“So nice to see young lovers reunited,” Granach purred, her cold breath tickling my neck. I hadn’t even heard her approach. She was smiling, not at Lena and Doctor Shah, but at me, as if she was the one who had jabbed a knife into my chest and twisted.

I did my best to swallow the jealousy and forced a smile of my own. “I’ve never met a vampire with dentures before. What kind of cream do you use to keep them in?”

“You have a good eye,” she said, but the amusement was gone from her voice. “These are specially designed. Would you like to see?” Her smile tightened, and tiny triangular blades slid from the canine teeth.

“Don’t tease her, Isaac,” said Shah. “Alice doesn’t take well to challenges.”

“Isaac.” Lena stared at me, her mouth round with confusion. She kept a possessive arm around Shah’s waist. I had the feeling she had completely forgotten my presence until Shah mentioned my name.

Doctor Shah looked from Lena to me and back. “I see.”

“I thought you were—” Lena began.

“I understand.” Shah was breathing hard, and her face was darker than usual. She wiped her brow and studied me more closely. “You’ve been overdoing your magic again, Isaac.”

There was the calm, clinically detached tone I remembered from the last time I walked out of her office. “I haven’t had much of a choice.”

Granach let out a melodramatic sigh. “Perhaps you could sort out your tangled little human emotions at a later time? I believe Isaac was going to try to help us find a rogue libriomancer.”

“She thinks Gutenberg is behind this,” said Shah.

“What do you think?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I’ve learned my way around Porter minds, but Gutenberg is a breed apart. The only thing I know for certain is that I don’t know or understand what goes on in that man’s head.”

Granach gestured toward the glass door. Lena didn’t meet my eyes as I stepped past her to examine the prisoner inside.

The woman in the cell was short and slender. Her skin had a strange blue-gray pallor. She wore green hospital scrubs covered in bloodstains, especially at the waist. Heavy scars covered her wrists, as if they had been repeatedly clawed open. Her fingernails were glassy with a bluish tinge, and there were faint lesions on her skin.

“You’ve been helping them?” Lena asked.

“Not at first.” I had rarely heard Doctor Shah angry before. She tapped the tattoo on her temple. “The Porters’ protections kept them from reading my mind, but they found other ways to batter my will. They took my files, forced me to decrypt and translate them so they could study every patient I’d ever worked with.”