Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (20 page)

“I sort of overheard. I was thinking…I saw these over
there. You’re so tall, I think they would work on
you.”

For a moment, as Ingwiersen
took the brightly colored dresses, Zelda felt sure she was going to laugh at
her. She hadn’t thought about it, but the conjuration professor’s style was
much more utilitarian, almost masculine. Then again, she had come into this
store and not Fleet Farm, so perhaps she was looking for something softer.

“Thank you,” said Ingwiersen,
holding the dresses up to the light as if they were counterfeit bills. “I’ll
just try these on, then.”

“The dressing rooms are over there,” said Zelda.
“I’ll make sure the girl knows you’re in there.”

“Thanks again,” said Ingwiersen,
and ducked into one of the booths.

Oh shit
,
Zelda thought.
I’m being helpful.
This was what crushes did to you: they made you cheerful and humanity loving
and stupid. Zelda had discontinued using the blindness formula and mixed up a
variation on the itching cream, but she had no guarantee yet that it was
working. Stupid Hector, making her fall for him. Making her want more. It wasn’t fair. She leafed through
dresses like they were pages in a book she wasn’t interested in. Stupid clothes. Stupid dating. Stupid perilous situations involving cats magnifying feelings that were
probably a terrible idea to begin with.

Ingrid Ingwiersen came out
of the dressing room wearing a yellow shirtdress patterned with white lilies.
Zelda smiled at her. “It fits,” she said.

Ingwiersen nodded. “Thanks
again.” She set the clothes on the counter and glanced at a couple of blouses
the salesgirl had brought over for her. “I’ll take all of these,” she said.

“You’re lucky,” Zelda said. “You’re just the type
designers have in mind when they make clothes like these. If I wore that I’d
look like a hippo stuck in a pup tent.” She laughed, though inwardly she was
mortified by this outburst of self-loathing.

Ingwiersen squinted at her.
“I’ve always thought you were rather attractive,” she said.

“Oh.” Zelda’s ears burned; she must be bright red.
She looked down at the dresses. “That’s very nice of you to say,” she finally
said, but when she looked up Ingwiersen was already
gone.

Zelda sighed and gave up. She wasn’t going to buy
anything today. She kept thinking back to Hector and Joy and the library. She
liked Joy, but there was something going on there that she didn’t understand.
She was a bit too interested in everyone else at the school. Maybe it was
political? Ambition Zelda could understand, but it seemed early for Joy to be
bucking for anything long-term here. She had to do the work first.

She thanked the salesgirl and walked out to her car,
still thinking about Joy. Maybe the thing to do was just to ask her.

Zelda grasped her crystal and said Joy’s name. A
moment later Joy picked up.

“Joy, it’s Zelda. I was
wondering — would you like to have lunch tomorrow?”

“That would be lovely,” said Joy. “Say the Mandrake at
about eleven thirty?”

“Perfect,” came Zelda’s
voice, just exactly as if she were not four hundred miles away.

“I’m looking forward to it,” said Joy, and ended the
call.

“Any more personal business?” asked Agent Gray. “If
we’re going to do this, let’s do it.”

Joy had worked with Gray a fair amount, but still not
enough to tell if he was always a little grumpy or just chronically sarcastic. “As
soon as the landlord gets here, we will.”

They were outside the Chicago address that Markie Malone had provided. Joy had portalled
to the Chicago office from Minneapolis after putting in a request for Gray to
accompany her. Security detail or not, she wasn’t going into a field situation
without backup if her undercover status didn’t dictate it. And she wanted a
truth-teller with her, because she had a lot of questions for the people at
Apex Landscaping.

They had tried the door and the buzzer several times,
but the outer door had a security code and a deadbolt. Joy had asked the field
office to try the office phone, only to find out that it was disconnected.
Justice had expedited a warrant, and the landlord was on his way from downtown — after
grumbling at Joy for nearly ten minutes on the crystal first.

Apex was located in a warehouse district north of the
Ashland-Lake intersection, just a short distance west of downtown. They were
surrounded by two-story buildings of red brick, with windows covered by metal
screens. The building they were looking at had a locked loading dock at one end
and a
No Solicitation
sign on the
curb out front. A gray food truck at the corner had attracted a few workers,
but it was the sort of area that probably looked deserted for most of the day
and was best avoided at night.

“Nice neighborhood,” she said.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, but excess
sarcasm gives me a headache,” said Gray. “Literally.
It’s a cognitive dissonance kind of a thing. Also it gives off this weird
buzzing sound.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s all right. You’re not nearly as bad as my
nephew. He’s fifteen.”

“Does your thing run in the family?”

“My ‘thing’? Really?”

“You know what I mean. Truth-telling.”

“My thing does not run in the family. Does yours?”

Joy was surprised to realize that she had never
thought about her sight in that way. “No, it doesn’t, now that you ask.”

“You have siblings?”

“Yeah. A
sister and a brother.”

“They have kids?”

“My sister does. My niece is seven and my nephew is
almost two.”

“I figured out my truth-telling at about three. I’d
always heard the fuzziness in certain things people said, but it wasn’t until
that age that I understood why it was happening. My parents, as you can
probably guess, were not thrilled about it. I think…maybe every relationship
has some necessary lies. But I think the parent-child relationship definitely
has that dynamic, in most cases.”

Joy was thinking about the lies, necessary and
otherwise, that were accumulating in her relationship with AD Flood. She was
supposed to brief him after this, and she didn’t know what she was going to
tell him about the dinner party at Yves’s place. “You’re divorced, right?”

“Yeah. That’s not too
surprising, really. What’s amazing is that my parents are still married, and my
brother and sister-in-law. My dad has four brothers, and they were all divorced
by the time I was your niece’s age. I’m still not invited to the family
holidays.”

“That’s…shitty.”

“I don’t know. I’ve hung around with a couple of
other truth-tellers, and they are pretty damn insufferable.” He nodded at an
SUV pulling up across the street. “I think this is our guy.”

Joy and Gray stepped out to meet the landlord. He
wore a suit without a tie and was even more agitated than he had been when Joy
called him, to judge by his aura and the fact that he couldn’t seem to stop
shaking his head. “I don’t know about anything illegal going on in there,” he said.

“We understand that,” said Joy. “There may not be
anything illegal, but there is something suspicious going on.” She handed him
the warrant; he didn’t even glance at it.

“Well, I never even saw them move in.” He went to the
security keypad, entered a code, mumbled something, and the outer door popped
open. He led them up a half flight of stairs. “This woman came by to look at
it, her references checked out, and she gave me first and last months’ rent.
Never saw her again.”

“When was that?” Joy asked. She pounded three times
on the heavy green door and nodded at Gray. They both pulled out their guns.

The landlord backed up when he saw the weapons. “Last
week. Thursday, I guess.”

“Please unlock the door and step aside,” said Joy.

He grunted, but Joy noticed that his hands shook as
he sorted through his keys. “I don’t want any shooting,” he said, and retreated
back down the steps.

The interior was huge, dark, and apparently empty.
The floor was wooden planking painted rust red; the air was warm and smelled like
oil and sawdust. Joy scanned what she could see of the left side of the room
and nodded at Gray, who stepped in to check out the right. There was only the
faint light from the north-facing windows to navigate by, and their footfalls
echoed in the space.

Joy spotted an office at the other end of the
warehouse and waved at Gray to bring it to his attention. There was a large
window looking into it, or rather out onto the working floor. Joy took the
right side again, the side where the office door stood. She kept glancing up
into the dark above — the ceiling was at least twenty feet high. For whatever
reason, she kept thinking that there could be some
thing
up there, rather than some
one
.

Joy looked in the office window but saw only carpet.
She glanced at Gray, who shrugged, then nodded. Joy tried the door.

Nothing. No
one. The place was empty.

“I told you, I never saw them move anything in,” the
landlord said after they brought him in to turn on the lights. He trailed them
and made helpful comments as they combed the place. Helpful comments
like, “That’s the loading dock,” and “There used to be a shelving unit there.”
He gave Gray a description of the woman — Joy found that taking descriptions was
like transcribing messages in a language she didn’t know — and asked if they were
finished.

“I don’t think we can call in the lab guys,” Joy
said. “We don’t have a crime here, exactly.”

“I don’t think they’d find anything, anyway,” said
Gray. “I don’t think anyone was ever here after he showed her the place.”

Joy agreed. Another dead end.
They could track down the credit card that had been used for the PoofPost account, but anyone this careful would have
themselves covered on that end as well.

“I don’t see what the point of all this was,” she
said.

“To keep you looking in the wrong
places, maybe. Or keep you off balance. Make you feel unsafe.”

“Well, it had the opposite effect. I’m angry now.”

Gray raised his eyebrows at her but didn’t call her
out on the lie, which she appreciated.

“I need to get back,” he said. “Do you want a ride?”

“I’m tired of cars. I’m going to go for a walk. Spend
the afternoon here. My sister recommended a restaurant a little ways south.”

“I just want to go on record as saying that I think
that’s not a very wise decision, and I would try to talk you out of it if you
weren’t one of the most stubborn people I’ve ever met.”

“I’m not stubborn,” Joy said.

“Liar,” said Gray.

As it turned out she was lying about more than a couple of
things, because after walking a few blocks south, past an El station and a
couple of bus stops, she decided that the neighborhood was a bit chancier than
she had anticipated and turned around. She called her sister for some
directions, then caught the Green Line at Lake Street, got off at the Circle
Line transfer point, rode that southeast to the Orange Line northbound and took
it to Halsted.

She had no trouble finding the Nightwood
Restaurant, but she had forgotten to ask the name of Rosemary’s ex-boyfriend,
who was supposed to be a sous-chef here. Rather than
call her sister back, Joy settled into a table for two in the corner and
ordered the salmon.

She tried thinking the warehouse dead-end through, to
find another angle to question the landlord from, but she found her thoughts
drifting back to Markie Malone and Agent Renard.
You were
starting to like him, weren’t you?
She had gone to Malone’s house, accepted
his hospitality, and allowed him to dictate how she perceived him. Just like
the dinner party with the Thirteenth Rib. Those people had brought her in,
filled her up with delicious food, and told her a bunch of things that were
likely to be at least partly true but were almost certainly not the whole
story. And yet, if one of the true things they had told her was that someone in
the FBMA had been somehow compromised, that meant she couldn’t really trust
anyone there, either.

“I really hope it’s Flood.”
Only after the people at the next table looked over at her did she realize that
she had said this out loud. Luckily her salmon arrived at that moment and put
everything else in the world out of her mind for a few minutes.

She was still in a state of salmon bliss when she got
on the El afterward, so she didn’t notice that she was the only one on her
particular car until a couple of stops out, when a man and a woman got on. The
woman wore a black turtleneck, black army-style pants with a wide black belt,
black boots, black gloves, black-framed glasses, and a black cape with a
clearly visible red lining. She undid the clasp of the cape and swept it
dramatically off her shoulders, set it on the bench across from Joy, and sat
down on it as the train lurched into motion.

The man wore a gray suit with a black tie and stood
holding on to a pole. His aura was red, but the woman’s was the deepest red Joy
had ever seen — the sign of someone who left nothing to chance.

“You are Joy Wilkins,” the woman said. “I understand
you have been looking for me.”

Joy was still wearing her Beretta in a shoulder
holster, but she was sure that the man would be on her before she could take it
out. She cleared her throat.

“You seem to know me,” she said, “but I don’t know
your name.”

“You can call me the Emissary.”

“I’d rather call you by your name.” Joy smiled as she
said it. This didn’t have to be an unfriendly meeting.

“I’m sorry if you think me impolite, but where I come
from names are not so lightly shared.” She smiled back at Joy, and her skin
seemed to take on a glow, as if her skull were a lamp. The city flowing past
outside and the car around them receded until the woman’s face took up all of
Joy’s perception, pressing upon her optic nerves in a way that was almost
painful until the features snapped into place in Joy’s mind, a model of perfect
symmetry. Joy knew that the woman was inside her head but she couldn’t summon
the will to protest. This woman might ask anything of her and she would give
it. And there was something else: Joy knew that for the first time in her life
she had seen a face she would never forget.