chapter thirty-one

"Victor attacked his father with a talking teddy bear? All it did was move its eyes and mouth while it played cassette tapes."

"Not when Victor was done with it," Nidhi said. "That teddy bear climbed onto the mantel, leaped out, and garroted August with a length of mint dental floss. They left him unconscious on the floor."

"Why would Victor reach out to him?" Lena shook her head in disbelief. "Death is rarely rational," Nicholas said absently. He appeared far more

interested in the dead than the living.

I couldn't hold Victor's dying mistake against him. I just hoped we would be able to fix that mistake before August Harrison did any further damage. "Why didn't the Porters wipe August's memories?"

"In the beginning, they didn't realize how much he had seen," said Nidhi. "Victor refused to talk about the abuse. His parents told the Porters they thought Victor had been playing in the car, and the whole thing was an unfortunate accident. As far as we knew, neither of them suspected anything magical. We

didn't learn the truth until months later, when Victor told us how his father had cowed the family into silence. The Porters visited August Harrison and did their best to erase his knowledge."

"That obviously didn't work," I said bitterly.

"It did for a time." Nidhi sighed. "Victor was never as careful with magic as he should have been. Over the years, August must have seen enough to piece the truth back together."

My parents and I hadn't always gotten along, but I couldn't imagine growing up as Victor had. I knew he had done time as a field agent, but I had never been able to imagine him facing off against monsters or magic-wielders gone bad. Now I understood. Monsters wouldn't scare a man who had grown up with one.

"If August has no magic, how does he control the insects?" asked Lena. "Nicholas—Victor—said something about a telepathic interface." August

couldn't have built the insects, any more than he could have pulled my shock- gun from its book. But once I made that gun, anyone could point and shoot. Likewise, if the queen was telepathic, August didn't need magic. "We know he has the queen. Who was the libriomancer with him?"

"August Harrison had no friends among the Porters," Nidhi said. "The few people who knew of him felt nothing but contempt."

"What happens if the queen dies?" asked Deb. "Do the rest of the bugs drop dead, or do they freak out and go after anything that moves?" When nobody answered, she punched Nicholas on the shoulder. "That was your cue to ask the dead guy."

Nicholas scowled, but turned back toward the place where Victor had died. "Victor isn't certain what will happen if the queen is killed. Her loss would stop them from breeding or evolving, but—"

"Breeding?" Three of us spoke at once.

"Victor used a fractal matrix for the core spells, allowing the queen's magic to be passed on." His eyes crinkled with amusement. "The insects aren't the true danger. Victor says you should be more concerned about the knowledge they could hold. They were designed to interface with his personal computer network, to better share their findings."

I sat down on the undersized pink desk chair and stared at the wall where Victor's backup server had once sat. He had disguised the machine as a potted cactus. I remembered the first time I sensed the power coming from Victor's system, and his mischievous smile as he watched me try to figure out what I was looking at.

Jeff cocked his head and let out a sharp grunt, somewhere between a bark

and a growl. Of us all, he was the only one who wouldn't understand the implications.

I had no idea what a fractal matrix was, but that was the least of our problems. "Victor Harrison designed most of the security for the Porter network." Anyone else who tried to hack our database would be lucky to survive in their natural shape, but if Victor had programmed his pets to avoid such traps, and if they had access to his system and software…

"August Harrison could have everything," Nidhi whispered. "Personnel records. Histories."

"Research reports." My reports. "Oh, God." "What's wrong?" Lena asked.

I swallowed to keep from throwing up. In my mind, I was back in the woods, standing over the broken body of the murdered wendigo. My throat felt like it had turned to stone.

Lena touched my arm. "Isaac?"

"He wanted their skins," I whispered. "That's why August had to butcher them while they were alive. Wendigos revert to human form when they die, and he needed the monster. He wanted to take their power. Their strength."

"How do you know?" asked Lena.

"Because I wrote the paper explaining how to do it." They were all staring at me. "Explain," Jeff snarled.

Eight years ago, I had never met a nonhuman. Ray had told me stories of vampires and werewolves, but they weren't real. Not yet. "This was when I first started training with Ray Walker down in East Lansing. We were talking about the nature of magical creatures."

I had come dangerously close to failing out of my first semester at MSU. I hadn't cared about my introductory courses. Why waste my time in a lecture hall when I could be studying magic? My textbooks sat unopened while I tore through magical theory and history. I skipped labwork in order to practice using my own powers.

"Libriomancy is an extrinsic magic. I use books to pull magic into myself before I can manipulate that magic. Werewolves and vampires use intrinsic magic. Your bodies use that energy automatically. You can't control the process any more than I can consciously manufacture white blood cells. We've known for centuries that intrinsic and extrinsic magic couldn't exist in the same person. It's why Deb lost her libriomancy when she changed."

"Get to the point," Deb said.

"Back in the 1920s, a group of Porters were searching for a way to use intrinsic magic without losing their other abilities. They…they started by

investigating werewolves."

Jeff's lips pulled back, and his hackles were up again.