“I’ve never done it before.” I knew of only one person who had. “We’ll need a quiet place to work, away from people.”

“One quiet, isolated place in the middle of Detroit. Not a problem.”

“Not the middle. We’re off to one side.” My head was throbbing, but I resisted the urge to use magic to heal the damage Granach had done. Doctor Shah was right. I was overdoing it, and if I was going to find our killer, I couldn’t afford to weaken my barriers any further.

“Do you believe they’ll return Nidhi?” she asked quietly as we pulled out of the parking lot.

“I believe that if we can find Johannes Gutenberg, we’ll be in a much better position to demand they hold up their end of the deal.”

I closed my eyes, thinking about everything we had learned. Chesa had tortured an elder vampire for two days, but hadn’t enslaved him. An elder would have made a valuable slave, suggesting she couldn’t do so. The libriomancer probably had to do that in person.

I was more worried by the fact that Chesa wasn’t a true vampire by most standards. A libriomancer who could control vampires was bad enough, but this one could control other magical creatures as well. I glanced at Lena, imagining her brown eyes tightening, pupils shifting into pointed crosses.

“What did Nidhi mean at the end?” Lena asked. “What’s so special about a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder?”

“Remember what I said to you about the dangers of libriomancy and the way books could reach back into you? It’s possible Shah was seeing different people fighting to control Chesa’s body. It’s also possible those shifts in Chesa’s behavior all came from the same mind. From Gutenberg’s mind.” I hugged my jacket tighter around my body. “Magically speaking, dissociative identity disorder looks a lot like possession.”

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

NEITHER OF US SPOKE MUCH AFTER THAT. Not that I could blame Lena for her silence. Thanks to me, her lover was still trapped underground.

I had planned it all out. The love magnet, the extra weapons to hand over, convincing anyone watching that I had been disarmed . . .

Smudge had known. He had tried to warn me, but I was convinced I knew what I was doing. That I was smarter than the bloodsuckers in their nest, smarter than the killer. And because of that arrogance, the killer had used me to infiltrate the nest and destroy our one potential lead.

At Mackinac Island two years ago, I had at least managed to stop my enemies before almost destroying myself. This time, all I had accomplished was to help a murderer. If Lena hadn’t been there and given me time to retrieve that detonator, I’d probably be dead by now.

“I should have called Pallas,” I said quietly. “Asked her to send a real field agent to question the vampires.”