Codex Born by Jim C. Hines Page A

him?
    I saw nothing wrong in fanning the embers of Frank’s lust. He
wanted
to be seduced, pushed over the edge until nothing existed but desire and satisfaction.
    For myself, I knew only joy. I lived for those moments when my body entwined with his, the urgent grunts of his exertions blending with my quiet moans, but there were other pleasures as well. The burn of my muscles when I was out working the farm. Devouring the meals Marion prepared for us.
    In the beginning, the other farmhands tried to flirt with me. I tolerated their overly familiar comments and “accidental” touches. Frank wanted others to appreciate what he had, but he was unwilling to share. So when one man tried to take things further, I broke his arm in two places.
    I knew I was stronger than the others, but that was the first time I had used my strength against another person. Through that confrontation, I discovered that violence could be just another source of pleasure.
    Only years later, long after I had buried Frank in the dirt, did I begin to recognize what I had done. What I had become.
    Only then did I begin to understand how dangerous I was.

    I SPENT THE NEXT hour on my laptop, lost in Porter databases and old research reports. I rarely used the laptop, which might have been why the insects spared it. Magic provided an amazing connection with the Porter network, but even magic couldn’t force the outdated hardware to process information at a faster rate.
    In one window, I scrolled through various weapons we had cataloged over the years, looking for ideas to clear the rest of the bugs from Lena’s tree. I found nothing that looked like it would destroy metal while leaving her oak intact. The sonic screwdriver from
Doctor Who
might have worked, having been canonically established as being ineffective on wood, but nobody had ever figured out how to use the controls on the blasted thing.
    I was also reading abstracts of every paper and report Victor Harrison had ever filed. I didn’t expect to find a description of a secret self-destruct code that would blow up his six-legged creations, but I had hoped to find
something
that might help us.
    “You’re a librarian. Can’t you do some sort of keyword search to speed this up?” Nidhi stood by the window where she could peer out at Lena’s tree in the backyard. Lena had returned to the garden, asking to be left alone.
    “Sure, and that would help if he’d filed his paperwork correctly.” I fought the urge to throw the laptop against the wall. “Even if he had, the real problem is figuring out what he didn’t document. Half the things Victor built could have gotten him kicked out of the Porters.” He had won twenty grand one year by betting on the outcome of the Super Bowl, a game he had recorded on his illegally-modified VCR a week before it aired.
    “He was as bad as you are in some ways,” Nidhi said. “Ruleswere never a priority. Once you start playing God, nothing else matters. You’re incapable of walking away from an idea, no matter how bad an idea it might be.”
    I glanced away, thinking of certain reports and experiments I had failed to file with the Porters. “I know, I know. ‘If you really want to kill a libriomancer, hook a bomb up to a big red button and tell him not to press it.’”
    For the first time that night, Nidhi almost smiled. “That sounds like Doctor Karim.”
    “She knows her clientele,” I admitted. Regular appointments with a Porter-approved shrink were one rule you didn’t get to break. Even Gutenberg had his own personal therapist, though rumor had it she was a hundred and thirty years old and preserved on a heavily fortified computer system, courtesy of a brain download performed using a Richard Morgan cyberpunk novel. “Doctor Karim’s worried about post-traumatic stress after the mess downstate. I’m pretty sure she’s also screening me for signs of bipolar disorder.”
    “A manic period is normal after magic use.” She looked pointedly at