by Sarah Gailey
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For the people who knew before I did
PROLOGUE
THE LIBRARY AT OSTHORNE ACADEMY for Young Mages was silent save for the whisper of the books in the Theoretical Magic section. Honeyed sun poured through two tall windows onto rows of empty study tables, which still gleamed with the freshness of summer cleaning. It was a small library—each section took up only a row or two of tall metal shelves—but it was big enough to hide in. Sunlight from the windows along one wall of the library spilled between the shelves, casting long shadows. None of the students had come to linger, not in the first week of school—they’d dashed in and then out again, looking for friends or for classes they’d never been to before. Now they were all downstairs at the welcome-back dinner, an all-staff-all-students meal that marked the end of the first week of classes. They’d joke there about house-elves and pumpkin juice—or at least the freshmen would. By the time they were sophomores, that vein of humor was worn beyond use.
Mrs. Webb was not at the welcome-back dinner, and neither was Dylan DeCambray. One was hunting the other, a familiar pastime for both of them. Dylan was hiding in the stacks—specifically, in the Poison and Theoretical Poison section. He had tucked himself into the shadow of a returns cart, his legs cramping as he listened to Mrs. Webb’s measured footfalls in the next section over: Electricity, Theoretical Electricity, Electrical Manipulations.
“Mr. DeCambray, let’s not have another year like this. You’re a senior now. I’d have expected you to be more mature than you were as a freshman.” Her voice was thick with age. The condemnation of immaturity might have moved another student to self-immolation, but Dylan had a higher purpose. He would never let an authority figure stand in the way of that purpose, no matter the depths of their misunderstanding.
The Prophecy.
Mrs. Webb rounded the shelves into the Poison section. She moved slowly, deliberately—she’d often told students that hurrying was a fool’s errand. If you need to hurry, her oft-repeated saying went, you’re already too late. The early-evening shadows cast by the drooping sun should have deepened Mrs. Webb’s wrinkles, but, as she turned, the golden haze that made it into the stacks hit her profile just right, illuminating the young woman she once had been. In that moment, only white hair, sculpted as always into a perfect bouffant, belied her eighty-six years. A few more steps, and her face was in shadow once more. Mrs. Webb was just a short distance from the returns cart, close enough for Dylan to inhale the faint powdery smell of her perfume.
Dylan took a deep breath, then cupped his hands and blew into them. He waved them in front of himself, a mime smearing grease across the inside of his invisible box. Mrs. Webb walked a few feet in front of him. Her sensible black clogs brushed across the industrial gray carpet tiles with a steady, rhythmic shush-shush-shush. She peered around the returns cart over the top of her red horn-rimmed glasses, looking straight into Dylan’s face. He could have counted the black freckles that dotted her dark brown skin. She hardly had to stoop to be at eye level with seventeen-year-old Dylan; when he stood at his full six-foot height, he towered over the tiny woman.
He held his breath as she straightened and continued stalking between the shelves of the Poison section. His concealment charm had held. Mrs. Webb had looked right at Dylan, and she had not seen a pale, stretched-out seventeen-year-old with unruly brown hair and the hollow, hungry face of summer growth spurts. She had seen nothing but a few cobwebs and a row of books about the uses of arsenic.
“Mr. DeCambray, honestly,” she called out again, her voice weary with exasperation. “I don’t know what you’re thinking you’re going to find in here, but I can assure you that there are no mysteries to be solved, no conspiracies to be unraveled. Whether or not you’re the—oh, hush,” she snapped at the books in the restricted Theoretical Magic section. But their whispering didn’t stop—if anything, it increased, the books murmuring to each other like a scandalized congregation of origami Presbyterians.
Mrs. Webb paused at the end of the Poison section, looking toward the Theoretical Magic section again. “Mr. DeCambray, please. Just come down to dinner. This is foolishness.” She rounded the end of the shelves, and the murmurs of the books grew loud enough that Dylan couldn’t quite make out what she was saying anymore. But that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that she was no longer between him and the library exit.
Dylan rose and made for the door, victorious: he had dodged her. He could make his way back to the dinner, and when she came to the dining hall to admit defeat, he could say he’d been there all along. It was a good way to start the year. This was going to be his year, Dylan thought. He eased the library door open, slipping his narrow frame through and closing it without so much as a silencing charm to cover the snuck sound of the latch. Triumph.
Dylan’s shoes squeaked on the linoleum of the hallway as he ran. His too-long legs tangled, and he was about to catch himself midstride, about to make it to the end of the hall and the stairs that led down to the mess—but he skidded to a stop.
A scream echoed through the corridor.
Crap. His heart was pounding wildly—was this it? Was it finally time? Dylan DeCambray was torn between terror and elation. It’s happening, it’s really happening—he pelted back toward the library, toward the sound of Mrs. Webb screaming over and over again. He knocked over a chair or two on his way to the section where the screaming was coming from—the chairs weren’t really in his way, but the moment felt so urgent that it seemed wrong to leave things undisturbed. A small voice inside him whispered, Now, now, it’s happening now.
He pulled up short at the Theoretical Magic section, gasping for breath, his hands braced on the shelves at the end of the row. His foot crunched a sheet of copy paper that read “Reorganization in Progress: Do Not Enter Without Protective Equipment.” The wards were down. The books, which had been whispering so insistently when Dylan left the library, had gone silent. They seemed to stare at the tableau in the center of the section.
Dylan stared too. Then his brain caught up to what his eyes were seeing. He turned, still clutching one of the shelves, and vomited. When he thought he could stand it, he tried to straighten—but then he saw what was in the aisle, and his empty stomach clenched, and he heaved again.
In the middle of the section, Mrs. Webb stood with the sun at her back. One hand clutched her cardigan closed over her throat; the other held an old, crooked birch wand high over her head, amplifying the sound of her screams to an inhuman volume. Her voice didn’t break or cease—the screaming filled the school like a strobing siren.
She took a step backward, mouth open, still screaming, when she saw Dylan. Her shoes sank with a sick su
cking sound into the soaked industrial carpet, which had turned so red as to look nearly black. Every time Dylan allowed his eyes to fall below her knees, he tasted fear-bitter bile rising in the back of his throat.
It was next to her feet.
At first Dylan had taken it to be two very slim bodies, facing away from each other. There were two fanning sprays of white-blond hair; there were two wide, pale green eyes staring up at the shelves out of two familiar profiles. But, as Dylan had noticed just before his stomach had twisted for the second time, there were only two long-fingered hands. Two total.
The woman on the floor had been cut in half, right down the middle, and laid out like a book with a broken spine. Her blood had soaked into the carpet and spread far enough to touch both bookshelves, a moat between Mrs. Webb and Dylan DeCambray. As Mrs. Webb’s voice finally began to crack with the strain of screaming, the books in the middle of the Theoretical Magic section of the library at Osthorne Academy for Young Mages began to whisper once more.
CHAPTER
ONE
IT MIGHT TAKE A LITTLE while to get there, but I’ll tell you everything, and I’ll tell you the truth. As best I can. I used to lie, but when I tell you the story, you’ll understand why I had to lie. You’ll understand that I didn’t have a choice.
I just wanted to do my job.
No, I said I would tell you the truth. Of course I had a choice. We all have choices, don’t we? And if I tell myself that I didn’t have a choice, I’m no better than an adulterer who misses his daughter’s dance recital because he’s shacking up in some shitty hotel with his wife’s sister. He tells himself that he doesn’t have a choice too. But we know better than that. He has choices. He chooses to tell the first lie, and then he chooses to tell every other lie that comes after that. He chooses to buy a burner phone to send pictures of his cock to his mistress, and he chooses to tell his wife that he has a business trip, and he chooses to pull cash out of an ATM to pay for the room. He tells himself that all of his choices are inevitable, and he tells himself that he isn’t lying.
But when I hand his wife an envelope full of photographs and an invoice for services rendered, her world is turned upside down, because he chose. If I try to pretend I didn’t have a choice, I’m not any different from the liars whose lives I ruin, and that’s not who I am. I’m nothing like them. My job is to pursue the truth.
So, the truth: it’s not that I didn’t have a choice. I did. I had a thousand choices.
I was so close to making the right one.
* * *
The man who stood between me and the door to my office was trembling-thin, his restless eyes sunken with desperation, holding a knife out like an offering. It was warm for January, but he was shaking in the morning air. He wasn’t going to follow through, I thought. Too scared. But then he licked his dry lips with a dry tongue, and I knew that his fear and my fear were not the same kind of fear. He’d do what he thought he needed to do.
Nobody decides to become the kind of person who will stab a stranger in order to get at what’s inside her pockets. That’s a choice life makes for you.
“Okay,” I said, reaching into my tote. I hated my hand for shaking. “Alright, I’ll give you what I’ve got.” I rummaged past my wallet, past my camera, past the telephoto lens in its padded case. I pulled out a slim money clip, peeled off the cash, handed it to him.
He could have demanded more. He could have taken my whole bag. But instead, he took the cash, finally looking me in the eyes.
“Sorry,” he said, and then he made to run past me, up the stairs that led from my basement-level office to the sidewalk. He was close enough that I could smell his breath. It was oddly sweet, fruity. Like the gum me and my sister Tabitha used to steal from the drugstore when we were kids—the kind that always lost its flavor after ten seconds of chewing. Looking back, I can’t figure out why we ever thought it was even worth taking.
The man pelted up the stairs. One of his feet kicked out behind him, and he slipped. “Shit shit shit,” I said, rearing back, trying to dodge him before he fell into me. He flailed and caught himself on my shoulder with a closed fist, knocking the wind out of me.
“Jesus fucking Christ, just go.” I said it with more fear than venom, but it worked. He bolted, dropping his knife behind him with a clatter. I listened to him running down the sidewalk upstairs, his irregular footfalls echoing between the warehouses. I listened until I was sure that he was gone.
CHAPTER
TWO
BAD THINGS JUST HAPPEN SOMETIMES. That’s what I’ve always told myself, and it’s what I told myself then: I could have bled out right there in the stairs leading down to my office, and not a soul would have known why it happened because there was no “why.” No use dwelling on it: it would have been the end of me, sudden and senseless. I clenched my jaw and pushed away the thought of how long it would have taken before someone found me—before someone wondered what had happened to me. I pushed away the question of who would have noticed I was gone.
I didn’t have time for an existential crisis. It didn’t have to be a big deal. People get mugged all the time. I wasn’t special just because it was my morning to lose some cash. I didn’t have time to be freaked out about it. I had shit to do.
I just wanted to go to work.
I made my way down the remainder of the steps toward the door that hid in the shadowy alcove at the bottom of the stairs. I nudged a Gatorade bottle with my toe. The man had been sleeping in my doorway. He couldn’t have seen it by the dim light of the streetlamps at night, but my name was written across the solid metal of the door in flaking black letters:
IVY GAMBLE, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR
MEETINGS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY
I hadn’t gotten the words touched up since I’d first rented the place. I always figured I’d let them fall away until nothing was left but a shadow of the letters. I didn’t think I needed to be easy to find—if someone didn’t know where my office was, that meant they weren’t a client yet. Besides, walk-ins weren’t exactly my bread and butter then. The dead bolt locked automatically when the reinforced steel swung shut. That door was made to withstand even the most determined of visitors.
I didn’t run my fingers across the letters. If I’d known what would change before the next time I walked down those stairs, though? Well, I wouldn’t have run my fingers across the letters then, either. I probably wouldn’t have given them a second glance. I’ve never been good at recognizing what moments are important. What things I should hang on to while I’ve got them.
I stood on my toes to tap at the lightbulb that hung above the door with a still-shaking hand. The filaments rattled. Dead. On nights when that bulb was lit, nobody slept outside the door, which meant that nobody got surprised coming down the stairs in the morning.
I bit my lip and tapped at the lightbulb again. I took a deep breath, tried to find something in me to focus on. Imagine you’re a candle, and your wick is made of glass. I gave the bulb a hard stare. I tapped it one more time.
It flickered to life. My heart skipped a beat—but then the bulb died again with a sound like a fly smacking into a set of venetian blinds and went dead, a trace of smoke graying the inside of the glass.
I shook my head, angry at myself for hoping. It hadn’t been worth a shot. I thought I had outgrown kid stuff like that. Stupid. I stooped to pick up the little knife from where it lay just in front of the door, squinting at what looked like blood on the blade.
“Shit,” I said for the fourth time in as many minutes. As I opened the heavy steel door, a white arc of pain lanced through my shoulder. I looked down, letting the door swing shut behind me. There was a fresh vent in my sleeve. Blood was welling up under it fast—he must have had the knife in his hand when he caught himself on me. I pulled off my ruined jacket, dropping it—and the bloodstained knife—on the empty desk in the waiting area of the office. It fell with a heavy thump, and I remembered my phone in the pocket, the call I was already late for. Sure en
ough, there were already two pissy texts from the client. I dialed his number with one hand, leaving streaks of stairway grime on the screen, then clamped the phone between my ear and my good shoulder as I headed for the bathroom.
I listened to the ringing on the other end of the line and turned on the hot water tap as far as it would go, attempting to scald the god-knows-what off my palms, trying not to think about the water bill. Or any of the other bills. The cheap pink liquid soap I stocked in the office wasn’t doing anything to cut the shit on my hands, which was somehow slippery and sticky at the same time. My shoulder bled freely as I lathered again and again.
“Sorry I’m late, Glen,” I said when he picked up. My voice probably shook with leftover adrenaline, probably betrayed how much my shoulder was starting to hurt. Fortunately, Glen wasn’t the kind of person who would give a shit whether or not I was okay. He immediately started railing about his brother, who he was sure was stealing from their aunt and who I had found was, in fact, just visiting her on the regular like a good nephew. I put Glen on speaker so he could rant while I peeled off my shirt with wet hands, wincing at the burning in my shoulder. I stood there in my camisole, wadded up the shirt and pressed it to the wound. The bleeding was slow but the pain was a steady strobe.
“I hope you don’t think I’m going to pay for this shit,” Glen was saying, and I closed my eyes for a couple of seconds. I allowed myself just a few heartbeats of bitterness at how unfair it was, that I had to deal with Glen and look for my long-neglected first aid kit at the same time. I was going to take just a moment of self-pity before going into my patient I’ve provided you a service and you were well aware of my fee schedule routine—but then I heard the unmistakable sound of the front door to my office opening.
