Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (9 page)

Joy checked her watch; it wasn’t yet five a.m. back in her bedroom. She paused outside Amanda Drake’s door to check for traffic before crossing the street toward the church.
The Thirteenth Rib.
It did sound somewhat biblical, but the references were all from the twentieth century. And then there was the fact that Carla Drake had asked for this information in the first place. Had she asked another historian to do research for her? It wasn’t unheard of, but it was unusual.

Joy groaned, realizing that she had found something that was going to keep her awake once she got home. And it would probably come to nothing, in the end.

She opened the church door, stepped through —

And someone seized her by the arm and threw her to the side. Joy dropped Carla Drake’s letters and twisted to take the fall, bringing her leg across and rolling over her shoulder. She slapped the ground and felt sand beneath her. The door shut; it was dark.

She scrambled to her feet, her shoes sliding across the dry sand. She was aware of moonlight above, but before she could get any sort of bearings something slender and cool wrapped around her throat. Her attacker pressed a knee into her back and pulled on the garrote.

Joy didn’t think; there wasn’t any time. She grabbed hold of the wire with one hand and fell forward, aiming her shoulder at the ground. The pressure around her throat almost caused her to black out, but it threw her attacker off balance, and when he loosened his grip on the garrote Joy held on to it. He rolled off of her. She pushed herself up and ran at him, kicking him once — it felt more like ribs than pelvis, but she wasn’t sure — before continuing past him into the dark.

She only ran for a few seconds, long enough to be sure she was out of reach. She slipped the garrote into her pocket, pulled off her shoes and her socks, and tossed them away from her in different directions. Under the top layer the sand was almost cold against her skin. Desert, probably somewhere in the western United States, where it was still the middle of the night.

She pushed that away. The details weren’t going to keep her alive, not right now. She dropped into a fighting crouch and went still.

Her eyes were starting to adjust. The moon was in fact full, and it outlined low shapes all around her: stones, cacti, and a freestanding frame that must be the door they had arrived through. But nothing moved. The assassin was nowhere in sight.

The moonlight was a small problem. She was glad for the purple of her suit, but the blouse might give her away if she hadn’t already been spotted. Stillness was only an option while they were both night-blind; it was time to move. The door wasn’t a realistic option; she had no way of knowing where it led to now, if anywhere, and no way of redirecting it. Despite Amanda Drake’s self-deprecation, spatial distortion was advanced magic, and Joy had no training in it.

What she did have training in was transmutation; she had just the spell for this situation, but she would need time. Joy took a deep breath and began reciting in a Berber dialect spoken by fewer than two thousand people. One of the keys to magic was that words that were rarely used had more potential energy; truly dead languages, used correctly, were among the most powerful weapons in the world. Joy kept her voice to a whisper, hoping the man trying to kill her wasn’t one of those two thousand.

She was in a shallow, bowl-like hollow, with ridges on three sides. She kept reciting as she climbed, still crouched, toward the top of the nearest ridge. Everything but her was still.

Gather.

The desert air was warm, even at what must be three in the morning. The reflected light of the moon washed down, casting ghostly shadows, calming her.

Focus.

The assassin hit her from the side, but she rolled with the impact, scooping up sand. She continued to chant as she broke his tackle, got up on her knees, and smeared the sand into his eyes. He grunted in pain and kicked at her, but she was already out of reach. He scrambled to his feet, and she swept them out from under him, dragging him down by his jacket. She pressed a knee into his back, placed her hand against the sand, shut her eyes, and finished her chant with a command:

Execute.

She shuddered as a flash of light and energy rippled out from her hands. There was a smell of burning sand, and then a blister of illuminated glass rose up out of the ground, casting bright light in all directions.

The assassin cried out. Joy kept her eyes shut as she tied his jacket into a knot around his arms. Then she turned him onto his side, pressed against the muscle of his jaw, and pried his mouth open. The second right premolar was fake, and she plucked it out and away from his struggling tongue.

“Cyanide?” she asked, and stood. Even now that she could see him, his aura held no sign that he had just been trying to kill her. To him it was just a job, which meant they were a couple of layers away from whoever was really behind this.

She pocketed the tooth with the garrote. “I was hoping you would come after me. You killed my boss. My friend. But he wasn’t expecting you.”

“You got lucky,” the man said. He was either American or doing an excellent job of faking the accent. He still squinted in the light.

“No, I’m just better than you.” Joy pulled her Beretta out of her blazer. Her hands were shaking, as much from adrenaline as from fear. She trained the weapon on the assassin and grasped her crystal. “FBMA emergency,” she said to it.

“There’ll be others,” the assassin said.

“There always are,” said Joy. The truth was, no one had ever tried to kill her before, not for real. She had trained for this, yes, a hundred times, but she had always been a little afraid that when it came down to it she would freeze up. Yet she hadn’t. She was buzzing from the exhilaration of not being dead.

“Why bring me out here to the middle of the desert? You killed AD Shil on camera. You wanted it to be seen. Are you suddenly shy?”

The assassin laughed. “My employer wanted an audience for Shil because Shil was important.

“You’re not.”

The FBMA line picked up. “Pacific Coast division, what’s your emergency?”

“This is Agent Wilkins, badge number SPA1176490, authorization code Niner Foxtrot Alpha. I need an extraction and prisoner pickup at my location, and I have next to no idea what that is. Can you track this signal?”

“It’ll take a little time,” said a male voice. “Are you safe?”

“I can’t say for sure. For the moment, I think so.”

“Can you describe your location?”

“Desert. Night. Still warm. There’s a dedicated portal here, but I don’t know what it points back to. Should I disable it?”

“Hold on.” There was a brief conference at the other end. “Agent, use your discretion. It’s our consensus here that your safety takes precedence over whatever we might learn from the spells on that door.”

“Hold on.” Joy knelt beside the assassin and checked his pockets. One pocket was empty; one held an orange-topped key for a public locker. Searching his suit jacket was trickier, seeing as how she had just tied it into a knot, but the pockets were empty.

The light of her sand-lantern was still bright, but it would fade in another twenty minutes or so. She grasped the crystal again.

“Have you got a trace on me yet?”

“You’re in the Mojave Desert. There are agents on their way to your location now, but we’ll need you to stay on the line until they arrive. I’ve got portal division on the other line — you were supposed to be in Aber — Aber—”

“Aberystwyth, Wales. Yes. I arrived just fine, but the portal was redirected. I was supposed to have a security detail, but I haven’t seen them.”

“Yes, we just heard from them. They’re stranded in Aberystwyth, it sounds like. If the portal is still active on your side, it opens somewhere else. Are you safe?”

“I was attacked, but my assailant is subdued. I believe it’s the same man that killed AD Shil.”

“Good work, Agent.”

“Not that I don’t appreciate the kudos, but I’d prefer an evacuation.”

“Portal division thinks they’ve narrowed down your entrance point. They believe it’s inactive. Requesting confirmation.”

Joy sighed. The door was a good forty meters away, and she wasn’t about to leave the assassin here alone, hogtied though he might be. He clearly had some camouflaging abilities, and if she lost him she’d never forgive herself.

“The option to disable it is still open?”

“Of course. At your discretion.”

Joy felt sure that AD Flood wasn’t going to let her slide by on her discretion. She took hold of the assassin by one arm. “Stand up.” He did so willingly enough. “I’ll put a bullet in the back of your knee if you try to run,” she said. “We’re going to walk over to that door, and then you’re going to get down on your knees while I check it out. Understood?”

“Understood,” he said after a moment, and started walking.

Joy kept her weapon on his back and spoke into the crystal. “Confirming now. Stand by.”

“Standing by, agent.”

Joy was sweating enough that her bare feet were coated with sand now. It wasn’t just that it felt like at least eighty degrees out here; there was something else — a creeping suspicion that this wasn’t over yet.

“Keep walking,” she said to the assassin, not because he had slowed but to see how he would react. He was utterly calm; he didn’t turn, didn’t make a sound. Joy scanned the ground in front of her and spotted her shoes. “Stop,” she said once he had walked past them. They were about ten meters from the door.

She bent to pick up one of the shoes. It was filled with sand. She hefted it a couple of times, then set it down again.

“I thought you wanted to check out the door,” said the assassin.

“Do I? Or do you want me to?” She spoke into the crystal. “Stand by a moment, please,” she said.

“Still standing by.”

“Lie down in the sand,” she told the assassin. “Facedown.”

He shrugged and knelt down facing the door.

“Not that way. Turn around.”

He turned until he was facing away from the door and lay down in the sand, facing her. She switched her weapon over to her left hand and kept it trained on him; she wasn’t ambidextrous, but at this range she wouldn’t miss. Her right arm was the better throwing arm. She picked up the shoe again.

“What are you doing?” the assassin asked.

“Keep your head down,” she said, and hurled the shoe at the door.

She switched the weapon back to her right hand as she spun and dived to the ground. She didn’t see the explosion, but she heard the
fwoomph
of imploding space and felt the heat of the flames. She opened her eyes first; when the assassin looked at her she had her weapon aimed at the space between his eyes.

“Agent Wilkins, are you all right?”

She fumbled for the crystal. “Affirmative, HQ. The portal’s been disabled — it was rigged to explode. You may have picked it up on satellite.”

For a moment she thought she’d lost the call. “Acknowledged,” the voice finally said. “Extraction team will be there in ten. No need to blow up anything further.”

Joy kept a locker at the Crowley Building — the DC headquarters of the FBMA, where Martin and now Flood’s offices were located. She took a long shower, finding scrapes and bruises all over, scrubbing the sand from between her toes and the folds of her skin. She kept having to adjust the temperature, because the warm water threatened to put her to sleep.

The Los Angeles field team had extracted her and the assassin — she still had no idea of his name — at around sunrise. Two SUVs and a helicopter had converged on their position; Joy and her prisoner rode back to the LA field offices while evidence teams went over the scene. They had recovered a few of Carla Drake’s letters to her mother, but not the manila envelope addressed to Carla herself, nor its contents.

The Thirteenth Rib.
Joy kept repeating it to herself, even though she had written down everything she could remember as soon as she’d been able to get her hands on some pen and paper. She was stuck in a loop, too exhausted to move on to something else, too wired to let it go.

Joy changed into sweats and an agency T-shirt and stuffed the remains of her blouse and her second-best suit into her gym bag. All this, an interrogation to work…and class to teach tonight. Maybe at some point this weekend she could get some sleep.

AD Flood was waiting for her outside the locker room, his aura still pulsing yellowish-red. He stood at parade rest, his feet a foot and a half part, his hands clasped behind his back. Joy was almost punchy enough to salute him.

“I want you to stay away from the interrogation,” he told her.

“Are you joking, sir?”

“We’ll get along better if you assume that none of my orders are jokes.”

“Sir, that man tried to kill me.”

“Which is exactly why I want you to stay away from him. You’re too raw right now. Parker and Gray have already started the interview.”

“That’s crap, sir.” Joy knew she shouldn’t be talking back to her boss, but her adrenaline was too high. “It’s not my fault that I was attacked. Where was your security detail, anyway?”

“Half a step behind. It’s portal division that I’ve been screaming at for the past hour; it’s their fault someone was able to override their distortion with a one-shot. But that’s an entirely different subject. You’re to stay away from the interrogation.”

Joy’s mouth twitched as she struggled to find words. “This is my case, sir. I can handle my emotions.” Even as she said it, Joy felt tears of frustration welling up, and that made her more frustrated still. “I need to know what’s going on.”

“Two things, Wilkins. First: the murder of AD Shil is
not
your case. So even if that man
hadn’t
just attacked you, I wouldn’t let you talk to him. Second: you’ll have access to the transcripts of the interview. Parker’s a good agent. If you need to follow up, you talk to Parker. If you can demonstrate an ability to follow orders and keep your emotions out of your work, I might even let you sit in with him.”

“What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

“Go get your nails done, or go have a good cry somewhere. I don’t care. I just want you to stay away from the interrogation.” He walked away. “You’re dismissed.”

Joy waited until he was out of sight around a corner before she slammed her gym bag against the nearest wall. It didn’t make a very satisfying noise, just a soft
flumph
. She wasn’t willing to admit that Flood had a point, not when he was such an asshole about it. But orders were orders. She couldn’t sit in on the interview, but she could do something else.

She picked up her gym bag and walked to the elevators. Her fatigue kept hitting her in waves, so she went to the commissary and ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, a bland fruit cup, and three cups of coffee. There was no one there whose aura she recognized, and no one greeted her or stopped by her table. Face-blind people tended to come across as snotty or self-absorbed, and Joy hadn’t made many friends in the agency. But she was used to this, and it didn’t bother her — much.

When she felt more like taking a long nap than like falling into a coma, Joy walked across the building to the archives. The Crowley Building was a squat concrete brick of a building — an early proposal to build it in the shape of a pentagram had been rejected — and its archives, unlike the library at Gooseberry Bluff, were windowless and oppressed by fluorescence. Joy approached the librarian on duty, a young woman sitting behind the desk.

“Hi, I’m Agent Wilkins,” she said, showing her ID. “I have something that might be a lead. It’s just a phrase, really. Can you help me get started?”

“I certainly can.” The woman had a pronounced Southern accent. “What’s the phrase?”

“The Thirteenth Rib.”

“All right, so we need a general search for the keywords ‘the Thirteenth Rib.’” The librarian wrote it down and smiled up at Joy. “You can go ahead and have a seat if you like, I’ll be just a few minutes.”

“I’m afraid if I sit down I’ll fall asleep,” Joy said.

“Oh, dear. Well, you’re welcome to wander. If you see any books clamoring for your attention, just bring them here. I’ll be back in a jiffy.” She stood, turned into the stacks, and disappeared.

Joy set her bag on one of the reading tables and walked into a row marked
reference
. On the top shelf, about halfway down the row, an oversize hardcover bound in red leather stuck out from the other books, wriggling as though trying to extricate itself from a trap. As Joy drew closer she could see that it was the fifth of six volumes in something called
Bond’s Comprehensive Directory of Secret Societies
.

Joy hadn’t taken the librarian literally when she spoke of books clamoring for attention, but she supposed that she should have. Library magic was a particularly innovative and unpredictable field. Joy took the book down; it stilled as soon as she touched it, but fell open to page 587, near the back. There was an entry for the Thirteenth Rib, a very short one:

Thirteenth Rib, the
: Society of magicians.
Date of Origin
: Unknown.
Base of Operations
: Unknown.
Membership
: Unknown.
Goals
: Unknown.
References
: Journals of Arthur Stag.

Joy sighed. “Not very helpful.” She carried the book back to her table and dug out a pen and notebook to make a note. Arthur Stag’s papers were located at Arthur Stag College, unsurprisingly. Perhaps the Thirteenth Rib was local to Gooseberry Bluff? Maybe she was really on to something — if she could locate this secret society.

Joy checked the rest of the reference section but found nothing. She peered down the long rows of stacks on the other side of the room where the librarian had gone, but the woman was nowhere in sight.

Maybe whoever had sent the assassin had wanted to prevent her from finding out about the Thirteenth Rib. Or maybe the Thirteenth Rib itself was trying to kill her. If it was a secret society, they might even have members in the FBMA itself. That could explain how they knew that she was on the case and how they had found Martin. The fear she hadn’t had time to process during the attack enveloped her now; she broke into a sweat, and her heart raced. So when the librarian said, “I didn’t find much, I’m afraid,” Joy almost jumped.

The librarian emerged from the stacks with a small stack of books and set them on the table without commenting on Joy’s reaction. “Three on biblical analysis, three on feminist theory, and a poetry chapbook by one of our poet laureates. I was hoping there’d be something for you in the casebooks, but there was no wiggle there.” She smiled. “Sorry. Librarian joke.”

“Thank you so much for your help. I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Ashley. Anything else you want me to look for at the moment?”

“Not right now. Thank you, Ashley.”

“Well you’re very welcome, Joy, and good luck.”

Joy was afraid she would need it. The books Ashley had found all obligingly fell open at her touch; some of them had multiple references, but they were all concerned with the theological, feminist, or symbolic implications of the rib that Yahweh had taken from Adam to create Eve. Joy found herself intrigued by one of the texts, which was all subversive retellings of various world myths, but there was nothing in it that seemed relevant.

She double-checked that she had taken down the information from the Bond book — she was so tired that she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she had dreamed it — and returned the books to Ashley at her desk.

“Sorry I couldn’t find more for you,” Ashley said.

“It wasn’t much to go on,” Joy said. “Can I ask you a question about the stacks?”

“Go right ahead.”

“Where do they go to? There’s some spatial distortion at work here, right?”

“Oh, yes. It’s the new wave in library magic. Why, I can walk straight from here to the National Archives, the Library of Congress, or the Smithsonian — I mean, you have to have the right clearances; I can’t just roll into the White House, or Langley. But it’s awful convenient. Lots of public libraries are doing it now, too.”

“And schools? Like, community colleges?”

“Sure, most of the state systems, and some independent consortiums. Setting up a few portals is a heck of a lot cheaper than having each place buy one copy of the same obscure book or shipping interlibrary loans every day. You need to be careful, of course, because people can get lost back there; that’s why I like to do it myself.”

“Do you know if Minnesota has an interlibrary portal system like that?”

“I believe they do, but I’m not one hundred percent on it. Would you like me to check?”

“No, that’s all right.” Joy wasn’t sure, but she thought she might be on to something with this. “Thank you, Ashley. You’ve been very helpful.”

Ken Song woke to the sensation of drowning in open air. He gasped and stood, but his legs gave way and his back twinged in protest. He propped himself up on all fours and coughed, vomiting up the air that had gone bad in his lungs while he had stopped breathing.

Once he could think he checked his defenses and found them still intact. The wooden floor warmed under his hands, the seams between the boards sucking at his flesh. When he could stand he walked to the kitchen, hitching his steps to the pain in his back. It was less sharp, now, than the pain behind his eyes.

He shouldn’t have let himself fall asleep. He’d meant to meditate, but he couldn’t do that on a mat anymore; his back hurt too much. He’d made the mistake of sitting down in the recliner, and now he’d lost — he squinted at the clock — four hours? He shook his head. He should be sweating, terrified, but now that he was awake and breathing he had to admit that he was calm.

The truth was, no matter how serious things were — and they were extremely serious just at the moment — he couldn’t get worked up about them. He couldn’t get scared. This was not a good thing; sometimes in life a little urgency was desirable, a little bit of terror to kick you in the ass. But Ken had never been able to muster it. He’d always been immune. He worried about Philip, and he worried about being killed in a long-distance magical duel against an opponent whose name he didn’t even know, but he had the irrational conviction that things would turn out all right in the end.

He swallowed two aspirin and half a gallon of water. His head felt immediately better, but his hands were shaking. There was an open bottle of malbec still on the counter, a couple of swallows left in it. Cheap stuff. If he had a concern about his drinking, it was that he had begun to relax his snobbishness. Australian malbecs should have been beneath him.

“Victor?” The water dish was still half full. Ken filled the blue plastic food dish from the bag of chow in the pantry and went looking for the dog. Victor was a seventeen-year-old basset hound, and despite his long, floppy ears he was completely deaf.

Ken found him in the bedroom. “You’re not supposed to be on the bed, Victor.” The dog was sprawled on his side across the carefully made bad. He’d shoved the dressing stool up to the footlocker again and climbed easily up to the bed.

“Breakfast time, Victor.” The dog still didn’t stir, but he was breathing. Ken scratched him on the top of his head, and Victor sat up immediately, sniffing at the air. Ken let the dog lick his hand once, then scratched him behind his ears. Victor tilted his head back toward Ken’s fingers, his eyes half-closed.

“Come on, little guy.” Ken coaxed the dog down his improvised staircase and lured him out to the kitchen with his food dish. Ken was watching the dog eat and thinking about going out for an omelet when his crystal chimed.

“Philip?”

“It’s me.” Philip’s voice sounded like it was coming from the inside of a coffee can.

“You’re OK?”

“I’m fine, Ken. I have yet to find anything, but I’m OK. I need a trace, honey.”

Ken sighed. “We only have two left, Philip. You need to be sure.”

“I’m not sure in the least. Every inch of this place is forest, from what I’ve seen. I need a flare.”

“You’re not going to see it if you’re not even in the right dimension.”

“I know that, Ken. But we’re running out of time.”

Ken shook his head.

“You’re shaking your head at me, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“That’s your prerogative. But you’ll do it, right?”

“I don’t know why I even argue. You just give orders.”

“You know I don’t mean it like that.”

“We’ll talk about it when you get home. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“I won’t. I love you.”

“You’d better.” Ken broke the connection, and then felt bad about it. “Dammit!” he yelled, and slammed the drawer shut. He was worried about Philip, and that always made him cranky. Not that he didn’t have reason to be, because he did. Not that Philip wasn’t being unnecessarily heroic and unreasonable, because he was. He could be killed; he could be captured; he could simply never manage to find his way home. And yet Philip treated it like a trip across the border.

Victor was finished with his breakfast, and Ken let him out into the yard. Then he walked to the guest bathroom at the back of the house. His house — Philip and he had attempted living together once, briefly, but decided it was better to have their own spaces — was a small, spare bungalow from the 1950s, with an attic for storage, no basement, and rooms that were all tiny except for the living room, which appeared even larger than it was because it opened out onto a deck overlooking the river. The guest bedroom was rarely used.