A new voice caught my attention, not a character from the book but a man arguing with himself. He spoke in sharp, angry sentences that jumped and fell in volume like a broken radio. I tried to see, and was rewarded with the image of a vague, manlike shape. I had to concentrate to fill in each detail. He was white. Slender, wearing a filthy coverall and heavy boots. A jagged scar ripped the side of his head and face.

“You think I don’t hear you?” He grabbed a handful of books, snarled, and threw them aside with a careless disregard that made me cringe. No true libriomancer would treat books so harshly. “Always watching. Always spying. Ripping out the pages of my brain.”

This wasn’t Johannes Gutenberg. The voice was unfamiliar. I couldn’t yet focus well enough to identify the speaker.

His fingers closed around Rabid, and his tone shifted, becoming deeper. “I see you, Isaac.”

My mind ran at a manic pace. This is awesome I’m talking to someone through a book oh shit he’s going to kill me how the hell do I get out of here?

He muttered in Latin, and I saw his words, like hastily scrawled ropes shooting outward. He was trying to lock the book again, with me inside.

“Who are you?” I demanded, projecting the question with everything I had.

He hesitated, and I heard . . . I felt different voices trying to respond. James Moriarty. Jakob Hoffman. Doctor Hannibal Lecter. Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Norman Bates.

There were more, but the original voice shouted them down, struggling to make himself heard. More Latin snaked toward me. He grabbed a pen, scribbling the words onto the pages as he spoke.

I fled, seeking the magic of the story. If I could follow the killer’s magical current to him, I should be able to follow whatever trail I had left for myself when I reached into the book. But before I could find it, another presence crashed into me from below.

I screamed, only to have my fear devoured and spilled back over me, increased a thousandfold. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I clung to myself as that tide dragged away everything I was. Memories, dreams, everything crumbled like a sand castle on the beach.

“Isaac!”

The syllables meant nothing, but I reached out instinctively, like an infant grabbing for his mother.

My eyes snapped open. My brain rebelled as it tried to reorient to a physical world of light and matter. My throat was hoarse. Lena sat beside me, shaking my shoulders and shouting, but I couldn’t hear her over my own screaming. My vision faded, and I felt myself topple sideways.