Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (22 page)

He shut his eyes and saw what
the bird saw, namely his own belt buckle, which was just the sort of shiny and
distracting thing crows loved to see. This particular bird was hurt but not
sick, mature but not old, and about as tame as a crow ever got.

“What are you feeding it?”
Hector asked.

“Are you kidding? He eats
everything. Gummi Bears, walnuts, coleslaw. He went
after a mouse yesterday, but with his wing hurt he was too slow to catch it.”

“We have mice?”

Edith Grim-Parker managed to
express an encyclopedia’s worth of impatience, exasperation, and contempt in a
single sigh. “Maybe you should have your student put up one of those antivermin wards, Professor Ay. Maybe
she
can keep the rodents out.”

The Chicago office of the FBMA
was supposed to have been built in the shape of a powerful letter or rune of
protection, but if that was so it was from a language that Joy had never
encountered. She had seen an aerial view—someone in her class at the academy
had gotten hold of a photograph and passed it around, just to see if anyone
could figure out what alphabet it was from—but to her it just looked like a
rabbit with pierced ears, and that was assuming that she was looking at it
right side up. None of the higher-ups would talk about it, and it had been
built long enough ago that it was possible that there was no one alive who
remembered.

Whatever its
occult meaning, the practical effect of the building was that in order to pass
from one “ear” to the other, you had to walk all the way down to the main tower
and then back up. So when she was told to report to room 1455, it meant a
half-mile walk, an elevator ride, and another half-mile walk. By the time she
reached the briefing room she was ready to kill the next architectural wizard
she came across.

She quickly forgot that when
she stepped into the room and saw AD Flood waiting there for her. “It’s about
goddamn time,” he said, throwing a small paperback book on the conference table:
Joy’s casebook. “I want an update. Right now.”

Joy didn’t hesitate. She wasn’t
sure how the geas—or
geases
,
plural—was going to interact with the casebook’s magic, but she had put Flood
off for two days already. She laid her palm on the book.

There was the immediate,
familiar sensation of being folded into the book, plunging in—but then there
was a jerking sensation, as if she’d reached the end of a bungee cord. She
hung, suspended, over a dim intelligence hungry for data, but there was a net
between them, filtering each item that it gave up—the geas. She plunged again,
like a dream of falling before sleep, and then hung again, and then fell. She
lost count of how many times this was repeated, of the slow negotiations
between magics. And then she was on her feet beside the conference table,
sweating, her heart pounding, her legs about to give
way underneath her. This was not the usual restful experience of debriefing;
this was the exhaustion of being caught between energies.

She dropped into the nearest
chair and slid the book toward Flood.

“Getting tired, Agent?” He
wasn’t even looking at her. The book was now a slim hardback, and he flipped
back to the index. “Did the woman give you a name?”

“She just referred to herself
as the Emissary,” Joy said.

“What’s this italicized—” Flood
flipped through the pages. “There’s a sketch here,” he said after a pause. He
held the book out to her. The verso page held a fine-penciled likeness of the
Emissary.

“That’s her,” said Joy.

“So you
saw
her.”

“She…it was like she took hold
of my perception. She
wanted
me to
see her. She knew…she knew I wouldn’t, without…whatever she did.”

“So you’re fixed now?”

She ignored that. “I assume you
already spoke to my security detail.”

“She told me about the
bodyguard. Would you rather talk about how you let them walk away?”

“I was in shock. And frankly, I
was pretty sure I couldn’t have stopped her if I’d tried. Did you miss the part
where she was tinkering with my brain?”

“I heard the part about her
making your brain work like it should. Tell me what happened after Agent Brooks
made contact.”

“Can we discuss Agent Brooks
for a moment? I have…not reservations, exactly, but questions.” Joy felt bad for
bringing it up, but the fact was that she wasn’t sure she felt safe having a
girl half her size protecting her.

“Agent Brooks’s job performance
is not in question here. She’s already foiled two attempts on your life.”

All the weight in Joy’s upper
body dropped into her stomach. She couldn’t speak.

“Tell me what steps you took to
attempt to apprehend this Emissary,” Flood said, as if he hadn’t just told her
that someone was determined to see her dead.

“Uh…I immediately placed a call
via crystal to this office and had Agent Brooks call Chicago PD. Unfortunately
we were unable to maintain visual contact; Agent Brooks saw them take the
staircase down toward street level, but we never saw them emerge. I considered
pulling the emergency brake, but that would have just left us stranded on the
tracks.”

“Where do you think they went?”

Joy shook her head. “I don’t
know. But I think they came from somewhere else.”

She was a little surprised that
the information slipped past the geas, but there it was.

“Somewhere
else?”

“Sir, I’m beginning to suspect
that we’re dealing with extradimensional adversaries
here. It would explain how it is that we can’t trace Carla Drake, and it could
also explain how it is that we can’t backtrace our Larch-panther.”

Flood snorted. “And what
evidence do you have to back up this fantastical theory?”

“None as of
yet. It’s just a hunch.”

“I am supremely uninterested in
your hunches.” He sat down. “Get comfortable, because we’re going to go over
this casebook in detail. I don’t care if it takes us the rest of the day.”

Joy didn’t make it back to her
rental in Gooseberry Bluff until it was nearly dark. It was the breezy tail end
of a warm day. Joy had spent most of her life in the south, and her six months
at the FBMA Academy in upstate New York had been during the summer. She had a
feeling that when the weather turned cold here, it would do so abruptly and
irreversibly; part of her was OK with Flood wanting to pull her out of Minnesota
before that happened.

On the other hand, maybe she
should just take herself out of here on her own. She’d been compromised twice
over, thanks to Philip Fitzgerald. She was withholding information from her
superiors, not by choice, but knowingly. The first was grounds for removing her
from the case; the second might be grounds for dismissal. And yet she felt like
she was close to finding something much larger and more dangerous than she’d
been sent to investigate; the fact that someone was still trying to kill her—and
that the Emissary was trying to turn her— would seem to reinforce that
conviction. Although Agent Brooks’s identification suggested that the Emissary
was simultaneously trying to turn her
and
kill her.

There were four large file
boxes on her porch, with an envelope taped to the lid of one. The note inside read “Carla Drake’s papers. Edith said you
requested them last week. Sorry for the delay.” It was signed by Philip
Fitzgerald.

“Don’t think this makes us
even,” she muttered at the boxes, and hauled them inside.

She took a shower, put on some
sweats, ordered a pizza, and settled in to look through Carla Drake’s papers.
There were copies of old exams, reams of notes on her Agrippa biography, and
numerous drafts of lectures and papers. Joy skimmed through most of this,
pausing occasionally to read something that caught her eye, until she realized
it was after eleven o’clock and she’d only just finished looking through the
first box.

The second box was mostly
journals and materials from various academic conferences, but near the bottom
she found a manila folder labeled
WRONG
MAN
. It was empty, but it fell open in such a way that suggested it had
once been swollen with material. There were notes scribbled on the inside cover:

- “Great Man” theory - Carlyle

- Multiverse theory - James

- Boleskine - Victoria - Cefalù

- A Domesticated Beast?

- Can Larch be trusted??

Larch, again.
Joy needed to get in to question the librarian, somewhere between teaching and
looking through stacks of papers for tiny clues. If Carla Drake had gone to
Larch for help, it might explain a lot of things—once Joy answered a few dozen
more questions first.

Joy was familiar with the Great
Man theory: it was the idea that history was driven by those who did great
deeds, rather than by the forces that shaped those people and their times. It
was a theory from the nineteenth century, little discussed now. Perhaps the
Wrong Man idea was Drake’s response to this? The meaning of “multiverse theory”
seemed obvious. Boleskine was a former home of Aleister Crowley—perhaps
Victoria and Cefalù were as well? Crowley’s nickname was the Beast. What was
Drake pointing toward? Domesticated in what respect?

Joy scoured the rest of the
boxes for any more mentions of Crowley or the Wrong Man, but she didn’t come up
with anything more. She would look again when she wasn’t exhausted.

She trudged to her bed and lay
down, but her mind kept spinning. What could Carla Drake have found that could
be so dangerous that the Emissary and the rest of order would want to make her
disappear? And what did it have to do with Aleister Crowley? She couldn’t stop
turning the notes over in her head, no matter how much she tried to meditate herself to sleep.

Insomnia,
again. The odd hours she kept, combined with the endless questions
raised by her job, were probably the worst things imaginable for her sleep
schedule. The anchovies on the pizza she’d just eaten probably weren’t helping
either.

She groaned and turned on her
bedside lamp, hissing at the sudden light. She shaded her eyes and blinked a
dozen or so times. She needed to think about something that wasn’t about the
case—she wished that she had bought a TV, or at least taken a novel out of the
library before it had become a crime scene.

The storybook that the Emissary
had sent her was on the kitchen table; she got up to bring it back to bed and
lay paging through it. The illustrations made it look like a kids’ book, but
the stories seemed more complex than that, and more adult.

One of them was titled “How
Otter Lost His Head and Got it Back Again,” and it
went like this:

Otter was having trouble
sleeping. He went out to hunt every morning, he came back home at the end of
the day, but he tossed and turned all night. He kept his wife awake too, until
finally she kicked him out of her bed.

One day Otter was coming home
from the hunt late at night, and he passed Turkey. Like all of his kind, Turkey
slept with his head under his wing, but all Otter saw was his friend Turkey
without his head.

“Hello there, Turkey,” said
Otter.

“Hello, Otter,” Turkey answered
without raising his head.

“Pardon me, Turkey, but didn’t
you used to have a head?”

“Of course I have a head,” said
Turkey.

“Then where is it?”

“It’s
right here,” Turkey said, with his head still tucked under his wing.

Otter looked all around where
Turkey was perched, but he didn’t find his friend’s head. But Turkey was
ignoring him and trying to sleep, so Otter went home.

“I think I know how to get a
good night’s sleep,” Otter told his wife. “My friend Turkey just takes his head
right off when he goes to sleep. It’s much more restful that way, and you don’t
even need a pillow!” And before his wife could tell him what a bad idea it was,
he took an ax and cut his own head clean off.

Instead of being restful, Otter
found having his head cut off so painful that he couldn’t relax at all. He
asked his wife to place his head back on his body, but she couldn’t get it to
stay. She made Otter spend the night in the cellar, and in the morning he
walked over to his sister Beaver’s house with his head tucked under his arm.
Otter asked Beaver if she could help him keep his head on. Beaver
tsked
at Otter, but then she fashioned a
collar out of bark and sealed it around his neck so that his head would stay
on.

Otter thanked Beaver for her
help, but he didn’t like the collar. It was tight, and it itched, and every
time he saw it he was reminded of how foolish he had been. So Otter went to
some of his friends. He asked Raven for a rib, which he fashioned into a
needle. He asked Rabbit for one of his long whiskers, which he made into
thread. With these things Otter’s wife sewed his head securely back on his
shoulders.

Otter brought the bark collar
back to his sister, Beaver, but Beaver would not accept the return of her gift.
She dammed up the river where Otter lived and hunted, so that it stopped
flowing, and she sent Ant to drive Otter and his wife out of their home. Bee
chased Raven from the skies, and Wolf killed Rabbit. Beaver moved on to another
river, and another, driving Otter and his friends ahead of her, until there was
no place left on Earth for them to hide.

The story ended there. The
first half reminded Joy of a story she had heard as a child—it was about a rabbit
instead of an otter, and it stopped with him cutting
off his head. She supposed that it was a sort of a joke about how sometimes tricksters
outsmarted even themselves. But the rest of the tale was unfamiliar, and the
ending was troubling. It was probably overthinking to wonder why Beaver was so
angry—folktales and myths just worked like that, sometimes. But Raven and
Rabbit were also trickster animals, and bees and ants and beavers,
it seemed to Joy, were creatures of order. There was no chance that this was
accidental, with the book having come from the Emissary. But who the hell was
Otter? Was it supposed to be Joy?