Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (3 page)

“I also want you to think of me as a resource. If you have questions about anything that falls outside of the scope of course content, ask me. What I don’t know, I’ll find out. How are you doing with the computer system?”

“Fine. I thought it was kicking me off last night, but then the site went down, so it must have been a system problem.”

Andy pressed his lips together and nodded. “Honestly, the servers here are ancient. Sometimes I wish that even half the resources that go into magical research went into computers.”

Joy smiled. “That seems unlikely.”

“I know. So. Questions? Fire away.”

Joy didn’t think she had any questions until she started talking, and then she remembered how much she had yet to learn. Andy’s energy was such that she didn’t feel hesitant about admitting when she didn’t understand something, and after a half hour with him she felt anxieties that she hadn’t realized she was carrying slide off her back.

As Andy stood to leave, Joy stopped him. “Andy, I have one more question. I was looking for a list of approved paper topics in Professor Drake’s materials, but I haven’t found anything. Do you think I could get access to the rest of what was left in her office?”

Andy crossed his arms. “I don’t know. I’m not even sure where it all ended up. President Fitzgerald went through the course materials himself; he wouldn’t even let me touch anything he hadn’t looked over first. He took the rest of it and locked it away somewhere, I think.”

“Ah. I’ve been trying to get in to see the president, but I can’t get past his secretary.”

“Edith. Yes. She’s actually wonderful, but she’s also a hard-ass.”

“Maybe you can get me past her,” Joy said. “It’s not just the list. I have some other things I need to talk to the president about.”

“I could try.”

Joy smiled. “I can’t ask any more than that.”

Joy spent the next two hours running through a computer tutorial on grading. No students showed up, which didn’t surprise her, since they’d only had one class. At noon she packed up her things and locked the office.

She stopped to say good-bye to Andy, but before she even opened her mouth the outer door opened and one of the alchemy professors, Zelda Akbulut, entered. Joy recognized her by her aura: turquoise patterned with splotches of a dark forest green. She backed in, carrying a tray of coffee stacked on top of a Dunkin’ Donuts box.

“First day!” said Zelda. She spun around, spotted Joy — and the tray of coffee tipped forward off the box and splashed Joy from her feet to her waist.

“Oh my god!” Zelda shouted. “I didn’t…I’m so sorry…are you…”

“I’m fine,” Joy said, even though her jeans and socks were soaked in scalding coffee. “Look out for the—”

Zelda set a three-inch pump on the soaking floor, slipped, and in struggling to retain her footing lost the box of donuts. Sugar and pastries fell in the coffee, taking on the appearance of a paste. Joy gritted her teeth and shook drops of hot coffee from her hands.

“I’ll call Greg,” said Andy, who had somehow come out of the whole ordeal with his dress unscathed.

Zelda had covered her mouth with one hand, and it looked as though tears were welling up in her eyes. “It’s really OK,” Joy said.

Zelda lowered her hand and sighed. “I should have — I’m so sorry.”

“It’s OK. I was just on my way out. We’ll talk later, OK? It’s fine.”

Gooseberry Bluff, Minnesota sat on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin on the St. Croix River just a few miles east of the Twin Cities. It had been a magic boomtown, settled by a number of minor practitioners throughout the fifties and sixties, including Arthur Stag, who founded his private college there in 1952. The community college was founded in 1965 in response to a grassroots campaign by a group of less prominent, but highly energetic, residents. Now the two schools, along with the maximum-security prison on the town’s western border, employed the majority of the inhabitants.

Gooseberry Bluff was a beautiful town with lots of trees, views of the river, and houses set back on the ridge overlooking the town. Joy found herself admiring it again as she drove north out of town and caught I-94, headed west toward St. Paul. But the farther she drove, the more tense she became. She hunched forward over the wheel and chewed at the inside of her lips. She started talking back to the radio, looked for some music that didn’t irritate her, and finally turned it off.

She pulled into a gas station just outside the St. Paul city limits, took a deep breath, and grabbed her satchel. She tried to keep the word “disappointment” out of her head as she walked in and made a beeline for the restroom.

“You’re late,” a man’s voice said the moment she pushed through the swinging door.

“Yes, well. I’m working two jobs now,” Joy said. She took a deep breath of air that smelled not of urine and disinfectant, but of wood and leather. “I wish we could meet a little closer. This isn’t a drive I want to be making once a week.”

“It won’t be the same place next time.” The voice came from behind a massive desk stained deep reddish brown. The desk had carved lion’s claws for feet and a front panel showing the seal of the Federal Bureau of Magical Affairs. The man who stepped out from behind the desk had bright-silver hair and an aura to match.

“Sir,” Joy said as they shook hands.

“Agent Wilkins; Joy. Sit down, please.” The man buttoned his sport coat and sat back against the front of the desk. “I’d love to make these briefings more convenient for you, but we can’t risk meeting too close to Gooseberry Bluff. The people we’re looking for might be able to detect that kind of spatial distortion.”

Joy sat. The man before her was Martin Shil, her handler and superior. He had brought Joy into the bureau, trained her, and personally picked out this assignment for her. He was the closest thing she had to a father since her own had died.

“So,” Martin said. “You’ve settled in and you’ve taught your first class. I want to hear your thoughts.”

“There isn’t much yet. I can’t get access to Carla Drake’s belongings. The president stopped by to embarrass me in front of my first class, but I haven’t been able to get in to see him since.”

“I’m sure he’s very busy,” Martin said. “And he has to be careful about letting his staff know that he’s invited us in to investigate them.”

“I know. Other than that, there are some…interesting people on campus, but it’s too soon to call any of them suspects.”

“Don’t worry about that. That’s why you’re there; we’re starting from square one. When we went in right after Drake’s disappearance we got nothing. Whoever’s responsible is good at blending in. What about the demons?”

“Nothing there yet, either. Have the blips picked up anything?”

“Not since June 18
^th
,” Martin said. Blips were diviners who specialized in tracking people or magical objects, in this case nameless demons. “Talk to me about” — he leaned over the desk to look at a file — “Ingrid Ingwiersen. Conjuration professor. Do we like her for the demon trafficking?”

“I talked to her for about two minutes at the faculty reception last week, but that’s it so far.”

“What’d she look like to you?”

“Honestly, she looked pretty gray.”

“Depressed?”

“Not just that. When someone’s really gray, it’s a signal that they could be a danger to themselves and others.”

“OK. I want you to look into her. Make friends. Anyone else give you a funky vibe?”

Joy managed not to smile at the way Martin said “a funky vibe.” He sometimes talked like he was on a seventies cop show, if seventies cop shows had cast patient, encouraging Indian-American men in leadership roles. “I don’t know, Martin. Everyone has secrets, you know? One of the alchemy professors dropped coffee on me right before I left to meet you; she had some dark green in her aura. It could mean a lot of things.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m frustrated.”

“Joy. This is going to be a long process. I’m going to be patient with you, so be patient with yourself.”

“It’s just…these people are trafficking
demons
, Martin. I heard about Seoul. If a shipment of them slips through on my watch, if there’s another Heartstopper because I let that happen, I don’t know if I’ll be able to forgive myself.”

“First of all, they stopped the attack in Seoul. Secondly, we don’t know that these demons are connected to the Heartstoppers. And third, that’s not your case. Let the blips and GUMP worry about that. Just get to know
these
people. Teach the kids.”

“What about President Fitzgerald? He’s our contact, and I can’t even get through to him.”

“Let me work on that.” Martin stood and crossed to the bookshelves; he picked out a slim, stapled pamphlet and carried it back. “Ready for the casebook?”

Joy nodded and stood. Martin set the pamphlet on his desk. It had a bright-blue cover that read:
FBMA Case ***2012-00765: Wilkins, J., Inv.

Joy set her hand on the book. At first it was just a little warm. Then it started to prickle her skin, and suddenly she felt like she was falling into the book. Her legs crumpled underneath her, and she folded at the waist; she sank toward the desk and curled up between the pages as if they were bedsheets.

Then she was standing next to the desk, feeling like she’d just had a four-hour nap.

Martin picked up the book. It was now a slim paperback, and Joy knew that everything she knew about the case had just been inscribed there in the book, exhaustively chronicled, indexed, and cross-indexed.

“How big do you think this case will get?” she asked.

“Only time will tell,” Martin said, and placed the book back on the shelf.

The moment Ingrid Ingwiersen walked in the door her sister started in on her.

“Where the hell have you been?”

Ingrid set her briefcase down near the door. “Teaching. I told you, today is the first day of class.”

“Your class was over at three-thirty,” Selma Ingwiersen said. “It’s nine-thirty. What the hell have you been doing?”

“Working.” Ingrid walked down the hall to the kitchen and opened up the freezer. “It’s impossible for me to get anything done
here
lately.”

“Oh, and I suppose that’s my fault?”

Ingrid was silent as she tore open a turkey dinner and put it in the salamander box — she refused to call it a MagicWave Oven. She filled a glass of water from the tap and drank it, never raising her eyes from the sink.

“How was your class? Did you show them
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
? You always do that on the first day, don’t you?”

“Everybody does.” This was true, or as close to true as to hardly matter. Demon conjuration had ended the Second World War, sure, but it hadn’t ended war; it had just changed it in ways that people who hadn’t seen it didn’t want to acknowledge. Watching Mickey Mouse hack a walking broom to splinters and having the splinters grow into a thousand walking brooms was a neat but pointed metaphor about unforeseen consequences.

“The dangers of conjuration,” said Selma. “The folly of those who think they can play God with the universe. I think you could come up with another way to teach your students about that, couldn’t you? Perhaps an anecdote from your own life.”

The salamander growled to let Ingrid know that her dinner was hot, so she lifted it out and started eating it over the sink.

“I miss food.” Selma’s voice was no longer harsh; she sounded as if she were holding back tears. “I miss beer. I miss so many things, Ingrid.”

“I’m going to fix this, I promise.” Ingrid turned. “I just need to—”

“Don’t look at me!” Selma shouted, and a whirlwind burst through the kitchen, blowing a family portrait off the wall, flipping the dish rack off the counter, and pinning Ingrid against the sink. She ducked her head and covered her eyes with one hand, waiting for Selma’s anger to crest and fade. Something shattered against the floor, shards skittering over Ingrid’s shoes. The salamander keened in alarm.

When the wind stopped Ingrid uncovered her eyes but kept her gaze turned downward. She scraped the remains of her dinner from her clothes and the cabinets and fed them and the package to the salamander. It crackled at her, mollified.

“I’m sorry, Ingrid.” Selma’s voice was so calm that Ingrid nearly believed her. “I’m really unhappy.”

“I know you are, honey. So am I.”

“Well, you should be. This is all your fault.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but Ingrid knew there was no point in arguing about it.

Six months ago, Selma had been at a mall in Minneapolis when someone had set off a Heartstopper. A Heartstopper was more or less exactly what it sounded like: an attack of unknown origin and mysterious mechanism that stopped the hearts of every living being within two hundred yards. It didn’t damage the heart or anything else, and it left the bodies in a suspended state where they did not decay, but they were essentially dead. Magic and medicine had, so far, completely failed to revive any of the Heartstopper victims.

The attacks had come at irregular intervals, seven of them in the last twenty-six months: Halifax, Taipei, Cozumel, Kiev, Addis Ababa, Minneapolis, and — just last week — Toledo, Spain. Ingrid had followed the investigations as closely as she could since the attack in Minneapolis, but her primary concern wasn’t with the cause but with the cure.

She took out her keys. “No no no,” Selma said. “Don’t go down there.”

Ingrid ignored her and unlocked the door to the cellar.

“I hate you!” Selma shouted. “I wish you were the one that was dead!”

“Believe me,” Ingrid whispered, “so do I.”

She locked the door behind her, although she knew Selma wouldn’t follow her. That was the problem, in a nutshell. She had managed to retrieve her sister’s soul from the ether, but for reasons Ingrid hadn’t been able to discover, rather than being drawn back to her body, Selma was repelled by it. She was furious, and abusive in ways that she had never been while alive. Ingrid couldn’t even blame her.

Selma’s body lay on a queen-size bed in the cellar. She — Ingrid thought of both the body and the spirit as her sister, even though they were both just fragments now — she was pale but beautiful. Ingrid pulled back the sheets that covered the body and grasped her sister’s feet. She massaged them carefully, flexing the stiff toes, then the knees. Ingrid moved up her sister’s body, massaging every inch of skin and exercising every joint. The first few times she had done this, she had cried. Now she just worked. She wondered what it was that kept her doing this. Hope was something she had put away on a shelf, but something about the accumulation of days taking care of her sister’s body gave her the inertia to continue doing so. That, and the angry ghost — the not-quite-her-sister — that waited upstairs.