recited it in my sleep. It was one of the few books whose magic I could use without reading the page, which was exactly why I carried it. My fingers sank through the paper into hot desert air.
The vampire pulled a black-hilted skinning knife from his belt. Dried blood darkened the blade’s edge and the nasty-looking hook on the back. “Beg for me,” he whispered.
The fingers of my hand closed around the end of a metal tube. I shifted my grip, allowing the book to drop away. I flipped a switch, and a glowing blade thrummed magically to life.
My first swing severed the vampire’s arm at the elbow. The knife clanged against the ground. I ducked low, taking his legs off with the backswing. He hissed and began to dissolve into mist.
I stepped to the side, studied the pipes for a moment, and slashed through the lower one. Hot steam blasted down, directly onto the mist. He re-formed a few seconds later, dragging himself out of the steam with his remaining arm.
I pointed the humming blade at his throat. “Ray Walker was my friend.”
His expression flickered. Confusion, fear, rage… emotions flashed past like a roulette wheel.
“You’re going to tell me where to find Gutenberg and what the hell you are,” I said. Ted had been terrified of this thing. Why?
His eyes glowed like coals, making the black cross of his pupils appear even darker. “You’ll find out soon enough, Porter.”
The flames started inside of him. Fury changed to pain, then fear as smoke poured from his mouth and nose. He cried out as fire consumed his body. Moments later, Smudge and I were alone, staring down at a layer of black, oily ash.
I deactivated my blade. The handle slipped from my fingers to clank against the floor. I heard Lena call my name, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t move at all.
The vampire’s final taunt had been in Middle High German.
Chapter 8
I was still standing there, staring at the blackened mess on the floor, when Lena arrived.
“You killed him.” Disapproval sharpened her words.
“I didn’t, actually. I cut off a few limbs, but that shouldn’t have been enough to destroy him.” I knelt and touched the ash. It had a thick, crunchy texture, like something you’d clean from your oven. “He burned up from the inside. Maybe to stop me from questioning him.”
“A vampire with a self-destruct button?”
“That’s what it looked like to me. Either he killed himself, or someone else did.” I wasn’t aware of any vampires who could spontaneously combust at will. I wiped my hand on the wall. “He knew my name.”
“If he was able to read Ray’s mind-”
“He didn’t try to read mine.” I hadn’t felt any of the telltale pains like I had with Deb back at the house.
Lena gestured to the pipe, which continued to hiss and spray hot steam into the tunnel. “We should get moving before someone comes to check on that.”
I pried myself away from the remains of our one lead and followed her back down the tunnel, filling her in on the details of the fight.
“Did you learn anything that could help us?” she asked.
I thought about his final words, spoken in Gutenberg’s native tongue. “Maybe.”
Lena had found some of the missing books from the archive. I counted a total of thirty, carelessly stuffed into a pair of plastic milk crates. Given the empty shelf I had seen, there should have been at least fifty.
Each of us picked up a crate. “If I can get onto the Porter database, I should be able to pull a list of which titles were shelved where and figure out what else he took.”
“What about the tunnel to the library?” Lena asked.
I hesitated. There were a number of spells which could have collapsed the small passageway. I flexed my hands, feeling the magic coursing through my veins, crackling for release. When I had returned my weapon to its book, voices from another galaxy had insinuated themselves into my thoughts, just as had happened with Alice in Wonderland.
“I’ve got this,” Lena said, watching me with much the same focus as Doctor Shah used to. She returned to the wall where we had emerged and dropped to her hands and knees. I did my best not to stare at the way her jeans hugged her thighs and backside as she pushed her bokken into the tunnel.
I could just make out thin roots and branches sprouting from the end of the weapon. Dust and bits of concrete began to fall as the tendrils bored into the tunnel.
Lena rose and brushed her hands together. We avoided the grates, walking instead until we came to a locked door that, once Lena worked her lock-picking magic, opened into a basement hallway. We strode past what appeared to be grad student offices. Only a few of the old wooden doors were open, and none of the students gave us a second glance as we found our way to a stairwell and left, emerging about a block east of the library.
“Wait.” I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and closed my eyes.
“What are you doing?”
“Listening.” Searching beneath the clanking of construction equipment, the grumble of distant cars, for any trace of magical energy. “The more magic I use, the more… permeable I become to that magic. It can cause problems if I push too hard.” The whispers in my head were only the first symptom. “I’m hoping I can use it. If someone else was controlling this vampire, I might be able to sense them.”
“Permeable?”
“The more you reach into books, the easier it becomes for those books to reach back into you.” The past few days had left me hypersensitive to magic. The locked books gave off a cool, heavy pull that made me think of dead stars floating in space.
I opened my eyes and turned in a slow circle. I could feel the Triumph in the parking garage, which was an accomplishment all by itself. As long as I pushed myself to the brink of madness, I’d always be able to remember where I parked. But I heard no other magical whispers, no trace of another presence.
If someone else had destroyed that vampire, they had either done so from a distance, or else they were strong enough to hide from my amateur attempt to find them.
Gutenberg could have done so with ease.
“Ted told us other vampires had been taken,” I said. “That they had been turned against their sires. We need more information. Were there any commonalities in who was taken? Did they develop the cross-shaped pupils this one had? What’s the pattern?”
“What you need is to rest,” Lena said firmly.
She was right, and tomorrow would be better for what I had in mind anyway. But my body was wound too tightly for rest. I wanted to act.
“We passed an Internet cafe on the way in,” I said. “I should at least check our taxonomy of vampires to see if there’s any mention of those eyes.” Given how many vampire books I had read, the odds were slim I had missed such a thing, but it was better to be certain.
She shifted her crate to one arm and waved her remaining bokken under my nose. “Tomorrow.”
I raised my hands in surrender, then bent to pick up my crate of books. “All right,” I agreed. “But first thing in the morning, we head to Detroit and start questioning vampires.”
Lena drove us to a small motel off the highway, giving me time to think. I kept imagining the fight in the steam tunnels. Had the hatred and fury been the vampire’s own, or had it come from whoever was controlling him? Was he killer or puppet?
The young man at the front desk gave us a skeptical once-over, taking in the dirt and dust that made us look like vampires ourselves, freshly risen from the grave. “Can I help you?”
I reached for my wallet, but Lena was faster, slapping a credit card onto the desk.
“How many beds?” he asked mechanically.
Lena grinned. “Just one.”
My neck and cheeks grew warm, even though I knew it meant nothing. Lena would find a tree to sleep in,
