Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (25 page)

“Couch,” said Rosemary. “Remember what I said about
the ashram? He’s taken over the guest room for that.”

“Is he still in there?”

Rosemary just shook her head and swigged the rest of
her beer…then Joy’s. “Man’s going to turn me into an alcoholic,” she said.

Night boating was not something Ingrid had much experience
in, so she took it very slow. The sky had cleared from the rain showers of the
day, but there was only a waxing crescent moon above; the stars did little to
illuminate the rough water. She’d bought a silent propulsion charm from a
specialty fishing store in Hudson—along with the canoe—but she had cast it at
its lowest intensity, ready to refocus it if she saw the lights of a patrol
boat.

She had placed the first column, a plastic pillar
filled with Earth, on her rented property already. Ingrid’s preferred method
was to use the controlling/generative/destructive Taoist conception of the
pentagram, starting with whatever element was most directly opposed to the
creature she was summoning. So Earth absorbed Water, a pillar of which she had
hidden on the public beach on the north side of Gooseberry Bluff. Water doused
Fire, which she had just concealed near a private dock on the Wisconsin side of
the river in a military-grade steel pillar. It contained a kerosene mix that
would burn hot and be nearly impossible to douse before her work was done. Fire
melted Metal, which was the heavy lead pillar she had planted in a copse of
spruce trees at the southeastern edge of campus earlier that afternoon. It was
a slight breach of ceremonial procedure to do these things out of order, but in
practice it wouldn’t matter. She wasn’t going to make two separate trips out in
the canoe.

The final pillar was Wood (Metal split Wood, Wood broke
Earth), which she was about to set up in the river shallows on the Wisconsin
side, half a mile or so ahead of her. The generative/destructive cycles played
out in either direction on the outer circle of the pentagram and helped to
balance the summoning energies. But the order of the pentagram—the order the
minor demon would activate them in tomorrow night—was what mattered most.
Prince Stolas was identified with Air, an element that didn’t fit into the
Taoist cycle, but in Ingrid’s experience Water and Earth both helped to
restrain the spirits of Air. The conjuration commenced with Earth and would
land Stolas in a body of running Water; Ingrid wasn’t worried about where
things would go from there.

Something called out across the water, some
chattering thing, perhaps a muskrat. As the call faded Ingrid became aware of
the sounds she had tuned out—the slow susurration of the river, the somnolent orchestra
of the crickets and other insect noisemakers, the faint noises of traffic from
the I-94 bridge to the south.

Then something else called out, a loud, emphatic
series of hoots. Ingrid’s heart drummed against her ribs. She was not a great
believer in omens, but here she was, about to summon a terrifying owl-demon,
and one of its animal kingdom cousins was calling out—a warning?

She was nearly to the spot. She suspended the
propulsion charm and stepped out into the shallows; the water was cold, but it
gave her focus.

One more pillar to place.

One more step complete.

One more day.

Joy slept hard. Sometimes sleep was like that, for her;
she went down and came up with no memory of dreams, her eyes bleary, her body
aching. She had a vague memory of someone, undoubtedly Lawrence, tiptoeing past
her in the middle of the night, watching her as if she were an alarm about to
go off. She had thought about saying something, but then she was asleep again,
and he was gone.

When she opened her eyes again it was bright in the
room, and Zen was shaking her. “Auntie Joy, get up! Daddy’s making pancakes!”

“They’re crêpes,” Lawrence called from the other
room.

“Daddy, that’s gross! Say pancakes.” Zen peered into
Joy’s face. “Do you want some juice?”

“Coffee.” Zen jumped; Joy’s voice was a feral rasp.
“I’ll get it.” She sat up on the couch, feeling rusty and mechanical. “Sit by
me, Zen-Zen.”

Zen sat next to Joy and threw her arms around her.
Joy’s chest did that thing it did whenever her niece let her know that she
loved her: something inside her expanded so much that it ached and felt like it
couldn’t possibly fit inside her. This smart, adorable, funny, fierce little
girl—she had to keep her safe any way she could. The world the Emissary had
described would be safe for Zen and her brother, for Rosemary. But she thought
she knew what Trevor would think of it.

Joy hugged Zen, kissed the top of her curls, and
hoisted her up over her shoulder to carry her into the kitchen; Zen shrieked
and laughed. Lawrence smiled at them but looked quickly away. He was a shy man
who occasionally covered it by being blustery and loud. This morning he wasn’t
bothering, and Joy appreciated it.

“Is there coffee?” She set Zen down; the girl was
getting too large for such favorite-aunt shenanigans.

“Already poured you a cup,” he said.

“Thank you, Lawrence.” Joy warmed her hands on the
cup. “I’m surprised the baby isn’t up yet.”

“He was up three hours ago,” said Lawrence. “He’s
already down for his midmorning nap. Rosemary went back to bed too.”

“Oh.” Joy was amazed that she had slept through all
of that. Maybe she’d have made a good parent after all. Or, actually, a
terrible one.

She sat down next to Zen. “How are you?”

“Daddy’s busy,” said Zen. Her tone was sad and
resigned.

To Lawrence’s credit, Joy saw the shock of dark blue
flash over his predominantly violet aura. He didn’t want to lose his daughter.

“I’m busy today,” Lawrence said. “But I’m taking
tomorrow afternoon off to hang out with my best girl. How would you like to go
to the zoo?”

“Yay!” Zen started listing off the animals she would
see at the zoo. Joy quizzed her on some of them. The seven-year-old knew far
more about animals than her aunt did; Joy wondered if the little girl would
remember these facts in five or ten years.

“Are there black panthers at the zoo?” Joy asked,
thinking of Frederick Larch.

“Black panthers are just leopards, really,” said Zen.
“Or jaguars.” She pronounced this last “jag-yars.” “Their spots are just all on
top of each other. They’re like one big spot! Mostly they live in zoos, because
the zoo people like them, I guess. They breed them.” She made a face at the
concept of breeding, then stuffed a forkful of crêpes and syrup into her mouth.

“Really.” Joy sipped her coffee and had some crêpe
herself. The bureau’s shape-shifting experts seemed convinced that Larch had
been born a panther; perhaps he had been born in captivity? She needed to
interrogate him at some point, as soon as gods stopped dropping in to chat with
her and hidden, secret manuscripts stopped coming to light.

After Lawrence took Zen off to school, Joy sat down
with Carla Drake’s manuscript. The introduction was so long and confusing that
Joy ended up skipping over most of it—it read mostly as a sort of biography of
the author, for reasons that weren’t clear to Joy. She saw that it mentioned
Carla’s mother, Amanda, as a woman of “vague yet unattained ambition” and
someone “more suited to running a sailing club than raising a child.” She would
have to go back and read it more carefully when there was time.

For the moment, she focused on the main argument of
the book, which seemed to be that Crowley’s death hoax—perpetrated in 1930 with
the help of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa—had not been a hoax at all. That
Crowley had, in fact, been replaced by another version of himself. This had
been done, Drake argued, because a mysterious group that she referred to as
“the Order” had attempted to recruit Crowley to their cause and had failed. She
cited obscure and confusing evidence that indicated—to her, at least—that
Crowley had been contacted by the Order three times: once in 1900 at his
estate, Boleskine House on Loch Ness; again in 1910 at his Victoria Street flat
in London; and finally at the so-called Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily, in 1920.

The
replacement Crowley, Drake argued, was not the trickster and seeker after
divine truth that the first had been. He had moved away from his experiments
with sex magic, put aside his former goal of personal encounters with the
divine, and turned his energies toward rehabilitating his image. This was all
just history to Joy, but Drake argued that the Crowley who became a vocal
critic of the Third Reich and went on to work for the United States war effort
was some sort of historical aberration. She cited a book that she claimed had
come to her from another reality, one that described a Crowley who had never
turned his powers to profit or volunteered to help the Allied cause. Drake even
went so far as to claim that Crowley should have died in 1947, not 1955 as he
in fact had. And the last few chapters presented evidence that the FBMA, the
agency Crowley had founded, was engaged in all sorts of suppressive and
oppressive behavior, a list that would make conspiracy theorists roll their
eyes and sigh.

When
Joy finished skimming the manuscript she was more confused than ever. The Order
might well be what the members of the Thirteenth Rib were talking about when
they discussed order and chaos—but replacing people with their own doubles?
What kind of a long game was order playing? Drake’s evidence for her claims was
shaky at best, considering it rested in large part on a book that none of her
readers would be able to get their hands on. Joy put the book back together and
set her head down, considering.

“
A Domesticated Beast: How Aleister Crowley
Became Uncorrupted and Founded the Most Dangerous Agency on Earth, the Federal
Bureau of Magical Affairs
,” Rosemary read. “My goodness, what a mouthful.”
She sat down across from Joy, baby Kenshō already happily sucking
away at her breast. “Is that what you’re not sure you should give to your
boss?”

“Yes.”

“You feeling any better today? Figured out which way
is up?”

“Not really. I guess whichever direction keeps my
head above water.” As soon as she said it, Joy realized it was true. There was
plenty about the manuscript that wasn’t clear to her, but it did seem to point
to a reason that order might want Carla Drake out of the way. She had that much
of her answer, and if she wanted to find any more she had to keep working. To
keep working, she had to keep Flood happy.

“I need to call my boss,” she said, but before she
could her crystal chimed. “This is Joy,” she said as she grasped it.

“Agent Wilkins, this is Yves Deschamp. We need your
help.”

“You do?”

“Would it be possible for you to come by the
McMonigal Arms this evening? Around six o’clock?”

“Can you tell me what’s going on?”

“I’d prefer to do that in person,” said Yves.

“All right.” Joy wasn’t happy about being summoned
like this, but she was convinced that the Thirteenth Rib knew more than she had
been told. Any opportunity to get more information from them was a good one.

“Good,” said Yves. “We will look to your arrival this
evening, then.”

“Was that him?” Rosemary asked after Joy disconnected.

“My boss? No. Just another on a long list of people
who make unreasonable demands of me.” Joy stood. “I need to get going. Where
are my clothes?”

“On the counter in the bathroom. Take a shower
first.”

“No time,” said Joy. “When this case is over, I’ll come
and spend a weekend.”

“Who says you’re invited?” Rosemary grinned and
turned her head up for a kiss. “I’d hug you, but his majesty here would scream
bloody murder if I took the nipple out of his mouth.”

“Good-bye, little Kenshō,” said Joy, shaking the
baby’s tiny hand. “Are you going to call him Ken?”

“I’m not going to call him ‘Awakening,’” said
Rosemary. “Oh, Joy, my kids are going to hate me for their names in ten years,
aren’t they?”

“Hey, Mom and Dad named
me
after an ideal state of being, and I turned out fabulous. So don’t
knock it.”

Joy packed the manuscript in her bag, dressed in two
minutes flat, and was out the door before Kenshō finished his meal. It was
a humid Atlanta day; all the rain of the night before seemed to hover in the
air. On her way to the Globe Gate office she put in a call to Flood.

“What is it, Wilkins?”

“I found something that you need to see. I’m in a
hurry; can I send it to your office?”

“What is it?”

“It’s what Carla Drake was working on when she
disappeared.”

Flood sighed. “All right. Get it to me today and I’ll
call you when I’ve had a chance to look at it. But don’t get your hopes up. I’m
still pulling you out of there on Monday.”

Joy gritted her teeth. “Yes, sir.”

The Globe Gate office was located in a strip mall
near the 285 on-ramp. As Joy approached it she realized that there was a
Kinko’s next door to it. She went in and asked how long it would take them to
make a duplicate of Carla Drake’s manuscript. The long-haired young man at the
counter sized up the stack of paper and shrugged. Behind him, the other
duplicators spun pages through the air, dots of ink marching across blank
paper, tiny blades punching holes in sheets as they settled into their
bindings. The work was mesmerizing, but the workers looked bored.

“Gimme ten minutes,” said the duplicator. “You want
it laminated? Bound?”

“Just like it is.”

“Run you about thirty bucks. I’ll give you the exact
total when it’s done.”

Joy took a seat in the waiting area. What she was
doing was illegal, but she thought she had a way to keep Flood from finding out
about it. Which didn’t mean that she wasn’t shaking like a leaf at the thought
that he might. The geases were not her fault—well, on second thought Flood
would think that they were, that she hadn’t been careful enough. Maybe he was
even right. But she hadn’t
chosen
to
withhold the information the geases were censoring. Right now she was making a
choice to defy Flood’s orders, bureau policy, and federal law. Sweat broke out
on her forehead at the thought. This was stupid. She should take back the
manuscript, walk into Flood’s office, hand it over, and tell him she’d been
compromised. He’d pull her out, he’d discipline her…but she didn’t know what
would happen after that, and she didn’t dare trust him to do the right thing. No.
The night at her sister’s hadn’t brought clarity, exactly, but it had been a
good reminder that right and wrong weren’t found in the bureau handbook.