Lena settled into the chair beside me. “What is it?”

“Time me.” I attacked the keyboard, clicking between windows. An Internet search pulled up more than a thousand results for “Jakob Hoffman,” including a character from a 2010 movie and a rather embarrassing YouTube video. I clicked through page after page of results, but found nothing.

The library database was no better. Not that I had expected it to be quite that easy. The Porters had already looked for Hoffman and come up short.

I cleared the screen. I couldn’t count the number of times I had helped patrons track down ancestors on genealogy sites or locate long-lost classmates, and I had found books with far less information than a character’s name. I was a pretty good libriomancer, but I was a damn good librarian.

I pulled up online book distributor sites next. No luck. If Hoffman was a character, he wasn’t important enough to be included in the book’s summary. The bookstore databases didn’t give me any results either.

I sat back, steepling my fingers and glaring at the computer as if I could will it into giving me the information I wanted.

“Ten minutes.” Lena said, smiling oddly.

“What?”

“Did you know you bite your tongue when you’re concentrating?”

I very deliberately closed my mouth and tried the fanfiction sites next. Fanfic writers often wrote about secondary characters, but once again I came up empty.

“All right, let’s cheat.” I removed my necklace and placed the stone in the middle of the keyboard. The screen flickered, and then a new window appeared, giving me access to the Porters’ database. Not only could I search through our catalog, but the site gave me a back door into various other organizations’ data. I could check law enforcement to see if “Jakob Hoffman” had ever been used as an alias, or— “Shit!”

Black smoke poured out of the front of the computer. The screen popped and fizzed, the image shrinking to a single line of white light. The hard drive made a sound like someone had jammed a screwdriver into the spokes of a bicycle wheel.

The man behind the front desk hurried toward us. “What happened?”

The Porters had locked me out of the database. I picked up my necklace and stared at the orange stone which had been created specifically for me, giving me access to centuries of knowledge and records.

“Sir?” The man, whose ID card read “Ro,” leaned past me to try the keyboard.

“I don’t know what happened,” I said numbly. “It just died.”

“Did you spill anything?” He dropped below the desk and yanked the power cord, but foul-smelling black smoke continued to rise from the box. He leaned back and raised his voice. “Stacy, would you call J. J. and tell him to get up here?”