He brushed his hands over his wrinkled purple silk shirt and black trousers. His silver belt buckle gleamed like polished chrome. “Hubert was brilliant, but undisciplined. He used magic to protect the men in his unit ten years ago. He killed six enemy combatants. That . . . was not his first violation.”

“You punished him for protecting his own people?”

“For his methods in doing so,” Gutenberg said. “What would happen when those deaths became public, Isaac? The Porters are not an American organization, but a global one. We cannot afford to interfere in political conflicts. How long before national interests would splinter us? Before we turned on one another in an ever-escalating war of magic?”

“Hubert sent the automatons to attack the Detroit nest of vampires,” said Lena. “Alice Granach is holding Nidhi Shah as a hostage.”

Gutenberg stepped toward the desk, examining the books. “There was an old text, bound in leather. I remember Hubert taking it from my library. Have you seen it?”

I knew exactly which book he meant, and I knew what must have happened to it. Only one other person had entered this office since Hubert’s death.

“I . . . don’t remember seeing a book like that.”

He studied me closely, then shrugged. “I’ll find it eventually.”

Somehow I doubted that.

Gutenberg grabbed another book from the desk. It opened in his hand. He glanced at the pages, then reached into the book to retrieve a small, black cell phone. “I assume Pallas is overseeing the conflict in Detroit?”

I nodded dumbly, trying to understand what I had just seen. Gutenberg hadn’t even looked at the cover or title before picking up that book. It was like he had known instinctively which one held the potential magic he wanted, and had opened the book to that exact page.

“Nothing.” He tossed the phone at the book. It vanished the instant it touched the cover. “They’re following standard containment practice. A single libriomancer uses a book to create an electromagnetic pulse to scramble radios and cameras. Unfortunately, such magic also plays havoc with communications.”

He gathered a handful of books from the desk, then marched out of the office and through the garage, stopping only briefly to survey the damaged automobiles in the parking lot. A Volkswagen Beetle growled to life and crept toward us. One headlight flipped upward, trying to blind us. The other pulsed with magic.

That second headlight was the piece that had come from Stephen King’s killer car. I braced myself. Hubert was dead, meaning the remaining cars were free of his control. My arms were useless, but I should be able to stomp these things into—

Gutenberg snapped his fingers, and flame exploded within the Beetle’s haunted headlight. The magical pseudolife within the car flickered out, and the engine died. Momentum carried the Beetle onward, but it was easy enough to intercept. The car crunched harmlessly into my leg.