“Mister Mason,” I called out. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but—”
Red sparks leaped from Smudge’s back. Mason swore and grabbed his book. He flattened his other hand, shoving it between the pages like a knife.
Even as I raised my gun, I couldn’t help but envy the ease with which he reached between worlds. There was a time, years ago, when it had been that easy for me.
I pulled the trigger. Heat flushed through the gun, and a beam of brilliant blue illuminated the room.
The gun was on its lowest setting, and should have disintegrated the book. Probably a good portion of Mason’s arm, too.
Instead, Mason somehow blocked the shot with his forearm. His shirt burned away in an instant to reveal a bracer made of cloudy crystal.
When he pulled his hand from the book, he wore a gauntlet of the same crystal. I fired again, with no better results than the first time. He pointed at me, then clenched the fingers of his gauntlet.
By now both the audience and Mason’s fellow panelists were fleeing the room. I followed moments later, tossed through the doors like a discarded toy. Footsteps pounded past my head. I tried to sit up, but when I raised my head, the world turned dark and the drumming in my skull hit a new tempo.
If I moved slowly, I was able to turn my head enough to check on Smudge. He clung to the top of his cage, still glowing faintly.
“Isaac?”
I looked up to see my bumpy-headed friend from registration staring at me, along with several hotel staff. I grunted something unintelligible.
This wasn’t the first pummeling I had taken in the line of duty, so I knew what to do. I shoved my gun into my pocket, out of sight. Then I turned to Larry the alien. “I’m going to need Tylenol. Lots of Tylenol.”
Larry helped me stagger into the Ontario Room. Mason was long gone, of course. I sagged into the closest chair and dry-swallowed four pills. “Thanks.”
“I’m trying to decide whether to call an ambulance or the police,” Larry said, his voice level.
“Neither,” I said. “Where did Garth Mason go?”
He ignored me. “One person says she saw you try to shoot Mr. Mason. And I hear someone with a spider started a fire in the dealer’s room.” He glared at Smudge, who stared right back, then turned and began to clean himself. The smell of burning dust made my nose wrinkle.
“If you don’t want to leave here in cuffs,” Larry continued, “you need to tell me what’s going on.”
“I wish I knew.” Mason had spotted me the instant I walked into the room. How had he known? And how had he deflected my laser? Mason was new to magic. He had to be, or else the council would have spotted him sooner. They might be a bureaucracy-loving gang of cranky old men and women, but they were good at their jobs. Mason shouldn’t have known other libriomancers even existed, let alone recognized one on sight.
I reached into my jacket and tugged out my copy of The Crystal Queen. “Ever read it?”
“I’ve got a first edition in my room. I was going to get it autographed tomorrow.” His forehead wrinkled with impatience, and the edge of his latex headpiece began to separate from the skin. I studied him, trying to evaluate the man behind the makeup. This was a hardcore fan, a grown man who paid money to dress up like a science fiction character. In other words, he was exactly the kind of person who might believe me.
“I’m going to show you something,” I said, reaching into another pocket. I pointed my gun toward the front of the room, aiming at a steel water pitcher sitting on one side of the table.
“That’s what you threatened Mason with?” Larry asked. “Nice. Very Golden Age. Custom job?”
“In a way.” I made sure the doors were shut, then fired a quick shot, burning a hole through the water pitcher and searing a black starburst on the wall. “I got it from L. Ron Hubbard. One of his books, rather.” I frowned. “Or maybe it was Asimov. It’s been a long time.”
Larry’s mouth moved, but it took several tries for him to form words. “Holy shit. You met Isaac Asimov?”
If I hadn’t been in so much pain, I would have smacked him. Instead, I opened The Crystal Queen and pressed my index finger against the page. It took close to a minute for me to pierce the page, sinking my finger to the knuckle. “I told you, I got it from a book. The same way Mason pulled some sort of crystal gauntlet from his own book to deflect my shot.”
Larry stared at the book. I raised it from my lap so he could see that my finger wasn’t sticking out of the back cover, then pulled free.
He turned back to Smudge. “And him?”
“He’s a fire-spider. I brought him out of a fantasy novel a few years back. Can’t remember the author’s name. Another midlist hack, but the spider . . . Smudge was awfully well-written.” I studied Smudge more closely. He had settled into a ball, legs tight to his body. He hadn’t even finished grooming himself. “Are you okay, buddy?”
I offered Smudge another chocolate, but he ignored it. Maybe the fall had shaken him up, too.
“You spider has a sweet tooth?” Larry asked.
“Chocolate-covered ants. I make them myself.”
Larry turned a little pale.
“Every book has power. The more widely read, the stronger the power. But Mason doesn’t know what he’s doing. If I don’t stop him, he’s going to get himself and a lot of other people killed.” I stood, testing to see how painful the movement was. “We should check his room first.”
“Can anyone do it?” His voice was hungry as he followed me into the lobby. He reminded me of myself a decade ago.“Can you bring characters through? Imagine sharing a meal with Gandalf, Valentine Michael Smith, and Paul Atreides.” He looked like he was about to drop to his knees and beg me to start yanking characters from the pages like a magician pulling handkerchiefs from his sleeve.
“Intelligent beings don’t manage the transition well.”
“What do you mean?”
I snorted. “My first job was to visit a kid who had managed to pull a Smurf out of a comic book.”
“What happened?”
“The more intelligent the mind, the harder it is to accept your world as real. The little blue bastard was convinced the kid was going to use him for some kind of magic spell.” This had been before the council cleared me to carry my laser. “I was too late to help the cat, but I managed to save the girl.”
“How did you stop him?”
I tapped my foot against the floor. “Steel-toed boots.” I wondered if they had ever gotten the stain out of the carpet.
“What about Smudge?”
“He’s borderline. Bright for a spider, but not intelligent enough to lose his mind. At least, not yet.” I checked his cage again, but Smudge was still curled into a ball.
“That’s not good.” Larry fiddled with his sash. “If he’s collecting the crystal armor . . .”
“He had a bracer and a gauntlet,” I said. “Possibly more, I don’t know. I’m assuming it’s magical?”
“Worse. It’s alive.”
According to Larry, convention guests were staying on floors eleven and twelve. A quick cell phone call to ops, and he had Mason’s room number.
Nobody answered when I knocked—not that I expected Mason would be there to welcome us. A DO NOT DISTURB sign hung from the knob.
“Want me to call maintenance?” Larry asked. “I could tell them—”
I shot a hole through the door, melting the lock.
“That works too,” Larry said. “So you can really produce anything you want? I don’t understand. Why aren’t you living on your own private island, or—”
“There are rules.” I opened the door. The room was a mess. Clothes were strewn over the bed. Untouched food sat on a tray by the window. A sticky film of spilled orange juice covered the desk. “The council supervises all magic. You’re allowed to use your power up to three times on a job, but after that you need to wait a year. Otherwise, bad things happen.” I had always hated the council for shackling me that way, even tho
ugh I understood why.
“What kind of bad things?”
“You know how the first nuclear weapons tests took place out west?” I asked.
Larry nodded.
“Those weren’t tests. They were damage control.”
Larry swallowed. “How do we know Mason hasn’t left the hotel?”
I set Smudge’s cage on the desk. “Fire-spiders can sense danger.”
“Your very own spider sense. That’s so cool. So hot, I mean.”
I rolled my eyes, even though I had made the same jokes when I first got Smudge. I tore a strip of paper from a memo pad on the desk and placed the end against Smudge’s body. The end curled and turned brown. “Mason’s still around, along with that armor.”
I sat down on the bed and pulled out my burned copy of The Crystal Queen. Mason had written a typical fantasy doorstopper, over six hundred pages if you included the preview of his next novel at the end of the book. “I don’t have time to read this. Tell me what we’re up against.”
“Olara was a powerful sorceress. Beautiful, intelligent, and so gifted that the dark dwarves sacrificed dozens of their warriors in order to capture her and her family. They forced her to choose: help the dwarves conquer the land or see her family killed. Olara found a third path. She made a deal with a dark god who gave her the crystal armor. It made her unstoppable. The dwarves killed her family, and she slaughtered the dwarves. But she didn’t stop there. Olara had always possessed a darkness, and the death of her family turned her fully evil. Eventually, the elves and humans managed to block her power and trap her in a mountain. Pieces of her armor were found centuries later, each one imbued with wisps of her magic.”
“Like the power Mason used to throw me into the hall.” That made sense. Most of us had a devil of a time using magic. It was easy enough to swipe Harry Potter’s wand from a book, but casting an actual spell was another matter. I had practically given myself carpal tunnel trying to levitate that damn feather.
But Garth Mason had invented the armor. He would know its powers better than anyone. “You said it was alive,” I prompted.
“Eventually, when enough of the armor was brought together, Olara returned. The spider god had bound her spirit to the armor, and—”
“Spider god?” I looked at Smudge. “Tell me that’s a metaphor.”
Garth shook his head. “Imagine Shelob on steroids. Olara turned her back on redemption, embracing the darkness. By the third book, Olara was more spider than woman. She poisons her prey and feeds on their liquefied remains. She controls lesser spiders, using them to assassinate her enemies. Mason says she’s his favorite character.”
A beautiful, wounded maiden, driven to despair . . . I could see how that might appeal to a certain kind of guy. But she would have sensed Smudge the moment I walked into the room. No wonder Mason had spotted me.
“I’m surprised she didn’t turn Smudge against you,” Larry said.
“She’s trying.” My throat tightened. “That’s why he’s sick.”
“I don’t understand. How—”
“Smudge was the most loyal character in his book. That’s how he was written. By trying to force him to fight me, to act against his nature, Olara is killing him.”
“So what do we do?” Larry asked.
“Find Mason.”
That was when the crystal spider punched through the window. Mason had found us first.
The spider sprang to the floor, landing amid a shower of pebbled glass. Smudge set the desk blotter on fire as he ran to hide behind the telephone. Fear had roused him that much.
“It’s one of Olara’s minions,” Larry said.
I had figured that out by myself. I shot the spider twice, doing no more damage than I had to Mason. The spider shivered, then ran toward me.
Sharp crystals the size of my fingers covered the spider’s body. He was easily three times Smudge’s size.
I jumped onto the bed, grabbed a pillow, and waited. The instant the spider climbed up, I smothered it with the pillow, then bundled it in the covers. I could feel the thing squirming, and the sound of tearing fabric meant it would be free very soon. Ripping the covers from the bed, I ran to the broken window and tossed the whole mess down into the parking lot.
Glass crunched as Larry joined me. Already we could see the tiny sparkle of the spider as he scurried to the wall and began to climb. “Mason must have most of the armor. Olara wasn’t strong enough to create her spiders until halfway through the second book.”
“Great. How do we kill it?”
“The prince used a frost dragon,” Larry said. “The icy breath froze the spiders, and then his elves swept through with silver hammers.”
I jabbed a finger at Mason’s book. “There’s no way a dragon is going to fit through this book.”
A dark speck dropped from the ceiling to land on my shoulder. I swore and slapped it, squashing a black and yellow spider. Even as I brushed its remains from my trenchcoat, two more raced across the floor. Another crawled across the ceiling.
“You said Olara could control ordinary spiders?” I asked.
Larry was twisting around, trying to reach the spider on his back. After a few unsuccessful attempts, he turned and slammed his back against the wall. “That’s right.”
More spiders were crawling through the window. I fired a few quick blasts, but I wasn’t a good enough shot to hit a moving speck.
Illinois wasn’t known for poisonous spiders, but it had a few. Unfortunately, these weren’t lining up for identification.
A big brown one made a dash for my foot, and then Smudge pounced. The brown spider tried to flee, but Smudge snatched it in his forelegs. I heard a faint sizzling sound as Smudge stuffed the charred spider into his mandibles.
Tiny legs still sticking out of his mouth, Smudge turned to face the oncoming spiders. Though smaller than the crystal spider, he was still significantly bigger than anything native to this state. He raised his forelegs, and I could see the sparks jumping between those bristly hairs. Weak or not, Smudge had never backed away from a fight.
Smudge charged. A few of the spiders tried to swarm over him, only to fall with their legs burned away. He jumped back and forth, showing no trace of his earlier lethargy as he attacked.
“He’s like some sort of ninja spider,” Larry said, flattening a spider who had slipped past Smudge.
I shook my head. This was the spider equivalent of an adrenaline rush. Smudge had to help me. It was how he had been written. But the harder he fought Olara’s control, the faster she would destroy him.
Outside, a faint clinking signaled the return of the crystal spider. I checked one pocket after another, searching for the equivalent of a tiny frost dragon.
I pulled out a John Scalzi hardcover and skimmed through the pages until I found what I needed. Forget the dragon. I could go even colder. I cracked the spine and set the book facedown on the bed.
“Toss me the ice bucket.” Crystal legs gripped the broken glass in the window. I fired at the glass, trying to knock the spider down again, but it was too fast. The spider leaped to the floor.
“Incoming,” Larry yelled.
I dropped the gun and caught the bucket. The spider was moving awfully fast. I pounced, slamming the bucket down on top of it.
The spider’s legs were wider than the diameter of the bucket. Even with most of my weight pressing down, I could barely keep it from crawling free. Jagged legs shredded the carpet. One stabbed through the side of the bucket.
I shifted my weight, pressing my chest down on top of the bucket and praying the spider didn’t start digging upward. “Book!”
Larry handed me the book, which I squeezed between myself and the bucket, pages down. My fingers curled around the edge of the book. The pages grew cold to the touch.
Pushing between worlds is like shoving your hand through plastic wrap. You can feel it growing thinner, stretching and clinging to your fingers like a second skin. The trick was to learn exactly when that bou
ndary would break and to do as little damage as possible.
Another leg punched through the bucket, then a third. One of the legs bent upward, gouging my forearm. And then I was through.
“Help me push,” I said.
To his credit, Larry didn’t argue. His weight pressed the breath from my lungs, but slowly, we forced the book down.
Soon the spider’s legs stopped moving, and then it and the bucket were both gone. I twisted out from beneath Larry and slammed the book shut. If the cold of deep space didn’t take care of the spider, Scalzi’s Ghost Brigades should be able to handle it.
“Smudge.” I tossed the book aside and scooped Smudge into my hands. He had curled his legs beneath his body, and he wasn’t moving. He didn’t even react when I set a chocolate by his head.
“Is he dead?”
“I’m not sure.” He was cool to the touch. I set him on a pillow and pulled out a battered copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
“What are you doing?”
“Lucy’s gift was a potion that would cure any ailment,” I said.
Larry caught my arm and pulled me away. “You said you could only use your power a few times.”
I thought about decking him. “Three times in a year.”
“That’s one,” Larry said, jabbing a finger at the Scalzi book. “And we still need to stop Olara. In the book, that required the combined might of humans, elves, and dragons. Even then, they weren’t able to destroy all of her eggs. You’re going to need all the tricks you can get to stop her.”
I was still looking at Smudge.
Larry squeezed my arm. “If we’re fighting crystal spiders, it means Olara is fully awakened. The first thing she’ll need to do is feed.”
Damn him for being right. I shoved the book back into my jacket and grabbed Mason’s. “Is this her on the back cover?”
Larry nodded.
I stared at the woman who was killing my friend. The armor hid every inch of her body. She looked like a walking geode. “That’s why Mason came here.”
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