Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (5 page)

“Well, you seem to be doing all right.”

“I am, thank you. And that reminds me. There may be another way to approach the president. I don’t know if you’ve met Professor Song yet, but he and Philip are very close. You might be able to work on him.”

“He teaches divination, right? Do you know if he’s in today?”

“I’ll find out. Be right back.”

Joy picked up the phone and reached for the campus directory. She needed to look into Ingrid Ingwiersen and Hector Ay, and she thought she had hit on just the right approach. Since she was teaching a survey course, she could approach a wide variety of professors under the guise of having them do a guest lecture.

Ingwiersen wasn’t in, so Joy left a message with the conjuration department. She managed to get a hold of Hector Ay, and after some back-and-forth about scheduling she arranged to meet him for a drink the following evening. She hung up just in time to see Andy return.

“Professor Song is in his office and says that if you can get there in the next three minutes — and promise not to waste more than five minutes of his time — he’ll see you.”

The divination department was on the south end of the fourth floor. Joy took the stairs at a run. The windows at each landing showed views of the front lawn of the college, green clouded with crows and students lying out in the sun. Joy had forgotten, in her seven years with the FBMA, what it was like to be around undergraduates. Most of them had no idea how good they had it, and part of her wanted to explain it to them. They still had so many possibilities open to them. On the other hand, Gooseberry Bluff was not the same as Kentucky State; the student body as a whole was older, for one thing, and some of them had already run out of those possibilities that were open to most undergrads.

Ken Song’s office was spartan in appearance, not at all what she would have expected from someone who had been teaching at the college for thirty years. There was a narrow bookshelf next to the window, neatly filled with hardcover books; an oval-framed mirror hung beside the desk, beside his diplomas; and a dozen or so framed photographs cascaded across two walls, most of them black and white. An expensive bicycle, not more than three years old, hung from a hook on the ceiling beside the door. It looked well taken care of, but there were more than a few scratches on the paint. The desk was not the standard gray steel cage that Joy had, but a simple table of blond, smooth wood, with only a computer terminal and a half dozen coffee cups on it.

Ken Song was taller than Joy had expected. His glasses had stylish rectangular frames and his long gray hair was swept back into a ponytail. He wore a baggy smock-like thing that might have concealed a paunch, but his legs were slim under his skinny jeans. Joy would not have taken him for the fifty-eight she knew he was from his faculty bio.

“Ms. Wilkins.” He took her hand in his right and covered it with his left, bowing slightly. “Please sit.” He shut the door behind her. “You are wondering whether I will be able to come and talk to your class this semester; the answer is yes. October 17
^th
would be ideal for me, if you haven’t already scheduled someone for that.” He stood behind his desk and sipped from a coffee cup. Joy realized that she was sitting in the only chair in the office.

“I’ll have to check to confirm, but that should work.”

“Good.” When he spoke, Joy noticed that his teeth had dark stains on them. She glanced at the nearest coffee cup and saw that there was liquid still in it and mold growing on top of it.

“I was also wondering—”

“Yes, I know. Philip is unreachable, unfortunately. He had to leave to deal with a crisis, but he should be back in a week or two.”

“Did he leave a phone number?”

“Mm. Where he’s gone to, the phone service is not very reliable. If there’s a—” Professor Song flinched and set his coffee cup down, sloshing liquid onto the desk. He leaned forward, one hand on the desk, the other on his chest.

“Professor Song?” Joy stood and guided him back to the chair. “Here, sit down. Do you need me to call an ambulance?”

“No, no, no.” He straightened up, moving away from the chair as though it were made of nails. “I simply…my doctor is after me to get more potassium in my diet, but I’m stubborn or forgetful or both. Listen, Ms. Wilkins—”

“You can call me Joy, if you don’t mind.”

“Joy.” He smiled. “Philip and I are close, and he did ask me to look after you, but I’m afraid that the…semester has already gotten away from me a bit. If you have a message for the president, I should be able to get it to him. If you have questions about how things work here, either Edith or Andy should be able to answer them.” He stepped past her and picked up his coffee cup. “Beyond that, I’m afraid that I’m a bit overextended already.” He took a long sip. His aura was a bright royal blue streaked with green; his eyes were bloodshot. “Do you understand?”

“I think so.” Joy was almost certain that he was saying that he knew why she was really here but that he couldn’t help her. She was also sure that he was drinking red wine; she could smell it, and his teeth were stained with it.

“Good. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lecture in about an hour, and I have to hunt down something to eat in the meantime. Good luck to you.”

That night Joy couldn’t sleep. She reread the textbook chapters she had assigned. She drank some calming tea. She meditated. She opened her window to listen to the night breezes. Nothing worked. She couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she had nothing: nothing on Carla Drake, nothing on the demon trafficking, nothing. Finally she got out of bed and sat down at her kitchen table to reread Carla Drake’s file.

Carla Drake was thirty-seven, born in Wales, and had read history at Cambridge. She met an American there, moved to Ohio with him, and divorced him three years later. She got a master’s in divination from CalWiz and a PhD in history from the University of Michigan. She was an expert in medieval magic and had been working on the definitive biography of Agrippa when she vanished.

One thing Joy didn’t understand was how Drake had ended up at Gooseberry Bluff. She was single, young, and driven, and yet as far as Joy could determine she hadn’t seriously pursued positions at any of the more prestigious four-year colleges. Gooseberry Bluff was well regarded, but it wasn’t a stepping-stone to Harvard. It was almost as if Drake had just run out of ambition. If there had been a man, Joy could understand. Or a woman, or a child, or even a dog. But every person they had interviewed insisted that she lived alone and had never dated anyone as far as they knew.

Then, on November 12 of the previous year, she had taught a Saturday morning seminar, driven out of the campus parking lot, and disappeared. Her car was found in Rochester three days later, but Carla Drake had not been seen since.

Joy sat back in her chair. The reason that the FBMA investigated cases like this was that people rarely just disappeared anymore. Modern divination meant that things like abductions were rare; most people were easy to find. Cases like the Jimmy Hoffa disappearance, which the FBMA had cracked in a matter of hours, had proved that. People who didn’t want to be found could cover their tracks and frustrate a diviner, but there would always be some sign that the tracks had been covered. And yet all attempts to divine Carla Drake’s location, alive or dead, had been unsuccessful. It wasn’t as if she had gone into hiding or someone was hiding her.

It was as if she had never existed.

Joy had been trained never to discount the impossible, so she ran with that for a bit. What if Carla Drake had never existed? What if the woman who had disappeared was not Carla Drake? Except that didn’t track. Carla Drake had parents, cousins, and an ex-husband. If someone had replaced her at some point along the line, the diviners would have found the remains of the real Carla Drake.

There were places a person could go, at least theoretically, where divination couldn’t track them: wizard-locked sanctuaries, other dimensions, that sort of thing. The kind of thing that people who weren’t practitioners liked to believe existed but probably didn’t.

Which brought her back to nothing. This case just went in circles. Joy sat in the kitchen until she realized she was falling asleep, put the file away, and went back to bed.

Joy woke up not knowing where she was. It was still dark, and it took her a minute to understand that she was in her own bed, and that her crystal was ringing. She squeezed it in her fist.

“Hello?” Her eyes were having trouble focusing on the clock. 4:17 AM. “Hello?” she said again, louder this time.

“Agent Wilkins? It’s going down right now. The blips picked up on it seven minutes ago.”

“What?”

“Wake up, Agent. This is Martin Shil. Someone is moving demons through the college right now.”

Joy shut her eyes tight and then opened them. “I’m on my way.”

It took her three minutes to put on jogging clothes. She put on her shoulder holster under her hoodie, locked the door behind her, and took off running toward the college. It was raining softly, and there was no one on the streets. She gathered speed as she ran, as her blood began to flow and the import of the call finally sank in. They were ahead of schedule; previous to this, the traffickers had only moved every six months or so. They had been sure that they would have until November, maybe December, to set up additional surveillance on the college and bring in more undercover agents. Instead it was just her, her Beretta, and no backup.

The squirrel trap hulked against the starless sky, lit at the arched entrance and by the exterior lights that ran along the outside of the second floor. Joy drew her weapon and kept to the trees as she approached, avoiding the lighted walk. Something fluttered amid the branches as she passed, and she looked up into the faintly glowing eyes of a crow.

There were no visible signs of activity in or out of the building and no cars in the lot. She needed to get inside.

When he had asked them to come onto campus to investigate, President Fitzgerald had given the FBMA three keys, but only one of them fit on a keychain. The other two were phrases that would get her through the outer and inner security shells. She whispered one of them as she approached the entrance, and shivered as she felt the energy field allow her through. She used the second phrase at the same moment that she slid the master key into the front door; she turned the key and slipped quietly inside.

Joy hurried down the nearest south-facing corridor, checking each door. The cool air inside the building chilled the rain and sweat on her skin, and she shivered as she moved on to the next corridor and then doubled back to the north side. No light, no sound. There could be someone in the shadows somewhere, but she couldn’t see auras without seeing the person first. She returned to the lobby and managed to make out the big clock amid the shadows: 4:33. She was running out of time.

She moved on to the second floor. She paused outside the library, thinking she had seen a light, but realized that it was just the eyes of a cat, darting between study tables. She searched the rest of the floor, then the third and fourth and the first again, but there was nothing. Whatever had happened, she had missed it.

She left the building shortly after five a.m., locking the door behind her. She holstered the Beretta and clenched her fists. What a mess. What a goddamned, shitty…a block away from the school she stopped and punched at the air, boxing with her inadequacies. She knew she would look like an idiot to anyone who happened to drive past on Stagecoach Trail, but she also knew that she would feel a little bit better afterward.

When she had calmed down she jogged back to her house. She would call Martin immediately. He would probably pull her out…no, actually. Martin wouldn’t give up on her that easily. The thought was comforting. By the time she got back to her house she had a list of questions for the blips and a second list of possible avenues of investigation for herself.

She swung her front door open and found herself in Martin’s office.

“I thought it was too risky to open a gate inside the city limits,” she said as she shut the door. “Listen, I got there and there was nothing. I’m wondering if the blips can…”

She stopped talking when she saw that the man behind the desk wasn’t Martin. It was a tall, balding white man wearing a suit but no tie. His aura was a pulsing red with bursts of bright yellow.

“Where the hell have you been, Agent?”

“I went to check on Martin’s report,” she said. “There was no one there, not unless they were hiding in the dark, and if they were hiding they certainly weren’t moving any demons through. Where’s Martin?”

“Are you trying to tell me that you spoke to Assistant Director Shil last night?”

“Not last night, no. Just an hour ago. He said the blips had spotted something.”

“An hour ago.”

“It was 4:17 by my bedside clock. Will you please tell me what’s going on?”

“Sit down, Agent Wilkins.”

“Please. Has something happened to Martin?”

The man — he still hadn’t told her his name — considered her for a long moment, his lips pursed. “You really might want to sit down.”

“Tell me.”

“We don’t know much, but I can tell you this: you didn’t speak to Special Agent Shil this morning, because he was murdered at around ten thirty last night.”

At some point Joy must have finally sat down in one of the red leather wraparound chairs in Martin’s office. She felt grubby and damp. Martin’s office was so elegant — the brightly lit bookshelves, the simple but fine rugs, the discreet shrine to Ganesh near the window. She didn’t want to be here, sweating on his furniture, but her legs would not hold her. She perched on the forward edge of the smooth cushion, waiting for her strength to return.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Assistant Director Benjamin Flood,” said the man. “And I’ll ask the questions from here on out.” He didn’t look up as he spoke. His posture suggested a military background; his baldness and the sagging of his jowls told her he was older. Late Cold War era, perhaps.