ELEVEN

I can feel my trachea trapped between Gretch’s fingers and thumb, her fingernails cutting into the skin of my throat. It’s a hold that can let her rip out my windpipe with one quick squeeze and pull, a very professional immobilization technique. Not the kind of skill possessed by most librarians.

“Glurk,” I say. I can still breathe, but just barely. I grab her wrist with both hands, more from reflex than anything else. She has me cold.

“Eloquent as always,” she says. She sounds like Gretch, too, that combination of quiet amusement and self-assurance. “You have no idea how much I missed that. Which is to say, not at all.”

“Guh?”

“Oh, don’t sound so bewildered. You don’t really think I ever found you witty, do you? I’m British, dear girl. Your japes were never anything to me but the crude vulgarity of an unsophisticated and ill-tempered brat.”

“Nuh!”

“But I suppose I do owe you a debt of thanks. If not for you, I would never have known this world, never have known the freedom it confers. Being a pire here is very different, Jace; it’s stronger, wilder, less cerebral. My blood is practically singing. I must confess, I feel a bit giddy.”

She looks it, too. I’ve never seen Gretch drunk—though pires on her world can and do consume alcohol with the aid of a little sorcery—but she’s definitely under the influence of something. I know what, too.

She leans across the desk, pulling me a little closer. “I feel like I could do anything,” she whispers. “I could tear off a man’s head and bathe in the spray of his arteries. I could kill an army. I could conquer a world and drink the blood of its children.”

I believe her. Unrestrained by moral boundaries and with no real supernatural opposition, Gretch could probably turn this whole planet into her personal blood bank within a generation or two. Welcome to the new British invasion.

“You have no idea how glorious it is, Jace. My chains have been broken, my soul released; I’m free of the cloying morass of petty human considerations like compassion or pity. No inhibitions, no restrictions—”

I let go of her wrist with one hand. I give her a look that says, “Yeah, but…” and hold up my index finger.

She frowns. Emotional repression, when finally released, produces emotional lability; she’s riding high right now, but look out for those mood swings. “Oh? Very well, then—tell me what one thing still holds me back.”

She releases my throat, letting me talk. I gasp, then stumble back a step. It’s a temporary reprieve, I know; Gretch is at least as dangerous as Zhang or Isamu. Probably more so, because she’s smarter than either of them. And she’s fast enough to take me down before I get anywhere near the door.

I take a second to get my breath back, then say, “Precon—” cough “—preconditions.”

“What preconditions?”

“You’re not here to rule the world, Gretch.” My voice is hoarse and it hurts to talk. I keep going, though, because it’s the best weapon I have right now. “You’re a booby trap. Sorry.”

Her frown deepens. I don’t have to explain it to her—all I needed to do was stall out her emotional surge, then point her in the right direction. I just hope that Ahaseurus’s spells have degraded enough to let her mind become aware of them; her own ferocious intellect should take care of the rest.

“My … consciousness has been tampered with,” she murmurs. “I’m not whole. Access to memories is incomplete. Emotional responses have been significantly altered.…”

NSA training on Thropirelem—the real Thropirelem—includes anti-brainwashing techniques. Gretch helped develop some of them. Right now she’s evaluating how bad the damage is, attempting to isolate the worst of it with psychic firewalls, and activating deep-structure mnemonic repair protocols—

“Oh, dear,” she says mildly. “That’s a shame.”

“What?” I manage.

“I hate you.”

“No, you don’t. You just think you do—”

She gives her head an impatient shake. “No, you don’t understand. I really, truly, do hate you. I’m incapable of doing anything else. My entire emotional baseline has been subverted and slaved to that one response. Quite an impressive job, really. I hate you so much I’m incapable of killing you. Making you suffer is far more important.”

“You—you can beat it, right?”

Her smile returns. “I’m afraid not. But there is good news: I’m not actually me. I’m a crude imitation, created through stolen memories implanted in a woman only recently turned into a pire. I can’t tell you by whom, though; those memories are missing as well. You’re absolutely correct about me being a trap: I’m here to make you doubt yourself, make you hesitate in crucial situations and/or wallow in guilt. Instead, I’m going to give you a single word of advice.”

“Which is?”

She opens a drawer and pulls out a pencil, then meets my eyes with a steely glare. “Don’t.”

She stabs herself in the chest.

With perfect precision, of course. The pencil slides under the breastbone and directly into her heart. Her body bursts into flames, just like Isamu’s did, and she slumps forward.

Onto the map.

I’m so horrified that I just freeze up. By the time my brain kicks into gear, it’s too late; I manage to find a fire extinguisher on the wall, but by then the map is gone. Whatever makes vampires self-immolate in this reality, it generates a lot of heat in a very short period of time.

Once I’m sure the fire’s out, I go out into the darkness of the library. I slump down at the end of a row, put my head in my hands, and let the tears out.

I know it wasn’t really Gretch. I know she did the best, smartest thing she could have. But right now, I don’t care; I miss her. If anyone could have found a way to get me out of this damn place, it was her, and now she’s gone.

Congratulations, Ahaseurus; guess this round goes to you.

*   *   *

I go home. I’m tired and depressed and all I want is a bottle of scotch, my dog, and a little TV. If Jimmy Zhang is hanging around waiting for me, I’ll get the chance to see how effective my improvised shotgun loads are.

But the only thing that greets me is my dog’s excited barking. I go in, pack a bag, then take Gally out to the car and leave. As much as the comforts of home are calling, this isn’t home. It never was.

I drive straight to Charlie’s place.

He’s already at the door when I jump out of the car. “No good, huh?” he says.

“No. See that storm cloud overhead? Apparently it’s keeping an eye on me. I try to leave and I turn into a lightning rod.” Galahad bounds out of the truck and follows me up the steps. “Cassiar talked to Terrance, and he’s got a solid alibi the sheriff is ignoring. Deputy Silver verified it, and it’s confusing the hell out of him. Cassiar back yet?”

“Not yet.”

We all go inside. I toss my bag down on the sofa and dig out my DVDs. I probably only need the one, but I brought them all just in case. “Oh, and Miss Peters, the librarian? She showed me an old map of a tunnel system beneath the town she found in the archives. Then she grew fangs, threatened to take over the world, and killed herself.”

Charlie looks at me blankly, then slowly shakes his head. “That’s it. You’re not allowed to go out anymore.”

“Buckle up, Charlie. This ride’s barely around the first curve.…”

I put the DVD in. I don’t know if Charlie’s TV will work like mine, but now’s the time to find out. I go to the scene menu, looking for the one with the Sword of Midnight, and find a scene that wasn’t there before: It’s titled Azura, and has a picture of her face. I select it and hit PLAY.

The image fills the screen but stays frozen. “Azura?” I say. “You there?”

“Maybe she’s in the john,” Charlie says. He’s eating an apple, which Galahad is regarding with the same kind of expectant admiration he shows all food. “Sorceresses do that, right?”

“I don’t know. Let me check my recently unlocked memories for detailed information on magic and/or peeing and get back to you.”

The image abruptly stutters and comes to life. “Jace! I was starting to worry.”

“Starting? Better put it in gear, Blondie—you’re about three crises behind on the it’s-time-to-freak-out train.” I let her know what’s happened since the last time we spoke.

“Too bad,” she says when I tell her about Gretch. “She could have been an important ally. But on that front, I have some good news.”

“The last time someone said that to me, she committed suicide with a sharpened number two pencil. Don’t do that, okay?”

“You have my word. I have a much better idea, anyway. How would you like a few old friends to drop by?”

“Oh, sure. Because the last person to visit really cheered me up—”

“I’m talking about the real deal, Jace. It’s tricky, but it’s still a lot easier to send a mental link across the dimensional divide than a person. I can manage three, in fact.”

“Wait. Three people? You can put me in touch with three genuine, not-mentally-screwed-with people from Thropirelem?”

“Better than that. I can link those people to their counterparts where you are, put them in control. You won’t be alone anymore.”

I’m thinking hard. “Which three?”

“Well, they have to have a counterpart there, of course, so your friend Gretchen is out. I don’t know everyone who’s available, either—you’d have to choose.”

Great. Azura doesn’t know enough about my life to throw any names at me, and my memory’s still too spotty to trust. I’ll have to go with what I know. “Charlie, for sure. Cassius would be good, but I’m pretty sure he’s already here—”

“I’ll work on that. It might be possible anyway.”

Who else? I try to think and realize I can only come up with one other name. “Tair. But he’ll be playing for the other side.”

“Mmm. A shame your Doctor Pete isn’t there, instead.”

“But … he is. He’s Tair—I mean Terrance’s—twin brother.”

She gives me a “you’re kidding” look. “Truly? That’s somewhat inspired, from a purely evil point of view … Doctor Pete and Tair are a single being, Jace. Doctor Pete was your friend and a fellow member of the NSA, while Tair is—well, an altered version of the same man. He’s the sorcerous equivalent of an alternate reality counterpart, a Doctor Pete who made some very bad choices early in his life. The ruthless criminal you know as Tair had much the same thing done to him as Ahaseurus attempted to do to you; his memory was manipulated with sorcery, giving him a history that never actually occurred.”

A magic-induced multiple personality—but here, each personality had his own body. Twice as many chances for Ahaseurus to mess with me. Maybe I can make that work for me, instead.…

“Think you can link to Doctor Pete and not Tair? Bypass the bad and plug in the good?”

She looks doubtful. “It’s possible, I suppose. You’ll have to get him to cooperate, though, and things could prove somewhat difficult on this end. The real Tair—the one that’s still here, not there—is in control of the original body, correct?”

“From what I remember, yeah. And that body was in jail.”

“Oh, good. I haven’t broken into a jail since the last time we got together.”

“Sounds like fun. Wish I could remember it.”

“You will, Jace. You will.”

“Uh, excuse me,” Charlie says. “Did I hear right? The plan is to take some other guy’s brain in another dimension and plug it into mine? ’Cause I gotta say, I don’t know how I feel about that. Oh, no, wait, I do. No goddamn way.”

Uh-oh. “That’s understandable,” Azura says. “In fact, that’s exactly what Charlie Aleph said you would say. So he told me to convey a private message from him to you. Jace, would you back away, please? And Charlie, would you lean in close to the television, as if I were going to whisper in your ear?”

I shrug and do as she asks. Charlie looks a little more hesitant, but he steps forward and bends down.

There’s a brilliant white flash.

Charlie hurtles backward and lands on his back on the coffee table. It’s a sturdy thing, made of thick, polished wood, and it doesn’t collapse.

“Aaah,” Charlie says. His eyes are unfocused, but he blinks a few times, then sits up.

“Charlie?” I say. “You okay? Azura, what the hell did—”

“The message,” Charlie says, “was real simple. I know you’ll never go for this, you stubborn gorilla, so let me explain it to you from the inside of your skull. I think he got it.”

“Charlie?” I repeat.

“Yeah. Hey, toots, nice to see you. Man, is this what it’s like to be made out of meat? Feels weird.” He pokes at his own face with a forefinger.

“CHARLIE!” I whoop, and tackle him.

Okay, it was meant more as a hug, but we wind up tangled together on the floor with me on top. I push off him and look down at his face with undisguised glee. “Damn, sandman, am I glad to see you.”

He glares up at me. “I can tell. I’ve had genitals for all of thirty seconds, and you’re already kneeling on them.”

I roll off him and spring to my feet. “This is fantastic! Charlie, you—”

I stop. Charlie’s still flat on his back, and his eyes have rolled up in his head.

“Charlie? Charlie, that’s not funny. Get up, or I’ll show you what it’s like to have shins, too.”

“Jace,” Azura says, her voice urgent. “He’s not pretending. Something’s gone wrong with the link—I think it’s the difference between lem and human minds, I don’t know—”

“Fix it!”

“I’m trying, but—I need your help, Jace. If the link breaks up, we could lose both their minds between dimensions.”

“Tell me what to do!”

“Kneel down. Cradle his head in your hands. Yes, just like that. We’re going to do something similar to what you and I did when we accessed your memories of a man named Gibby. Do you remember?”

“What? No!”

“It doesn’t matter, I’ll guide you through it. We’re going to access a powerful memory of Charlie’s, one that will resonate at a deep emotional level. It’ll act as an anchor, bonding his mind—temporarily—with that of Mr. Allen. Just close your eyes and repeat the words I say.”

I close my eyes, concentrating on her voice. She starts to speak, alien words with odd syllables, first gutteral then sibilant. I’ve always had a good ear, and I repeat what I hear as exactly as I can.

The darkness behind my eyes begins to swirl, and then I’m someplace else.

*   *   *

It’s 1962. My name is Amy Jorgunsen, and I’m seventeen years old. I know this because Charlie knows it, and he knows it because Amy just told him. He’s sitting across from her in a booth in the Olde Tyme Soda Shoppe, dressed in his neatly pressed army fatigues. He is exactly two months old.

“So,” I say, taking a sip of soda water. “I always kind of figured you’d be green.”

Charlie looks confused. “Green? Why?”

“My brother has these green plastic army men. You’re sort of made from plastic, and you’re in the army.”

“Oh, I get it. No, I’m kind of special. They call me an enforcement lem. Black volcanic sand instead of the regular kind. And I’m charged up with something unusual, too.”

“What?”

“The spirit of a dinosaur. Tyrannosaurus rex—you know what that is?”

“Sure. One of those big meat-eating ones.”

“You sure all you want is a soda water? I could buy you a malted or even a sundae. I don’t eat myself, but I hear they’re pretty good.”

I shake my head. “No, thanks. This is about all I can have, really. Have you seen the menu?”

I point at the sign over the counter. A, O, and AB bloodshakes. Blood ice cream in flavors ranging from porcupine to baboon. Sundaes with anticoagulant syrup.

Charlie frowns. His smooth, glossy black face looks different, somehow—even though lems don’t age the way humans do, he still seems younger. More innocent. “Don’t they have anything for nonpires?”

“Why should they? The whole town’s gone pire. That’s why my family moved here in the first place.”

I hear snickering behind me, and glance over my shoulder. It’s a group of local teens, every one of them pale skinned and red eyed. They’re looking at me with the malicious pleasure teenagers get from singling out the isolated and vulnerable. Charlie gives them a hard stare and they shut up.

“You got any nickels?” I ask him. “They’ve got some good dance songs on the jukebox.”

When he nods, I get up and pull him to his feet. He joins me at the jukebox, though he protests he doesn’t know anything about music or dancing. I tell him I’ll teach him; my father taught me when he got back from the war.

Like all new lems, he learns fast. By the second song he’s got the fundamentals down, and by the third he’s pretty good. It’s swing music, of course, stuff that was popular twenty years ago. There’s no rock and roll on the jukebox at all.

Afterward, we go for a walk. Even though it’s well past sundown, the main street is lit up as brightly as a baseball stadium during a night game. Huge banks of lights on tall posts stand sentry on each corner, illuminating every square inch of ground.

“Those are some lights,” Charlie says as we stroll.

“Aren’t they? I hear they got them from a studio in Hollywood. They play recordings of birds, too. You know, to make it feel like it’s really daytime.”

The cars on the street are all at least ten years old: Studebakers, Chevrolets, Edsels. Men and women are dressed in fashions from the 1940s. I don’t see anyone I recognize as a thrope or a human, though I do see a few more lems in army uniforms.

“So, is basic training as hard as I’ve heard?” I ask. “My father complained a lot about it in his letters.”

Charlie shrugs. “I don’t know. My sarge says I’m a natural. It comes pretty easy to me, but I don’t have anything to compare it to.”

We stop in front of a haberdasher’s shop. There’s a double-breasted dark gray suit in the window, with a matching fedora. “You’d look good in that,” I say.

He studies it seriously. “Really? It seems sort of … expensive. I understand clothing that protects you, but other than that—”

I laugh. “You can’t wear an army uniform all the time. Besides—what else are you going to spend your money on?”

Charlie looks thoughtful. “I don’t know. Those nickels I put in the jukebox were the first time I ever spent money on anything. Other than your soda, I mean.”

“Well, being generous is nice, but you’re going to have to think of yourself, too, you know. You can’t rely on other people to do that.” My own voice sounds a little sad, but Charlie doesn’t seem to notice.

“Amy, I was wondering something. Why did you want to do … well, this with me?” He sounds genuinely puzzled.

I smile at him. “Because we both stand out, I guess. You’re the first black lem I’ve seen in town, and I’m practically the only human. The only one who isn’t ancient, anyway.”

“You think we’re alike?”

“Maybe. I wanted to find out.”

“And?”

“You’re a pretty good dancer, but we’ve got to do something about your fashion sense.”

He walks me home. I live in a little white house with a white picket fence—though the pointed tops of the boards have all been rounded off. We stop outside the front door. “That was fun,” I say. “We should do it again.”

“Sure. But I don’t know when I’m shipping out—they say I’m going to a country called Vietnam.”

“Well, call me if you get another pass,” I say. “Or you can always write me from Vietnam, if you like.”

“I’d like that.”

I give him an impulsive kiss on the cheek. “Good night.”

When I close the door, I vanish. These are Charlie’s memories, after all.

The next time I see him is the following week. We dance some more. We go clothes shopping. We even get to spend a little daylight time together, when I sneak out of the house after everyone else has gone to bed.

We stroll down the middle of the street, hand in hand. Charlie’s carrying a basket of food I packed. There’s no one on the streets, and every window has its curtains drawn. Heavy steel shutters cover glass storefronts and doors, a barricade against the relentless sun. Post-apocalypse small-town America, before any decay has set in.

We spread a blanket on the grass of a small park, next to a statue of a Civil War general. The general’s riding a horse and holding some sort of battle-axe.

I see the way Charlie keeps looking around, and chuckle. “Don’t worry. We won’t get in trouble. It’s just that everyone’s asleep.”

Charlie shakes his head. He’s wearing the suit I picked out for him, an olive green number with wide lapels. “Even your folks?”

I look away. “Especially my folks. They’re both pires.”

“But you’re not. How does that work?”

“My dad got turned against his will by a rogue pire. My mom decided to join him afterward, so they could be together. My brother’s older, but he decided he’d rather be a thrope. My parents weren’t happy about that—they haven’t talked to him since.”

“So what about you?”

I shrug. “I’m just waiting until I get a little older … eighteen, maybe. Then I’ll kick daylight.” I lean back on my elbows, close my eyes, and bask in the sun. “I won’t get to do this anymore, but it still sounds like a pretty good deal. Immortality, right? Never get old, never get sick, never have to worry about my figure.”

Charlie doesn’t say anything for a moment. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll … miss something?”

I laugh. “You mean like food? Sure, I guess. But they’re doing all kinds of things with blood now. I heard they’re even working on potato chips!”

“That’s not what I meant. Human beings are … well, you’re complicated. You change as you age. You have all this biology that affects who you are, what you do.”

“And what would you know about human biology?”

I swear he looks embarrassed. “They teach us many things. If golems are going to live in this world, we need to know how other beings think and act.”

“I’ll bet they didn’t waste much time on us, did they? Not much point.” I don’t sound bitter, more like amused. “We’re almost obsolete.”

“You shouldn’t say that.”

“Why not? It’s true. Anyway, it’s just another change—isn’t that what you were just saying, that change is good?”

“But it’s not change, Amy. It’s stopping at one point in your life and staying there forever. All those things you get to avoid—maybe you shouldn’t avoid them. I haven’t been around long, but I’ve learned a lot since I came into this world. Both good and bad. And I know you can’t just pick one and ignore the other.”

I smile at him. “Wow. You’re quite the philosopher, Charlie Aleph. I’m impressed.”

He looks down. “You’re a good friend, Amy. I just want what’s best for you.”

“Don’t worry about me, Charlie. I’ll be fine.”

*   *   *

My POV changes suddenly. I’m looking out of Charlie’s eyes now, as he reads a letter.

Dear Charlie:

I miss you, and I hope you’re okay. I watch the news about the war every day and worry about you.

It was hard for me to write this letter. What you’re going through is so much worse than my little problems that I feel guilty even telling you about them. But I promised you I’d be honest when I wrote, so you’re getting the unvarnished truth.

School has been bad. I still don’t have any friends. I have to bring my own lunch because the cafeteria only serves blood, and somebody keeps stealing my food. I’ll find it on my desk with a note on it saying This is Disgusting; or even worse, I’ll find out everything’s been soaked in blood.

I get a lot of insults thrown at me, of course: bloodbags is the new favorite, replacing the old standby snacky. Lots of offers to turn me, most of them lewd.

Even the teachers treat me like I’m some kind of idiot. I’m not stupid, I just find it hard to concentrate on trigonometry at 2 AM. The other kids don’t have that problem, of course; they were all born pires. They’ll keep aging, just like me, until their parents decide they’re old enough and cancel the enchantment. But in the meantime, they’re stronger and faster and tougher than I am.

And they belong.

I’m tired of it, Charlie. Tired of being on the outside. I get up at noon, when I’m supposed to be asleep, and just walk around the town. It’s quiet and empty and lonely, just like me. I sure wish you were here.

But you’re not. You’re out there fighting the good fight, and I’m stuck in Nowheresville, America. I kind of envy you; at least you have other lems around that you can count on. I’m on my own.

I’m going to do it, Charlie.

I just can’t wait anymore. I want to have friends, I want to do what everyone else is doing. My parents still want me to wait, but once it’s done, what can they do?

There’s a boy at school. Not one of the ones who bully me—he just watches. There’s something in his eyes … the bullies are all cowards; I don’t think any of them would actually bite me, but I think this boy would. We’ll see, I guess.

Please don’t be angry at me. I hope I’ll see you soon.

Yours,

Amy

Charlie puts down the letter. He’s in a foxhole. I can hear an odd noise in the distance, multiple snaps followed by a sort of low thrumming. I look up and see a thousand arrows falling toward me, filling the sky. As they get closer, they get bigger; they’re the size of spears, then flagpoles, then lampposts, tipped with triangular heads as big as traffic signs. In a world without guns, this is what passes for artillery. They slam to earth all around, a rain of timber that shakes the ground.

Charlie ignores it. He reads the letter again.

*   *   *

I come back to myself, kneeling on the floor, Charlie’s head cradled in my lap. I almost expect to feel the smooth glossiness of plastic skin, but no; it’s warm and hair-covered and human, Charlie Allen as opposed to Charlie Aleph. But who’s underneath?

Charlie winces and sits up. When he turns to face me, I know.

“You wondering what happened to her?” he asks.

“It’s none of my business, Charlie.”

“It is now. You gonna go traipsing around between my ears, you get the full tour.”

“Fair enough.”

“She did it, just like she said. Wouldn’t tell anyone who had bitten her, just that it was her choice. Took her a while, but she made friends, got accepted. By the time she graduated, she was almost popular.” He looks down.

“And then?”

“Then I did some traveling. Fought in a few wars. Came back to visit, now and again. Grew up a lot. She didn’t.”

I don’t say anything, because I don’t have to. I get it. Whatever Amy did with her life, whatever she became, part of her would always be a seventeen-year-old girl. An unhappy seventeen-year-old girl.

“I just thought it was a shame, you know?” Charlie says quietly. “Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it does. But I’ll never know—and neither will she.”

“You still see her?”

He shakes his head. “Not so much. Turns out we don’t have a lot in common, after all.…”