“Another horse bent down to bite my face. I pressed my hand to its neck and fired a beam of heat that burned through the horse and seared a hole in the wall behind. The same heat ray the Martians used.”

“Holy shit.” Deb stared. “Libriomancy without the book?”

“It almost killed me.” I glanced at my hands. “Humans char, too.” I shuddered, remembering the numbness in my arms, the blackened skin that had taken months to heal. “I destroyed everything. The horses, the zombies, the dealer . . . I would have died if the fire department hadn’t dragged me out of there. The next thing I remember, I was waking up in a magically warded prison cell.”

Lena reached over to give my hand a quick squeeze. “You stopped that man.”

“I got lucky,” I said. “I ignored the rules. I punched through the boundaries between myself and my magic until it almost consumed me. I could have destroyed half the island.”

“What was the last contact you had with the Porters?” Deb asked.

“An e-mail from Ray about a week ago, confirming that he had received my latest batch of books to be magically sealed and asking if I caught the Firefly marathon on Saturday.” My head was starting to throb. I didn’t remember Bujold describing headaches when she wrote about this drug, but it had been a while since I read her stuff.

Deb turned to Lena. “And how did you end up here, just in time to rescue Isaac from these vampires?”

“He was the closest Porter I thought I could trust,” Lena said, a little too quickly. “I came to his house first, figuring it would be better to talk privately. A sparkler showed up looking for him.”

I yelped. “They came here?”

“Only one. He got a lot more cooperative after I cut off his right hand. He said the others were planning to jump Isaac at the library.”

“What did you do to the sparkler?” Deb asked.

“I sent him home.”

“You let him go?” I demanded. “How do you know he won’t come back?”

Lena smiled innocently. “Because I said if I saw him again, I’d use his hand for fertilizer, but if he went away like a good boy, I’d mail it to him later this week. Which reminds me, there’s a vampire hand in your freezer’s ice maker.” Seeing my aghast expression, she added, “Don’t worry. I double-bagged it.”

“This is not how I used to fantasize about you showing up on my doorstep,” I protested.

Lena’s brows rose.

“Relaxed inhibitions,” Deb reminded her.

“Yep.” Which I suspected I would regret later, but at the moment I couldn’t bring myself to care. “I always imagined you as the outdoors type, and the two of us rolling around in the grass together. Maybe in the rain. Definitely barefoot, though.”