by Sarah Gailey
I froze for a gut-clenched second before hanging up on Glen. I let my blood-soaked shirt drop to the floor, shoved my phone into my bra so it wouldn’t vibrate against the sink when he called back. I heard the office door close, and a fresh flood of adrenaline burned through me.
Someone was in the office with me.
No one had an appointment. No one should have been able to get inside at all. That door locked automatically when it closed, and I knew it had closed. I knew it, I had heard it click shut behind me. This wouldn’t be the first break-in attempt, but it was the first time someone had tried it while I was in the office. I pressed my ear to the door, carefully gripped the knob without letting it rattle in my fingers. The lock on the door was busted, but at least I could try to hold it shut if they decided to look around.
“I’m here to see Ms. Gamble.” A woman’s voice, clear and steady. What the fuck? I could hear her footsteps as she walked across the little waiting area. I winced, remembering my jacket and the bloodstained knife on the abandoned admin desk. She murmured something that sounded like “Oh dear.” My phone buzzed against my armpit, but Glen and his yelling would just have to wait.
“Once you’ve finished treating your wound, you can come out of the bathroom, Ms. Gamble. I don’t care that you’re in your camisole. We have business to discuss.”
I straightened so fast that something in my back gave a pop. My head throbbed. I stared at the white-painted wood of the door as I realized who was waiting for me out there. This was not good.
This was not good at all.
The shitty waiting-room couch creaked. She was serious—she was going to wait for me. I rushed through cleaning up the slice in my shoulder, wadding up wet paper towels and scrubbing blood off my arm, half ignoring and half savoring how much it hurt. The bandage I hastily taped over the wound soaked through with blood within a few seconds. I would say I considered getting stitches, but it’d be a lie. I’d let my arm fall off before setting foot inside a fucking hospital.
I checked myself in the mirror—not a welcome sight. I pulled my phone out of my bra, ran a hand through my hair. There was only so much I could do to make myself look less like a wreck, and I kept the once-over as brief as possible. I like mirrors about as much as I like hospitals.
I opened the door and strode out with much more confidence than a person who has just been caught hiding in a bathroom should have been able to muster. I’ve always been good at faking that much, at least. The short, dark-haired woman standing in the front office regarded me coolly.
“Good morning, Ms. Gamble.”
“You can call me Ivy, Miss…?” The woman’s handshake was firm, but not crushing. It was the handshake of a woman who felt no need to prove herself.
“Marion Torres,” she replied. The woman peered at my face, then nodded, having seen there whatever it was she was searching for. I could guess what it was. It was a face I couldn’t seem to get away from. Shit.
“Ms. Torres,” I replied in my most authoritative, this-is-my-house voice. “Would you like to step into my office?” I led Torres to the narrow door just beyond the empty admin desk, flipping the light on as I entered. I opened a top drawer of my desk, sweeping a stack of photographs into it—fresh shots of a client’s wife and her tennis instructor making choices together. Nothing anyone should see, especially not as a first impression. Although, I thought, if this woman was who I thought she was, I didn’t want to impress her anyway.
Torres sat straight-backed in the client chair. It was a battered green armchair with a low back, chosen to make clients feel comfortable but not in charge. I remember being proud of myself for the strategy I put into picking that chair. That was a big thing I solved, the question of what kind of chair I should make desperate people sit in before they asked for my help.
Light streamed into the office through a narrow, wire-reinforced casement window behind my desk. The sunlight caught the threads of silver in Torres’s pin-straight black bob. I felt the sliver of camaraderie that I always experienced in the presence of other salt-and-pepper women, but it evaporated fast enough. Torres stared intently at the fine motes of dust that danced in the sunlight. As I watched, the dust motes shifted to form a face that was an awful lot like mine.
I swallowed around rising irritation. I would not yell at this woman.
“You don’t look exactly like her,” Torres said. “I thought you would. The face is the same, but—”
“We’re not that kind of twins,” I replied. I crossed behind my desk and pulled the shutters over the window closed, rendering the dust motes—and the familiar face—invisible. “Is she okay?”
“She’s fine,” Torres said. “She’s one of our best teachers, you know.”
I settled into my swivel chair, folding my hands on top of my desk blotter. All business. “So you’re from the academy.”
Torres smiled, a warm, toothy grin that immediately made me feel welcome. Damn, she’s good, I thought—making me feel welcome in my own office. I pushed the comfort away and held it at arm’s length. No thanks, not interested.
“I am indeed,” she said. “I’m the headmaster at Osthorne Academy.”
“Not headmistress?” I asked before I could stop myself. I cringed internally as Torres’s smile cooled by a few degrees.
“Yes. Please do not attempt to be cute about my title. There are more interesting things to be done with words. We spend most of our students’ freshman year teaching them that words have power, and we don’t waste that power if we can help it.”
I felt a familiar principal’s-office twist in my stomach, and had to remind myself again that this was my office. “Understood.”
We sat in silence for a moment; Torres seemed content to wait for me to ask why she was there. I couldn’t think of a good way to ask without being rude, and this woman didn’t strike me as someone who would brook poor manners. Distant shouts sounded from outside—friendly but loud, almost certainly kids skipping school to smoke weed behind the warehouses. They’d sit with their backs against the cement walls, scraping out the insides of cheap cigars and leaving behind piles of tobacco and Tootsie Pop wrappers.
Torres cleared her throat. I decided to accept defeat.
“What can I do for you, Ms. Torres?”
Torres reached into her handbag and pulled out a photograph. It was a staff photo, taken in front of a mottled blue backdrop; the kind of photo I might have seen in the front few pages of my own high school yearbook. A twenty-five-cent word sprang unbidden into my mind: “noctilucent.” The word described the glow of a cat’s eyes at night, but it also seemed right for the woman in the photograph. She was a moonbeam turned flesh, pale with white-blond hair and wide-set light green eyes. Beautiful was not an appropriate word; she looked otherworldly. She looked impossible.
“That,” Torres said after allowing me to stare for an embarrassingly long time, “is Sylvia Capley. She taught health and wellness at Osthorne. Five months ago, she was murdered in the library. I need you to find out who killed her.”
Direct. More direct than I was prepared for. I blinked down at the photo. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” The words came automatically. “But isn’t this a matter for the police? You—um. Mages. Don’t you have police?”
Torres pursed her lips, looking up at the shuttered window. “We do. But they—hm.” She hesitated.
I didn’t push her for more. I knew from experience that it was far more effective to let a client sit with the silence—to let them decide for themselves to fill it. I’ve always been good at letting silence put down roots.
“I don’t agree with their findings,” Torres finally finished. “I’d like a second opinion.”
“My opinion?” I said, flashing Torres the skepticals. “I don’t do murder investigations.” I said it as if it were a choice, rather than a simple fact of the law and my poor marketing. I was sure that there were some people out there who were still hiring PIs to solve murders, but none of them had ever come knock
ing at my basement door. I wanted her to think it was a choice, though.
“You come highly recommended,” Torres replied, dry as kindling. “And you know about us. You’ve got the right eye, to see the things that the investigators missed because they were too busy looking for obvious answers to see this for what it was. This was murder.”
“And what are the obvious answers?”
Torres pulled a business card from the space between naught and nothing. I bit back annoyance again. She wasn’t doing it to antagonize me. Probably. She handed me the card, and, to my credit, I only hesitated for a couple of seconds before letting the paper touch my skin. A breathtakingly high number was written on the back in a headmaster’s irreproachable penmanship. “That’s the amount of retainer I’m willing to pay. Up front, in cash.”
It’s not that there was a catch in her voice, not exactly. But I could hear her keeping herself steady. I kept my eyes on her business card, counting zeroes. “Why are you so invested in this? If the magic-cops said it wasn’t murder—”
“It was murder,” she interrupted, her voice clapping the conversation shut like a jewelry box I wasn’t supposed to reach for. I looked up at her, startled, and she pursed her lips before continuing in a calmer tone. “Sylvia was a dear friend of mine. I knew her well, and I am certain that she didn’t die the way they say she did. Courier a contract to the address on the front of the card if you’re willing to take the job. I’d like to see you in my office on Friday morning.”
And before I could ask anything else—before I could come up with the next question or the sly rebuttal or the little joke that would keep her there, talking, explaining everything, telling me what the “obvious answers” were supposed to be—Marion Torres had vanished. I sat heavily in my chair, staring at the place where she had been, trying to swallow the old anger. It was just like these people to drop a line like that and then poof. If they would only stay vanished, my life would be a hell of a lot simpler.
I reread the number Torres had written down. I ran my thumb over the grooves her pen had left in the thick paper. I listened to my cell phone vibrating—Glen calling again to yell at me. I breathed deep, tasting the dust in the air. The dust that Torres had rearranged into the shape of my sister’s face. It was the first time I’d seen that face in years. It was a face I hadn’t thought I’d ever see again.
I pressed one corner of the business card into the meat of my palm, deciding whether or not to take the case. I stared at the way the paper dented my skin, and I pretended that I had a choice.
CHAPTER
THREE
I NEVER WANTED TO BE magic.
That was Tabitha’s thing, not mine, and sometimes you just have to be fine with things the way they are. And I was fine with it.
“Liquid lunch?” The bartender cocked an eyebrow at me as he placed a dark, sweating bottle in front of me next to a chilled glass.
“Part of a balanced breakfast,” I replied mildly, decanting my beer into the glass. He gave me an easy smile, a you’re-funny smile that he probably used on everyone. Affirmation and illusion, bound up tighter than two snakes in the same egg.
But then, maybe he didn’t give that smile to everyone. Maybe he actually thought I was okay, for a lunchtime customer. Maybe I was just being a cynical asshole.
“I’m actually having kind of a terrible day, if I’m honest.” I said it quietly, half hoping he wouldn’t hear. Giving him a chance to ignore me. I leaned my elbows against the long reclaimed-wood bar. This wasn’t my usual bar—the place was new in the neighborhood, eminently forgettable in the grand scheme of gentrification. This bartender didn’t know my face, wouldn’t recognize me. Didn’t have to be nice to me now, or ever again. I’d come here telling myself I just wanted to exist while I drank my breakfast and digested everything that had come with the morning. I’d wanted to hide. But then the bartender gave me that you’re-clever smile, and I realized I had to tell someone. Just to have it all out in the world, somewhere other than my own head.
The bartender didn’t say anything. Maybe he hadn’t heard me at all. I studied the decor as if I didn’t care either way. Tiny pots with tinier succulents, weird art accents hanging above the bottles behind the bar. I couldn’t tell if I’d been there for happy hour before, or if I’d just been to a thousand places exactly like it. Places like that were springing up around Oakland by the score back then, every one a marker of the way the city was changing. It felt all-at-once, even though it had been brewing for years. Decades. Across the bay, San Francisco bled money like an unzipped artery. Those who had been privileged enough to have their buckets out to catch the spray drove back over the water to Oakland—from The City to The Town. They bumped aside people who had been living in these neighborhoods for generations, and they tore down storefronts, and they built brunch pubs with wood reclaimed from the houses they were remodeling.
It was shitty and it was destructive and it was perfect, because I could slip onto a barstool and pretend I had a place to go. Just for a few hours at a time. Something familiar. Bars with driftwood behind the bottles instead of mirrors.
“Tell me about it?” The bartender was in front of me again, holding a bucket of limes. He started slicing them, looking back and forth between me and the knife.
“Shouldn’t your barback be doing that?” I asked, watching him slowly quarter a lime.
“He’s too hungover to function,” the bartender said, rolling his eyes. “So what’s up with your day?”
I took a pull of my stout—it was thick as a milkshake, and it hit my belly like a hug. “Well,” I said. “I got mugged.”
“Sucks,” he replied, and I tipped my drink toward him in a cheers-to-sucks gesture.
“And then this woman came into my office. She wants to hire me for a case. A big one. It’ll mean hiring someone to handle all the other active cases I’ve got going.” The other active cases were small potatoes—two disability claims, three cheating spouses, one spouse who wasn’t cheating after all but whose husband couldn’t believe that she had really taken up pottery. She was pretty good at it too. This wouldn’t be the first time I’d had to hire help; when the workload got too intense, I occasionally subcontracted to other, less-established outfits in the area. I’d return the favor for them someday, if they ever needed someone to do a little heavy lifting. My remote assistant would arrange the logistics—the subcontractors, the paperwork, the payments, the letters to clients. No problem.
“Sure,” the bartender said, and bless him, he didn’t care enough to ask a single clarifying question. He didn’t want to know who I was, where I worked. He just wanted some noise to make the limes less boring. It was perfect.
“So, the woman who was in the office this morning. She’s the headmaster at the school where my sister teaches.”
“Headmaster? Shit.”
“It’s a private school. Some kids board there, some don’t. It’s down by Sunol, in the hills. The Osthorne Academy for Young Mages.”
He nodded, didn’t flinch at the word “mages.” I tapped my fingers on the table, one-two-three-four. This guy wasn’t half listening to me. I wasn’t anybody to him—just some freelancer drinking beer in the middle of the day and watching him cut a few dozen limes.
So I told him. I told him everything that I knew about the case, and about Osthorne. Halfway through the story, he looked up at me, opened his mouth to say something. Closed it again and went back to the limes, but a stillness had entered his movements—he was listening now, trying to decide if I was crazy. I took a long, slow sip of my beer, made a project of setting my glass down exactly within the condensation ring it’d left on the table.
“But magic isn’t real,” he said after a moment.
“Isn’t it?”
“It—of course not. I would have heard of it. Everyone would have heard of it.” His eyes were laughing now, waiting for the punch line. He had paused with the tip of the knife in the rind of a runty lime, and he waited for me to answer before push
ing it the rest of the way through.
I tried to feel like I was talking to a friend, like this was a real conversation that wouldn’t just turn into a weird story he told at the end of his shift. I tried not to feel temporary. Just for a few seconds. But trying not to feel something isn’t the same as not feeling it, and I knew it was just a matter of time before I was alone again.
That’s how life goes. People don’t stick.
“Haven’t you heard of it, though?”
He shook his head, used the knife’s edge to scrape lime pulp off the edge of his cutting board. “But that’s different. That’s like … fiction. Or magicians. Illusionists. Or whatever.”
“It’s not quite like that.” I needed him to believe me. Not that it mattered. I would never see him again. Let him think I was crazy. It didn’t matter. “But it is real. There are people—a lot of people—who can do magic. Real magic. My sister is one of them. So’s that woman who was in my office this morning. They’re mages. They do magic.” I looked at him, tried to beam understanding into his brain. “They are magic.” I wasn’t sure what I was saying anymore—the look on his face was making me lose track of things. He didn’t believe me. This was it: he was going to give me a tight smile and walk away and later he would tell his friends about the lunatic who came into his bar to talk about magic.
But then he didn’t walk away. He looked at me, and he didn’t say anything, and I realized that he was waiting.
I took another drink, tried to get my thoughts in order. Forward. “So. There was a death on campus, in the school library.”
“Your sister’s school.”
“Yeah. It’s—she works there. We don’t talk.”
He nodded, and I couldn’t tell if he believed me or had decided to just go with it. I couldn’t tell which would be better. “And she’s a … a witch?”
“A mage,” I answered. “We don’t call them witches. Or wizards—they hate that.”
“Are you one too?”
“Nope. Not me.”
