Unbound

by Jim C. Hines

  “Don’t.” I stared at the dirt, fighting to keep my temper under control. “I’m not a Porter, and you’re not my therapist.”

  “I know that.” A hint of pain and reproach edged her next words. “I don’t have any Porter clients anymore, remember?”

  More than half of Nidhi’s client base had been magical, from a werewolf with crippling anxiety disorder to libriomancers who played God so often they started to believe in their own divinity. But in the eyes of the Porters, Nidhi was part of my family. The lover of my lover is my . . . I don’t know exactly how they classified her, but they had kicked her out the same day they did me.

  “If I was your therapist,” she continued, “I’d probably talk about how you’re grieving for your lost magic. Or point out that your insistence on blaming yourself for what happened to Jeneta suggests an unrealistic sense of power, as well as an overly developed ego. I’d also start you on at least fifty milligrams of Zoloft.”

  This wasn’t our first time through that particular script. “I’m not suicidal, and if I’m a little depressed, I’d say I’ve got good reason. Right now, the last thing I need is drugs messing up my brain.”

  “You think depression hasn’t already done that?” she asked gently.

  “If anything screwed up my head, it was Gutenberg.”

  “Oh, good. Then we agree your head is screwed up.” Her delivery was perfectly deadpan. She waited a beat, then sighed. “How long has it been since you laughed?”

  I shrugged.

  “Lena says you’ve been having trouble sleeping, and I can see that you’ve lost weight. How are things going at work?”

  “I’ve read the DSM-V. I know the diagnostic criteria for depression, too,” I snapped. “This is different.”

  “I’ve read Gray’s Anatomy. That doesn’t make me a surgeon.” She stood to go. “Oh, I almost forgot what I came out to tell you. I’ve found someone who might be able to help you uncover those dream memories.”

  I set Lena’s book aside—carefully this time—and jumped to my feet.

  “I haven’t worked with her in a while, but I’ve been keeping up on her research. Best of all, she’s only a few hours away.”

  “Who is it?” When she didn’t answer, I folded my arms. “Come on, Nidhi.”

  “First, put that book away and come eat. Then I’ll tell you.” She headed toward the deck.

  “Since when do therapists use blackmail?” I called out.

  She turned around and cocked her head. “Like you said, I’m not your therapist anymore. See you at dinner.”

  BEIJING—Additional details are finally being released about what appears to be a burglary three weeks ago at the National Library of China. Authorities have confirmed that six people were killed, and another thirteen hospitalized.

  Initial accounts described the perpetrators as “inhuman.” One was said to have hair like living snakes, similar to the legendary Medusa. Her companion was allegedly twelve feet tall, strong enough to smash brick with his bare hands. Some eyewitnesses claimed the pair was accompanied by a teenaged girl.

  Social media site Xı¯nlàng We¯ibó, a Chinese microblogging Web site similar to Twitter, has been abuzz with speculation. Theories range from terrorist activity to an American CIA mission gone wrong. However, the library is now announcing that the attackers’ primary target seems to have been the Rare Books Restoration Center. Most of the books and scrolls stored there are centuries old.

  The library’s Web site provides a partial list of missing items, including works of religious, historical, and mythological significance. A fire that began in the rare books section damaged hundreds, perhaps thousands of other works. It’s not known whether the attackers deliberately set the fire.

  Some are speculating that this break-in and the supernatural appearance of the perpetrators are somehow related to a message that appeared in a popular fantasy novel last week purporting to reveal the existence of a magical secret society headed by Johannes Gutenberg.

  The library is closed indefinitely for repairs. The U.S. Library of Congress has offered to send a team of rare book librarians to Beijing to assist with restoration efforts.

  “HER NAME IS EUPHEMIA SMITH,” said Nidhi. “She’s a siren.”

  I set my pizza crust down on the top of the box. Given the state of my kitchen table, we had elected to eat on the deck instead. Nidhi and I sat on old plastic chairs, while Lena perched on the railing, her bare feet pressed to the wooden post.

  Nidhi had refused to share any information about her mysterious lead until I finished at least three pieces. She looked pointedly at the crust, and I crammed it into my mouth.

  “A siren?” I chewed fast. “As in, Odysseus binding himself to the mast so he could listen to their song, sailors throwing themselves overboard to drown, ships run aground on the rocks, and all that jazz? How is that supposed to help me?”

  Most magical creatures these days were book-born, like Lena. Libriomancy had brought hundreds of new species into our world from the pages of books. Intelligent beings generally couldn’t make the transition from fiction to the real world—in part because they simply didn’t fit through the pages—but there were other paths. Lena had been created as an acorn that grew into her first oak. Vampires—so many different flavors of vampires—spread to our world when overimaginative readers reached into the stories and got themselves bitten.

  Other species had evolved naturally. Or supernaturally. There were ongoing debates among the Porters whether sirens and their cousins the merfolk were a result of natural selection or deliberate magical manipulation from millennia ago.

  Nidhi sipped her iced tea. “Euphemia and her husband Carl run a hypnotherapy clinic in Marinette, Wisconsin. Neither mental discipline nor magical barriers are proof against a siren’s song. She lulls clients into a trance and helps them face the roots of their problems. She and Carl generally help people to quit smoking, lose weight, things like that. I was one of three Porter therapists assigned to supervise the first five hundred hours of her work while they were getting licensed. Nicola wanted to be sure there was Porter oversight.”

  Nicola Pallas was the Midwest Regional Master of the Porters, responsible for keeping tabs on all things magical for much of the United States and a chunk of Canada. “Marinette isn’t that far,” I said. “Why haven’t I heard of this siren?”

  “Because Euphemia works very hard to keep quiet and out of sight. The Porters have a long file on her, of course, but as long as she doesn’t hurt anyone or openly use her power, they consider her harmless. She has a speech impediment that limits the more dangerous aspects of her power. She’s not strong enough to lure ships to their death anymore. But she and her husband have an impressive success rate. I believe she could help you recover your fragmented memories.”

  I downed the last of my Pepsi. “I’ll grab my keys.”

  “You’ll want to grab your checkbook, too.” Nidhi didn’t move from her chair. “The Smiths aren’t cheap, and I doubt your insurance covers this. I made you an appointment for tomorrow afternoon.”

  I was already in the doorway. “Tomorrow? But—”

  “If we left now, it would be close to eleven when we arrived,” Nidhi said. “I’m sure you’d happily pay extra for a late-night session, but they have concert tickets tonight. Carl is taking Euphemia to see Big Daddy Kane in Green Bay. They’ll be exhausted, and Carl tells me his wife’s song gets rather intense after two hours of live rap.”

  I wondered briefly if Euphemia and Nicola had ever done a duet. Nicola was a bard with a preference for jazz-based magic. I had once seen her knock a man unconscious with a single bar of music sung over a cell phone.

  “Is it dangerous?” Lena asked.

  Nidhi hesitated. “It shouldn’t be. Usually, Carl does the intake. He meets with Euphemia afterward, and she tailors a recording for him to use in follow-up sessions. But given the nature of Isaac’s mind, the magical and psychological barriers he’s dealing with, we both agreed t
his needed to be a ‘live’ session with Euphemia present.”

  I slid the door closed and turned around, resting my back against the glass. “You’re saying you don’t know what will happen?”

  “Lena and I will be there to keep an eye on things.”

  My boss wouldn’t be happy about me calling in sick again. I’d used up most of my leave time over the past month. Jennifer had pulled me aside on Friday to discuss my less than stellar job performance. I should check the schedule to see if anyone was available to cover. Alex might be willing to pick up the extra hours. He was trying to save up for a new electric guitar. “I’ll see you both tomorrow. What time do we leave?”

  Lena and Nidhi looked at one another, and I saw pages of unspoken discussion pass silently between them. “I thought I’d stay here tonight,” said Lena.

  “But you normally stay with Nidhi on Sundays.” I hesitated, double-checking my mental calendar. This wouldn’t be the first time I had lost track of the date.

  “Not tonight.” Lena gestured at the pizza box. “I’m not going to let half a deep-dish sausage and pepperoni go to waste.”

  I should have been happy. Instead, I found myself resenting that they believed I needed a babysitter. Guilt immediately followed resentment. They were only trying to help.

  It might be better for all of us if they left me alone. Given Lena’s nature, what was my recent mood doing to her? How much had I dragged her down with me? It was one more reason she should go with Nidhi tonight, to get away from my negativity. It wasn’t like I was going to drive to Marinette to track Euphemia down myself, showing up on her doorstep at midnight to demand she dig the answers out of my brain.

  Probably.

  I rubbed my eyes. Maybe Nidhi was right about the Zoloft.

  The laptop baked my thighs as I sat on the couch, searching the Internet while Star Trek reruns played in the background. Online, librarian circles were buzzing with speculation about the attack on the National Library of China. I found plenty of theories, but not a single photograph of the attackers.

  A gorgon, a giant, and a teenage girl. No mention was made of the girl’s appearance, but who else could it have been?

  On another day, I would have been fascinated by the prospect of a living gorgon, a creature thought to exist only in myth. I would have loved to see an MRI scan of her head. I had always been curious about how the serpentine hair might work. Each snake presumably had a brain of its own. Did they have independent thought, or was it more of a hive mind? And did the snakes eat? If so, what happened to their meals? Either their intestinal system needed to link into the gorgon’s, or else the gorgon would need some truly potent shampoo.

  I switched Internet windows and pulled up a list of my preprogrammed search spiders. I had customized more than a hundred automatic searches, monitoring the web for any information about the Porters, the students of Bi Sheng, or Jeneta Aboderin.

  I found two more reports of people digging up the sites of old Porter archives, working from the information in Bi Wei’s letter, but in both cases the excavations turned up nothing. The Porters must have either cleared out the contents or found a way to trick the searchers into forgetting what they found.

  Lena settled onto the couch beside me and studied the screen. “What are you looking for?”

  “Anything I can find.” Almost as bad as losing my magic was being shut out of that community, cut off from every reliable source of information and gossip. I might have been sent to the sidelines, but I still wanted to know what was happening in the game, dammit.

  I switched to a report from South Africa. “A lightning storm two weeks ago fried every electronic device in a five-mile radius near the edge of Polokwane. That sounds like a magical EMP, one of the tricks the Porters use to avoid being recorded. But I have no idea what they might have been doing there.”

  I was more certain about the next thing I showed her, an e-mail from one of six publishing-related lists I was on. I opened the attached press release and read, “‘Rose Hoffman takes over as CEO at one of the top UK publishing houses.’ I don’t know the name, but the photo is familiar. I’m pretty sure I met her three years ago. She’s a Porter researcher. She was trying to prove the existence of magical resonance between different translations of the same books. Her findings suggested there could be some minimal resonance, but it wasn’t conclusive, and she wasn’t able to point to the mechanism that would explain it.”

  Lena’s smile made me realize I was beginning to ramble.

  “Sorry. The point is, she’s almost certainly a plant.” The Porters had always had people in New York and other publishing hubs, but it sounded like they were working to take more control of what books—and what potential magic—got into readers’ hands. How many books made the bestseller lists not because they were particularly original or well written, but because they included something the Porters wanted to use?

  Another open folder contained copies of scholarly articles I had downloaded for review, primarily about the development of printing technology in Asia. Gutenberg’s press and the invention of libriomancy had launched a new era in magic, at least in Europe, but China had been working with book magic for centuries before Gutenberg came along. If I could uncover more of that history, I might find clues as to where Bi Wei and her fellow students had disappeared to. If the Porters wouldn’t help me, maybe they would.

  “Time for emergency measures.” Lena bounced to her feet and grabbed the remotes. A minute later, the opening notes of Christopher Franke’s Babylon 5 soundtrack blasted from the television speakers, making me jump.

  Lena yanked the laptop away from me, set it on the coffee table, and plopped down beside me. She turned sideways, leaning her body against mine and crossing her legs on the arm of the couch.

  Annoyance and amusement fought it out and decided to call it a draw. That alone should have been enough to make me realize how far gone I was. When a bright, fun, beautiful woman resting against me was a source of frustration, I had a problem.

  I wrapped my arm around her and tried to relax, to ignore the part of my brain that refused to stop obsessing. We were five minutes into the episode when I realized how tightly Lena was holding my arm. With my other hand, I combed the thick, black hair from her face.

  She caught my hand and kissed my palm, never taking her eyes from the show.

  I ended up drifting off about halfway through the episode. But I jolted awake when Lena switched off the TV and set the remote on the table.

  “Damn,” she whispered. “I was trying not to wake you.”

  I smothered a yawn. The sky outside was black. “How long did I sleep?”

  “Two and a half episodes.”

  I slid my hand around her waist, feeling the warm skin of her back. She tilted her head to kiss my chin. A second kiss, this one to the base of my neck, carried an unspoken question. I kissed the top of her head in response, but nothing more. After that, neither of us moved for a long time.

  I mentally checked off another box on the list of diagnostic criteria for depression: anhedonia, a decrease in enjoyment of most day-to-day activities, including a loss of interest in sex.

  Eventually, she stirred enough to ask, “Walk me out to my tree?” Her breath tickled my neck.

  “Sure.”

  The air outside had cooled, and the night was quiet save for the whisper of leaves. We walked hand-in-hand to her grove. I tensed as we approached. Memories of sharp-featured metal constructs and white-furred monsters flashed through my thoughts.

  “We’re alone here,” Lena said.

  She would have known had anyone violated her grove. I knew that, but it didn’t help my heightened sense of wariness. We were safe tonight. How long would that last?

  Jeneta knew about Lena’s grove, as did the Ghost Army. Even if Lena transferred herself into another oak tree, a process that was a hell of a lot harder than moving into a new apartment, they had found her tree once before.

  I had watched one dryad devastat
e an entire block. If they took Lena away, turned her into another Deifilia . . .

  “I’m sorry about Deifilia,” I said suddenly. I couldn’t recall if I had ever spoken the words.

  “Thank you.” She pulled away, her movements tight. One hand touched her tree where Deifilia had died. “I can still hear her sometimes. Only whispers and shadows, impressions of who she was, preserved in the wood like insects in amber.”

  I wasn’t sure how to react to the revelation that Lena’s oak contained the echoes of a woman who had been prepared to kill us both.

  She must have seen my concern. “They’re little more than memories, Isaac.”

  “I’m glad you have them.”

  It was the right thing to say. She smiled and kissed me. “Do me a favor,” she said as she pulled away. “Don’t stay up until three in the morning again searching for answers that might not exist.”

  “There are always answers,” I said automatically.

  “That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to find them,” she shot back. “Or that the cost of those answers is worth paying.” She pulled me in for another kiss, ending the argument quite effectively, and in a way that left me with no complaints.

  “Promise me?” she asked when we broke away. “If you can’t sleep, fine, but no reading anything related to ghosts, Jeneta, Gutenberg, Bi Sheng, or the imminent end of the world.”

  “I promise.” I waited while she entered her tree, her flesh merging into the wood like the bark was clay molding itself around her. I put a hand on the tree once she had disappeared, but felt nothing of Lena or the power in her oak. “Good night, love.”

  After a brief debate the following morning, we ended up taking my pickup truck to Wisconsin. Neither my convertible nor Lena’s motorcycle could comfortably carry three, and the last time we used Nidhi’s car to do something magic-related, wendigos had pretty well totaled it. Nidhi was still fighting the insurance company over that one.