Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines Page A

away. “There are two kinds of magical creatures in this world. Those that arose ‘naturally,’ and those that were created. I’m one of the latter. I was born fifty years ago in the pages of a cheap paperback.”
    The stiffness in her body and the numbness in her voice reminded me of myself, sitting in Doctor Shah’s office after Mackinac Island. “You can’t bring intelligent beings into our world from books.”
    Aside from the problem of size, no book could truly capture the complexity of a sentient being. The fictional mind couldn’t handle the transition into the real world. They went mad.
    One of my earliest jobs for the Porters had been at an elementary school, where I had been sent to repel an invasion of little blue men. An overly talented fourth grader had somehow managed to pull them out of an old book. Three apples high and batshit insane, every last one of them. I never had gotten the smell out of my steel-toed boots, and the deranged singing had earwormed me for weeks.
    Even Smudge was rather neurotic. He had run endless laps in his cage for weeks after I created him, until he collapsed from exhaustion. He probably would have died from the shock if he hadn’t been written to be so loyal. I had needed his help, and that core loyalty gave him a lifeline, a mission that saved him from madness. “How could you have come from a book?”
    “This was when the
Gor
novels first came out. Just like any other hot trend, authors scrambled to join the bandwagon.” She spoke in a monotone, reciting the story instead of telling it.
    I knew the
Gor
books, a series by John Norman famed for its portrayal of sexual servitude.
Tarnsman of Gor
had been the first of dozens, back in the late sixties. The series had been popular enough to spawn an entire subculture.
    “The book was called
Nymphs of Neptune
.”
    I groaned. “Really?”
    That got a quiet chuckle. “A terrible title for a terrible book. There were twenty-four nymphs, all of whom looked roughly the same. The author had a fondness for plump women, describing us as ‘the Grecian ideal of beauty and perfection.’ Our surface appearance changed, depending on the desires of our lovers. One of us was given to ‘a noble Nubian warrior,’ and she became ‘dark as the richest chocolate, to match her lord and master.’”
    My fingers clenched tighter around the wheel. “And somebody published this crap?”
    “Oh, it was quite popular for a time.” She sighed. “Central to a nymph’s nature is the inability to refuse her lover.”
    “You’re not allowed to say no.”
    “I’ll never know who reached into that book and pulled out an acorn from the tree of a dryad. They must have tossed it aside and forgotten all about it, but my tree grew with magical swiftness. Within a few years, I emerged naked and lost. I wandered for two days until I came to a farmhouse. The first person I met was a farmer named Frank Dearing. He took me in. I helped work the fields during the day, and by night—”
    “I can guess.” My jaw hurt from clenching it.
    I had always assumed Lena to be a natural-born dryad. The idea that she had been
created
, grown from a seed in a bad pulp novel . . . created to be someone’s plaything, like some kind of magical sex toy . . . I felt physically ill just thinking about it.
    Lena touched my forearm. “It’s all right.”
    “How the hell is it all right?”
    “I was happy. Content. I didn’t know any better. Part of our nature is that we don’t
want
to say no. When Frank died and the Porters found me, they brought me to Nidhi. They thought I was suffering from Stockholm syndrome. They knew I was magical, but we didn’t discover my origins until later. By then . . . I had spent so much time with her.”
    I looked at Lena, the black hair, the brown skin. “You and Doctor Shah?”
    “We’ve been lovers for nine years.”
    My mental clutch jolted and stalled as I tried to incorporate this information into my image of Doctor