“Magnets won’t touch a boson chip.” I jumped up and began to pace. “Those things can survive a nuclear blast at close range. We need to lure the bugs out of the tree and destroy them all at once, and we need to do it quickly. You’ve known Lena longer than I have. How much time do you think she has before she has to return to her tree?”
“When her oak is healthy, she can stay away for up to a week if she absolutely has to. But with these things weakening her, I’m not sure.”
I glared at the laptop “Why the hell would Victor make something like this?”
“The same reason you keep drawing up plans for magic-based space exploration. Victor loved his toys. He loved to create, but he wasn’t always good at thinking through the consequences.”
I thought back to what we had seen that afternoon. “The man we saw was wearing metal armor of some sort.” I picked up the decapitated ladybug. “Imagine a swarm of these things clinging to you.”
“They could serve as armor and weapons both,” Nidhi said, nodding. “We thought the wendigo’s wounds had been made by bullets, but they were roughly the size of the holes these insects drilled through your door and ceiling.”
I shivered, remembering the insects landing on my body, biting into my skin. I imagined them burrowing deeper, through flesh and bone. “He’s got to be controlling them. When we showed up in Tamarack and began snooping around, he sent his insects to attack Lena’s tree.”
“How did he know where to find it?” Nidhi asked.
“One question at a time.” I steepled my fingers and tapped them against my chin. “Instead of destroying them, what if we overrode their orders?”
“How?”
I grabbed the phone and dialed the line for Jeneta Aboderin’s camp. I spent the next five minutes explaining that I was her internship supervisor, and yes, this really was a crisis.
The counselor on the other end sounded about fifteen. “It’s eleven o’clock. Curfew was an hour ago. Everyone is supposed to stay in their cabins until reveille.”
“Dammit, man, this is an emergency. We’ve got a burst water pipe here, and more than two thousand books that have to be bagged and frozen immediately!”
“You’re…you want to freeze the books?”
“I want to
The counselor stammered an apology and went to fetch Jeneta. He must have been running, because she picked up only three minutes later.
“Do you have any poems that could draw insects out of a tree?” I asked the moment I heard her voice.
“Seriously? You dragged me out of bed for a termite problem?”
“I called because I need your help.”
“Oh, really?” I could hear her grin through the phone. “Before I agree to anything, does this mean you’ll take me with you next time you run off to do something interesting? Because if I’m going to be—”
“It’s Lena,” I said. “It’s her tree being attacked.”
Jeneta hesitated. “How serious is this? If you’re calling now instead of waiting until morning…”
“They’re killing her tree. Killing
“Oh.” In that single syllable, I heard fear evict the excitement and bravado of moments before. “I’ll try, but I’ve never done anything like this before, Isaac. I’m not sure it will work.”
“I’ve seen what you can do, Jeneta. You can handle this. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” When I hung up, I found Nidhi watching me with a flat, expressionless look I remembered from our sessions together. “You disapprove.”
“She’s fourteen years old. What happens if she can’t control these things? What if they attack her like they did you?”
“Do you have a better suggestion?”
She turned away. “If I did, I’d have stopped you.”
“I don’t like it either,” I admitted. “If you see another one of those things, get the hell out of here. I’ll leave Smudge in his travel cage. He should give you enough warning if anything goes wrong. Keep him with you, but don’t let him get into another scuffle with the bugs.”
I looked through the window. Lena sat in the archway of the garden, her back to the house. Even from here, I could see tension and weariness in the set of her shoulders, the slump of her head. “Call me if anything—”
“I will.”
Jeneta wore an oversized blue sweatshirt with the moose-and-lake logo of Camp Aazhawigiizhigokwe on the front. She spent the drive reading, and the soft light from her e-reader cast odd shadows over her face.
“How do you stand it up here?” she asked. “There’s only one building at camp with a decent Internet connection. The wireless signal doesn’t even reach the cafeteria, and the cell reception sucks.”
“It’s like working with stone knives and bearskins, I know.” The Triumph’s traction spells kicked in as we rounded a curve. It felt like an invisible lead blanket had settled over my body, stopping me from sliding into the door. “You’d think they were trying to get you to talk to each other instead of spending all your time checking your phones. Total madness, I know. Someone should file a complaint with protective services.”
“Your jokes get worse when you’re worried.” She didn’t look up from her screen. “What happened to that rule about no magic for twenty-four hours?”
“Your nightmare was last night. In another ten minutes, it will be midnight, and I’ll be able to tell Nicola Pallas that I didn’t ask you to do anything magical until the following day.”
“Uh-huh.” She packed whole paragraphs worth of skepticism into those two syllables, as only a teenager could.
“I’ll be right there with you,” I said.
“Will you be in my nightmares if the devourers come back?” she demanded.
“You can stay with—” My brain caught up with my mouth at the last second. My house had been attacked once today, and there was no guarantee it wouldn’t happen again. Not to mention the creepiness factor of a grown man inviting a fourteen-year-old girl to spend the night. “With Doctor Shah.
By the time we reached the house, Jeneta had donned a cloak of pure confidence. I all but dragged her through the house to show her the headless ladybug and the other melted insects. “This is what we’re dealing with.”
“Cool,” she said, studying the broken bug. She picked up the head and poked the mandibles with her fingertip. “Nasty, too.”
“Can you get them out of Lena’s tree?”
She tapped her reader on her palm. “I’ve got an Emily Dickinson poem I think should do the trick.”
I stopped to grab a few more books from the library.
“Whoa, what happened to your back door?”
“I’m remodeling.” I stepped carefully through the broken doorframe, then crossed the yard to the garden. The roses muted the light from the back porch. Within the garden, we found Lena and Nidhi resting on a hammock made of interwoven grapevines. Smudge’s portable cage hung from a higher loop of vine.
Nidhi’s hair was disheveled, and her clothes appeared rumpled. She was sweating, and her shoes and socks had been tossed in among the pumpkins. I stopped in the archway. Nidhi and Lena had been together for years, but I had never walked in on them during or immediately after the act.
I knew Lena’s nature. I knew she drew strength from her lovers. It made perfect sense for her to turn to Nidhi for comfort. It was a smart move. But it still felt like I’d been punched in the esophagus.
“When did you plant grapevines?” I asked, stammering slightly.
“Tuesday morning.” Lena climbed out of the hammock and grabbed my free hand, pulling me in for a quick kiss. “I’m glad you’re back.”
