“I have a harder time reading autistics, but—”

“What?”

She blinked. “You didn’t know?”

“I don’t have access to her files.”

“Neither do I,” Lena said sharply. “But I’ve learned a thing or two living with Nidhi. I’ve been here for four days, long enough to get a sense of Nicola Pallas. She doesn’t express her emotions the same way you or I do. I think she’s frightened, though. When I first described what happened, she walked away from me in mid-sentence and started making phone calls. When she finished, she was playing with her bracelets and moving about like she wanted to run but didn’t know where.”

“She knows something,” I muttered. “Why wouldn’t she tell me?”

“Maybe because she knows how close you came to dying,” Lena said sharply.

I had no answer to that.

I stopped at the end of the driveway, which emerged onto a dirt road bordered by maple trees on either side. “One more question. Which way do I go to get back to Michigan?”

Chapter 15

Chapter 15

IF I HAD TO CHOOSE the single most important moment of my life, the turning point that determined who and what I would become, it would be the day Ray Walker invited me to join the Porters. He had changed everything. Even as a cataloger, I had been a part of something magical. And now I had thrown that away.

I relived my conversation with Pallas again and again as I drove. I knew she was doing what she felt was right. She was playing by the rules, pulling me off the investigation until they could be certain I hadn’t been contaminated by whatever it was I had seen in Detroit. Or maybe, as Lena suggested, she was genuinely trying to protect me.

I stopped at a gas station to ask for directions to the nearest library, which turned out to be a small white building squeezed between the post office and the police department. I pulled into the parking lot and spent the next five minutes trying to bribe Smudge back into his cage. He was not happy about going back there, but leaving him loose in the car wasn’t a good idea, and I didn’t want to try to explain his presence to the local librarian.

“The Porters have spent four days looking for Jakob Hoffman,” Lena said as she followed me inside.

“I’m sure they’re doing the best they can.” I sat down in front of a public computer terminal and opened up the library’s catalog in one screen and an Internet browser in another. “But I know the other libriomancers in this area. One’s a mechanic. Another works for a museum. None of them are librarians.”

I flexed my fingers, doing everything I could to ignore the hollowness in my chest. “I need you to do me a favor.”