Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (13 page)

Stag’s phrasing
had
been
ambiguous, but the fact that the society was only named in connection with
Hilda Ruiz made her think that Ruiz was the one involved in the society, not
Stag. If Stag had been involved he would have mentioned it, or been coyer about
not mentioning it, Joy suspected. And if Hilda was involved, the entire
founding faculty of Gooseberry Bluff might have been involved. The
current
faculty might be involved. Probably not the president, because she couldn’t think of a reason
for him to bring the FBMA in if he were, and probably not Hector Ay — although he
was still being mysterious about his security protocols for the campus.

The campus lawns had been mowed the day before, and the ubiquitous
crows were still feasting on the clippings. As Joy came up the path from the
lot, they turned their heads, one by one, to watch her. This time she was sure
of it. She stopped then, realization bubbling up through her.

“You’re the surveillance system,” she whispered to the nearest crow. It
cocked its head at her. “Something like a flock of
familiars or shamanic transference or something. But passive.
I’m right, aren’t I? Can you hear me, Hector?” Oh, he was clever. She reached
into her bag for her notebook and pen. She squatted down in the middle of the
path and wrote in thick black letters on the first blank page. Then she held it
up to the nearest crow, tapping on the paper.
Meet
me in the library, it said; Joy just hoped that the crows had good
enough vision to transmit it and that Hector’s security magic worked the way
she thought it did.

“Later, birds,” she said, and hurried up the path. Things were starting
to make some sense; it was a slightly giddy feeling, thinking that she was
going to figure all this out. She could do this job; she wouldn’t let Martin
down.

The question was, if Hector could be trusted
and he really had the entire campus monitored, how could the demons be moving
through? Where were they coming from, and where were they going? No; there were
still too many questions, too many basic unknowns. She had an idea of what the
demons were being used for and some insight into the whens,
but the whos and the wheres
and the whys remained elusive.

The cool inside of the building revived her somewhat, and she took the
stairs to the second floor two at a time. She knew the library was open on
Saturdays, but not how late, so it was a relief to see the posted hours on the
door as 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

Mr. Larch was behind the circulation desk; he gave her a languid,
almost leering smile. “Ms. Wilkins,” he said. “A pleasure to
see you again.” He wore a sky-blue short-sleeved button-down shirt and a
silver ascot, a combination that few men could have pulled off. Larch was not
one of them.

Joy made an effort to ignore the revulsion she felt for him. “Hello,”
said Joy. “I was wondering if we have a collection of Hilda Ruiz’s papers here.”

“Indeed we do. Letters, journals, drafts, and
unpublished articles, some books from her personal library with marginalia in
her hand. Her handwriting isn’t the best, fair warning.”

“OK. I think I’d like to see her journals first.”

“Right this way.” Larch set off north through the stacks, his movements
as graceful as his wardrobe was awkward. He moved with economy, not
exaggeration, no free-swinging arms or thrown-back shoulders. He had the least
self-conscious walk Joy had ever seen, and if you assumed that his fashion
sense stemmed from that same lack, it almost made him appealing. Ascot or no,
Larch gave off a decidedly masculine vibe; he reeked of Old Spice and not
testosterone, but Old Spice was one of the more masculine scents Joy could
think of, next to sweat.

She cleared her head of those thoughts when a gap appeared in the
stacks, a wire-enclosed but well-lit cage labeled
Founder's Room
standing to one side of it. Larch took out a
set of keys and sorted through them. “We don’t get many requests for this
stuff,” he said. “Looking for anything in particular?”

“Just some local color for my lectures,” she said.

“Ah! Don’t know that much about the founders myself. Let me know if you
come across anything interesting, eh? And when you’re done, just leave the
books on the table and they will reshelve themselves.”
He unlocked the cage for her. There was a wide table with two chairs in the
center of it and shelves on three sides. The northernmost one was labeled
Hilda Ruiz
.

“I’ll do that,” she said, hoping that her failure to make eye contact
would encourage him to leave quickly. Joy took the volume marked
JOURNAL,
1955-57
down and sat facing the door of the cage.

“Unless you want me to lock you in and let you out
later?” Larch grinned and waggled his eyebrows.

“I’m all set,” Joy said through clenched teeth. “Thanks.” Larch shrugged
and finally left her alone.

Ruiz was not nearly so prolific a diarist as Stag, and Larch was not
wrong about her handwriting. Her entries were crabbed and terse and contained
many abbreviations. Even more vexing was that many, it seemed, were missing.
There were at least a dozen pages torn out, with notations from an early school
archivist that “pages 23–26 missing” and so forth. One of those gaps fell in
late June, when Hilda was supposed to have had lunch with Arthur Stag.

Joy looked up and saw one of the library cats sprawled out on the floor
outside the cage, yawning. “You and me both, buddy,” she said.

There were more entries missing, all through 1956, 1957, and 1958, but after
that Ruiz must have decided to stop writing about whatever it was she — or
someone else — had decided was better kept secret.

Joy took down journals for the other founders from the same period and
found a similar pattern; all entries for New Year’s 1956 had been removed, as
well as others between April 1955 and October 1958. She was more certain than
ever that she had found the shape of a conspiracy, but its face remained
hidden.

“Dead end.” Joy sighed. She had been reading
other people’s journals and letters for hours; her eyes stung and her attention
had begun to waver. She left the books on the table and locked the cage behind
her.

“I can’t think straight anymore,” she said to the cat. It had gray
stripes and a black circle around one eye. It had stood and retreated to the
edge of one of the stacks when she stood, but it was still watching her.

“I need a walk to clear my head,” she said. On impulse, she turned
north into the stacks rather than south. She wondered how far she would have to
walk to reach the community college in Hibbing, or Brainerd, or wherever the
other branches were linked to the Gooseberry Bluff library. She was still
exhausted from the funeral service, and she felt like she hadn’t really
processed anything. She felt like she wouldn’t until she finished this job.

She passed through a gap in the shelving and spotted something out of
the corner of her eye on the east wall. It was the faint glow of an aura in a
distinctive pattern: violet and yellow separated by a stripe of white. It was
there and then gone, like the flare of light behind a closed door. But there
wasn’t a door there.

At least, there wasn’t a door that she could see.

She crossed to the wall and walked slowly back and forth in front of
it. It was featureless brick, with a READ
poster featuring an actress from some science fiction show on it. As she
stepped past the poster, the glow flared out again, in a straight line from the
floor to just above her head. Violet and yellow, separated by
white.

The aura of an inert, nameless demon.

Joy traced the door and found a knob at waist level. It wasn’t locked;
she turned it and opened the door slowly.

The room inside was naked concrete, just large enough for the two
pallets of demon canisters that lay within.

Joy touched the crystal at her throat. “Benjamin Flood,” she said. But
the voice she heard when the connection was made was not Flood’s.

“Joy,” Martin said. “You’re in danger, Joy. Turn around.”

Joy spun. There was a big black panther behind her.

“Oh, Martin,” she said. “Remember when you said that whoever’s
responsible for all this is good at blending in?”

The panther growled.

“Well, you couldn’t have been more wrong.”

There were
certain substances, supposed to bestow or embody luck, that
Zelda had learned early on to avoid. Acorns, whether powdered or roasted, just
made her logy. Clovers, four-leafed or not, tended to give her shortness of
breath. Bamboo messed with her digestion in mortifying ways (although in the
case of the latter, the real problem was that long before she had been cursed,
she had been allergic).

So she tended to stick to certain substances. Clay
and mineral rubs, certain common weeds and leaves, rabbit saliva — the usual
things. She kept an arsenal of ingredients in her home, with smaller
kits in her car and her purse. Testing the applications was tricky — she usually
limited her altruism to bird feeders. Unfortunately, once the curse had
responded by carpeting her backyard with the bodies of robins and sparrows,
felled by something toxic in the seed mix she had purchased. The company issued
a shipment recall the next day, but it was a day too late, and Zelda had felt a
pang of guilt at the dead birds all across the Midwest. She even felt badly
about the cost the seed company had incurred.

Yesterday, though, she had tried a small batch of seed, and this
morning her backyard was crowded with cardinals, magpies, and even a pair of
mountain bluebirds. She went out to put out more seed, and the birds circled
her like dancers; a golden-crowned sparrow landed on her shoulder and chirped
softly at her. She felt like a Disney princess, and immediately after filling
up the feeder she got in the car to buy what she needed for another batch.

Zelda shopped at Marilyn’s, downtown, for her alchemy supplies. Marilyn
and her daughters, who mostly ran the place these days, were scrupulous about
stocking only free-range bat’s wings and newt’s eyes, and they didn’t carry any
components from endangered animals — she wasn’t clear on how rabbit saliva was
humanely gathered, and suspected that the image she had of rabbits in saloons
and drawing rooms, each with their own spittoon, was unlikely — but if Marilyn’s
sold it, Zelda was sure it was safe. It was slightly more expensive but
generally of higher quality than the big box stuff, and so far spending her
money there hadn’t added enough karmic weight to the scales for the curse to
feel obliged to balance things out.

Alchemy Depots were popping up all over the place, putting the
mom-and-pop component shops out of business and exploiting employees and
suppliers both. Of course, Alchemy Depot would probably have had three cases of
daisy clay in stock, but Marilyn’s had one, and they could get two more by the
middle of the week. Zelda had needed half a case to dilute the rabbit saliva,
and that had only made four applications. She couldn’t slather herself in
aromatic clay every single night — the expense alone would force her to find a
second job.

But it was
working
. She was
sure of it.

Which was why, when Hector Ay walked into Marilyn’s as she was on her
way out, she paused, took a deep breath, and asked him if he would like to go
for a walk.

“Sure,” he said. He didn’t offer to carry anything, but he followed her
to her car and stood slack-jawed while she put the daisy clay in her trunk.

“You look tired,” she said.

He made a face. “It’s been a long couple of days,” he said.

She suggested that they walk down by the river. He still hadn’t said
much, and Zelda wondered if she was already too late to fix things.

“I’m sorry for not returning your calls,” she said as they waited to
cross the St. Croix Trail at the corner of Central. The day had been bright so
far, but from where they stood she could see a faint haze coming off the broad
expanse of the river.

“It’s fine if you didn’t want to,” he said. “I mean, if you thought we
made a mistake.”

The flat way he said it felt like a knife in her stomach. “You think we
made a mistake?” she asked as the light changed and they crossed.

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” he said. “I don’t want—”

“That was you, wasn’t it?” she asked sarcastically. “The
guy on my couch with the purple briefs?”

He stuttered something in response, some sort of denial or excuse. “Was
it you?” she said, in a voice so sharp that it worried her. She didn’t want to
be fighting with Hector, but his sudden seeming disinterest hurt. Even though
it was at least partly her fault, the way she had been avoiding him. She felt
the sting of frustrated tears welling up.

“Yes.”

She was mad at him for no reason. She needed to tell him.

“I like purple,” he said.

“I’m cursed,” she said. She reached the corner and stopped to face him,
the tears blurring her vision.

“What does — I mean, I like purple, so what? I
like bright colors. It’s not my fault that men in this country dress in an
assortment of earth tones. I don’t see why that means you’re cursed—”

“I don’t mean metaphorically, you dumbass. I mean I have an actual
curse, and if I’m nice to people, bad things happen to them.”

“So you were just being nice to me?”

“No, you idiot. I like you. I’ve liked you
since I met you, but I didn’t dare do anything, because of the curse. But I had
this counteragent that I thought was working, and then it wasn’t, but I think I
found another one, and — are you still there?”

“You’re looking right at me,” he said.

“Oh shit.” She waved a hand in front of her face but saw only a vague
shadow. “I think I’ve blinded myself.” Of course the chorus of birds had been
too good to be true.

Of course.