Codex Born (18 page)

I slept for five days before they found me. At first, I thought the pressure on my roots was a dream, but the pain of the metal ax biting into my roots shocked me awake. I curled my injured root close and flexed the rest, toppling my attacker onto the ground. As my awareness moved closer to the surface, I began to make out their words.

“Ha! Pay up.” A man’s voice.

“Okay, you were right,” said a second man. “The tree’s magic.”

“What do you think, Mike?” asked the first. “Wizard of Oz?”

“Nah. The fighting trees were more willowy. The branches bent down like vines to wrap around the scarecrow, remember. This is oak. Narnia, maybe?”

“I don’t recall C. S. Lewis’ trees killing random farmers and burying their bodies.”

They thought I had murdered Frank. I started to withdraw again, retreating deeper into the heart of the wood. It didn’t matter what they believed. Frank was gone. Let them cut down my tree.

“If you ask me, we should be looking into the ex,” said Mike.
“Maybe she never got over losing Frank. ‘If I can’t have him, no one can,’ and all that. She sounded crazy enough to do it.”

“I’m more interested in that girl, Lena. The one Frank was shacking up with. Marion said Lena tried to kill her once. Wouldn’t surprise me if she killed him, too. If she was a witch, it would explain the magic we picked up.”

“A witch who used her power to ruin Frank Dearing’s marriage and trick him into letting her work his farm for no pay, year after year?”

“What about Dungeons and Dragons? Don’t they have some kind of spell or scroll we could use to figure out what this thing is? The old man locked the main rulebooks, but there’s a new supplement out. It might not have been cataloged yet.”

As the pain from the ax eased, so did my fear. I could hear the fondness beneath the men’s banter. Their presence made me yearn for companionship. My isolation was a physical pain constricting my very core, worse than any ax. In isolation, I had been content to sleep, but now that others had arrived, the loneliness was suffocating. Before I realized what I was doing, I stretched myself from my tree and stepped lightly onto the dirt.

A young man pulled a gold-bladed sword from a scabbard at his side while the other raised a tiny gray-and-black pistol. A nylon backpack sat open on the ground a short distance away. It seemed to be stuffed with books. The ax rested against the base of a tree.

“Lena Greenwood?” asked Mike, keeping his sword ready.

“I didn’t kill Frank,” I said.

“You did something,” said the man with the gun. “Whatever magic you used, the Porters felt it all the way over in Chicago.”

Mike lowered his sword, but I noticed how his friend stepped to one side, keeping a clear line of fire. “We aren’t here to hurt you. We’ve talked to your neighbors. We know how Frank treated you. If you were acting in self-defense—”

“No!” Why wouldn’t they believe me? “I loved him.”

They looked at one another. “How long did you live with Frank?” asked Mike.

The question confused me. “I’ve always been with Frank.”

“John, why don’t you give Doctor Shah a call?” Mike sheathed his weapon and smiled. While John unclipped a cell phone from his belt, Mike extended a hand. “Would you mind coming with us to talk to a friend?”

I didn’t have the willpower to refuse.

“Don’t worry,” John said as he dialed. “Nidhi’s nice. You’ll like her.”

A
UGUST HARRISON’S FRIENDS WEREN’T the only ones who could counter magic. I peeked down at the phone as I typed out the message.
Found killer
.
Hostages. Need distraction and automaton.

My phone tried to correct the last word to “airmen.” I fixed it and hit Send, then brought the phone to my face. “We’re coming out. Call the wasps back.”

I waited for the insects to retreat from the door. An answering text arrived a few seconds later.
Understood.

I stepped onto the porch. “The wendigos, too.”

“In time.” Harrison sounded every ounce the gentleman now that he believed he was in control. He stood behind the SUV’s hood, watching me. “Your friends will be free to go as soon as you’ve joined us.”

An aborted squeak made me whirl. Deb froze, a guilty expression on her face, then slowly wiped her mouth on her sleeve. She was moving better, and her knife wounds had stopped bleeding. She swallowed, grimaced, and offered me a halfhearted shrug.

I looked past her to the empty birdcage. “You didn’t.”

“Hey, if that woman hadn’t stabbed me when all I was trying to do was help, maybe—”

“What is
wrong
with you?” I yelled.

“Nothing, anymore.”

I was tempted to shoot her myself. “When this is over, you’re buying this family another bird.”

My phone buzzed with another text message. I glanced at the screen. I didn’t have time to deal with Deb. With a disgusted glare, I turned back to Harrison. “Sorry about that. We’re coming out.” A low double-beep signaled another incoming call as I descended the steps. When my foot touched the bottom step, I pretended to stumble. I caught the rail with one hand. With my other, I tapped the phone, bringing Nicola Pallas into a three-way call with August Harrison.

Even with the phone away from my ear, the opening bars of Pallas’ song felt like she had plugged an electrical cable directly into my eardrums. I flung the phone into the grass and clung to the rail with both hands while I waited for the world to stop spinning.

As unpleasant as that tinny melody was for me, how much worse must it have been for August Harrison, who had his phone clamped to his ear. Pallas’ bardic magic dropped him with the first notes.

“Go,” I yelled.

Jeff bounded out the door, knocking me off my feet. Deb and Sarah followed close behind, and I saw Rook flying from the window, swooping into the street like an enormous geeky raven.

Lena hauled me inside, then grabbed her weapons. I did the same, scooping up books and my shock-gun, and clipping Smudge’s cage to my jacket. Outside, the two libriomancers were doing their thing, presumably trying to suppress the magic coming from Harrison’s cell phone. But even if they succeeded, the damage was done. He wouldn’t be waking up for a while, and that meant he couldn’t command his swarm.

“Isaac, there were more around back,” Lena shouted as she followed the others outside. “Make sure they don’t cut through the house.”

Flames danced through the bars of Smudge’s cage. I heard claws scrabbling overhead. “Watch the roof!”

Lena jumped down to the sidewalk as the first wendigo landed on the porch. She spun, one wooden sword raised high, the other low for stabbing. The wendigo ripped the iron railing
from the concrete and hurled it at her. She lunged to the side, using both swords to bat the railing out of the way.

“Dumbass,” I muttered, and shot him in the back. I opened the first of my books to a dog-eared page and skimmed the text. As a second attacker bounded around the corner of the house, I finished my spell and flung the book at his chest like a Frisbee. The cover flapped open as it flew, and the dust jacket tore away to flutter to the ground.

The cover art showed a single bee beneath the title:
African Honey Bees in North America
.

The bees emerged en masse and angry. They wouldn’t have been a threat to a true wendigo with its thick armor of ice and fur, but this wasn’t a full wendigo. He—no wait, this one was female—scrambled backward, swatting furiously.

Sarah’s scream echoed down the street. I turned to see her falling backward, her extremities dissolving into dust. I couldn’t tell what the two wendigos had done to her, but by the time she hit the road, only a skeleton remained. That crumbled away within seconds.

A third libriomancer had joined the other two, and I counted a total of seven wendigos in an all-out brawl with Deb, Jeff, and Rook in the middle of the road.

Lena sprinted toward them, and the green-haired girl raised her book like a shield. Lena veered toward her, one sword slashing at the book.

The sword snapped like a rotted stick. Lena flung the hilt at the girl’s face, then dropped low to kick her feet out from beneath her. Before she could follow up, a wendigo leaped onto the top of the SUV and pounced.

I took another shot with my shock-gun, but as before, the lightning failed to reach its target. It looked like they had ended my spell with the killer bees, too.

I ran toward my phone and dialed Pallas’ number again. “It’s Isaac. We could really use that automaton right now.”

“I’m aware of the disturbance. I’m waiting for approval from Gutenberg.” She sounded utterly unfazed. I was pretty
sure Pallas was incapable of being fazed. “I thought your plan was to question Victor’s ghost.”

“August Harrison had his own plan. The ghost-talker is dead, as is one of his escorts. Harrison has his own little army of mutant wendigos, not to mention three wannabe libriomancers doing tricks I’ve never seen before.”

“This shouldn’t take long. In the meantime, in case you’re killed, what have you learned so far?”

“That’s cold, Nicola.” But I couldn’t argue with her logic. Outside, another wendigo hurled Deb through the air. She crunched into a tree and didn’t get up. I fired again, with no more effect than before. “August got his hands on Victor’s magic bugs and used them to hack our network. He’s building himself a little army of wendigos. No idea how he’s controlling them.”

“We have a team in Switzerland working to lock him out of our computer network.”

I was only half listening. Each time I pulled the trigger, the point where my shot dissolved moved closer. Whatever barrier they were using, it was creeping toward me. The only effect the lightning had was to interfere with my phone’s reception. “Gotta go, Nicola. If they kill me, just send a ghost-talker to get the rest of my report.”

I tossed the phone aside, gripped the gun with both hands, and kept shooting. I picked other targets, trying to assess the size of the barrier, but however they were doing this, it was enough to shield a spread of at least ninety degrees.

A flicker of light in the front yard announced the arrival of our reinforcement. The automaton was eight feet tall, armored in small, magically linked blocks of metal. Only the extremities revealed the dark wood Gutenberg had used to craft the body centuries ago. A blank wooden face turned, eyes like oversized black pearls taking in everyone’s positions.

Each automaton housed a human spirit, a mind that gave them some freedom to think and act within the boundaries of their magical programming. Every line of text stamped into
their wooden bodies was a spell, allowing them to access power far beyond any libriomancer.

I hated the damned things, but at this particular moment, I was ready to jump up and cheer.

Three wendigos peeled away from the fight and charged the automaton. It strode to meet them, arms outstretched. Flame and yellow smoke billowed forth from its hands.

“Pluit ignem et sulphur de caelo et omnes perdidit,” I whispered.
It rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all.
It was a verse from the Gutenberg Bible, the text of which Gutenberg had somehow transferred to his automatons. The stench of sulfur spread through the air, making me grimace.

As the rest of the wendigos turned to face the new threat, Lena used the respite to grab Deb and haul her back from the carnage. Jeff tried to get at Harrison, but gunfire drove him away. Rook was fleeing down the street at inhuman speeds, proving him to be the smartest of us all.

Another wendigo jumped onto the automaton’s back, wrapped its arms around the neck, and tried to wrench the wooden head free.

The automaton reached behind, the shoulder swiveling well beyond what any human joint could manage, and seized the attacker by the arm. With no visible effort, it flung the wendigo into the SUV. Metal crumpled from the impact, and the wendigo didn’t get back up.

The green-haired libriomancer shouted, “Concentrate on the golem!” She and her two companions ran forward with their books.

The automaton stopped moving.

“How the shit did they do that?” Deb asked weakly.

“I don’t know, but they look preoccupied.” I raised my gun, sighted through the doorway at the closest of the libriomancers, and pulled the trigger. He must have seen my movement, because he whirled and raised his book. He took a jolt, but not enough to put him down.

The automaton shuddered, then stumbled forward. Green
shouted another order. Wooden fingers ripped a slab of blacktop from the road and hurled it at the closest book-wielder. He tried to dodge, but he wasn’t fast enough. The missile caught his shoulder, spinning him in a full circle and sending the book flying to the side of the road.

Another burst of flame poured forth, but this time it failed to reach its target. Instead, the fire curved toward the house.

“Oh, crap.” I dove into the family room. Lena hurled Deb after me, then rolled out of the way as flame poured through the door. Jeff got a little singed, but the fire wasn’t as bad as I feared. Whatever they were doing to turn the automaton’s magic against us must have weakened its power.