Codex Born

different reasons. I couldn’t let him go.

My fingers tightened around the burnt limb. With my other hand, I pulled myself up to touch the carved, featureless face.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m not sure.”

I reached for the memory of oak, and the feel of Isaac’s arms around my body, my mouth on his. He had tasted like coffee with not enough cream, just as I had doubtless tasted of waffles and strawberries, but neither one of us had been willing to break off that first frantic kiss.

My fingers sank into the automaton, and I felt my own life fighting to inhabit the dead wood. Cells long-since dried and broken struggled to heal, and then to grow as I forced myself deeper into the broken body of my lover.

And then we were one. The libriomancer and the dryad, joined in a way I had never known, not with Nidhi, nor with Frank.

Nidhi’s love had given me strength and power. Now Isaac’s love gave me the strength to use that power in a way I had never imagined.

If you ask Isaac when we first made love, he’ll say it was two days later, in the damp grass of his backyard. Which isn’t as romantic as you’d think, given the mosquito population here in the U.P. They didn’t bother me, but he kept squirming and slapping until I laughed and rolled us over, climbing on top of him and driving all other distractions from his mind.

But what we did beneath the cloudy sky that night was merely the completion of what we began in that dying wooden body.

“CALL GUTENBERG,” I said. “Tell him what he’s facing.”

“What is he facing?” asked Nidhi.

“Hell if I know.” The Ghost Army wouldn’t care about restoring Victor Harrison, which meant Jeneta should be safe. They cared only about their own return. “Bi Wei, when Deifilia restored your two companions, what did she do to their books and their readers?”

Her grief surged through me, confirming my guess. “How did you know?”

“We’re very clever. She destroyed them, didn’t she?”

“Chu Zao was the first to be brought back. No sooner had Deifilia drawn him forth than she used the insects to destroy the book. His reader was taken away to become another wendigo. What remained of Chu Zao…his body lives, but my friend is gone. I tried to stop Deifilia, and her insects almost killed me. By the time I awoke, she had done the same to another of us.”

“They’ve tried to possess Porters through the years, but even when it worked, they were trapped in a damaged body with an even more damaged mind. They tried to take you, but you fought back.”

“It appears I owe you thanks,” Bi Wei said. “Deifilia would have torn my own book to pulp if you hadn’t taken it, and I would be dead.”

“Wei, are the other books the same as your own? The same appearance, the same format and title?”

“The Yang/Soul/Story, yes.”

There was no equivalent English word, but I saw in her thoughts the untranslatable characters from the cover of her own book. The Yang/Soul/Story of Bi Wei, safeguarding her spiritual soul. “I have an idea, but I’ll need names.”

She saw what I had in mind, and gratitude flooded through our shared connection. In that instant, I knew the names of her fellow students as well as she did.

Raw fury followed a moment later, so sudden I cried out. Lena yanked me away, and Nidhi slammed the book shut. A part of me cringed to see such an old book handled so roughly, but it worked. My connection to Bi Wei weakened, though I could feel her horror and guilt as she realized what had happened.

The Army of Ghosts was still inside her. I hadn’t sensed them through our connection, but they had been listening from the shadows of her mind. “I need McKinley’s Beauty, and we’re about to have visitors.”

“No more magic,” Nidhi insisted. Lena moved to stand beside her, their shoulders touching. Jeff simply looked puzzled.

“Deifilia restored two more of the students of Bi Sheng. And then she destroyed their books. It ripped their minds and souls apart, leaving the bodies as vessels for the Army of Ghosts. She’s going to do the same to the rest.”

“The ghosts—the devourers—were deranged,” said Lena. “How is Deifilia controlling them?”

That made me pause. “I have no idea.”

“Call another libriomancer,” Nidhi insisted. “Let them do the spell.”

“They don’t know the books we need.” I could see the titles in my mind, but I lacked the words to explain them, even to a fellow libriomancer.

I touched the duct tape square on my shirt. “Toni, how much of this did you hear?”

“Enough.” Strange to feel her voice buzzing against my chest. “Gutenberg’s team is at the mine, but it will take time to work their way through the tunnels. The ghosts are already weakening their magic. Isaac, we’ve got incoming, and they’re playing dirty.”

“What’s going on?”

“Most of them are flying high and fast. Aimee says they took some of ’em out at the bridge, but the damn things didn’t even slow down. Looks like they’re heading your way.”

“Understood.” Where was the book? I had returned it to the reserves shelf, which had fallen when the dragon attacked.

“I’m going up to intercept them. Let’s see these fuckers try to ignore me.”

“Be careful.” There, beneath an overturned filing cabinet. The spine was ripped, and the pages were beginning to tear free. This needed professional repair. I couldn’t do anything but press the pages carefully back into place and hope for the best. As I finished gathering my things, fire bathed Smudge’s body. He crouched low, watching the sky. “I think we’re out of time.”

Jeff ripped a leg off of a table. “Get out of here. I’ll watch over Guan Feng and give you as much time as I can.”

Three metal falcons streaked into the library. Lena stepped past me, and her bokken whipped through the air to rip the wing off the first. Two more went after Jeff.

True falcons shouldn’t have been able to hover and dart about like hummingbirds. Within seconds, Jeff’s hands were bleeding where they had cut him with their knifelike beaks. Screams in the distance meant the rest of Deifilia’s forces were closing in fast.

I pulled out my shock-gun, dropped to one knee, and braced my arm against the shelves. My first shot missed, but my second sent a falcon into a tailspin. Jeff smashed it, then took out the third falcon on the backswing.

“Go,” said Jeff. “I’m gonna call in a few friends, see if we can’t teach you Porters how to fight.”

“Thank you.” I handed Nidhi my keys. These things would shred her rental car like tinfoil. “Please tell me you know how to drive a stick.”

Oily black smoke streaked the windshield over Smudge. He was keeping an eye—all eight of them, actually—on the metal mob chasing us down the road. He would have melted right through the dashboard by now if not for the trivet secured to the plastic.

We drove with the top down so Lena could protect us from aerial assaults. She sat in my lap, one knee in the seat. In her left hand, she swung her bokken at anything that came within range. With her right, she fired lightning bolts into the sky.

I did my best to ignore the thunderclaps going off two feet from my head and read. I couldn’t save the two books Deifilia had already destroyed, but if I could concentrate, I might be able to create backups of the rest.

From the moment I touched the pages, I felt the characters trying to reach into my head. The conflict of the title character Honour, who preferred to be called Beauty. Her brother-in-law’s fearful warnings about the woods. Her father’s shame as Beauty chose to give herself to the Beast to save his life. The one thing the characters