Codex Born by Jim C. Hines Read Free Book Online Page B

They’ve been trying to break through to our world. Gutenberg assigned me to figure out what they were and how to stop them.”
    “That would explain the stress. How far have you gotten?”
    “I’m not even close.” I carefully closed the Asimov book and tucked it back into my bag. I’d need to write up a report for Pallas. She would
not
be happy. “I don’t even know if what we saw through my spell is the same thing that tried to kill me in Detroit. The manifestation was similar, but not identical.”
    “Helen believes a libriomancer was behind this,” Nidhi said. “She’s scared whoever it is will come after the werewolves next.”
    “What do you think?”
    “I don’t know.” Tension lined her eyes and forehead. “There are libriomancers who enjoy power more than they should, but if anyone were capable of this kind of violence, it should have been caught and dealt with long before reaching this point. As for your devourers, we screen for symptoms of possession.”
    “You can’t screen for what you don’t know about,” I countered. The Porters hadn’t yet recovered from the last libriomancer to turn against us. I didn’t know how the organizationwould survive a second betrayal. “How much trouble are Jeff and Helen going to give us?”
    “None for now. I convinced them to let us look for the killer on our own.”
    I glanced up. “How did you manage that?”
    “I reminded them that the Porters are a pack. If one of us did this, it’s our responsibility to stop that person. Just as Jeff and Helen would personally hunt down any of their people who broke pack law.”
    “Nice.” I ran my fingers over the rest of my books. “I’ll look up any wendigo encounters from the past decade. Maybe this is a simple revenge thing.”
    Nidhi said nothing, but I had worked with her long enough to recognize the tilt of her head and the slight compression of her mouth. She didn’t buy that any more than I did.
    A knock at the door made me jump so hard Smudge had to grab my ear to keep from being dislodged. I held very, very still until he released me.
    Lena opened the door and peeked inside.
    Nidhi jumped to her feet. “What’s wrong?”
    Sweat beaded Lena’s brow, and her face was pale. The muscles in her neck were taut. She gripped the doorframe so tightly her knuckles were white. “We have to leave.”
    I started toward her, but Nidhi was faster. She slipped an arm around Lena for support. Lena accepted gratefully, resting her head against Nidhi’s.
    I waited in awkward silence until Lena kissed Nidhi and pulled away.
    “Are you hurt?” I asked. “Did someone—”
    “It’s not me.” She frowned and shook her head. “It’s not this body, I mean. It’s my tree. Something’s wrong.”
    “I’ll drive,” I said. There was no way I was letting her ride a motorcycle on these roads in her condition. I might have burned through a little too much magic today, but I was in far better shape than Lena.
    “I’ll be right behind you,” said Nidhi.
    Lena didn’t protest. She tossed Nidhi the keys to her bike while I shouldered my bag.
    “Isaac.” Nidhi directed a pointed look toward my bag. “Be careful.”
    “Of course,” I said, but I was already thinking beyond the weapons in my book bag. If someone was hurting Lena’s oak, I intended to bring my entire library down on their head.

    A 1973 Triumph convertible wasn’t the most practical choice of car for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Setting aside Michigan’s attitude toward foreign-made cars, the little two-seater was simply too small and unreliable for the no-holds-barred assault winter launched on the U.P. each year. Up here, the ideal winter vehicle was anything you could mount a snowplow to. When I first brought the car up, more than one person had offered wagers on how many times I’d put it into a ditch or get myself stuck at the bottom of an icy hill.
    I had pocketed close to four hundred bucks from those bets. This thing was far safer