Codex Born

shared was the need to escape, whether it was the hardship of their new lives in Blue Hill, the father’s guilt, or the Beast’s castle. And my mind would provide them that escape if I wasn’t careful.

I didn’t have time for careful. I grabbed another book and turned it diagonally, trying to pull it free without destroying both books in the process. Beauty was a hardcover, but the books I needed were larger, and if the binding completely failed, the book would fall apart in my hands. I slid the book out and tucked it behind the seat.

“Where are we going?” Nidhi asked.

“Water tower,” I said. “Toni’s team ought to be able to help us out, and the tower’s built on a hill, so it should be more defensible.”

Lena shifted her weight and smashed a beetle that had landed on the trunk.

“Watch it,” I protested.

Nidhi yanked the wheel, swerving around an overturned truck. A wendigo was clawing at the truck’s door, and I heard screams from inside. Nidhi slowed long enough for Lena to shoot both the wendigo and the truck. Hopefully the rubber tires had insulated the driver.

“Hold on.” Nidhi lurched over the curb and into a parking lot. We wove between cars, barely missing the cart corral in front of the grocery store.

“Where did you learn to drive?” Lena demanded as we zoomed around the back of the store and down the grassy hill beyond.

“Isaac’s always bragging about what this car can do,” she said tightly. “I wanted to see if he was exaggerating.”

I could feel the Triumph’s traction spells kicking in, fighting to cling to the wet grass and mud. Even as the magic won out and we climbed onto the road, the book distorted my perceptions, turning black steel into exhausted horses, their coats streaked with sweaty froth.

“Isaac?” Lena fired at another falcon, set her bokken down, and squeezed my shoulder. “Stay with us.”

There were too many books to create. The longer I held Beauty open, the stronger the voices grew. If the ghosts got hold of me now, I doubted I’d be able to resist them. I needed to end this.

I spread the book on my lap. Given the battering it had taken, the hardest part was overcoming my own revulsion at what I was about to do. I gripped half the pages in each hand, prayed for forgiveness from whoever might be listening, and finished cracking the book’s spine. I tugged the covers until the endpaper began to tear free, then plunged my hand back into the Beast’s library.

My vandalism allowed me to stretch the pages an extra three quarters of an inch. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to speed the process along. The crack of thunder faded. Nothing mattered but the next book.

“Isaac…” Lena grabbed my hand, then pointed up the road as we crossed the railroad tracks and saw the war waging in front of us.

“Oh, my God.”

The water tower had fallen onto the road. It looked like a giant jellyfish, the body partially crushed under its own weight, the metal tentacles bent and stiff. One of the legs had smashed a minivan, nearly cutting it in half. The water had flooded the parking lot of the restaurant on the opposite side of the road, pushing two cars into the front wall.

Toni Warwick stood uphill on the broken concrete foundation of the water tower. She appeared to be holding off a small swarm of bugs with a drinking straw and a yo-yo. A team of libriomancers flanked her, fighting a small herd of rusty metal beasts. Lawrence Hume held a bulky rifle of a design I didn’t recognize, while Whitney lay on the ground flinging pennies at their attackers. Even from here, I could see that her leg was broken.

One of her coins bounced off the head of a wolf, who slipped and rolled into the path of a charging moose.

“Unlucky pennies,” I guessed. The moose trampled the wolf, which didn’t get back up. “Nice.”

Nidhi pulled off the road and killed the engine. I scooped Smudge onto my shoulder, grabbed the books, and snatched the keys from the ignition. I hurried to the back and popped the trunk. The Triumph had better protective spells than any of us. I shoved the books inside and slammed the trunk.

Lena handed me the shock-gun. “How many were you able to get?”

“Ten, including Bi Wei’s.” Beauty had fallen apart when I tried to pull out the eleventh book. It wasn’t enough.

I counted five fallen beasts, but others were circling the three Porters, trying to get up the hill to surround them. In addition to the wolf and the moose, there were several deer, two dogs, what looked like a fox, and a handful of rats. Sparkles on the ground showed where Toni had taken out many of the bugs.

I stopped to shoot at a metal snake which was trying to circle around to flank them. My third shot took it down, but attracted the attention of its friends, and the metal mob that had pursued us from the library was closing in fast.

“I hope you have a plan, Vainio!” Toni shouted.

Lawrence used the confusion caused by our arrival to fire at another wolf. The metal body began to hum like a tuning fork, the sound rising in pitch until my eardrums threatened to rupture. Then the wolf simply blew apart. Shrapnel dented a deer, but it regained its balance and kept coming.

“I need a hand. ‘Eat me.’ End of chapter one.” I yanked Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from my jacket and flung it toward Whitney. I gave Nidhi a boost up the hill and started to follow, but the moose had recovered from its collision with the wolf and was charging toward me.

“Mine.” Lena sprinted past, swords raised. Just before she collided with the moose, she jumped to the right and stabbed one of her swords into the joint where the front leg met the torso. The move took her off balance, but she turned her fall into a roll and bounced to her feet, gripping her remaining weapon in both hands and knocking a rusty dog aside.

The moose staggered. Sprigs of green sprouted from the shaft of the sword. It was the same trick she had used with the toothpick and the metal beetle back in my office. Her bokken grew through the moose, entangling and paralyzing the inner workings before it could reach me.

“Incoming,” Whitney yelled, pointing toward the swarm of birds and bugs flying up the road. She turned her attention to my book, reached inside, and yanked out a small glass box.

I scrambled up the hill to snatch it from her hand. Inside was a small cake. Currants spelled out the words “EAT ME.” I collapsed on the dirt, opened the box, and set both it and Smudge on the ground. “Time for lunch, buddy.”

A swarm of rats had cut Lena off from the rest of us. I readied my gun, but before I could aim, Lawrence shouted, “Watch the trees!”

A pair of wendigos bounded toward us. I rolled and hit one in the leg. Lawrence shot the other, causing the ice that armored its skin to shatter. I didn’t know what kind of weapon he was using or where he had gotten it, but next chance I got, I was definitely looking that sucker up in the Porter database.

On the road, Lena jumped onto the back of the dying moose and smashed a rat off of her leg. Another sank metal teeth through her shoe. She cried out, then kicked off the shoe and rat both. More rats climbed up the moose. I grabbed another book, hoping Whitney or Lawrence could control the rust magic better than I had.

I didn’t get the chance to find out. With crumbs of magic cake stuck to his mandibles, Smudge charged into the fray.

I had cared for that spider since high school, and he had saved my life more than once. He was more than a partner. He was family. And despite all we had been through, the primitive, reptilian part of my brain wanted only to get as far as I could from the flaming spider I had magically enlarged to the size of a station wagon.

Apparently magic rats felt the same way. They jumped off of the moose and backed away.

They weren’t fast enough. Smudge snatched the first one up without breaking stride. His mandibles punched through the metal body like an old-fashioned can opener, and then he was moving toward the next.

Exhaustion and triumph made me giddy. I pumped my fist in the air and whooped like a hockey fan at the bar during playoffs. Smudge grabbed a possum-looking creature and bit into it. Two rats tried to climb his leg, but his flames deepened from red to purple, and they fell back.

There was little question that Smudge remembered what these things had done to him back at the house. Nor was there any doubt in my mind that he was enjoying his payback.