Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (11 page)

“Key points, sure. OK, please, can you focus on what you need to know? If you — if there’s a phrase or even just a single word that summarizes what you’re most concerned about, just try to fix that in your mind for me.” She swallowed. “Was that OK?”

“I’m focusing, Margaret.” Or trying to. He couldn’t expect a complete novice to gain any insight into the location of his dueling opponent. He tried to focus on something mundane — the growth on Victor’s front right leg, maybe — but his subconscious was already settled on one thing. “All right, I think I have it.”

“Great!” She smiled up at him. “Um. Is there any way you could sit down?”

Ken borrowed a chair from the outer office. Hilda gave him a sympathetic look; Ken might have rolled his eyes in return, but he was beginning to be interested in what Margaret might find. What he’d said about divination being social magic was true; every day since Philip had been gone he’d wanted to do a reading about his safety or return, but there was no point, and no one else he could talk to about where Philip had gone.

“OK,” Margaret said when he was sitting down across from her. “Now, to focus my own energies—”

“What comes before that?”

“Oh, crap. Gather. Gather, focus, execute. OK, gathering now.” Margaret closed her eyes and held up her hands as if in supplication. Ken resisted the urge to tell her that the dramatics weren’t going to help; there was such a thing as overcorrecting a student. Better to get her through this and worry about the small stuff later. And indeed, once Margaret stopped talking, the energy changed completely. The sunlight streaming through his office window took on a Technicolor tinge, and there was a slight feeling of vertigo, as if the girl had become the gravitational center of the room.

“You may state your question if you are comfortable doing so,” she said. Her voice was distorted, like a record running at too low a speed. “Otherwise please continue to focus on your foremost concern.”

Ken said nothing. He wondered if this girl had any idea how much power she had access to. He wondered what the hell she was doing at this school.

Margaret opened her eyes and leaned over the coffee cup with its dregs of moldy malbec. “A long, arduous journey. He will return, but he will change. He has not found what he was looking for.” She let out a breath, and then sniffed at the cup. “Oh, that’s rancid,” she said, leaning back. “What
is
that?”

The energy in the room had returned to normal. Ken reached across the table and slid the cup away from Margaret, quickly enough that he hoped she wouldn’t notice his hands were shaking. “That was good,” he said. “Write it up according to the format I gave you. You can turn it in tomorrow if you need a little extra time.”

“I can get it to you by lecture,” Margaret said. “That was actually really easy! Who’s on a journey?”

“A friend.” Ken stood and waved as Margaret left. Her reading had been cryptic, and reassuring on its face — so why did it worry him?

Martin’s funeral took place on a sticky, overcast Saturday morning outside DC. Joy portalled directly to the temple, one of a stream of mourners passing through the receiving doors.

“Wilkins,” someone called, and she recognized Flood’s aura. He was wearing a white blazer over a white polo. Gray was beside him in loose-fitting white beach pants and a collarless white shirt buttoned all the way up to his neck. White was the Hindu color of mourning, and it made for an odd sort of uniform. Joy wore a midcalf white skirt and a short-sleeved white top, and tried to imagine the three of them as a trio of angels. She failed. Gray fit the bill, or nearly so, but neither Flood nor herself would be particularly convincing.

She tracked her companions carefully as they joined the other white-clad mourners. She recognized a few more auras, or thought she did; she had consulted once on a paper about the radical instability of auras at funerals, due not only to their inherent emotional charge but to the pressure to display or suppress grief, sometimes both at once.

Joy’s own grief welled up when she was intercepted by Martin’s wife, Veena. “Joy, it’s me, Veena,” she said, and Joy immediately burst into tears, because Veena had always been so considerate of her face blindness — sometimes to the point of exasperation, but always coming from a place of kindness and patience.

“I’m so sorry.” Joy wasn’t sure her words were intelligible, but she blurted them out anyway as she and Veena embraced. “Martin was…he was so…” But her grief was too raw; she couldn’t put her feelings into words, let alone put those words in a pleasing order.

“I know,” Veena said. “He was so proud of you, Joy. And I’m so grateful to you for surviving, and for bringing in the man who killed him.”

Joy nodded and managed to calm herself. She released Veena, and Flood stepped smoothly between them.

“Mrs. Shil, perhaps you remember me, I’m Benjamin Flood.”

“Of course I remember you.” Veena shook his hand, but the tone of her voice was not friendly.

“I’m so sorry for your loss. As you say, we have the assassin in custody. We’ll find out who’s behind this.”

“I hope so, Benjamin. I understand you’ve taken on a great deal of Martin’s responsibility since he was killed. I hope you haven’t overreached.”

“I…I don’t think so, ma’am. I can’t replace your husband, but I—”

“No, you would not be a very good replacement, that’s true. If you’ll excuse me, the service is about to start. Will I see you after, Joy?”

Joy nodded, bowing her head to hide her pleasure at Veena’s slam on Flood. Veena squeezed her hand good-bye before making her way through the sea of indistinguishable white-clad people to the front of the room. Joy stepped into the viewing line behind Flood and Gray.

She remembered a warm day like this one, the day of Martin and Veena’s daughter’s wedding. The ceremony had taken place in this same temple, but the reception had been at a private house a few miles away. After dinner Joy and Martin had sat together on the wide porch. Martin had had a couple of drinks, and out of the blue he had started talking about work.

“It’s not about being Sherlock Holmes, you know. The kind of cases we work are primarily a matter of data collection. We put together enough information, we look at it from a thousand different angles, until we see something we didn’t see before.”

“But we also need evidence.”

“If you’re doing it right, the evidence is just the data with a narrative sewing it together.”

“And what if there isn’t time to do it right?”

Martin laughed. “In other words, ‘That’s all very well, old man, but what about the real world?’” He took a sip of brandy. “You have to trust your instincts. Concentrate on the gaps in what you know, on the witness whose story doesn’t add up. Worry at the facts that don’t make sense until something comes loose. And when all else fails, accuse a likely suspect. People talk a lot differently when they think you’re going to lock them up.”

“And what if my instincts are wrong?”

“Then you’re in the wrong line of work,” Martin said. “But I happen to know that’s not the case. After all the aptitude magic I’ve invested in you, I don’t have any doubts.”

She came to the front of the line, to the body in the casket. It had no aura. It wore one of Martin’s suits, but it could have been anyone.

Joy wept openly for the rest of the service.

After the funeral Joy cleaned herself up in the ladies’ room, wiping away the crust of snot and tears. She suspected that she was supposed to be celebrating Martin’s life, not mourning his death, but she was too tired to dissemble, too wrung out to suppress her grief.

Out in the reception area she searched for Veena, but she was surrounded already. She spotted Flood by his red aura; he beckoned her over.

He cleared his throat as she approached. “Agent Wilkins, you, uh…are you doing all right?”

“I’ll be OK.”

“I’d like to debrief quickly, if you don’t mind.”

Joy sighed but didn’t bother to object. “I don’t have anything new to report, honestly. But I’d like access to the prisoner’s interrogation recordings, if not access to the prisoner himself.”

“I can summarize those for you in one word: nothing. He hasn’t said a single word. At times he seems nearly catatonic.”

“Let me talk to him,” Joy said.

“Out of the question.”

“Then let me go in with Parker. His aura will talk even if he won’t.”

“We have other aura readers in the agency.”

“Yes — but none of them are as good as me.”

Gray arrived at that moment, munching on a plate of raw vegetables. “She’s telling the truth,” he said through a mouthful. “At least, as she sees it.” He winked at Joy.

“I’ll consider it,” said Flood. “Have you spoken to Ingwiersen yet? The conjuration professor?”

“I’m having coffee with her in”—Joy checked her watch—”two hours.”

“Give the time and location to my office, and I’ll make sure your new security detail is there.”

“All right, but it’s in the Gooseberry Bluff town square. I’m not worried about an attack.”

“You’re not paid to worry. I am.” Flood looked past her, to someone just behind her. “Mrs. Shil.”

Joy turned to face her. “Veena.”

“Hi, Joy. I was hoping we could talk, just for a moment. You don’t mind, do you, gentlemen?”

Flood made grudging, noncommittal noises as Veena pulled Joy away. “I despise that man,” she said. “I know it’s an unkind thing to say, but I honestly don’t care. If Martin knew you were being forced to work for him it would break his heart. He loved you like one of our own children, you know. He never wanted the girls to follow him in his work, but when he found you I think he realized that he had missed something. He was very proud of you.”

Joy took a deep breath and managed not to dissolve into tears. “Thank you. He was a wonderful mentor to me — you’ve both always been so welcoming.”

Veena waved away her gratitude. “What I want to know is whether you are all right. You’ve been attacked, you’re alone in that place, and now you’re reporting to that…I’m not even going to say what he is. Are you all right? Are you safe?”

Joy was not safe, and she knew it. But she was in far enough now to know that she wouldn’t be safe until she knew more, and it wasn’t going to help Veena any to know that. She wondered, abruptly, if she should tell Veena that she had talked to Martin’s ghost, but it didn’t really seem like an appropriate time or place to do that.

“I think so,” she lied, and kept on lying. “We’ve caught the killer and he’s starting to talk. We’re close to finding out who he’s working for. Try not to worry.”

Joy was at Café Dante on the Gooseberry Bluff town square at exactly 2:30. She ordered an iced coffee and took a table outside.

Ingrid Ingwiersen arrived fifteen minutes late, her aura gray with a tinge of red that might have been sunlight reflecting off the scarlet of the café’s sign. She was even thinner than the last time Joy had seen her, at the faculty reception a week and a half before. There she’d looked unwell, but also like a figure carved out of marble, untouchable; now she looked feral and on edge. She took her black satchel with her to order a drink, as if she were afraid Joy was going to look through it while she was gone.

She came back with a double espresso, even though she was obviously wired already; her leg twitched under the table like a speed-metal metronome.

“Thanks for meeting me,” Joy said, putting on her best Eager New Professor voice.

“I can’t stay long,” Ingrid said. “I’m on my way over to Arthur Stag to use their library.”

“Really? Actually, I sort of wanted to check their library out too. If you want, we could just head over there together, and talk on the way.”

Suspicion rippled across Ingwiersen’s aura. “I thought you just wanted to talk about my guest lecture. I told you, I’d prefer to do it later in the semester. That always worked for Carla.”

“Well, I’d rather have you come in sometime before Thanksgiving break.”

“November 14th, then? That’s the Wednesday before. I don’t see why we couldn’t have done this over the phone.”

“I was hoping to pick your brain a little about readings on conjuration, for the students.”

“You have the syllabus, right? You’re still using the same textbook?”

“For now.” Joy was struggling to maintain a demeanor of cheery oblivion in the face of this woman’s hostility. She knew a lot of things about Ingrid Ingwiersen already, from her file; the trick was not to reveal that she knew them, while at the same time using them to get at the things she didn’t know.

“I’m thinking about a few changes in the syllabus for next year, and I was hoping to get your input. For instance, Professor Drake has a lot of readings about Crowley in the syllabus. I know he’s influential and can’t be ignored, but I’d like to highlight some more modern thinkers in conjuration.”

Ingwiersen grunted and sipped at her espresso. “Carla always did have a little more reverence for the Beast than he deserved,” she said, almost grudgingly. “What he really was, was a master of public relations. The Wiks did most of the heavy lifting; they just didn’t publish as much.”

“Exactly my thinking!” Joy hoped she wasn’t overdoing it on the enthusiasm. “So who do you teach?”

“Oh — both Pierces, Whitson and Volant, Kombuis…a little bit of Fernandes, but not enough of it is translated. You’ve got to have them read
The Book of Daemons
, just because it’s expected, but I’d supplement with some of those names. I can give you a list.”

“What about…what’s the name…de Forest?”

Ingwiersen squinted. “You mean de Fourier?”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

“That’s…you can’t teach that. It’s dangerous. De Fourier was a Crowley fanatic, you know; his books are full of magical booby traps, coded spells that will blow up in the face of anyone who doesn’t know what components to leave out. And the appendix — the appendix is a working demon summoning spell, written in a cipher that any reasonably motivated college kid could solve.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that,” Joy lied. “I guess you’d have to know that, in your field.”

Ingwiersen nodded. “Every year they give us an updated list of prohibited texts, and every year it gets longer.”