Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib

by David J. Schwartz

  “I don’t see what the point of all this was,” she said.

  “To keep you looking in the wrong places, maybe. Or keep you off balance. Make you feel unsafe.”

  “Well, it had the opposite effect. I’m angry now.”

  Gray raised his eyebrows at her but didn’t call her out on the lie, which she appreciated.

  “I need to get back,” he said. “Do you want a ride?”

  “I’m tired of cars. I’m going to go for a walk. Spend the afternoon here. My sister recommended a restaurant a little ways south.”

  “I just want to go on record as saying that I think that’s not a very wise decision, and I would try to talk you out of it if you weren’t one of the most stubborn people I’ve ever met.”

  “I’m not stubborn,” Joy said.

  “Liar,” said Gray.

  As it turned out, she was lying about more than a couple of things, because after walking a few blocks south, past an El station and a couple of bus stops, she decided that the neighborhood was a bit chancier than she had anticipated and turned around. She called her sister for some directions, then caught the Green Line at Lake Street, got off at the Circle Line transfer point, rode that southeast to the Orange Line northbound, and took it to Halsted.

  She had no trouble finding the Nightwood Restaurant, but she had forgotten to ask the name of Rosemary’s ex-boyfriend, who was supposed to be a sous-chef here. Rather than call her sister back, Joy settled into a table for two in the corner and ordered the salmon.

  She tried thinking the warehouse dead-end through, to find another angle to question the landlord from, but she found her thoughts drifting back to Markie Malone and Agent Renard. You were starting to like him, weren’t you? She had gone to Malone’s house, accepted his hospitality, and allowed him to dictate how she perceived him. Just like the dinner party with the Thirteenth Rib. Those people had brought her in, filled her up with delicious food, and told her a bunch of things that were likely to be at least partly true but were almost certainly not the whole story. And yet, if one of the true things they had told her was that someone in the FBMA had been somehow compromised, that meant she couldn’t really trust anyone there, either.

  “I really hope it’s Flood.” Only after the people at the next table looked over at her did she realize that she had said this out loud. Luckily her salmon arrived at that moment and put everything else in the world out of her mind for a few minutes.

  She was still in a state of salmon bliss when she got on the El afterward, so she didn’t notice that she was the only one on her particular car until a couple of stops out, when a man and a woman got on. The woman wore a black turtleneck, black army-style pants with a wide black belt, black boots, black gloves, black-framed glasses, and a black cape with a clearly visible red lining. She undid the clasp of the cape and swept it dramatically off her shoulders, set it on the bench across from Joy, and sat down on it as the train lurched into motion.

  The man wore a gray suit with a black tie and stood holding on to a pole. His aura was red, but the woman’s was the deepest red Joy had ever seen — the sign of someone who left nothing to chance.

  “You are Joy Wilkins,” the woman said. “I understand you have been looking for me.”

  Joy was still wearing her Beretta in a shoulder holster, but she was sure that the man would be on her before she could take it out. She cleared her throat.

  “You seem to know me,” she said, “but I don’t know your name.”

  “You can call me the Emissary.”

  “I’d rather call you by your name.” Joy smiled as she said it. This didn’t have to be an unfriendly meeting.

  “I’m sorry if you think me impolite, but where I come from names are not so lightly shared.” She smiled back at Joy, and her skin seemed to take on a glow, as if her skull were a lamp. The city flowing past outside and the car around them receded until the woman’s face took up all of Joy’s perception, pressing upon her optic nerves in a way that was almost painful until the features snapped into place in Joy’s mind, a model of perfect symmetry. Joy knew that the woman was inside her head, but she couldn’t summon the will to protest. This woman might ask anything of her and she would give it. And there was something else: Joy knew that for the first time in her life she had seen a face she would never forget.

  The woman released her hold on Joy’s senses, and Joy slumped forward, gasping to catch her breath. She kept her gaze lowered, terrified of being seized again. She focused on the dirt that filled the rubber treads in the floor and on the shimmy of the car.

  “What do you want?” she asked when she remembered how to speak.

  “I just wanted to show my face,” the woman said. “To help you understand what it is you’ve stumbled into.”

  “I’m just looking for a missing woman,” said Joy. “Are you the one who sent the package?”

  “Carla, yes,” the Emissary said. “Carla is fine. She’s perfectly safe.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s with us.”

  “Who is ‘us’?” Joy steeled herself and met the woman’s eyes. She was just a woman now, as far as Joy could see. But if she started to glow, Joy was going to shut her eyes and stumble toward the next car.

  The woman crossed her legs and clasped her hands across her knee. “Ms. Wilkins — Agent Wilkins — can you imagine a place with no war, no murder, no rape? No one going hungry. No one living in slavery, no one being tortured or oppressed simply for being who they are. Can you conceive of it?”

  Joy thought for a moment. “No. I would like to, but I can’t.”

  “It exists. And once you have lived in it, you will understand why the idea of anyone living in any other way is morally unacceptable.”

  There was no argument against that, and yet once more Joy was presented with someone trying to sell her a version of reality that she had no way to confirm was real. Clearly this woman was from the worlds of order, but did she know that Joy knew that there was such a thing? She stuck to what she had learned from Martin: Until you know everything, it’s usually better to pretend to know nothing.

  “I don’t understand where it is you’re supposed to have come from,” Joy said. “Heaven?”

  The woman chuckled. “There was a book in the package you were sent. Did you look at it?”

  “I glanced at it. Stories about an otter, right?”

  “Trickster Tales of the Hvenashawa People,” the woman said. “A popular children’s book where I come from. Not as popular these days. The trickster in question is usually just called Otter, although the Romans referred to him as Lutrinaes — which basically means Otter, but you know how the Romans could be. Otter, like most tricksters, was able to take many shapes, could be male or female, a helper or an obstacle to heroes. Otter’s specialty, of course, was slipping out of the grasp of anyone who wished to capture him.”

  “I don’t know those stories. In fact, I wasn’t able to find anything on the Hvenashawa people at all.”

  “No, I don’t imagine so. I would advise you to read the book, and to be wary of those around you, because they may have the shape and sound of people you know and trust, and yet they may be deceiving you.”

  Joy was silent. Nearly everyone was deceiving her about something or other, it seemed to her, so this was not very upsetting news.

  The train slowed, and a recorded voice announced the next stop. The woman stood, swept her cloak from the seat with a flourish, and clasped it around her neck again. “I will speak to you again,” she said. “I would rather have you for a friend than an enemy.”

  “If you want to prove your goodwill, you should release Carla Drake,” said Joy.

  “I am not holding her,” said the woman. “She is where she is out of her own free will.”

  The doors opened, and the woman stepped out onto the platform. The man in the gray suit followed; Joy had all but forgotten that he was there. Joy considered following them, but the memory of the light from the woman’s face
froze her, and the doors shut.

  As the train pulled away from the stop, the door at the end of the car opened and a girl not quite five feet tall walked in. She wore gray leggings and a black tank top under a pastel green hoodie. Her brown hair was cut very short, pixie-like, and her eyebrow, nose, and lip were pierced.

  She sat on the bench opposite Joy, exactly where the Emissary had just been.

  “Hey, um.” She paused. “So, I’m your security detail. My name’s Piper.”

  “Oh.” Joy was taken aback; this girl didn’t look very impressive. “I’m Joy.”

  “Yeah, I know. So, um…I wouldn’t normally come out in the open like this, but I was watching, you know, ’cause that’s my job and everything. And, uh, you know that guy that was with that really spooky lady you were just talking to?”

  Joy resisted the urge to change the topic to Piper’s age. She didn’t sound more than fifteen. On the other hand, her aura was fascinating: orange-red shot through with waves of turquoise and blue. She might be nervous about speaking with Joy, but she was otherwise fearless.

  “I saw him.”

  “Well, I know you saw him, but I also you know you have a problem with seeing people? Their faces, I mean?”

  “True.”

  “Yeah. So I thought I’d better tell you, that guy looks exactly like the guy who attacked you in the desert…and killed Martin Shil.”

  Episode 7

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  DOMESTICATED BEASTS

  By the time he finished, Hector was soaked in sweat. My God, she’s a lot stronger than she looks, he thought to himself as he slouched against a parking meter to catch his breath.

  “Oh, thank you so much, Professor!” Margaret May shouted. “I thought I’d never get it off. I mean, I wouldn’t have, without your help. I still don’t know what I was doing wrong.”

  Hector just nodded. Margaret May lived in Mud Park, the student neighborhood on the west side of the park that gave it its name. It was about equidistant from the Gooseberry Bluff and Arthur Stag colleges, and was a mix of three- and four-story apartment houses and older homes divided into flats.

  Margaret had called his office after lunch, frantic. He’d given his 101 class an assignment to put a simple antivermin ward on their place of residence, but somehow Margaret had managed to create an aversion that triggered a nausea reaction from everyone and everything that went near the place. Even working to remove it from across the street, Hector had had to fight to keep his lunch down.

  Margaret moved to stand in his field of vision, an anguished expression on her face. “I’m not getting an A on this assignment, am I?”

  Hector used his T-shirt to wipe the sweat from his face and straightened up. “That’s not important, Margaret. If you had nothing to learn, you wouldn’t need to be in the class in the first place.”

  “I just…I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

  “If you took good notes, I can probably spot it. But I think this is a problem of fine-tuning more than anything. Margaret, I get the impression you don’t realize how strong you are. That spell was as strong as some of the wards I cast in my freelance work.” The truth was that it was probably stronger, but Hector didn’t feel like admitting that. Bad enough that his freelance work had dried up in the past few months; having a student surpass him, however inadvertently, was not something he wanted to think about right now.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. It’s not a bad thing, honestly. You’re gifted. But because of that, you need to really work on your control, and resist the urge to improvise. Later, when you’re more experienced, then you can experiment some. But for now, adhere to the letter of your spells, and hold back a little. When you’re gathering, don’t take in as much power.”

  “OK. Thank you.” An angry-looking woman wearing khaki shorts and a Twins T-shirt was approaching them from across the street; Margaret spotted her and sighed. “Um, that’s my landlord. I really hope I don’t get evicted. I’ll see you in class, Professor.”

  Hector considered staying to mediate between Margaret and the landlord, but he told himself to step back. You can’t adopt her. That was one reason he liked teaching at a community college: there were fewer sheltered kids straight out of high school, more people who had lived through some things. That wasn’t always a positive—they had a tendency to decide they knew more than the instructors—but on the whole Hector would rather contend with egos in the classroom than be pushed into babysitting.

  He got in his car and drove without giving much thought to where he was headed. He had spent the morning making plans for his date with Zelda on Thursday, and he was still distracted by thoughts of that. What if the weather didn’t cooperate? What if she was bored? What if the curse decided to drop a piano on him while he was wooing her?

  He found himself back at the school; he almost turned around in the parking lot and headed home, but he had the feeling he had forgotten something. Besides, he had a change of clothes in his office, and the day was humid enough without walking around in sweat-drenched jeans.

  He checked the school’s wards as he walked toward the main building. Maybe he should have Margaret cast them the next time—or maybe not, since they might end up with a campus no one could enter. At some point, though, he should give her a shot at it. She wasn’t the strongest magician he’d ever encountered, but she wasn’t far off.

  It was cool inside, but he still felt grimy as he climbed to the third floor. “President Fitzgerald’s office called,” the departmental assistant said as he entered, and he remembered what it was he had forgotten.

  “Shit.”

  “Twice, actually. I was about to try your crystal.”

  “Call down and tell them I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  Hector shut his office door behind him and changed into fresh pants and a button-down shirt. He’d been waiting for Philip to call him on the carpet since the mess in the library on Sunday, but Monday had passed without a word from the president’s office. Hector had been on his way out the door Tuesday night when Philip had finally called and mildly asked if he had some time to meet on Wednesday. Philip was difficult for Hector to read; sometimes he was so odd as to be almost silly. But a few times, mostly late in the day, during meetings about the school’s security—something Philip took an almost obsessive amount of interest in—he had become cold and serious. When Philip was like that, he was actually easier to deal with, even as it put Hector off-balance, because something about it reminded him of his father. Alfonso Ay had been an academic, a widely published authority on magic theory. He had also been a granite-hard man, a supporter of the Mejía regime during the Guatemalan Civil War, who claimed that the death squads were “leftist propaganda” and ruled his household in the way that he believed the country should be ruled. He was one-quarter Mayan and was simultaneously proud of this heritage and contemptuous of the Maya people.

  “If they call, I’m on my way,” Hector said to the assistant on his way out the door. He was still thinking about his father. Something about facing a potential dressing down always triggered these sorts of thoughts.

  Hector hadn’t realized how much he hated his father until he was safely away from him, and then again when the man died. Something had pushed all of that far down, where he wouldn’t think to act upon it until he was out of the house and the country. Much was expected of him, and Hector would never forgive himself for not telling his father where he could insert his expectations, or worse yet, for managing to live up to some of them.

  Hector loved his mother, but she still cried over her husband every night, and when he visited she begged and wept until he accompanied her to his father’s grave. She and Hector’s sisters depended on the money he made doing the work that he had chosen, not because he loved it, but because he still couldn’t shake his father’s idea of the man he was supposed to be.

  Hector couldn’t pinpoint why it was he liked Zelda so much, but when he was in an overthinki
ng mood he would trace it all back to his father. Maybe Zelda was like his father, or maybe she was unlike everything his father had thought women should be, or she just didn’t fit anywhere in his father’s idea of what Hector’s life should turn out to be—not that Hector had ever felt like he knew what that idea was, exactly. When he wasn’t overthinking—he was overthinking their date even now, unable to decide whether to cook for her or to ask Chuck at the Mandrake to let him use his rooftop terrace for an intimate get-together—he just knew that he liked Zelda. She was tough but she was also funny; she was whip smart; and she had the sort of body that made him start looking for things to do with his hands. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d had to restrain himself from touching her. He wanted not to have to do that anymore.

  Hector let thoughts of Zelda chase thoughts of his father from his mind as he hurried down to the president’s office. Edith Grim-Parker looked up at him as he entered, but did not smile. “He’s inside.”

  “Thank you.” Hector stopped. “Edith, what’s that bird doing there?”

  A crow was perched on the windowsill. It cocked its head at him.

  “Don’t worry about that bird; you’re half an hour late. Get in there.”

  Hector hurried through to Philip’s office and shut the door behind him. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “Yes, well, it’s…it’s…it’s certainly not convenient.” Philip looked agitated; he was pacing, and his hair stood out on the sides as if he’d been clutching at it.

  “I know, it’s my fault. I was dealing with a crisis with a student, and I didn’t realize what time it was.” One thing Hector had learned from dealing with his father: never say “I forgot” to anyone with power over you.

  “Well, you’re here now. I’m a little out of sorts. I missed lunch because of…work.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sit down,” said Philip. “You don’t have anything snackish on you, do you? Maybe some crab puffs? Do they sell those in bags? You know, like the…what do they call them…”