Free Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines Page A

I passed the bottle to Lena. “You should only need one drop,” I said in a voice that sounded almost human again. “It’s supposed to heal any injury.”
    Once Lena finished, I poured another drop onto my fingertip and extended it to Smudge. His mandibles tickled my fingertip, and soon he, too, was back to his old self.
    I picked up Deb’s World War I book and squinted at the edges of the pages, where the paper was glued to the spine. Lines of ragged black seared the inner margins, invisible to anyone not trained to see it. The char wasn’t bad enough to be a threat, but further use would cause problems.
    I sealed
Starship Troopers
next, then returned my bat and shield to their respective texts. I considered keeping the medicine, but I was pushing things too far already. I remembered Ray Walker lecturing me on the importance of terminating my spells.
    “Every time you reach into a book, you’re creating a portal, a hole into magic.”
He had punched a hole in the top of the half-empty pizza box to demonstrate.
“The more of that energy you return, the faster those holes heal. Now, the universe is pretty tough, and you can get away with keeping the occasional fire-spider, but don’t push it. Not unless you want to rip open something you can’t fix.”
    I returned the vial to the book, then surveyed the damage to my library. Angry as I was at Deb’s betrayal, seeing the bullet-ridden texts was worse. It was one thing to shoot at me, but to destroy my
books
 . . . I picked up an Asimov paperback, examining the tattered hole through the spine and pages.
    “So you have vampires among the Porters,” Lena commented. “That’s new.”
    “Deb’s not exactly a vampire.” I set the damaged book on the arm of the chair—she had shot my chair, too!—and returned to the kitchen to finish the rest of my water. “Muscavore Wallacea, from a ninety-year-old book called
Renfield
. It’s a sequel to
Dracula
, written by Samantha Wallace. In her book, the Renfield character wasn’t mad at all, and actually gained certain powers by consuming the smaller lives of insects and other creatures. Renfield was strong, fast, and able to influence the thoughts of others. Let a child of Renfield into your head for too long, and that ‘madness’ becomes infectious.”
    Lena whistled. “In other words, I owe you a thank you.”
    “After the sparklers at the library, I think we’re at one save apiece.”
    Her answering smile took some of the sting out of the past twenty-four hours. She picked up her bokken and strode out the back door, glass crunching beneath her bare feet. “Do you think she’s right about someone from the Porters working against the vampires?”
    “I don’t know.” I took a slow, shaky breath, trying in vain to calm myself. I was in way over my head, but I no longer cared. “But I say we get out of here and find out.”

    I stood in front of the open hall closet, staring at a brown suede duster on a wooden hanger.
    I’m officially reassigning you back to the field.
    One little sentence, alluring and seductive, offering me a path to my dreams, then snatched away before I could seize it. Before it could seize me.
    My breathing was rapid, and my heart continued to beat double-time. I hadn’t just fallen off the magical wagon; the wagon had run me over and dragged me six blocks down a pothole-ridden street. The effects were worse after two years away. My body was no longer used to channeling this kind of energy.
    Two years behind a desk, cataloging magic but never able to touch it. Two years of purgatory, redeemed in that one little sentence.
    I reached for the hanger. My hand trembled, to my great annoyance—another aftereffect of magic and adrenaline. The duster was heavy, lined with a polyethylene fiber weave that could stop small caliber bullets or turn away a blade. It held up pretty well against zombie horses, too.
    I had sewn pockets into the lining, carefully sized and positioned to accommodate