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right for not giving me the key. If he wanted me to read the thing, it was either jimmy the lock or troop back to his office. Didn’t take me long to decide that one.
    I sifted through the tools on my knife and came up with the corkscrew. Not that I knew diddley-doo-dah about lock-picking, but it seemed a logical place to start. I resumed my position in my bed-tent, turned the book on its spine, and flashed the light on to the gleaming lock. Seemed a shame to wreck it.
    When I passed my finger over the tiny keyhole, a sharp pain ripped through my hand. I jerked back, leaving a perfect ruby drop of blood on the gold, though I couldn’t see anything obvious that might have cut me. Nausea rolled my stomach. Blood and I never got along when we were in the same room together.
    Groaning, I sucked on my finger. As I watched, my blood slipped into the lock, uphill, as if the keyhole had its own gravity. A click, and the freakin’ thing unlocked, though the cover remained closed. I could have sworn the veins in my hand glowed midnight blue for a second, but I blinked and the color disappeared.
    “Jesus. Vampire book.” I inched away from the tome. The top cover fell open on its own. Every hair on my body sat up and paid attention. I’d never heard of a book needing a blood sacrifice to open it. Hindu, Greco-Roman, Celtic, Maya, and Inca legends talked of such sacrifices, only it was usually the whole person. Weird.
    I leaned over the pages again. The title page read, “Mortal Machine.”
    “Mortal Machine,” I said, testing the weight of the words on my tongue. A rush of cold air ruffled my makeshift tent, and the covers blew outward, which meant it wasn’t a draft from outside. I scrambled out from under them again. Had it come from the book? Or from me?
    “What the bloody hell is Mortal Machine?” I asked my poster of The Castle, Chichen Itza, the most famous of the Mayan Ruins in Mexico, which was taped to the wall. The poster didn’t answer me. It never did. You’d think I’d stop asking it stupid questions, but I didn’t.
    I’d never been a big believer in the whole druid-power-in-the-blood-and-ritual thing, but if reality could unravel like cheap cotton and spill out a bugman, I could buy that other stuff might be real, too. Had it been my blood that had invoked whatever had just whistled through my bed like a winter wind? Or speaking the name of the book? No, that couldn’t be right or it would have happened again while I conversed with my poster. Jeez, could Green not have given me a manual for it? He was probably over there in his office yukking it up while he got wasted on whiskey.
    I put a bandage over my cut finger and crawled back under the covers for the third time. The book still sat there, staring up at me in its own Mag spotlight. I ran my fingers along the rough stumps of the missing pages. What a shame. What had been on them? And who’d done it?
    Rubbing the silk of my baby blanket between my finger and thumb, I began to read what pages remained.
    I became so engrossed, I didn’t snap back to reality until I’d made it halfway through the book. “The wraiths are using people as doorways,” I heard myself saying. Yes, the book called the beings beyond the veil wraiths. The one who’d sniffed at me during Green’s lecture had been one of three known castes described by feel alone—which seemed to indicate that the authors of the book couldn’t see them like I could. Since the Bugman’s cold and creep-factor had only hit my outer flesh and hadn’t frosted my innards, I guessed it was the lowest on the scale.
    The Mortal Machine was a secret society of immortal people responsible for keeping the wraiths from crossing over from their world to ours, made up of soldiers and sentinels. The soldiers gathered intel and covered up after a hunt, and the sentinels were the wraith-hunters. Both could feel the presence of wraiths, which most normal people couldn’t sense or see.
    Holy shit, was