by Sarah Gailey
Torres stood at the end of the aisle, her narration gathering speed as I snapped photos. She explained about the welcome dinner, at the end of the first week, well after the boarding students had found their bedrooms and gotten unpacked and reviewed their schedules and evaluated the way everyone had changed over the summer. She explained about Mrs. Webb’s discovery, about Dylan DeCambray, about the screams that had echoed through the halls all the way down to the cafeteria.
“I left the dinner immediately to investigate, along with a couple of other teachers. When we arrived,” Torres continued, “we found Dylan over there, being ill.” She pointed to a stained section of carpet near the end of the shelves, then indicated the butterfly stain in the center of the aisle. “Mrs. Webb was standing there.”
“Where was the body, exactly?” I asked. The bloodstains could have told any number of stories, and making assumptions this early on wouldn’t make the job any less impossible.
“The—I’m sorry, it’s still so hard to think of her as ‘the body.’” The headmaster kneaded her forehead with her fingertips.
“You two were close?” I ventured.
She rolled one shoulder in an aborted shrug. “I’m sure I thought of us as closer than we were. You have to understand … I keep most of the staff at arm’s length. I’m at the top of the ladder here. It’s crucial that I’m beyond reproach.” I nodded, having no idea what she was talking about. Being beyond reproach wasn’t the important part. Get there, Torres. “But Sylvia brought joy to a role that can occasionally be on the thankless side. She asked me how I was doing, and remembered my birthday, and—I don’t know. I suppose this sounds silly to you.”
“Not at all,” I said, not putting my hand on her arm but wishing I could. “She was kind to you even though you were her boss. She treated you like a person, right?”
She smiled past the bloodstains on the carpet. “She treated everyone like a person. It’s rarer than you’d think.” She drew a breath. “Her body was there, and there.” Torres indicated each of the butterfly wings of the stain.
“Wait. You mean … the body—er, Sylvia’s body—it was in both places?”
Torres swallowed, looking away from the stain. “Yes. Both.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.
Torres was quiet, then murmured, “I’m not sure I do either.”
A chime sounded, and the headmaster looked at her watch before clicking her tongue. “The day is getting away from me. I’m going to be late for a parent meeting. I’m so sorry, Ivy,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. “I’m going to have to leave you. Mr. Snead will be waiting for you in front of the school—he can show you to your apartment in staff housing, and you and I can touch base a little later.” She gave me a sharp nod, and I didn’t mean to blink, but of course I did, because she was gone.
I glanced at the folder in my hand. It looked so innocuous—bland, even—but the corner of a matte photograph stuck out of one side, as red and waiting as an open mouth. I looked down at the dark bloodstains and considered the fact that I was now standing in the place where a woman had lost her life. The folder in my hand contained the images of her death, and I was responsible for uncovering the truth. I wondered what I had gotten myself into.
I wondered what Sylvia Capley had gotten herself into.
* * *
Frances Snead was nothing like what I expected. I’d never met a groundskeeper before, and I had some idea, probably cobbled together from various reruns of Scooby Doo, that a groundskeeper should be a wizened old man shaking his cane at meddling kids who run on grass. But Mr. Snead, waiting for me in front of the school, was something altogether different—a tiny, waspish man with deep-set eyes and a cap of slick black hair. He wore a crisp white button-down, the collar of which was dark with water, and the smell of Ivory soap wafted off him like cologne. The fragrance brought into sharp relief old memories of my father leaving for work in the gray light of early morning, brushing past me as I stumbled into the house in a cigarette-smoke fog.
“You’re Ivy Gamble?” The groundskeeper’s voice was soft. His eyes didn’t meet mine as he shook my hand. Calluses, and a firm enough grip, but fingers as light as a pickpocket’s.
“That’s me,” I said, trying for friendly. He nodded once, sharp, then wheeled around and began striding across the vast green lawn that surrounded the campus. It took me a moment to realize that I was meant to follow.
“You’ll be in staff housing.” He said it as though to himself, his eyes trained on the sloping ground ten feet in front of him. “This isn’t a hotel, you understand? No one will be cleaning up after you.”
“Good,” I said, feeling loud and clumsy next to Snead. “I prefer not to have anyone in my space.”
“You’ll have that,” he murmured. “No one going in there anytime soon, that’s for sure.”
We crested the little hill we’d been climbing, and I couldn’t stop myself from coming up short. In the dip on the other side of the hill was a nest of townhouses. I thought of my drive up to the campus—of the shape of the road, and of what I had expected to find when the trees parted—and I tried to reconcile the size of this colony of homes with the surrounding geography.
It didn’t work. None of it worked. There shouldn’t have been a huge school with ample staff housing and sprawling lawns, not here. There wasn’t room for all this sprawl, not in the cramped, rippling Sunol hills.
But, in a display of complete disregard for how space is supposed to function … there was the sprawl. There was the school, and there were the homes. It wasn’t possible, but it was laid out before me as sure as anything.
Fucking magic.
I won’t pretend that I didn’t have a choice. I always have choices. We all make choices.
And in that moment—I had to choose.
I could have decided to be disoriented. I could have chosen to struggle with the things I was seeing, as plain as they were. As much as I knew that this was only the beginning—and as much as I knew the impossible would only get worse—I could have decided that it was already too much.
Or I could pretend that everything was normal. I could decide that this was a world where I belonged. I could accept the impossible.
I could stand with my toes hanging over the edge of the cliff, and I could just stare at the way the pebbles fell while my heart tried to fall out of my throat.
Or I could jump.
The empty eyes of the surrounding homes did not watch my descent. I staggered a little as I followed Snead down the hillside toward my apartment. Nobody saw me choose a path.
Nobody saw me choose. But I chose.
Snead handed me the keys and showed me the light switches. “No fire or electrical spells in here,” he said with a grim frown. “If you want to do those, arrange with the science department to use the lab. Garbage goes outside your door on Thursday nights. Separate your recycling.”
He was gone before I could say another word. He didn’t vanish the way Torres did when she left my office, but the speed and silence with which he slipped out of the room told me that he didn’t want to be here. Frances Snead didn’t want to be in this apartment, or he didn’t want to be near me.
It was a cute setup. There was no other word for it—cute was the thing that came to mind, and cute is what stuck. The front door opened right into the living room, which was separated from a galley kitchen by a low island with an empty bookshelf set into one side. Stainless steel appliances, granite countertop. New-looking, but there was a chip in the granite near the refrigerator and a decent-sized scuff across the front of the dishwasher. Past the kitchen, a carpeted hallway led to a bedroom and a bathroom.
Small.
Simple.
Cute.
So why didn’t he want to be there for longer than he had to?
I felt foolish the moment I realized. It was the most obvious thing in the world. Why would there be an empty apartment in staff housing? “No one’s going in there anytime soon,
that’s for sure,” he’d said.
Because it was Sylvia’s apartment.
I was going to be living in a dead woman’s home.
I stood in the bedroom, staring at the two nightstands that flanked the bed, and I breathed it all in. I let my fingertips trail across the cheap duvet. It was slippery in that unwashed new-fabric way. I knew that if I buried my face in the sheets, they’d smell like big-box-store plastic.
“No fire or electrical spells,” Snead had said. As if I belonged in that fresh-out-of-the-box home he’d made up for me. As if I were someone who might do the wrong kind of magic and light the place up. As if I could be the kind of woman who could live in a place like this. Who could die in a place like this.
It all stuck in my throat. I closed my eyes and gripped that shiny new duvet in both fists, and tried not to choke.
CHAPTER
SIX
BY THE TIME I had emerged from my new home at Osthorne Academy for Young Mages the next morning, mist was draped across the school grounds like a headache clinging to the temples of a mildly concussed and half-hungover private investigator.
I swallowed an extra-strength Tylenol with a last swill of cold coffee left over from the night before. I cursed last-night-Ivy for her woeful judgment regarding gin—but the curse didn’t have much firepower behind it. I couldn’t blame past-Ivy, even if I wished she would have at least added water into the beverage rotation. The photos in the folder had merited a late-night trip to a neon-windowed liquor store in the nearest town.
I didn’t spend much time looking at dead bodies. It was usually petty, shameful shit that I saw. This case was a whole new level for me. The headache was probably worth the lack of the complete nervous breakdown that should have come with looking through that folder. Looking at those photos.
They were high-quality matte prints, littered with scale rulers and yellow crime-scene markers and obscure annotations. In each of them, Sylvia Capley lay on the dull gray carpet of the Theoretical Magic section of the library. She looked like an optical illusion, like a crappy trick at a third-rate magician’s afternoon show at an off-Strip casino in Vegas.
She’d been bisected, split down the middle; a clean line from the top of her head, through her nose, down the cupid’s bow of her top lip, between her collarbones, all the way to her bellybutton and beyond. She’d fallen open like a split log; the two halves of her faced away from each other, staring at opposite bookshelves.
Subsequent photos of the carpet showed only bloodstains. I’d started leaving the tonic out of my gin upon realizing that, sometime between the photos of the corpse and the photos of the carpet, some poor bastard had to figure out a way to scoop Sylvia off the floor without leaving anything behind. I had wondered if there was a spell for that—to keep everything inside her, given her state—or if maybe they’d slid a sheet of cardboard under her. And then I had put the folder away and taken my drink to bed with me. I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I’d fallen asleep before I could finish the last few fingers of gin, which was probably the thing that saved me from a debilitating hangover. I’d dreamed of Tabitha and a hall of mirrors that night; when I woke up, I felt mushy, staticky. Somehow pushed off to the left of center.
A spell gone wrong.
That’s what the file said. I wanted to believe it—I wanted a reason to think that maybe this kind of thing just happened to people who got magic handed to them at birth, or whenever these things get handed out. It would have felt a little like justice. I’m not proud of thinking that, given that I was standing on a campus full of children who had two fistfuls of magic already and were reaching for more.
But then, this isn’t a story about things I’m proud of.
The folder Torres had given me didn’t just contain photos of horror beyond my wildest imagining. There was also a copy of a report with the logo of the National Mage Investigative Service stamped across the top: a spray of leaves, probably alder or something with a similar symbolic weight, over a barbed crescent moon that cupped a spread-fingered hand. I’d stared at the logo for a long time, studying the seven stars that were nested in the palm of the hand and wondering about the significance. Wondering if this was the kind of thing you know when you spend your school years in a place like Osthorne.
When I finally read the report, I found it even less satisfying than the emblem had been. It reported Sylvia’s cause of death as “a miscast version of a theoretical spell intended to facilitate instantaneous physical translation.”
I spent too long in a too-hot shower that morning, trying to cut through the fog in my brain and figure out what that meant; in the end, I decided that it probably meant she tried to teleport and failed. Or maybe it meant she was trying to transform herself and wound up split in half. I wasn’t sure it really mattered either way. Sylvia Capley, it seemed, had tried to do something impossible because she thought that the rules of existence didn’t apply to her. And she paid the price. It was, as the report wanted me to believe, that simple.
I took the long way from staff housing to the school grounds, trying to get a little fresh air to circulate where the last of the gin fumes might be lingering. I told myself that it was also to give me a chance to scope out the grounds—to see if there was anyone skulking around where they shouldn’t be, scrawling “I am the murderer” on a wall somewhere. I scratched absently at the tape that held fresh gauze on my still-stinging shoulder. It itched like hell, and the only thing keeping me from reopening the wound was the bandage covering it. The air was crisp and cloud-smelling, but rather than clearing my head, the breeze grated against my headache like sand between my teeth. I kept taking deep breaths, telling myself that this was fine. It was all fine.
As I cut across the grass in a wide arc, a tone like a crystal glass being struck rang out through the morning, the sound bright in the thick silence. The immediate explosion of chaos and sound was only barely muffled by the walls of the school as students decamped from the first class of the day. Given the headache that lingered at the base of my skull, I was glad to be a safe distance from the banging of lockers, the squeak of shoes on linoleum, the blinding flashes of bright adolescence.
By the time I made it inside, a second clear tone had sounded, and most of the students were once again safely stowed in classrooms. I walked through the halls toward Torres’s office, feeling truant. Waiting for someone to ask me where I was supposed to be. I thought I remembered how to get to the front office, but my head was throbbing. I took a wrong turn.Then I got flustered and took several more wrong turns, tangling myself up in my own leash. I finally rounded a corner and things looked familiar again, and I thought maybe I was on the right track, but no. I wasn’t at the front office; I’d found myself at the same bank of lockers I’d lingered over yesterday.
And I wasn’t alone.
The boy I’d seen in Torres’s office stood where I’d been the day before, his fingers tracing the m in “Samantha” from an inch above the metal, just far enough to avoid the shock. His hair was still unkempt in that hours-in-front-of-a-mirror way. He was rangy, but not hunched—there was something in his posture that suggested purpose. He had that too-many-bones look that teenage boys get, but I could almost see the shadow of the man he would become in six or seven years. He looked perched on the cusp of something. Or maybe he was at the edge of something, looking down.
Here we go, I thought. Time to get to work.
“Do you know who did it?” I asked. The kid—Dylan, I suddenly remembered, that’s right, Dylan the troubled—jumped about a mile at the sound of my voice. He looked around to see if a teacher was going to make him go to class, if someone was going to yell at him.
“No,” he answered. His face had gone still. The lie was as obvious as if it were a tarantula perched astride his wide, thin-lipped mouth. It struck me that he might not be sure if I was talking about the graffiti or the murder. I let his lie—and his uncertainty—linger for a moment before brushing it to the floor to scurry back into the shadows f
or another time.
“Okay.” I clocked the twitch of surprise between his eyebrows; he couldn’t tell if he was getting away with the lie or not. Good. Let him wonder. When someone thinks they’re getting away with something, they’re easier to manipulate. They stop looking closely at the things that might make it feel like their lie is unraveling, and they reveal things they didn’t mean to. “It’s supposed to be some really advanced stuff, isn’t it? This spell.” I gestured to the graffiti, watching his face closely, but he didn’t look proud so much as irritated.
He nodded, twisted his mouth up. “Yeah. I mean, I haven’t even been able to figure it out, and I’m supposed to be—” He stopped himself, looked down at his shoes. “I’m supposed to be smart.”
“Remind me of your name?”
“Dylan DeCambray.” He shoved his hands into his pockets, glowering. I beamed at him, bright enough that he surely knew I wasn’t missing his glare so much as willfully ignoring it.
“Great, Dylan, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Ivy Gamble, PI.” His face rearranged itself when I dropped those two letters after my name: I’d piqued his interest. I handed him a card. “I’d love to talk to you sometime—smart kid like you, I could use your help.” A spark of pride—that was good. It meant he was at least a little bit gullible. “Meantime, though, can you show me the way to the main office? I promise not to rat you out for skipping class.” He nodded and fell into step beside me. “So. Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Are you smart?”
He seemed to chew on this for a minute. “I have to be.”
“Says who?”
He gave me the kind of shrug that probably made his mother’s ears shoot steam. “It’s complicated.”