Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (31 page)

“Three,” said Piper. “There was a limo full of guys down by the river, just now. More clones. Like the guy on the train, you remember?”

“I remember,” said Joy. “You were down there too?”

“Protecting you is my job,” said Piper. “And you don’t make it easy, let me tell you. Not that I don’t appreciate the workout and everything.”

“But how did—did you follow me down there on foot?”

“Let me guess. I don’t look that fast?”

Joy stared at the girl.
Young woman
, she corrected herself. Piper was right, she wasn’t being fair to her. The back of Piper’s neck and her hairline shone with sweat.

“Did any of them hurt you?”

Piper made a face.

“No, listen,” said Joy. “This isn’t me doubting your abilities, this is me showing concern. I fought one of those guys in the desert.”

“I know,” Piper said. “No offense, but you got lucky. I do this for a living. Six guys who are a little too impressed with themselves aren’t much of a challenge when you know what you’re doing.” Piper took a left onto Virginia Avenue, part of an upscale subdivision at the southeast corner of town. “So I appreciate the concern, but they weren’t much trouble.”

“What did you do with them?”

“I punctured the tires, left them on the side of the road, and went after you. My priority is keeping you safe. I called Flood, but he was busy at the time.”

“Maybe we should have had you take on Stolas,” said Joy.

“I never fought an owl before.” Piper sounded thoughtful. “Leverage would have been a challenge. Might have been interesting.” She pulled up outside a very conventional-looking ranch-style house. “This is the address.”

It wasn’t until Joy got out of the car that she realized she wasn’t wearing her gun. “Dammit. You weren’t exaggerating just now about how badass you are, were you?”

“I was not,” said Piper.

“Good, because sometimes being undercover means that your bureau-issued firearm is in a locked drawer at home instead of in a holster under your blazer.”

Piper nodded. Her aura showed complete confidence. “I’ll go first.”

Joy rang the doorbell and knocked on the front door. “Federal agents,” she called out. She waited a few seconds, not expecting a response, and then tried the door handle. “It’s open,” she said.

“Could be booby-trapped,” said Piper. “Let me do it.”

Joy stood back, feeling foolish, while Piper crouched beside the door and flung it open. Nothing exploded. The door opened onto a foyer tiled in a reddish-brick color, with an uncarpeted staircase to one side. Piper went in first.

“Federal agents,” Joy called again as she stepped inside. She readied a simple wind spell, just in case.

“Hello?” The voice was faint.

“Do you need assistance?” Joy motioned toward the hallway, and the kitchen beyond, then followed Piper in that direction.

“Yes,” came the voice again. It didn’t sound fearful, just tired.

There was a door to the basement in the kitchen. Joy and Piper stood to either side of it, and Piper pulled it open. Joy peeked around the doorframe…and saw a pale woman about halfway down the stairs, wearing a robe and clinging to the railing. Her aura was silver, pulsing bright yellow: a nurturing person, currently very much afraid.

“The note said to call an ambulance,” said the woman. “I think…she may have underestimated how hard it would be for me to get to a phone.”

“Call them,” Joy said to Piper. She hurried down the stairs to the woman’s side and helped her climb the rest of the way. “You must be Selma,” said Joy.

“Have I really been dead?”

“I can’t answer that question,” said Joy. “You were
presumed
dead. The truth seems to be a bit more complicated.”

She helped Selma into a seat at the kitchen table. There was a note on the counter that read:

B
ANANA SMOOTHIES IN THE FRIDGE

P
UT THE CUP ON THE BLENDER AND HIT PURÉE FOR A FEW SECONDS

Joy followed the instructions. There was no reason to believe that Ingrid would have gone to all the trouble of bringing her sister back to life only to poison her once she was mobile. She found clean glasses above the sink and filled one for Selma.

“Paramedics on the way,” said Piper, coming in from the dining room.

“Thanks.” Joy sat down and waited for Selma to drink a bit of the smoothie. The recently dead woman was looking out the window at Ingrid’s backyard, unkempt but green in the twilight.

“It’s spring,” she said.

“Actually, it’s nearly fall,” said Joy. “It’s September 13th.”

Selma said something emphatic in what Joy could only assume was Danish. “How long?” Selma asked.

“Well, it must be nearly six months, if you were caught in the Minneapolis Heartstopper.”

Selma shook her head and smiled. “I don’t even know what that is,” she said. “Can you tell me where my sister is?”

“I was about to ask you that question,” said Joy. “Did she leave any more notes or anything?”

“Yes. Downstairs. No, wait.” Selma reached into the pocket of her robe and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “This is the only one that really has any information. I don’t know what to think of it. Maybe you can tell me.”

Joy read the note quickly, then folded it back up. “I think we’ll want to hold on to this, if you don’t mind. You can probably get it back after the investigation.”

“And just what are you investigating? My miraculous resurrection?”

Joy considered for a moment before realizing that she was free to tell someone the truth, more or less, for the first time in a while. “We believe that your sister forced a major demon to manifest in the middle of the St. Croix River—the same demon which we believe was animated by the attack in which you were apparently killed. What happened after that isn’t clear, except that the demon is now gone, and your sister is missing.”

Joy gave Selma a moment to consider this. Sirens faded in, came close, went silent. Joy exchanged a look with Piper, and the bodyguard went outside to meet the paramedics.

“The note said it might take her a while to get home,” said Selma. “It didn’t say she
wouldn’t
come home.”

“True.” To Joy, it had read very much like a suicide note, but Selma needed hope right now as much as anything.

“This smoothie is terrible,” said Selma. “She never could cook. Look at how fat that salamander is. She probably eats all of her meals out of her MagicWave.”

Joy knew it was a joke, but laughing didn’t seem appropriate, so she forced a smile instead.

“I think you should focus on the fact that you’re here,” she said. “Focus on getting strong. We’ll see if we can find your sister.”

Selma didn’t nod, but she also didn’t argue.

The paramedics came in. One of them checked Selma’s vitals while Joy spoke to the other. “It’s my belief that she’s been in a magical coma of a sort,” she said. “She’s very weak.”

If this was an unusual layman’s diagnosis, the paramedic gave no sign. “Probably malnourished. We’ll take good care of her.”

Joy watched them work for a moment. Selma waved, so Joy waved back, then made her way toward the front of the house just in time to meet AD Flood and Agent Gray coming inside.

Flood spoke to Agent Brooks first. “We found your limousine, but no assassins.”

Piper shrugged. “My orders are to stay with Wilkins, sir. I’m sorry I was unable to secure the suspects.”

Flood frowned but didn’t argue the point. “What did you find?” he asked Joy.

“We found Ingrid’s sister, alive and in…satisfactory condition,” she said. “She just woke up. She doesn’t seem to have any memory of anything over the past six months, including the attack.”

“Where is she?”

Joy was surprised at how protective she was feeling of the woman in the kitchen, whom she had just met. “The paramedics are with her,” she said. “She doesn’t know anything. She did find this note, though.”

Flood snatched the note away from her and read it. “Jesus Christ. The sister is a lunatic. Or was.”

“I think she was depressed. I also think she saved her sister’s life, possibly at the cost of her own. I’d say that’s foolhardy, sure, but not exactly lunatic behavior.”

Flood stepped closer to her. Joy held her ground.

“You really don’t like me, do you, Wilkins? If I said the sun was hot, you’d want to use it to cool your drinks. That’s fine. And if you want to admire a woman who put thousands of people at risk on the off chance that she could bring a family member back in the process, that’s your prerogative. Maybe it’s inconvenient for you to remember that we have summoning laws in this country. That the very rituals and materials she used to accomplish this little miracle have been banned.”

“Sir, I think she learned those rituals in our Special Forces.”

“Good point, Wilkins.” Flood’s tone was sarcastic. “Gray, tell my office to get DOD on the phone. They might want to charge Ingwiersen too.”

Gray gave Joy a bored look and didn’t make any calls.

Flood just stared at Joy for a minute. His breath smelled like tuna.

“I really wonder, Wilkins, if you’re even cut out for this job. What are you prepared to do to keep it? What are you prepared to do to guarantee the safety of the American people?”

“Whatever it takes, sir.” Joy knew it was the answer he wanted to hear; she was less sure whether it was the truth. She glanced at Gray, but his aura betrayed nothing.

Flood stopped one of the paramedics coming back down the hall. “What hospital are you taking her to?”

“Lakeview.”

“I want you and Gray to go with them,” Flood said to Joy as the paramedic continued toward the front door. “Zelda Akbulut is down there—she was a witness to what happened on that roof down there. Find out what she knows.”

“Sir, I’m not clear on what happened on the roof down there myself.”

“There was a Heartstopper apparatus set up on top of a restaurant—what’s it called?”

“The Mandrake,” said Gray.

“Right. The owner and Hector Ay went off the roof. The owner’s dead, and Hector Ay is in surgery. Akbulut and a waitress were the only witnesses. Talk to them both. And get some good answers, because you and I are going to have another long talk before you sleep tonight.”

Sitting in the waiting area of the ER at Lakeview Hospital, Ken and Simone watched as Joy Wilkins walked in with a couple of paramedics, a good-looking white man in a tracksuit, and a woman in a wheelchair who very much resembled Ingrid Ingwiersen. Joy made brief eye contact with Ken but otherwise ignored him as her group spoke to the duty nurse and were ushered into the examination rooms.

“That can’t have been Ingrid’s sister, can it?” asked Simone.

Ken shrugged. He could speak if he had to, but it hurt. He wondered if he was going to sound permanently gravelly now. His father had had a gravelly sort of voice, particularly when he was speaking Korean. Ken hadn’t thought about him in a long time.

“Are you sure you don’t want anything?” Simone asked. Ken shook his head and smiled at her. People who didn’t know Simone well thought of her as nurturing, even motherly. She might be those things, but mostly she was a doer. She hated to sit still, and doing things for other people was a way for her to keep busy.

“Don’t laugh at me,” she said. “This has been the worst week I can remember—the worst since Hilda died, certainly. I’m just sitting here trying to figure out what I feel worst about: Bebe, Ingrid, Larch, Carla Drake, Martin…or poor Philip.”

Ken knew that Simone and Martin Shil had been involved to some degree some time ago, but Simone had never given him any details. Their friendship was unbalanced in that respect; Ken told Simone everything, sometimes too much. Simone was a good listener, albeit an occasionally scandalized one, but she was not, by nature, a confider. Sometimes, when she and Yves were together, they would reminisce about their upbringing—they were second-generation members of the Thirteenth Rib, their parents having been magic-using bohemians who came to the hinterlands of Minnesota at Hilda Ruiz’s invitation. They had made their living as stage illusionists before they taught at Gooseberry Bluff, but their real power—at least that of their mother—was in transformation magic. Simone would tell stories about her parents’ outrageous behavior for hours, but she rarely had a complete sentence to offer about herself.

“You don’t think Bebe is right, do you? About it being hopeless?”

Ken shook his head. It wasn’t hopeless. It wasn’t exactly the fight he had signed up for, either, all those years ago. But Ken was stubborn enough to keep fighting, and he knew Simone was too. He reached over and squeezed her hand for support.

“You didn’t…” Simone trailed off, so Ken raised an eyebrow in question. “You and Lutrineas. You didn’t…?”

Ken couldn’t help laughing at her prim way of phrasing such a salacious question, and laughing made him cough. Simone hurriedly handed him a glass of water. He sipped it and then motioned for a pad and paper.

D
ID YOU JUST ASK ME IF
I
HAD SEX WITH A GOD
? he wrote.

Simone blushed and looked around the waiting area. “I was trying to be circumspect.”

I
HAVEN’T SLEPT WITH ANYONE BUT
P
HILIP IN YEARS
, he wrote.

“But did you know he wasn’t Philip right away?”

Ken nodded. “He told me,” he whispered.

“Oh.”

Ken had to fight back laughter at her expression.

“What?”

I
F YOU’RE THAT CURIOUS WHAT IT’S LIKE TO SLEEP WITH A GOD, WHY DON’T YOU PROPOSITION HIM
?

Simone made an exasperated noise in the back of her throat. “That’s the last thing on my mind,” she said. “A normal man is confusing enough. A trickster would be…well, I can’t even imagine.”

L
UTRINEAS DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A MAN, YOU KNOW.
H
E’S A SHAPECHANGER
.

“I am
aware
,” she said. Her tone indicated that she was about to lose patience with him, but he couldn’t resist getting in the last word:

Y
OU ASKED.

“Yes, and that’s always a mistake with you. I should know by now.” She turned her head away, then turned it back. “You know, I didn’t even get a chance to ask you—did they attack you again? Before Bebe did?”