Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (28 page)

“You’re being sarcastic.”

“I’m being fucking scared! You
saw what happened in the library. And those were
cats
. That thing couldn’t even fill up on cats. That thing could
snack on a train full of honey-roasted cats, have a blue whale fillet, and wash
it down with a water tower.”

“Yes, and if it decides to come
this way, a lot of people are going to die. I may be able to prevent that. But
I’m going to need help.”

Zelda ran a hand through her
hair, which was still wet and stiff from being set on fire and put out with
beer. “I’m leaving, Hector.”

“Zelda—”

“I can’t help you!” She was
furious; she clenched her hands into fists so she wouldn’t pick up anything and
throw it. “I can’t help anyone, Hector! Even if I had the perfect potion for an
owl-demon, it would only make things worse! My curse is real, and you can’t
charm it away with your sweet talk and your homemade tortillas—”

“Tamales.”

“I don’t care! Stop pushing me.
You’re only making things worse.” She stomped to his apartment door, yanked it
open, and slammed it behind her. Then she stood there in the hall, trying to
catch her breath. She didn’t want to be in the same space as Hector anymore,
but going outside right now was probably a bad idea.

The door opened a couple of
seconds later. “Zelda,” Hector said.

“I can’t help you.” She didn’t
have the energy to shout about it anymore, but she said it again, quietly. “I
can’t help you.”

“I understand. I wasn’t—I
didn’t mean to push. I do understand about the curse. I…”

He was silent for long enough
that Zelda looked at him. “What?”

“I didn’t believe you at first.
Not really. I thought you were exaggerating. That was unfair of me.”

“You thought I was just a silly
girl with a persecution complex.”

“No. I mean, I understand it
probably feels that way, and that’s my fault. It’s fair to say I didn’t take it
seriously enough, though, and that was shitty of me.”

“Yes. It was.”

“Just now, though, when I said
I needed help, I wasn’t talking about you.”

“Oh.” Stupidly, Zelda’s feelings
were hurt.

“I’d like it if you came with
me, though.” He leaned against the wall opposite her, his hands in his pockets.
“Don’t help me. Yell at me. Keep trying to talk me out of doing what I’m doing.
I would prefer you didn’t assault me, but otherwise, hinder me in any way you
can.”

“Hector, you’re still thinking
of the curse as a logic problem, as something that can be solved or outsmarted.
It’s not. It’s a vengeful, evil bitch, and it hates me, and you can bet it
hates you too, because even though you say stupid things all the damn time I
can’t help the fact that I like you. Which means that it’s
going to hurt you, and it’s going to be my fault.”

“Not if you don’t help me. Come
on. Come with me. Please.”

Zelda couldn’t bring herself to
say no.

The woman who had sold Ingrid
her arrows lived in Arizona. She was a weather wizard of sorts, but instead of
predicting temperatures and precipitation she went out after lightning storms,
driving an ancient, elemental-powered Jeep through the desert, seeking
fulgurites.

Fulgurites were sometimes known
as petrified lightning; they were glass tubes formed when a bolt from the sky
superheated sand, silica, or soil. They were fragile and irregular in shape,
but Ingrid’s dealer was a patient and skilled woman. She bonded the fulgurites
with silver and strengthened them with repeated treatments of fire and high
voltage. The process she used to balance the shafts so that they would fly
true—she made spears and harpoons as well—was a secret, and the reason that
Ingrid had paid an exorbitant price for the three arrows she had purchased.

The first arrow flew, jagged
but true, into one of the thirteen tines of Stolas’s crown. The charge of
living lightning inside the arrow released on impact; it flashed white and
purple, electric light and gem refraction, psilocybin and phosphenes. The crown
tumbled back off the owl’s head and plummeted, rolling through midair into the
waters of the St. Croix.

“I warned you,” Ingrid said. “I
can’t imagine how you put that on your head in the first place. It’s going to
be a real pain to get it back on. If you can find it, that is.”

Stolas roared. The summoning
circle trembled, shaking Ingrid in turn, but she kept her feet.

“No tantrums.” She picked up a
second arrow and nocked it. “The next one goes in your heart.”

I
HAVE NO HEART, FOOL
.

“Oh, you don’t mean that,” said
Ingrid. God, was she flirting with this thing? She hadn’t felt this alive in
years. Maybe she hadn’t been depressed at all; maybe she simply missed the
adrenaline of risking her life and her soul. “What you mean,” she went on, “is
that you’ve hidden your heart somewhere. But if I take out a leg and a wing,
you won’t be able to get to it before I find it. And I will.”

I
WARNED YOU
.

“Yeah, we both warned each
other. So far I’m the only one who’s pulled the trigger, so to speak. You’re
stalling to give your Heartstopper pals time to get set up. I’m giving you five
seconds. Five.”

Y
OU
HAVE NO
—

“Four.”

—
IDEA
THE
—

“Three.”

—
PLANS
YOU
—

“Two.”

—
ARE
MEDDLING
—

“One.”

—I
NGWIERSEN
,
DON’T BE
—

“A fool?”
Ingrid shot him in the eye.

Ken watched from the
third-floor window of the McMonigal Arms while Joy Wilkins and Lutrineas drove
from the building and toward the river. It was stupid, but when Lutrineas had
changed his shape, Ken had immediately missed Philip more. He wasn’t any more
gone than he had been before, but being able to see him—or someone who looked
exactly like him—had helped Ken pretend that he wasn’t as afraid for him.

When Abel’s truck disappeared beneath
the trees three blocks away, he turned back to the rest of the group. Bebe was
paging through demonology books while Abel waved a jade amulet above an
enchanted map of the town. Yves and Simone had gone downstairs to fetch
something for everyone to eat. Cyril Lanfair sat across the table from Ken, his
hands clasped, trying to look calm.

If Ken was honest, he had
always disliked Cyril. He was fastidious to a fault and overly invested in his
stupid cats. He was also sexless in a way that Ken found impossible to relate
to. Cyril and Bebe had been close for decades—Bebe was scornful to everyone,
but even more so to the people she loved—but so far as Ken could determine they
had never even kissed. Maybe Cyril preferred men; maybe he was horribly
repressed; maybe he was asexual. It was embarrassing, the amount of time Ken
had spent trying to figure Cyril out, and yet he had never bothered to ask
because there was always the possibility that Cyril might explain himself, and
then Ken would become trapped as some sort of confidant for a man he could
barely bring himself to be polite to.

“No potions for owl-demons on
the stove downstairs?” Ken said finally.

Cyril just pursed his lips at
him.

“Come on, Cyril. Don’t tell me
you’ve never lain in bed agonizing over the idea that one of your babies might
be carried off by a great horned owl. I know you’re the one who was sabotaging
Simone’s bird feeders out back.”

“The squirrels were the only
things eating out of them,” Cyril said.

“Oh, my goodness, that’s
practically a confession!”

“Quit badgering him, Ken,” said
Bebe. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“No, I’m just supposed to sit
here and wait until I’m attacked again, and my heart stops, and the town’s
defenses fail completely, and an army of orderly Cyril clones marches across
and tattoos serial numbers on all of us.”

Abel’s amulet hovered and
locked into place above a spot near the river. “Ken,” Abel said, “shut up.” He
grasped his crystal and said, “Joy Wilkins…Joy, this is Abel. I have something
for you. Ingrid’s on the point, just across the harbor from the Mandrake. There
are some rentals out there.” He gave her an address and paused. “Yes, one
moment. Bebe, do you have anything for Agent Wilkins?”

“Not yet,” said Bebe. “The
sooner there is anything resembling quiet in this place, the sooner I can
help.”

“We’ll call you back,” said
Abel, and let go of the crystal. “I’ll never understand why no one in this
group is capable of just saying yes or no,” he said to the room at large.

“You know what I can’t understand?”
Ken said. “You lent that girl your truck like it was nothing. Your baby-blue classic that you won’t even give any of us a ride in. Just
like that. Do you have a crush on our Agent Wilkins, Abel?”

“Ken,
I know you’re worried, but maybe you could do something useful instead of
needling everyone.”

Trust Abel to see right through
him. “Apparently my usefulness is limited at the moment,” Ken said.

“I’m going to go see what the
news is saying about this,” said Cyril. “Does anyone need anything?”

“Yes or no,” said Ken, and was
pleased with Cyril when he ignored him and left. He felt so pleased that he
resolved to do something.

“I don’t like this plan,” he
said. “I’m not going to sit here and wait for them to attack me. I’m going to
go on the offensive.”

“So long as you’re sticking to
your strengths,” Bebe said.

“We really do need some new
blood in this group,” said Ken. “Even the jokes are old.”

He walked to the other wing of
the library. The entire place was a shared space, in theory, but Ken spent less
time here than the members who lived in the Arms, and he felt slightly less at
home. Philip had staked out the globe table as his home, mapping the other
Earths he had visited searching for the enemy. Simone liked to work near the
door, because Simone was Simone and liked to keep track of people, to make sure
they were happy and fed. Abel and Bebe and Yves could work for hours at the
main table in a companionable silence.

Cyril had never seemed
comfortable in the library. It was too cluttered and crowded, and cats had
never been allowed. After what had happened at the school, Ken thought that
decision even more sensible. He himself, when he couldn’t avoid it, read and
worked in the leather chairs at the back of the south side of the space. The
truth was he often napped there until Philip was ready to leave.

Now he settled onto the leather
ottoman, slipping off his shoes and tucking his legs underneath him to sit
cross-legged. He slowed his breathing, pushed Philip and Lutrineas and Cyril
and Prince Stolas out of his mind.

Gather.

Once engaged, a magical duel
never ended unless one opponent disengaged. The funiculus was just a thought
away, a slender connection between Ken and the still-nameless, still-faceless
opponent at the other end. Ken shut his eyes and visualized himself traveling
along that thread.

Focus.

Attacks in a long-distance
duel—in any duel other than a show duel—were always sudden, because it was so
difficult to sneak up on an opponent to whom you were always connected. You
couldn’t simply spy. You had to distract first, and the best way to do that was
with pain.

Execute.

Ken was no sadist, but there
was satisfaction in striking back at someone who had caused you pain. He
preferred to go after the hands. The boy he had lived with in New Orleans had been
a medical student, a surgical intern; he had pointed out to Ken that the hands
had an enormous amount of nerves in a relatively small area. But to really hurt
someone that way you needed to have a pretty good idea of where those nerves were,
so Ken had borrowed the surgical intern’s textbooks. Out on the circuit, they
considered this tactic less than sporting, but Ken had another word for it:
effective.

He could feel the agony in his
opponent. They had been grasping something, and now they couldn’t let go of it.
They were distracted enough that Ken was able to get a mental picture through
the agony: an office, much like Philip’s office, but the yellow-and-blue color
scheme was reversed. It might actually
be
Philip’s office.

Ken tried to go for his opponent’s
neck, to goad them into turning their head so he could see more of the room, or
possibly the view out the window. But something was impeding his focus; a
discomfort, a distant pain. Ken’s eyes shot open, and he reached for the cloth
that was wound tightly around his neck.

Someone was trying to strangle
him.

Joy called Flood directly on
her crystal three times before he picked up. “Wilkins, I am in a meeting. This—”

“We’ve got a physical
manifestation of a major demon in the middle of the St. Croix River here, sir.
I thought you’d like to be informed.”

“What the—which one?”

“Prince Stolas. Sir, Stolas’s
demonic number is one-four-niner, which happens to
be—”

“The number of people killed in
the Minneapolis Heartstopper. I know those files as well as you do, Wilkins.
Why is it there?”

“Sir, someone left some crucial
information out of Ingrid Ingwiersen’s file. Her sister is recently deceased,
yes, but it’s not that simple. She was a victim of the Minneapolis
Heartstopper.”

“Oh, for the—so this is revenge?
That’s what you’re thinking?”

“I’m thinking Ingwiersen is the
person doing the summoning, yes. I may have an address for her current
location.” Joy repeated the address Abel had given her as she came to a stop at
the Stagecoach Trail intersection. Abel Bouchard’s truck smelled like rubber
and chocolate; Joy half expected that the glove compartment would turn out to
be filled with bicycle tires and Lindor truffles.