by Sarah Gailey
She went quiet; I thought she’d dozed off. I drank my water and thought about Alexandria.
“The graffiti?” I said.
“Yep,” she said, not opening her eyes. “I can’t prove it and she won’t admit it, but that’s got Alexandria written all over it.”
“And nobody can figure out what spell she used?”
“Nobody,” she said, her voice trailing into the soft murmur that precedes sleep. “I looked into some theoretical possibilities, but it’s beyond what I can even really grasp. So … see what I mean about her?”
I nodded. “Powerful.” I nudged Tabitha’s foot with mine again. “Hey, kiddo. Time to get you home, huh?”
She grabbed my hand as her eyes flew open. Her fingers were cold and damp. “Let’s just stay here for a minute, Ivy. Just—a couple minutes. I dunwanna go back.” She was slurring, half-drunk and half-sleepy. My sister, holding my hand. I didn’t want to tell her no. I tried to find the anger I’d felt just a couple of hours before, the bitterness—but her hand was in mine, and her head was on my shoulder, and I couldn’t break the spell just yet.
“Okay.” We sat silently for a few minutes. My mind was ticking over everything she’d told me. Maybe there was an easy solution to this. Maybe I could walk away from Osthorne with a few days’ worth of expenses, the balance of the retainer, and the memory of my sister’s hand in mine. And then I’d have done it: I’d have solved a murder. Can it be this easy?
“Tabitha?” I whispered it, almost hoping she wouldn’t hear me; but of course she did.
“Yeah?”
“I hate to even ask this, but you know I have to. Where were you that night?”
She stiffened beside me—that hesitation, Am I going to play this game? Then a shrug. “Home sick. Food poisoning. Lots of us got it.”
I tried for a self-effacing laugh. It came out sounding canned. “Great! I guess I can cross you off the list, then, huh?”
She did a better laugh than I had as she stood, brushing sidewalk grime off her pants. She suddenly seemed very sober. “Yep. Need some proof? Or am I free to go?”
“Wait,” I said, my voice breaking in the middle of the word. “Wait, no, I believe you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make this about work.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “It was always about work, Ivy.” She looked down at me with weary eyes, and the puddle of light from the streetlamp above her shivered as she gestured at me with two crooked fingers.
The next thing I knew, I was standing on the lawn at Osthorne, dew soaking the cuffs of my pants. I knew, the way you know when you’re going to throw up, that I’d gotten into a cab and taken it home. But the last thing I could really remember between standing outside the bar and standing on the grass was the look Tabitha had given me—disappointed and satisfied, both at once. Like she’d seen it coming.
I walked into the apartment and looked around. It was barren in there, sterile. I filled a glass of water, then went down the hall into the bedroom. I stared at that huge bed and felt like I was going to scream. It was too big, too empty. It belonged to a dead woman. I grabbed the slippery duvet with both hands and pulled hard. The mattress shifted as the tucked-in blanket popped out from under the edges. I left it off-kilter, wrapping the duvet around my shoulders before stumbling back into the living room. I fell onto the couch, letting the fabric of the cushion imprint a weave onto my cheek.
As I fell asleep, I heard Tabitha’s voice over and over again. It was always about work, Ivy. It was always about work.
CHAPTER
NINE
MONDAY MORNING CAME ON LIKE a head cold. I stumbled into the bathroom of the staff apartment, dragging the full weight of the week to come. I avoided looking into the bedroom, where the bare mattress stared back out like an accusation. I’d slept on the couch all weekend, shoving the duvet to one side during the days so I could sit up and review reports and reply to subcontractor emails and make a dent in the gin bottle.
I was making progress. It was fine.
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and peeled back my shirt collar to look at the wound on my shoulder, which was … not fine. I’d left the gauze off all weekend, vaguely remembering something my mother had said about how it was important to “let it breathe.” The cut itself was a livid white smile inside a wide ellipse of red. The skin around it was swollen, tender. I caught my own eye in the mirror as I prodded it, and I realized that the injury was the best-looking part of me: the bags under my eyes were definitely well past the carry-on limit, and it was painfully obvious that I hadn’t actually showered or brushed my hair over the weekend. I ran my fingers through my tangles as though that would make a difference.
I looked like something that had been pulled out of a shower drain, but really, I was fine. I’d just had an intense weekend. I’d gotten wrapped up in reading background checks on all the staff. They were super clean, although some of them had heavy redactions that I would have wagered were redacted because they were magic. I got wrapped up in those reports. I got wrapped up in all of them—it wasn’t that I had lingered over Tabitha’s, I hadn’t. There was nothing there that I didn’t already know. Background reports don’t go all that deep. They don’t explore why are you the way you are? or what would it take for me to understand you?
Besides, there wasn’t time to linger. If there was no time to shower, there certainly wasn’t time to dwell on things I couldn’t change.
I turned away from the mirror and started the process of making myself into a human being, someone who could walk into a meeting with Marion Torres without embarrassing herself. I’d shopped on Saturday morning, and the clothes and makeup I’d bought were all still packaged and tagged. As I tossed labels and stickers into the tiny bathroom trash can, I reflected that I could have just driven back up to Oakland. I could have gone to my empty apartment there and grabbed the things I needed to live here, in this other empty apartment.
But I had needed some new things anyway. I only bought the slightly nicer brands because I was flush with cash, not because I was trying to impress anyone at Osthorne. If the things I was wearing happened to look like the clothes the faculty at the school wore—well, they looked good, didn’t they? There was nothing wrong with drawing style inspiration from people who look good in what they’re wearing. There was nothing wrong with wanting to look as casually professional and put-together as they did.
I kept telling myself that as I showered and got dressed and tried to make myself look like someone who could walk between worlds. It was an outfit, not a costume.
This could be the real me.
On my way across the lawn to the school, I rubbed absently at my shoulder. It didn’t hurt, per se, but it felt taut and soft at the same time, like overripe fruit. I gave it a poke and bit back a swear as a flash of blue pain bit through my vision. Okay, so maybe it did hurt, per se. Very fucking per se.
I was still massaging it with the heel of my hand when I got to the main office. I ran into a student on their way out—another girl holding a pink hall pass and a white pharmacy bag. I turned to look after her, pausing with my hand on the doorframe, my mouth half-open to ask a question I hadn’t finished forming yet. The question vanished entirely at the sound of a throat clearing.
“Can I help you?” I turned to see Mrs. Webb, watching me with a flinty glare. I could deal with her. I was used to flinty glares. People don’t like a PI nosing around: they think we’ll create drama by turning over stones and revealing what’s living in the soft damp dark underneath. They don’t realize that the things live in the soft damp dark whether or not we expose them to the sunlight. “Did you have an appointment with Ms. Torres? I don’t see you on her schedule,” she rasped, not bothering to open the thick engagement calendar that sat on her desk.
“Actually,” I said, clearing my throat, “I’m here to talk to you, Mrs. Webb. I’d like to get your perspective on what happened on the day of the murder. When you found the, um. Body.” My I-can-handle-this petere
d out rapidly as Webb watched me, unblinking.
“I gave a full testimony to the NMIS under oath,” she said.
“Yes, but I was just, uh, hoping to—”
“I have no interest in discussing it further,” she said. “You can read the deposition transcripts in the file I composed for Ms. Torres to give you. It is a very thorough file, Ms. Gamble.”
Mrs. Webb and I regarded each other. The way she was staring at me reminded me of the way she’d been pinching herself when I saw her last. I tried hard not to let my gaze fall to her arm, where there were surely bruises hidden under the cardigan. I knew I had to push for answers: What did you see? What did it do to you?
After a moment, she clicked her tongue. “Alright, then, let’s see it.”
I blinked at her, feeling like a cow faced with a differential equation. “What?”
“Take that ridiculous jacket off and let’s see your shoulder,” she rasped, bracing her arms on her desk and pushing herself out of her chair. My indignation was slow to set in.
“Ridiculous? This is a nice jacket, I got it from—hey, what are you doing?” With quick fingers, she’d somehow gotten my jacket halfway off before I’d even realized what she was doing. Fucking mages.
Mrs. Webb pressed on the red, swollen skin of my shoulder with her dry fingertips. They were so cool, so gentle—then, she pressed harder, and my shoulder lit up with white-hot pain. Then, “Ow, shit, no, hey, st—”
Then everything went very fuzzy around the edges, and my shoulder exploded.
CHAPTER
TEN
“YOU ARE NOT STUPID, MS. GAMBLE.” Mrs. Webb’s voice floated through the red haze of my vision, her throaty rasp echoing across the hiss of panic-static in my ears.
The red haze was not the metaphorical mist of rage that blinds a furious detective so they don’t have to explain exactly how they wound up with a gun in their hand. It was a literal four-foot-wide spray of blood and tissue, floating in front of me like a hologram. Tiny sponges of bone hovered a few inches from my nose. I had an absurd urge to reach out and bite one.
“Are we sure I’m not stupid?” I whispered.
“In spite of all evidence to the contrary, yes,” Mrs. Webb said crisply. “You are not stupid, or I wouldn’t have suggested that Ms. Torres hire you to solve Sylvia’s murder.” My field of vision began to narrow, my periphery going gray. A dark brown finger pushed aside a strand of muscle fibers that hovered in front of my nose, and then pointed to a large blob of gray-yellow toward the middle of the shoulder-fog.
Something in my brain screamed, vomited, fainted. I didn’t blink. I didn’t look down at the place where my shoulder should have been, because I didn’t want to find out if it was still there. I suspected strongly that it wasn’t.
“You’re not stupid, and yet you did not take this infection to a medical professional. Would you care to explain?”
I gave a high-pitched squeak, then cleared my throat and mumbled something unconvincing about how I was dealing with it myself. I petered out halfway through my explanation as two hunks of muscle brushed against each other like kelp in a slow current. I heard the wet shush they made as they met, and I lost the ability to make words.
I could practically hear Mrs. Webb’s mouth forming a thin line of disapproval. A slim piece of wood poked its way through the floating morass of shoulder parts, then prodded the yellow-gray blob. The blob shuddered, blackened, smoked, and disintegrated.
My arm felt like it was filled with bees, but the bees were made of fire and the fire was made of lightning and the lightning was—and then, just like that, the fog of blood and muscle was gone.
I sat down hard on the floor.
I looked up at Mrs. Webb. She was sitting behind her desk, not a hair out of place, staring at me over her glasses as though she hadn’t moved an inch. My jacket was back on.
“Next time,” she said, “you’ll go to the doctor.”
I nodded slowly. Then, before I could unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth, the door to Torres’s office opened.
“Ivy?” Torres peered at me with a small frown. “Are you alright?”
“Yes, I’m, uh.” I reached up and grabbed my shoulder. There was still flesh and bone filling out my apparently ridiculous jacket. My shoulder didn’t hurt when I dug my fingers in, and I dug them in hard, just to make sure everything had been put back where it was supposed to be. I scrambled to my feet. “I’m fine.”
“Did we have an appointment?” She looked between Mrs. Webb and me. “I don’t recall—”
“Yes,” Mrs. Webb said. “You have a ten-minute check-in this morning.”
I looked at Mrs. Webb. She was offering me an exit. My internal debate about whether to take it was abominably short. On the one hand, I knew that I should really stay to interview her. I had the deposition transcripts, and I had the file, and I could go off those—but it would be unprofessional to skip an interview. On the other hand, she could explode me with a touch. And judging by the way she was looking at me, she’d be very happy to do so.
“Just a quick check-in,” I said, forcing myself to smile. Torres held her door open and I followed her inside, lowering myself gingerly into the chair in front of her desk.
“Are you sure you’re alright? You look pale.” She looked me over with concern. “We don’t have a school nurse anymore, Sylvia was the closest thing. But Mrs. Webb could take a look at you, if you’re not feeling well.”
I jumped. “Mrs. Webb?”
“Yes! Yes, Mrs. Webb used to be a professional healer. Top of her field. I can’t think of anything she wouldn’t be able to handle.” She blinked. “Well. Within reason, obviously.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, still a little out of breath. “What—why is she…?”
Torres smiled ruefully. “Why is she here? I know, she’s seriously out of our league. But she got bored during her second retirement, and her granddaughter had been a student here, and she decided that she’d get involved for a few months. That was, let’s see … nine years ago? Now she more or less runs the place.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “She’s way overqualified to be filling in as school nurse, but I’m sure I could ask her to—”
“No, no, that’s, no,” I stammered a bit too fast. “I’m fine, really, I just. Need to get some coffee. In a few minutes.” I rustled my papers to give my hands something to do.
“Alright,” Torres said, settling back in her chair, still eyeing me. “How’s the case going? Have you made any progress?”
I took a deep breath. In my mind, I took what had just happened to my shoulder, and I put it into a box. A box with a tight lid. I dropped the box into a deep brick-lined oubliette. It landed somewhere next to my mother’s last words and my searing loneliness and everything else I needed to forget, and just like that, I was fine again.
“I’ve got a few good starting points,” I said. “But I want to set expectations—this is probably going to be a slow process. It will take weeks for me to gather the evidence necessary to even approach a conclusion.” I gave her the familiar spiel about keeping a reasonable outlook—a speech I could have given in my sleep. It was one that every client needed to hear: no case solves itself in a week of miraculous discoveries and confessions. I stopped myself before my usual last line: I can’t just pull answers out of thin air—I’m a PI, not a wizard.
I flipped open my notepad and pretended to check my notes as if I hadn’t memorized them over the weekend. “It would be great if I could get Sylvia’s medical records—did you have any luck getting them from the ’miz?”
She looked uncomfortable. “They assured me that they’d sent a copy already. They said that the records were appended to the coroner’s report.”
I raised my eyebrows. “They were definitely gone by the time I got the report.” I glanced around her office—there were locking cabinets in several corners. “Where did you store the file before you gave it to me?”
Her lips twitched. “I stored it
on my desk.” She rubbed her temples. “It didn’t occur to me that anyone would try to tamper with it—that anyone would even know to tamper with it.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s … interesting.” Someone was trying to hide something. In that moment, it hit home: The killer is here. Right here on campus, and likely in this building. “We can get another copy of the medical record, yes? Did you already ask for that, or…?”
“They said they’d send it over sometime next week,” Torres said with a grimace. “Bureaucracy, I’m afraid.”
I waved a hand at her. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll see if I can hassle them into sending it sooner. Otherwise—I think I’m ready to start talking to people, to get an idea of who Sylvia was. It’ll help me to understand her life. To get a picture of who was involved in her day-to-day, and who might have had a reason to, you know.” I cleared my throat. “To kill her.” Torres’s lips pursed minutely. I made a mental note to practice discussing murder until it didn’t make me stumble anymore. “I was hoping to formally interview a few students this week, and then staff members next week, if that’s alright with you?”
“Formally interview students?” The temperature in the room dropped by a few degrees. Her eyes narrowed, and I suddenly wished I was back out in the main office with Mrs. Webb, looking at a cloud of my own blood.
“I just need to learn a bit more about Sylvia, that’s all.” I balanced my tone on the incredibly narrow ridge between placating and casual. I didn’t read Torres as the kind of woman who would take kindly to blatant mollification. “Students usually know more about teachers than we give them credit for. You said it was alright for me to talk to them—I just want to move those conversations into a setting where they can be a little more candid.”
Torres hesitated before nodding. “As I understand it, ’miz guidelines require that at least two adults be present for formal interviews. But you aren’t from the ’miz, and our Department of Education leaves internal matters up to each school’s headmaster.” She looked at me with frank evaluation. “I can’t spare staff to supervise these interviews, so I’d like you to be somewhere that feels a little more public than an administrative office. Will the library work? I noticed you working in there yesterday. If you’re comfortable where you were, you’re welcome to it.”