might have been able to estimate our height based on the apparent size of the planet, but that was beyond my ability to do in my head.
My thoughts began to drift. What would the Porters tell my parents? They couldn’t exactly head out west, knock on the door, and say, “We regret to inform you that your son was stabbed by a dryad, then lost his body when he entered a clockwork golem.”
They should make pamphlets. How to cope with the loss of a loved one: A guide to selective magical amnesia. I could have used some instructions back in college, for that matter. How to make your girlfriend believe you’re really not cheating on her, and you’re just a member of a secret magical organization called Die Zwelf Porten?re, founded by a guy who supposedly died in 1468.
Die Zwelf Porten?re. The Twelve Doorkeepers. Books were a doorway to magic, and the automatons were living books. I had passed through that doorway. Surely there was a way to pass back, to re-create my physical body…
Doorkeepers. Guardians.
I thought back to my first encounter with Hubert, in Detroit. Whatever had come after me in that book had felt like a living mind. Not a character, not a spell, but another presence, desperate and starving.
What if Hubert hadn’t sent that thing through the book? What if it had already been there, living in magic itself? Locked away. What had Hubert said? Everything comes down to locking the doors. Creating prisons.
It made sense. That was why Pallas had wanted to keep me under guard. I had reached too deep into magic, and she was afraid of what I might have brought back.
Turbulence jolted me back to the present. At this speed, even the thinnest air at the very edge of Earth’s atmosphere battered me harder than any automaton. I spread my arms and legs, tilting my hands like rudders to spin myself toward the closest automaton. The air below grew hotter as I flew closer.
It reached out to grab me, but this time I welcomed the attack. I wrapped the other automaton in a bear hug, wrenching us both around so it was beneath me. “Ever wonder why meteorites burn up in the atmosphere? Welcome to your first and last lesson in twenty-first-century physics.”
By now, we should have been traveling at many times the speed of sound. Our bodies compressed the air, superheating the gases below us until they reached temperatures hot enough to vaporize rock… or melt metal. Most meteorites burned up within seconds. My timing would have to be perfect.
I did my best to stay atop the other automaton, using it as my own personal heat shield. The metal skin on my exposed arms began to melt. The air around us turned to flame. I concentrated on the other automaton’s magic, watching spells snap and melt away. The wooden body began to crumble as its protections vanished. I could feel my own magic struggling to hold me together.
“Yeah, it’s a short lesson.” Praying this worked, I concentrated on the ground below and shouted, “Dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux!”
I imagine I looked a bit like the Human Torch as I materialized above the parking lot, my arms blackened, my body covered in flame. I dropped a good forty feet, smashing through a Hummer that was too slow to drive out of the way.
My hands were useless lumps of coal, held together only by magic. The air rippled from the heat rising off my body. But I was alive, more or less. I rolled off the crumpled remains of the truck and climbed to my feet. The winged vampire who had been guarding the roof swooped toward me, then apparently thought better of it.
I strode through the open garage door. Hubert stared at my glowing form. “What did you do?”
“Research.” I could still bend my left arm at the elbow. My right arm was dead from the shoulder. Blobs of molten metal streaked the charred wood.
Hubert backed away, hands shaking as he clutched his silver cross like a shield.
Time in this body had acclimated me to its senses. I could see Hubert’s possession, the other minds tumbling and fighting for control like some sort of magical spin cycle. What remained of Charles Hubert was tattered, shredded almost to nothingness.
I could see something else, too: a darker thread of consciousness woven through those invading minds, seeping into Hubert from elsewhere. “End this, Charles. Let me-”
“Let you help me?” He sounded weary. “You and I both know we’re past that.” He raised his cross to his forehead. Behind him, Lena lifted a black revolver.
I rapped my left hand against my metal-clad chest. Chunks of charred wood fell away from my fingers. “You can’t kill me with that.”
Lena pressed the barrel of the gun beneath her chin.
“Oh.”
A true sorcerer could have manipulated the gunpowder in the bullets, transforming it into something inert. I needed my books, and a way to pause time or freeze Lena in place before she pulled the trigger.
“Show me how you claimed that body for your own, and I will give Lena back to you.”
Give him and the darkness that infested him the ability to take a new form, one which would be all but unstoppable? “This isn’t your fault,” I said softly. “You didn’t know what was out there.”
Hubert jabbed the cross at Lena. “I will kill her.”
I looked down at myself. I could try to drain the magic from the cross, but that would take too long. I couldn’t risk Lena pulling that trigger.
“And the delusions of their magic art were put down,” I whispered, finding the corresponding text on my body that shielded me from hostile magic. Two years ago I had performed libriomancy without a book, channeling the magic of War of the Worlds through myself to destroy the zombies that would have slaughtered me. Now I was the book. I concentrated on that single line of text, the spell which shielded me from outside magic, and flung it around Lena and Smudge.
Metal blocks fell away from my body and clinked on the floor. I hadn’t counted on that. Having extended that spell to others, I had lost its protection for myself… but it did what I had hoped. Slowly, Lena lowered her weapon.
Deranged and dying, Hubert was still a genius. He was several geniuses, in fact, if you included the various characters in his head. He looked from Lena to me, and his face twisted into a snarl as he put the pieces together. He pointed the cross toward me, and I felt its magic take hold of my mind and body. “Kill her.”
To my horror, I moved to obey. Lena jumped to the side and fired the gun. Hubert fell, blood dripping from his arm. The silver cross clattered away, but didn’t release me from his final command. I swung at Lena with my remaining arm.
She rolled out of the way, then jumped over one of the open repair bays. She picked up Excalibur from the floor and lunged at me. The blade chipped deep into my right arm. The blackened wood cracked, and the lower part of my arm fell away.
“I’m sorry, Isaac.”
I swung again, then jumped forward, using the weight of my body to knock her off-balance. She stumbled, and I kicked at her knee. She twisted to avoid the worst of the blow, but my foot caught her thigh, and she fell.
I felt Hubert’s will guiding mine, manipulating my thoughts… and then the strings snapped. I froze, my leg raised to stomp Lena’s chest. Slowly, I lowered my foot and turned around.
Hubert screamed. Standing atop the silver cross was Smudge, doing what could best be described as an eight-legged jig. White-hot flames danced over his body.
I straightened. “You should not have pissed off the fire-spider.”
A ruby fell free and rolled across the floor as the cross softened beneath Smudge’s onslaught. Hubert crawled toward it on hands and knees, his shoulder leaking blood. He snatched up the ruby, then reached for the cross.
Lena and I both shouted at him to stop, but he ignored us. His hand closed around softened metal, and I heard the sizzle of burning flesh. Smudge skittered back, his work done. When Hubert lifted the cross, it sagged and melted around his hand.
The winged vampire had entered through the garage door. Fangs bared, he clutched his rifle with both hands, looking from Lena to me to Hubert.
Tears poured down Hubert’s face. His hand shook violently. One bar of the cross broke free and fell to the ground. “Why?” he demanded. “Why do you protect them?”
I glanced at the vampire, who tossed the gun to the floor and bolted away. “They’re what we made them.
