chapter eighty-three

"Toni, how much of this did you hear?"

"Enough." Strange to feel her voice buzzing against my chest. "Gutenberg's team is at the mine, but it will take time to work their way through the tunnels. The ghosts are already weakening their magic. Isaac, we've got incoming, and they're playing dirty."

"What's going on?"

"Most of them are flying high and fast. Aimee says they took some of 'em out at the bridge, but the damn things didn't even slow down. Looks like they're heading your way."

"Understood." Where was the book? I had returned it to the reserves shelf, which had fallen when the dragon attacked.

"I'm going up to intercept them. Let's see these fuckers try to ignore me." "Be careful." There, beneath an overturned filing cabinet. The spine was

ripped, and the pages were beginning to tear free. This needed professional

repair. I couldn't do anything but press the pages carefully back into place and hope for the best. As I finished gathering my things, fire bathed Smudge's body. He crouched low, watching the sky. "I think we're out of time."

Jeff ripped a leg off of a table. "Get out of here. I'll watch over Guan Feng and give you as much time as I can."

Three metal falcons streaked into the library. Lena stepped past me, and her bokken whipped through the air to rip the wing off the first. Two more went after Jeff.

True falcons shouldn't have been able to hover and dart about like hummingbirds. Within seconds, Jeff's hands were bleeding where they had cut him with their knifelike beaks. Screams in the distance meant the rest of Deifilia's forces were closing in fast.

I pulled out my shock-gun, dropped to one knee, and braced my arm against the shelves. My first shot missed, but my second sent a falcon into a tailspin. Jeff smashed it, then took out the third falcon on the backswing.

"Go," said Jeff. "I'm gonna call in a few friends, see if we can't teach you Porters how to fight."

"Thank you." I handed Nidhi my keys. These things would shred her rental car like tinfoil. "Please tell me you know how to drive a stick."

Oily black smoke streaked the windshield over Smudge. He was keeping an eye

—all eight of them, actually—on the metal mob chasing us down the road. He would have melted right through the dashboard by now if not for the trivet secured to the plastic.

We drove with the top down so Lena could protect us from aerial assaults. She sat in my lap, one knee in the seat. In her left hand, she swung her bokken at anything that came within range. With her right, she fired lightning bolts into the sky.

I did my best to ignore the thunderclaps going off two feet from my head and read. I couldn't save the two books Deifilia had already destroyed, but if I could concentrate, I might be able to create backups of the rest.

From the moment I touched the pages, I felt the characters trying to reach into my head. The conflict of the title character Honour, who preferred to be called Beauty. Her brother-in-law's fearful warnings about the woods. Her father's shame as Beauty chose to give herself to the Beast to save his life. The one thing the characters shared was the need to escape, whether it was the hardship of their new lives in Blue Hill, the father's guilt, or the Beast's castle.

And my mind would provide them that escape if I wasn't careful.

I didn't have time for careful. I grabbed another book and turned it diagonally, trying to pull it free without destroying both books in the process. Beauty was a hardcover, but the books I needed were larger, and if the binding completely failed, the book would fall apart in my hands. I slid the book out and tucked it behind the seat.

"Where are we going?" Nidhi asked.

"Water tower," I said. "Toni's team ought to be able to help us out, and the tower's built on a hill, so it should be more defensible."

Lena shifted her weight and smashed a beetle that had landed on the trunk. "Watch it," I protested.

Nidhi yanked the wheel, swerving around an overturned truck. A wendigo was clawing at the truck's door, and I heard screams from inside. Nidhi slowed long enough for Lena to shoot both the wendigo and the truck. Hopefully the rubber tires had insulated the driver.

"Hold on." Nidhi lurched over the curb and into a parking lot. We wove between cars, barely missing the cart corral in front of the grocery store.

"Where did you learn to drive?" Lena demanded as we zoomed around the back of the store and down the grassy hill beyond.

"Isaac's always bragging about what this car can do," she said tightly. "I wanted to see if he was exaggerating."

I could feel the Triumph's traction spells kicking in, fighting to cling to the wet grass and mud. Even as the magic won out and we climbed onto the road, the book distorted my perceptions, turning black steel into exhausted horses, their coats streaked with sweaty froth.

"Isaac?" Lena fired at another falcon, set her bokken down, and squeezed my shoulder. "Stay with us."

There were too many books to create. The longer I held Beauty open, the stronger the voices grew. If the ghosts got hold of me now, I doubted I'd be able to resist them. I needed to end this.

I spread the book on my lap. Given the battering it had taken, the hardest part was overcoming my own revulsion at what I was about to do. I gripped half the pages in each hand, prayed for forgiveness from whoever might be listening, and finished cracking the book's spine. I tugged the covers until the endpaper began to tear free, then plunged my hand back into the Beast's library.