Pallas would have known I’d head straight to the library. She had probably killed my access before I even left the driveway . . . just as the rules required.

I blinked, ashamed to realize how close I was to tears. I stood and backed away, leaving the staff to worry about the now-useless computer. Useless unless you needed a boat anchor, maybe.

Lena touched my arm. “Porters?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I jammed the necklace into my pants pocket and moved to another machine. With each breath, I pushed the grief back down until I could focus on the screen.

“Time?” I asked, my voice tight.

Lena glanced at the clock on the wall. “Fourteen minutes.”

The U.S. copyright database was no help. Nor were various social media sites. I checked phone directories as well, but my gut told me Jakob Hoffman wasn’t a real person. I had felt the different voices in that libriomancer’s head, lost and incomplete, struggling to survive in a world utterly different from the ones they were used to.

If Hoffman was a character, he had to be important enough for readers to identify with him, to believe in him. But he didn’t come up in any of the bookstore or publisher listings . . .

What if the author hadn’t used a regular publisher? I opened up a new window and began searching for blogs and review sites that specialized in self-published titles. “Bingo.”

“Twenty-four and a half minutes,” said Lena, leaning over my shoulder.

I was getting rusty. “Jakob Hoffman is the hero of a self-published World War II fantasy called V-Day. He’s an American soldier in Germany who discovers that Hitler is raising an army of vampires.” I jabbed a finger at the screen. “Hitler enslaves the vampires using a mystical silver cross.”

“Who wrote it?”

“The review doesn’t say. There’s no link, no ISBN or other information.” I couldn’t find a single copy available for sale online, new or used. The title wasn’t registered with the copyright office, the Library of Congress, or anywhere else. “This isn’t right. It’s like the author went out of their way to make it hard to track down a copy of the book.”

“Like they’re trying to hide it?”

Few self-published titles sold well enough to create the communal belief necessary for magic. This one obviously had, and had done so while bypassing traditional sales and distribution channels. That couldn’t be a coincidence. I sent a copy of the review to the library printer. “He wrote this book himself.”

“The other libriomancer?”

“To create a weapon.” I pulled up the library catalog again. “It breaks one of Gutenberg’s cardinal rules.”