Codex Born

“That can’t be healthy for him,” Nidhi said.

“I pulled him out of a sword and sorcery novel. Who knows what fictional spiders are supposed to eat? He seems healthy enough to me.” I waited as Smudge climbed up my arm and settled onto my shoulder. “You were using him to keep an eye on me. A warning system?”

“Isn’t that what you use him for?”

“That’s not fair. I also use him to repel mosquitoes.” I stretched my arms, grimacing at the tension in my back and shoulders. My jaw ached, too. I must have been clenching it in my sleep. “How long?”

“You’ve been asleep five hours.”

The good news was that I had successfully cast a spell I would have thought was impossible only a few months ago. The bad news was that it had kicked my ass. “Gutenberg tosses magic like that around all the time.”

“Gutenberg has been practicing for more than five hundred years. You’ve had what, a decade?”

“Exactly. I’m young and spry and energetic.” I winced and rubbed my neck. “Young and energetic, at least.”

“You seem to have survived the experience with your mind intact. Which means you should be able to tell me what the hell you were thinking out there!”

I could think of a few things more surprising than Nidhi Shah losing her temper and shouting at me. Smudge spontaneously breaking into a tap-dancing routine, for example. Gutenberg giving up magic and devoting himself to competitive macrame.

I couldn’t even remember the last time Nidhi had raised her voice, let alone yelled at anyone. “I was trying to find out who killed that wendigo.”

“By experimenting with magic you couldn’t control?” She started to say more, but caught herself before she could speak. She clasped her hands tightly together, and took three deep breaths. Her body visibly relaxed. “I’m not your therapist anymore, Isaac. I’m your…I’m trying to be your friend.”

“I know that.” Friend was as good a word as any. The closest term I had come across for “my girlfriend’s other lover” was “metamour,” but the word suggested an uncomfortable level of intimacy between Nidhi and me.

Her lips pursed. “As your friend, I will call your therapist and have you yanked off this investigation if I think you’re endangering yourself or the people around you.”

Every Porter was required to see a therapist on a regular basis. It seemed a wise precaution for people who routinely rewrote the laws of existence to suit their whims. “We just saw a man who might be a libriomancer help slaughter a wendigo. I don’t think I’m the one we should be worrying about right now.”

Nidhi didn’t even blink. “The closest Porter therapist would be Doctor Karim. I assume Pallas assigned you to her when I was removed from your case?”

My silence was confirmation enough.

“I’ve got her on speed dial. I consulted on one of her cases last year, a bakeneko with bipolar disorder who was living as a barn cat in Ohio. In her manic phase, she liked to reanimate dead mice and chase them through the house.”

“Wait, how do you treat a shapeshifting cat for bipolar disorder?”

“Stress management techniques, a light box for winter, lithium when she’s in her human form, and diet control. Particularly the catnip tea. Don’t change the subject. I’ve lost Porters before because they didn’t respect their magic. They didn’t understand the risks. I’m not going to lose you.” Her gaze slipped away. “I won’t let Lena lose you.”

I tightened my fist. “I understand the risks.”

“You understand the dangers,” she said. “You don’t believe in the risks. Not to you. You think you’re too clever, just like every other Porter who ended up destroying themselves.”

“Three vampires tried to kill me in my own library earlier this summer. Then a possessed Porter sent an automaton after me. If that wasn’t enough, I ended up ripping open a book that almost consumed Lena and me both.” I stared at the wall, remembering the charred pages of that damaged book ripping free like a dam crumbling from the weight of its magic. Unformed power trying to escape, followed by a presence Gutenberg had described as Hell itself, ripping me into nothingness, devouring my very core.

“And every time, you survived. You reinforced your own deluded belief that you’re immortal, exempt from the dangers. I’ve seen it before. The things you can do are amazing, but with great power comes great responsibility.”

“You did not just quote Spider-Man at me.”

She leaned closer, both her words and her demeanor softening. “What’s going on, Isaac? Ever since Detroit, you’ve been on edge. Angry.” She looked me up and down. “You’ve lost what, five pounds? Ten?”

“No.” It was twelve, according to my last weigh-in at Doctor Karim’s office. Magic burned a lot of calories, and overuse sent the sympathetic nervous system into overdrive, effectively destroying your appetite. In the beginning, magic sounded like the ultimate diet plan, up until you ended up hospitalized for dehydration and malnutrition.

“Lena’s noticed it, too,” she said gently. “You’ve spent more and more time locked up with your books. Does this have anything to do with your discomfort about the three of us? Anger and confusion are normal reactions to a kind of relationship you never expected.”

“I’m not mad,” I said, a little too quickly. “Yeah, it’s a little weird, but I’m getting used to it.”

Her response simmered with skepticism. “If that’s true, then what’s driving you, Isaac?”

“Gutenberg.”

“Ah.” She nodded.

“He chose to hide magic from the world. I can understand that.” I understood, but I didn’t always agree. How many diseases could we have eliminated through the open use of magic? How many tragedies could have been averted? Not to mention the potential exploration. Magic could create livable habitats in the deepest crevasses of the ocean, in the hearts of active volcanoes, not to mention outer space. So what if NASA had never given us the moon base we wanted. Science fiction had provided all the tools we needed to build one ourselves.

“But,” Nidhi prompted.

“We both know he’s been hiding things. Lying about the rules and limitations of libriomancy.” Not to mention the devourers.

“Would you teach a middle school science class how to mix thermite?” She raised her hands before I could answer. “I’m not suggesting you’re a child. But Gutenberg is more than six hundred years old. To him, we’re barely out of infancy.”

“If those infants already have the ingredients to make thermite, I’d damn well teach them how to make and handle it safely instead of waiting for them to accidentally burn down the school.” I stood up and searched the room for my satchel. Nidhi had tucked it beneath the foot of the cot. I yanked out the Asimov collection and opened it to “The Dead Past.” Dry petals of Moly fell from the pages. I tried to catch one, and the blackened petal broke apart like ash at my touch.

The pages looked like someone had lit a fire in the center of the book’s spine, blackening all but the outer edges. The damage had rendered the book useless for libriomancy, like a cracked lens in a laser. I would need to update our database. Magical resonance treated identical copies of a book as a single point, which was why we could touch the belief of all readers of a given title. But those same principles meant every copy of Asimov’s collection now carried the same magical charring, though only libriomancers would see it. Every copy of this book would be useless for years, even decades. Depending on the severity, the damage could even creep into other editions of the same book.

“You’re angry at Gutenberg for keeping secrets from you.” Nidhi cocked her head to the side. “Yet every time Lena or I ask you about your secret research project for the Porters, you change the subject.”

I drew a tally mark in the air, acknowledging the point. “You saw what I’ve been working on,” I said softly. “The shadow that tried to claw its way out of my spell.”

“The woman?”

“Or something like her. Jeneta called them ‘devourers.’ They’ve been trying to break through to our world.