Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (21 page)

The woman released her hold on Joy’s senses, and Joy
slumped forward, gasping to catch her breath. She kept her gaze lowered,
terrified of being seized again. She focused on the dirt that filled the rubber
treads in the floor and on the shimmy of the car.

“What do you want?” she asked when she remembered how
to speak.

“I just wanted to show my face,” the woman said. “To
help you understand what it is you’ve stumbled into.”

“I’m just looking for a missing woman,” said Joy.
“Are you the one who sent the package?”

“Carla, yes,” the Emissary said. “Carla is fine.
She’s perfectly safe.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s with us.”

“Who is ‘us’?” Joy steeled herself and met the
woman’s eyes. She was just a woman now, as far as Joy could see. But if she
started to glow Joy was going to shut her eyes and stumble toward the next car.

The woman crossed her legs and clasped her hands
across her knee. “Ms. Wilkins — Agent Wilkins — can you imagine a place with no
war, no murder, no rape? No one going hungry. No one living in slavery, no one being tortured or oppressed simply
for being who they are. Can you conceive of it?”

Joy thought for a moment. “No. I would like to, but I
can’t.”

“It exists. And once you have lived in it, you will
understand why the idea of anyone living in any other way is morally
unacceptable.”

There was no argument against that, and yet once more
Joy was presented with someone trying to sell her a version of reality that she
had no way to confirm was real. Clearly this woman was from the worlds of order,
but did she know that Joy knew that there was such a thing? She stuck to what
she had learned from Martin:
Until you
know everything, it’s usually better to pretend to know nothing
.

“I don’t understand where it is you’re supposed to
have come from,” Joy said. “Heaven?”

The woman chuckled. “There was a book in the package
you were sent. Did you look at it?”

“I glanced at it. Stories about an otter, right?”

“
Trickster
Tales of the Hvenashawa People
,” the woman said. “A popular children’s book where I come from. Not as popular
these days. The trickster in question is usually just called Otter, although
the Romans referred to him as Lutrinaes — which
basically means Otter, but you know how the Romans could be. Otter, like most
tricksters, was able to take many shapes, could be male or female, a helper or
an obstacle to heroes. Otter’s specialty, of course, was slipping out of the
grasp of anyone who wished to capture him.”

“I don’t know those stories. In fact, I wasn’t able
to find anything on the Hvenashawa people at all.”

“No, I don’t imagine so. I would advise you to read
the book, and to be wary of those around you, because they may have the shape
and sound of people you know and trust, and yet they may be deceiving you.”

Joy was silent. Nearly everyone was deceiving her
about something or other, it seemed to her, so this
was not very upsetting news.

The train slowed, and a recorded voice announced the
next stop. The woman stood, swept her cloak from the seat with a flourish, and
clasped it around her neck again. “I will speak to you again,” she said. “I
would rather have you for a friend than an enemy.”

“If you want to prove your goodwill, you should
release Carla Drake,” said Joy.

“I am not holding her,” said the woman. “She is where
she is out of her own free will.”

The doors opened, and the woman stepped out onto the
platform. The man in the gray suit followed; Joy had all but forgotten that he
was there. Joy considered following them, but the memory of the light from the
woman’s face froze her, and the doors shut.

As the train pulled away from the stop, the door at
the end of the car opened and a girl not quite five feet tall walked in. She
wore gray leggings and a black tank top under a pastel green hoodie. Her brown hair was cut very short, pixie-like, and
her eyebrow, nose, and lip were pierced.

She sat on the bench opposite Joy, exactly where the
Emissary had just been.

“Hey, um.” She paused. “So,
I’m your security detail. My name’s Piper.”

“Oh.” Joy was taken aback; this girl didn’t look very
impressive. “I’m Joy.”

“Yeah, I know. So, um…I wouldn’t normally come out in
the open like this, but I was watching, you know, ’cause that’s my job and
everything. And, uh, you know that guy that was with that really spooky lady
you were just talking to?”

Joy resisted the urge to change the topic to Piper’s
age. She didn’t sound more than fifteen. On the other hand, her aura was
fascinating: orange-red shot through with waves of turquoise and blue. She
might be nervous about speaking with Joy, but she was otherwise fearless.

“I saw him.”

“Well, I know you saw him, but I also you know you
have a problem with seeing people? Their faces, I mean?”

“True.”

“Yeah. So I thought I’d
better tell you, that guy looks exactly like the guy who attacked you in the
desert…and killed Martin Shil.”

By the time he finished, Hector
was soaked in sweat.
My God, she’s a lot
stronger than she looks
, he thought to himself as he slouched against a
parking meter to catch his breath.

“Oh, thank you so much,
Professor!” Margaret May shouted. “I thought I’d never get it off. I mean, I
wouldn’t have, without your help. I still don’t know what I was doing wrong.”

Hector just nodded. Margaret
May lived in Mud Park, the student neighborhood on the west side of the park
that gave it its name. It was about equidistant from the Gooseberry Bluff and
Arthur Stag colleges, and was a mix of three- and four-story apartment houses
and older homes divided into flats.

Margaret had called his office
after lunch, frantic. He’d given his 101 class an assignment to put a simple antivermin ward on their place of residence, but somehow
Margaret had managed to create an aversion that triggered a nausea reaction
from everyone and everything that went near the place. Even working to remove
it from across the street Hector had had to fight to keep his lunch down.

Margaret moved to stand in his
field of vision, an anguished expression on her face. “I’m not getting an A on
this assignment, am I?”

Hector used his T-shirt to wipe
the sweat from his face and straightened up. “That’s not important, Margaret.
If you had nothing to learn, you wouldn’t need to be in the class in the first
place.”

“I just…I don’t know what I’m
doing wrong.”

“If you took good notes, I can
probably spot it. But I think this is a problem of fine-tuning more than
anything. Margaret, I get the impression you don’t realize how strong you are.
That spell was as strong as some of the wards I cast in my freelance work.” The
truth was that it was probably stronger, but Hector didn’t feel like admitting
that. Bad enough that his freelance work had dried up in the past few months;
having a student surpass him, however inadvertently, was not something he
wanted to think about right now.

“Really?”

“Yes. It’s not a bad thing,
honestly. You’re gifted. But because of that, you need to really work on your
control, and resist the urge to improvise. Later, when you’re more experienced,
then
you can experiment some. But for
now, adhere to the letter of your spells, and hold back a little. When you’re
gathering, don’t take in as much power.”

“OK. Thank you.” An
angry-looking woman wearing khaki shorts and a Twins T-shirt was approaching
them from across the street; Margaret spotted her and sighed. “Um, that’s my
landlord. I really hope I don’t get evicted. I’ll see you in class, Professor.”

Hector considered staying to
mediate between Margaret and the landlord, but he told himself to step back.
You can’t adopt her.
That was one reason
he liked teaching at a community college: there were fewer sheltered kids
straight out of high school, more people who had lived through some things.
That wasn’t always a positive—they had a tendency to decide they knew more than
the instructors—but on the whole Hector would rather contend with egos in the
classroom than be pushed into babysitting.

He got in his car and drove
without giving much thought to where he was headed. He had spent the morning
making plans for his date with Zelda on Thursday, and he was still distracted
by thoughts of that. What if the weather didn’t cooperate? What if she was
bored? What if the curse decided to drop a piano on him while he was wooing
her?

He found himself back at the
school; he almost turned around in the parking lot and headed home, but he had
the feeling he had forgotten something. Besides, he had a change of clothes in
his office, and the day was humid enough without walking around in sweat-drenched
jeans.

He checked the school’s wards
as he walked toward the main building. Maybe he should have Margaret cast them
the next time—or maybe not, since they might end up with a campus
no one could enter. At some point, though, he should give
her a shot at it. She wasn’t the strongest magician he’d ever encountered, but
she wasn’t far off.

It was cool inside, but he
still felt grimy as he climbed to the third floor. “President Fitzgerald’s
office called,” the departmental assistant said as he entered, and he
remembered what it was he had forgotten.

“Shit.”

“Twice,
actually. I was about to try your crystal.”

“Call down and tell them I’ll
be there in five minutes.”

Hector shut his office door
behind him and changed into fresh pants and a button-down shirt. He’d been
waiting for Philip to call him on the carpet since the mess in the library on
Sunday, but Monday had passed without a word from the president’s office.
Hector had been on his way out the door Tuesday night when Philip had finally
called and mildly asked if he had some time to meet on Wednesday. Philip was
difficult for Hector to read; sometimes he was so odd as to be almost silly. But
a few times, mostly late in the day, during meetings about the school’s
security—something Philip took an almost obsessive amount of interest in—he had
become cold and serious. When Philip was like that, he was actually easier to
deal with, even as it put Hector off-balance, because something about it
reminded him of his father. Alfonso Ay had been an academic, a widely published
authority on magic theory. He had also been a granite-hard man, a supporter of
the Mejía regime during the Guatemalan Civil War, who claimed that the death
squads were “leftist propaganda” and ruled his household in the way that he
believed the country should be ruled. He was one-quarter Mayan and was
simultaneously proud of this heritage and contemptuous of the Maya people.

“If they call, I’m on my way,”
he said to the assistant on his way out the door. He was still thinking about
his father. Something about facing a potential dressing down always triggered
these sorts of thoughts.

Hector hadn’t realized how much
he hated his father until he was safely away from him, and then again when the
man had died. Something had pushed all of that far down, where he wouldn’t
think to act upon it until he was out of the house and the country. Much was
expected of him, and Hector would never forgive himself for not telling his
father where he could insert his expectations, or
worse yet, for managing to live up to some of them.

Hector loved his mother, but
she still cried over her husband every night, and when he visited she begged
and wept until he accompanied her to his father’s grave. She and Hector’s
sisters depended on the money he made doing the work that he had chosen, not
because he loved it, but because he still couldn’t shake his father’s idea of
the man he was supposed to be.

Hector couldn’t pinpoint why it
was he liked Zelda so much, but when he was in an overthinking mood he would
trace it all back to his father. Maybe Zelda was like his father, or maybe she
was unlike everything his father had thought women should be, or she just didn’t
fit anywhere in his father’s idea of what Hector’s life should turn out to
be—not that Hector had ever felt like he knew what that idea was, exactly. When
he wasn’t overthinking—he was overthinking their date even now, unable to
decide whether to cook for her or to ask Chuck at the Mandrake to let him use
his rooftop terrace for an intimate get-together—he just knew that
he liked Zelda
. She was tough but she
was also funny; she was whip smart; and she had the
sort of body that made him start looking for things to do with his hands. He
couldn’t count the number of times he’d had to restrain himself from touching
her. He wanted not to have to do that anymore.

Hector let thoughts of Zelda
chase thoughts of his father from his mind as he hurried down to the
president’s office. Edith Grim-Parker looked up at him as he entered, but did
not smile. “He’s inside.”

“Thank you.” Hector stopped. “Edith,
what’s that bird doing there?”

A crow was perched on the
windowsill. It cocked its head at him.

“Don’t worry about that bird;
you’re half an hour late. Get in there.”

Hector hurried through to Philip’s office and
shut the door behind him. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Yes, well, it’s…it’s…it’s
certainly not convenient.” Philip looked agitated; he was pacing, and his hair
stood out on the sides as if he’d been clutching at it.

“I know, it’s
my fault. I was dealing with a crisis with a student, and I didn’t
realize what time it was.” One thing Hector had learned from dealing with his
father: never say “I forgot” to anyone with power over you.

“Well, you’re here now. I’m a
little out of sorts. I missed lunch because of…work.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sit down,” said Philip. “You
don’t have anything snackish on you, do you? Maybe some crab puffs? Do they
sell those in bags? You know, like the…what do they
call them…”

“Potato
chips?”

Philip snapped his fingers.
“Yes!”

Hector let himself relax a
little; Philip didn’t seem to be upset with him, just a little manic with
hunger. “No. I don’t think they do.”

“It doesn’t matter. Hector, I
wanted to talk to you about the security.”

“Ah.” The tension was back.
“Right. Look, when I started we talked about the cats and
the library security, but that was all Larch’s thing, and I—”

“No no no. I don’t care about
that. I mean, I
care
. Obviously I
care, I’m in charge. These things are my responsibility, ultimately. But I mean
security in the larger sense.” Philip held his arms open to indicate security
in the sense of a large balloon, or perhaps a yoga ball.

“Well, I hadn’t redrawn the
wards yet when the incident in the library happened, so I didn’t replace them
until fairly late, but there was no interruption and there
were
cops all over the place the entire time.”

“The wards,
yes. The, uh…”

“The sleep ward,
and the panic ward. That’s what you meant, right?”

“I suppose I was thinking more
along the lines of the, of our, of…the more confidential security measures
here.”

Hector swallowed. “Philip, do
you want me to ask Edith to order you a sandwich or something? You seem kind of
off balance. I’m sure someone could run something over from the cafeteria.”

“Oh, what a
great idea! Edith!” Philip walked halfway toward the office door, seemed
to remember he had an intercom and turned back toward his desk, then just shook
his head and jogged over to the office door and leaned outside. Hector heard
him talking excitedly at Edith, but none of it was decipherable from where he
sat.

“And a couple
of bags of potato chips!” Philip shouted as he reentered the office.
“Hector, do you want something?”

“I’m fine. I had lunch.”

“Good.” Philip sat in the
visitor’s chair next to him. “Now about the confidential
security.”

“Philip…I don’t know what you
mean.”

Philip winked. “We agreed not
to talk about it, right? But it’s OK, because I’m giving you permission to talk
about it now. I’m asking you to. Not quite ordering, exactly, because this is a
friendly conversation. We’re friends.”

This was news to Hector, but he
thought it would be bad form to say so. “Of course.
But…Philip, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. There isn’t any
confidential security, unless it’s so confidential that you haven’t told me
about it.”

He made eye contact with Philip
as he said this, and Philip locked eyes on his and leaned forward as if he were
looking for cataracts. He breathed in through his nose, and Hector could almost
have sworn that he was being sniffed.

“You’re telling me there’s
nothing?” Philip said it loudly, and with his mouth right next to Hector’s
face, so that Hector could not help but jump.

“There are the wards, and all
the departmental counterspells against summoning
pranks and illegal portalling, but that’s really about it. Again, as far as I
know.”

“Dammit!” Philip stood so
quickly that Hector was relieved not to have knocked skulls with him. “They’re
going to walk right in here and…” He walked over to the window and stood
looking out.

“What?” Hector asked. “Who’s
going to walk right in here?”

“Nothing,” said Philip. “I mean, no one. Right. Sorry to
have…the inconvenience, and everything.”

“Am I in trouble?” Philip was
keeping something from him, that much was clear. “Is this about the campus, or
about you? Are
you
in some kind of
trouble?”

Philip laughed. It wasn’t a
very reassuring laugh, but he came back to the desk and patted Hector’s
shoulder. “Not at all, not at all. Let me know if you
have any thoughts. Sorry, I have to be going, another meeting.”

Hector stood and moved sidelong
toward the door. “You should really eat something, Philip.”

“Right, of
course. Thank you, Hector. Have a good day.” And with that, the door was
shut, and Hector was on the other side of it.

“Is he not well?” he asked
Edith, but she just frowned and clicked her pen at him before turning back to
the paperwork on her desk. When he’d first started at the school Hector used to
take Edith’s demeanor personally. He was a charming guy; everyone said so. But
Edith disliked everyone, as it turned out, except for those she merely
distrusted.

Hector turned to the crow but
didn’t approach it. Its feathers shone in the light from the narrow window, and
it stared at his belt buckle. “So, the bird?”

“I’m calling him Christopher.”
That wasn’t what he’d meant, but he knew that Edith knew that. She was just
being Edith.

Hector concentrated on the
bird.
Corvus
brachyrhynchos
, the common American crow. They were curious, intelligent
birds, which made them perfect for his security spell. There were crow species
nearly everywhere in the world, except for Central and South America. Growing
up Hector had tried bonding with all sorts of birds, most successfully with red-throated
caracaras, an intelligent bird of prey that filled a similar evolutionary
niche. But even with them he’d never had the sort of success that he’d had with
crows.