Libriomancy in its most common form allowed us to grasp an object from a story and pull it into the world, transforming belief and potential magical energy into physical reality. Assuming said object would fit through the pages.

If that was 101-level libriomancy, what I’d been working on for the past year was post-graduate work.

My vision blurred, like I’d been reading too long in poor light. My mother used to tell me I’d ruin my eyes that way. As it turned out, she hadn’t been entirely wrong.

I yanked off my glasses and slipped them into my shirt pocket. The spots of shadow floating around the edges of my vision grew worse, but the book’s text sharpened. The damage to my eyes was a result of magical charring, and behaved similarly to early cataracts. Glasses helped me to compensate, but paradoxically made it harder for me to truly see magic.

I’d tried to heal the damage, but the scars weren’t physical. Magic simply flowed around the charring, like a stream past rocks.

I reached deeper into the book. My hand touched Door’s back. Rather, the composite imagination of Door’s back. I wasn’t truly touching the outline of her shoulder blades, or feeling the faint beating of her heart. I was touching readers’ belief. Belief in the character, and belief in her particular ability.

“Our driver’s getting twitchy,” Lena commented.

“I’m almost done.” From here, I could have plucked an object from Door’s hand and created it in my own. Instead of pulling anything physical from the page, I grasped Door’s ability and drew it into my body. Lines of text crept up my skin. In essence, I was making myself an extension of the book.

This kind of libriomancy carried two significant risks. For one thing, the magic came from a fictional universe. Any portal I created would want to connect to that nonexistent universe. If I screwed up, we’d be lucky to find ourselves lost in the sewers of London. If we were unlucky, the magic would try to send us into Gaiman’s fictionalized London.

Since that world didn’t exist, it would just kill us instead.

Then there was the danger of letting a book get into your head. As the story flowed through my blood, I began to hear the characters calling me. When I looked around, it was as though the fictional world had been overlaid with this one. I saw our driver staring at my truncated arm, watched her mouth move, but I heard the murmurs of the London crowd, saw tunnels and subway lines passing through the cab, smelled the damp fog . . .

“Isaac?” Lena touched my neck, helping ground me in the real world.