She glanced away. I wondered if she was remembering her own tree, killed by vampires. “The automaton tried to take my strength. I let it. The more I flowed through it, the more it became a part of us. A part of the tree.”

“The bulk of the automaton’s body is wood,” I mused. That might have made it easier for Lena to absorb it into the tree. I tried again to pry the letters free from the broken body in front of us. “Can you soften this one enough for me to pull these loose?”

Lena put her hand over mine. She grimaced when she touched the body, but the rigid splinters gradually bowed beneath our grasp. I wiggled one of the letters like a loose tooth, back and forth until it finally twisted free. More letters followed. I set each one down in order and studied the indentations in the wooden body.

“Lux.” I checked the blocks to be sure. “Latin for light.”

Lena pried more letters free from both sides of the word. Even with her magic, they clung hard. It took ten minutes to remove and reconstruct the rest of the sentence.

“Dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux,” I read. “And God said, ‘Be light made,’ and light was made.”

“From the Bible?”

“Genesis.” Latin text. I stared at the blocks, excitement prickling the back of my neck. “Pry off the next row. Hurry!”

I stopped myself from reaching past her to try to rip the letters free, knowing it would be futile. I placed the letters together one by one while I waited, trying not to fidget. “Et magicae,” I whispered as more words formed.

“Magic?” Lena asked.

“Yes!” I flushed and lowered my voice. “Yes, that’s right.”

She laughed, but pulled more letters free until I had laid out the entire sentence. “Et magicae artis adpositi erant derisus et sapientiae gloriae correptio cum contumelia.” I jumped up, laughing like a madman. “That’s the same spell Gutenberg used for his lock. I knew it sounded familiar.”

“Which means what?” Lena caught my arms. “Spill it.”

“And the delusions of their magic art were put down, and their boasting of wisdom was reproachfully rebuked.” I picked up one of the letters, cupping it in my hands. “This is from the Latin Vulgate Bible. The Mazarin Bible.”

“Some of us aren’t libriomancers, and don’t spend our lives memorizing everything we read.”

“Also known as the Gutenberg Bible,” I said. “This thing is a walking Bible.” But not a line-by-line reconstruction of the Bible. Gutenberg’s Bible had been well over a thousand pages. This was more like clippings, rearranged and hammered into place to create something new. The first line was from Genesis, while the next was from a completely different part of the Bible. The Book of Wisdom, if I was remembering right.