Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) Read Online Free PDF

hadn’t been able to discover, rather than being drawn back to her body, Selma was repelled by it. She was furious, and abusive in ways that she had never been while alive. Ingrid couldn’t even blame her.
    Selma’s body lay on a queen-size bed in the cellar. She — Ingrid thought of both the body and the spirit as her sister, even though they were both just fragments now — she was pale but beautiful. Ingrid pulled back the sheets that covered the body and grasped her sister’s feet. She massaged them carefully, flexing the stiff toes, then the knees. Ingrid moved up her sister’s body, massaging every inch of skin and exercising every joint. The first few times she had done this, she had cried. Now she just worked. She wondered what it was that kept her doing this. Hope was something she had put away on a shelf, but something about the accumulation of days taking care of her sister’s body gave her the inertia to continue doing so. That, and the angry ghost — the not-quite-her-sister — that waited upstairs.
    After she finished working the front of Selma’s body, Ingrid turned her sister over and did the back. She applied lotion to the papery skin and carefully washed her hair. She knew it was late, but she also knew that she probably wouldn’t sleep tonight anyway.
    Once she had done all she could do, she turned Selma onto her back, brushed her teeth, and pulled the sheets and blankets up over her. Then she sat down in the ugly old armchair she had set next to the bed and turned on the television. She and Selma watched a late-night talk show for a while. The host was Scottish, and that made Ingrid think of the trip she and Selma had taken to Europe to visit family in Denmark and to look at castles everywhere else. Selma had developed a crush on a backpacker they met in Munich, a Scottish girl whose accent was nearly indecipherable around her freshly pierced tongue. Remember that? she thought at Selma. She used to talk out loud to Selma’s body, but since the ghost had moved in she had decided that the real Selma could hear her thoughts. It was crazy thinking, sure, but crazy was her life.
    A news bulletin interrupted the talk show, something about Seoul and a subway. A moment later, Ingrid realized what they were saying, and she turned the volume up.
    “—lieved to have foiled an attack of the type known as a Heartstopper. Details are still coming in, but a police spokesman there is saying that they believe they may have discovered the purpose, or at least a purpose, behind these attacks, is that correct?”
    “That’s right. Seoul police are saying that they discovered an apparatus similar to that used in certain types of demon conjuration, including a vat of what appears to be human fat and blood. Investigators are now saying that they believe the Heartstoppers may be intended not as an attack in and of themselves, but as a mechanism for harvesting the life force of a large number of victims at once, in order to animate what may be a major demon. While this attack has been foiled with a little luck and good police work, this puts the previous attacks in a very different light, since it suggests that, well, I suppose it suggests that they will continue, and that whoever is conjuring these entities may have larger plans.”
    Ingrid seized her sister’s hand. All this time she had been thinking of her sister as composed of two parts, the body downstairs, the spirit upstairs. But now she understood that there was a third part. Call it a life force, energy, chi, what have you — it was what she needed to bind the other two together. Except that someone else had taken it and used it to bring a demon into the world.
    Selma , she thought to her sister. I know how to bring you back. I just need to find a major demon and kill it.
    Upstairs, the ghost of her sister began to laugh.

Chapter 2 — Blips on the Radar
    “In premodern alchemy, there were considered to be five principles, or constituent elements. In