Digging a hole through the mess would have been hard enough without the characters shouting in my head, warning me to don protective gear, to call in a team to sterilize the entire place. I was constantly jumping at imagined noises and movement that vanished as soon as I turned to look.

Bricks shifted, and a blackened hand reached for Lena’s wrist. She fell backward. “There you go.”

I crawled over to where she had been working. I could just make out part of the face and left arm. The skin had changed. The charring was worse, and black dust fell away from the fingers every time it moved, reaching unerringly toward me.

I picked up a metal bolt and poked the back of the hand. It felt like burnt leather.

Was this my fault? Had I damaged the book so badly in my attempt to find the killer that I had allowed him to send this twisted, unfinished creature back after me?

“I could try to finish what he started,” I mumbled. “Separate it from the book and fix it in this form long enough to destroy it.” But even if I knew how to do that, who was to say the character I created wouldn’t carry the virus? “You think the vampires would let me borrow their dungeon to study this thing?”

Lena didn’t answer.

I couldn’t heal a book, and ultimately, that was all this was: a burnt, pissed-off book oozing magic all over the place. “I need to lock it.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know how to do that.”

“I don’t.” I sat back and rubbed the dust from my eyes, remembering hastily scrawled Latin reaching out to constrict me. “But Gutenberg figured this out centuries ago. All I have to do is duplicate his work.”

“He probably wasn’t sitting on top of a killer book at the time.”

I forced a chuckle at that. Gutenberg probably hadn’t been so burned out that the simplest spell could have cost him his sanity, either.

I pulled a paperback from my pocket and brought it toward that blackened hand. Instead of a lock, maybe I could simply dissolve it into another book?

The instant the fingers touched the book, black char spread like charcoal dust through the pages. I yanked it back. So much for that approach.

“Magic is a two-part process. Access and manifestation,” I whispered. Both I and my counterpart had accessed the book’s magic. He had controlled the manifestation of that magic.

I closed my eyes, rereading the opening chapter of Rabid in my mind, rebuilding the scene until it was as real as I could make it. The story surged through me, threatening to drag me down. I did my best to walk the line between magic and madness. I needed that connection to the story, but if I lost myself, we were all screwed.