Books were everywhere. A set of whiteboards listed every title I’d brought over from the library. Many were crossed out, while others were annotated with Post-it notes.

Last year in Copper River, I’d watched a sorceress named Meridiana use libriomancy to turn a body of water into a portal to the moon. It hadn’t ended well for her, but the idea had stayed with me.

Magical gateways were such a common element of speculative fiction that they had their own unofficial subgenre: portal fantasies. You couldn’t pull the magical wardrobe out of C. S. Lewis’ Narnia books, of course. The size of the book limited what you could create, and a wardrobe that took you to a fictional world would almost certainly kill you. But Meridiana had successfully combined the magic of multiple works in a way that allowed her to anchor a stable portal to another real-world location.

I’d glimpsed her magic, the way the text of the different stories twined together, but as I’d been in the middle of a small magical war at the time, I hadn’t gotten to study it as closely as I wanted.

That didn’t matter. I knew the one thing that truly mattered. I knew it could be done.

The wading pool was part of my initial attempt to duplicate her original portal, but without opening up a rift to the cold vacuum of the moon. The patched section of floor was the result of that attempt, which had simply disintegrated everything in a five-foot diameter circle.

A black shape perched atop the smartboard on the wall to my left. “Good morning, Kerling.”

The crow ruffled her feathers.

I switched on the board, which could act as a television screen, whiteboard, remote network terminal, and more. After logging in with my New Millennium ID, I pulled up a map of the United States and tagged the locations of the attacks from earlier this week. Michigan, California, Oklahoma, and New York. There was also the aborted plan to hit the Kagan, but without knowing where on the East Coast she was stationed, I had no way of adding that to the map.

If future attacks followed the same pattern, they would target prominent anti-magic politicians, which narrowed things down to pretty much anywhere in the United States. Assuming they continued to limit their focus to one country.

I cleared the screen and pulled up the last Porter census map of inhuman populations within the U.S. The clustered dots, each color representing a different species, suggested a weak potential correlation. The killers in Lansing had been werewolves, and Michigan had one of the larger werewolf packs in the country. New York had a disproportionate number of trolls. There was a group of nagas living in the California desert, and Oklahoma was known for its chupacabras. Each attack had been carried out by a single species, one more-or-less native to the area.