I hesitated. “No offense, but the last time I saw you, you shot up my living room and then tried to poison me.”

“That will not happen again,” Gutenberg said firmly. “I took a page from your book, Isaac. Nothing so crude as the bomb you implanted in Ted Boyer, but I promise you Ms. DeGeorge will not act against us in the future.”

Deb scowled, but didn’t say anything.

I wrapped the jacket around my waist like a makeshift kilt, tying the sleeves together at the hip. “How did you get back so quickly? Wait, how long were we in there?”

“Long enough for us to begin cleaning up the damage Hubert did.” Gutenberg returned the sword to its book. “I left you three hours ago.”

Three hours. It had felt like minutes.

“It’s a disaster,” Deb said quietly. “Like a bomb went off at the daycare center.”

“We have people working the perimeter,” Gutenberg went on. “They’ll keep the mundanes out and the vampires in until we can cover up the most obvious signs of magic.”

“Signs like a big freaking elevator shaft into the center of the Earth?” Deb asked. “Yeah, people might have a few questions about that.”

“How many . . .?” Lena asked quietly.

“Our preliminary count is between thirty and forty humans dead,” said Pallas. “Most were killed by vampires in the chaos. We won’t have a verified casualty list for at least a week. We’ll be monitoring the morgues to make sure everyone stays dead. At least a hundred more saw the fighting. Information on vampire casualties is rougher, since few of them leave corpses behind. We estimate that the automatons slaughtered at least fifty. It will be days before anyone can figure out how many more might have fled.”

Close to a hundred lives, maybe more, snuffed out in a single night by one deranged libriomancer.

“The vampires have telepaths among their kind,” Gutenberg said. “They’ll gather up any of their number who might have strayed.”

“And do what with them?” asked Pallas. “They murdered innocent people—”

“They were running for their lives,” Deb shot back. “Running from your killer mannequins.”

“Enough,” Gutenberg interrupted. “I’m not prepared to escalate the war Charles Hubert worked so hard to try to create.”

“So it’s contained?” I stared at them, trying to believe it. Trying to focus not on the death, but on how much worse things could have been. “We stopped Hubert in time?”

“You did,” said Gutenberg. “Though it will take months to fully contain the damage. I’ll be diverting one automaton to Taipei, where the vampires are currently engaged in a full-fledged civil war. Another will go to Kaliningrad to deal with a libriomancer who, in my absence, has been offering his services to the Russian mob.”

“What about Nidhi?” Lena hadn’t left my side. I felt her tremble slightly as she spoke.