Lena tossed her swords aside, scooped up a brick, and threw. It tore an ugly wound through Georgia’s shoulder. Paper skin flapped loosely, but the damage healed within seconds. Lena made a face and retreated toward a broken section of wall, where she ripped out a six-foot length of rusted rebar and gave it a quick spin with both hands. Bits of concrete clung to one end of the bar.

I backed away as whatever it was lurched toward me. Lena strode up to it and swung her metal staff like a baseball bat. The impact flattened the thing’s head and knocked it to the ground, but it merely groaned and pushed itself to its knees. Lena smashed it back down, spinning her staff to batter it about the head and limbs. “Join in any time.”

I tried to remember the calming exercises Doctor Shah had insisted on teaching me. I needed to focus, to think, but every time I looked at this thing, I saw only darkness returning to devour me.

Not just me. It would have to kill Lena to get to me. Smudge, too, unless I found a way to stop it.

The thing showed no sign of strategy or planning. As far as I could tell, it was simply going after the closest and strongest source of magic.

“It’s like fighting a piñata from Hell,” Lena said, breathing hard.

“He didn’t send something through the book,” I said slowly. “He reshaped the book itself.”

“Terrific. So how do we kill it?”

Smudge was a magical creature given physical form. You could hurt or kill him by destroying that form, but this was a book, a literal portal to magic. No matter what we did, it could re-form itself.

A part of me wondered at the limits of such magic. If we flung the damn thing into the sun, how long could it endure? As I had no convenient way of launching it into space, that was a dead end. I needed more time to study the damn thing.

Lena cried out and jumped back. Her pants leg was torn, and blood dripped down her ankle. “It’s cold!”

I pulled a cyberpunk book from my jacket. My fingers shook as I flipped to the dog-eared page I wanted. I hesitated. I had performed libriomancy a thousand times, but now I was afraid. I felt like a child again, terrified of the book and what lay beyond.

Rationally, I knew this book should be safe. Yet it took all of my willpower to force myself to reach into those pages.

Even as I tried, a girl’s voice condemned my recklessness: another character from Rabid, decrying the dangers of biological warfare.

I shouted to drown out the voices and plunged my hand deeper, grabbing a simple handle reminiscent of a sword hilt.