs of Neptune were able warriors, and there were plenty of scenes where we fought our sisters for the pleasure of men. I learned to fight for a better purpose.” She shrugged. “It could be worse. I’m smart, strong, and nigh indestructible.”
Being born from an acorn, she wouldn’t have experienced the shock of transition the way a more fully-fleshed character might. I suspected her nature helped there as well, just as Smudge’s had. Presumably both Frank Dearing and Doctor Shah wanted a sane lover, and Lena would have been shaped by those desires. “Is it strength if you exist to fulfill someone else’s fantasy?”
She flexed an arm. “Tell you what. Let’s arm wrestle, and you can tell me if that strength is real.” Her words were playful, but muted.
“This doesn’t explain why you read my file. Why you sought me out.” My anger at Lena had fled, replaced by confusion. Her athleticism, her energy, her sense of humor, everything I found so appealing about her, were these things simply a result of how her race had been written?
“Think about it, Isaac. My lover was taken by vampires. If she’s not dead, if they turn her like they did your friend Deb… her desires define me, Isaac.”
“And you can’t refuse your lover. So you need-” I almost swerved off the road.
“You’re not usually this slow on the uptake,” Lena commented.
“You want me to become your next owner?” Red sparks crackled from Smudge’s back, either from the anger in my words or my driving.
“I knew you were attracted to me, when we met before. You appreciated my body, but you also liked me. Your file confirmed that you’d make a good partner.”
“And you didn’t think you should let me in on this plan?”
“Sorry, I got a bit distracted saving your ass from those sparklers.”
“Lena, I can’t-”
“Nidhi was conflicted, too, when she learned the truth about me. This is what I am. I can’t change that. And there are a lot of people out there who… well, their fantasies aren’t something I ever intend to become.”
I couldn’t even figure out who I was angry at. Whatever hack had written Lena’s book couldn’t have known what he was creating. From the sound of things, whoever pulled her acorn from the pages had been an untrained amateur. Otherwise, why leave it in the woods? As for Lena herself, she was simply trying to survive, to take some kind of control over what she would become.
Of everyone she had met in her time with Doctor Shah, she had chosen me. She was entrusting me with her life and with her self, with who she would become.
I thought back to her unwillingness to kill, the way she had described vampires as victims of magic, shaped and defined by their magical nature. “I’m sorry.”
Her answering silence lasted long enough for me to realize how inadequate my words were, and then she shrugged. “Everyone has problems.”
“Couldn’t you-”
“ Don’t try to fix me. I am what I am.” Her sudden, mischievous smile eased the mood. “It’s a lot to process, I know. I’m thinking of putting together a pamphlet. ‘What to do When a Dryad has the Hots for You.’ What do you think?”
How had Shah lived with herself? Yet if I said no, Lena Greenwood could become far more dangerous than any vampire. “So what are you supposed to do?”
She took a deep, slow breath. “I’m not asking you to make a decision, or to commit to anything. Just please think about it.”
I was going to have a hard time thinking about anything else.
Chapter 6
I was no less conflicted when we reached the Mackinac Bridge three hours later. I pulled into line at the toll booths and asked Lena, “Do you have an M amp;M?”
She fished one from the bag in her pocket, her head cocked in confusion.
I used the candy to lure Smudge off the dashboard and out of sight as we pulled up to the booth. I wasn’t aware of any laws forbidding the transportation of large spiders, but I tried to avoid giving people heart attacks when possible. Smudge stayed on my lap, hidden by my jacket as I paid the toll and drove onto the bridge.
“You look pale,” Lena commented.
“I’m fine.” I shifted gears, staying in the right lane and keeping my eyes fixed on the road ahead.
“Do you want me to take a turn driving?”
“The only thing worse than driving over this bridge is sitting in the passenger seat while someone else drives. No offense. It’s a control thing.”
The Triumph’s built-in enchantments provided protection against everything from rocks to bullets to dragonfire (though I’d never tested that last one). None of which made me any more comfortable as the road sloped higher and we left the U. P. behind.
Five miles of steel suspension bridge connected Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas. At its center point, the Mackinac Bridge rose two hundred feet above the churning water. At that height, you’d fall for roughly three and a half seconds, slamming into the water at around 110 feet per second, or roughly 77 miles per hour.
Discomforting as the math was, it helped keep my mind occupied. I soon found myself stuck behind a slow- moving station wagon. Passing was out of the question. The center lanes were grated steel, which meant they generated enough vibration to make you feel like you were trapped inside a pissed-off bumblebee. Not to mention the fact that the wind rising through the grate could flip a small vehicle.
Sure, it had only happened once, back in eighty-nine. But I wasn’t taking any chances.
My companions had no such fears. Smudge returned to the dashboard and squeezed into the lower right corner of the windshield in order to better watch the thick steel cables as we passed. I wondered if he saw this as a kind of enormous metal web. Lena was smiling as she peered out at the water.
“Is it true there’s a colony of lake trolls living at the base of the bridge?” she asked.
“Not since seventy-one.” I peeked out at the blue water below, where Lake Huron met Lake Michigan. Whitecaps highlighted the waves.
“Tell me about Gutenberg.” Her calmness reminded me of Doctor Shah, and I wondered if this was a deliberate attempt to distract me. “If he drank from the Holy Grail, why can’t you do the same thing and become immortal, too?”
“He locked the book. Most holy books are locked, actually.” Given how violent humans could get over matters of religion, this was one of the few things almost every Porter agreed on. “Basically, he seals the text, preventing anyone from using its magic. Libriomancy works through the resonance among copies of a book. Locking one seals them all, and the original, locked copy goes to one of our archives.”
“Is it something they do often?”
“Often enough. It’s getting harder to keep up with new titles these days. Catalogers flag potentially dangerous books. Take David Brin’s Earth. He wrote about a microscopic black hole that fell into the planet’s core, threatening to devour the entire world. That black hole would be small enough to fit through the pages, meaning any fool kid with magical talent who didn’t know better…”
“Would it really destroy the Earth?”
“It’s tough to say. The amount of energy it would take to create a black hole, even a pinpoint one, is immense. It might just swallow the kid and pop back out of existence, but in theory, it could also become self- sustaining as it devoured more mass.” There were plans upon plans for such world-threatening eventualities,
