By the time I spied the discarded copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I was too pissed off to think. I raised the rifle to my shoulder. “Let’s see if your little peephole works both ways, you son of a bitch.”

I switched the rifle to full auto and pulled the trigger, emptying the magazine into the book in a mere four seconds.

That might not have been the best move. Magical backlash surged through the gun like an electrical shock, flinging me backward. The rifle dissolved in my hands, leaving nothing but a coating of greasy black dust on my palms. I landed on my back hard enough to knock the wind from my lungs.

Smudge skittered off my shoulder to the ground, flame rippling on his back as he turned around to glare at me accusingly.

“Sorry about that.” I wiped my hands on my jeans and sat up. I had dug a smoking hole at least twenty feet deep and five feet wide. The book was gone. I retrieved my sunglasses. One lens was shattered, but the other worked well enough. I searched the hole, making sure no trace of magic remained.

“Come on, Smudge.” The smart thing would be to get the hell out of here. If Lena hadn’t destroyed the automaton, if it managed to escape the tree, then at any moment I could find myself face-to-face with a mechanical nightmare, with no dryad bodyguard to save my ass this time around. Or Hubert could send another one after me.

But Lena was in that tree, too. She hadn’t left me, and I’d be damned if I was going to abandon her.

I gathered up every book I could find from the cabin and brought them to the tree. Back at my house, Lena had said she knew I was home because she sensed my arrival through the trees, meaning she retained some awareness of the outside world. I leaned against the trunk, wondering if she could feel my hands and forehead against the bark. “Thank you.”

I sagged to the ground, surrendering to the aftermath of so much magic, but there was one precaution left to take. If the automaton won whatever battle it was waging within the tree, it would try to escape. I re-created the monofilament sword I had used in Detroit. The blade should cut through the tree as quickly as I could swing.

I might not be able to use magical weapons against the automaton, but if it killed Lena, I’d slice the whole damn tree to pieces before I let it back into the world.

I tried to concentrate on the books, sorting those that showed the worst signs of magical char. Those were the books Hubert had used the most. “What were you doing here?”