Spirit and Dust

13


AT THE TRUCK stop, three twenty-dollar bills convinced the driver of an eighteen-wheeler to give us a lift to the next town on his route. The guy looked us over—Carson in his button-down and muddy trousers, two a.m. shadow on his jaw and a cut on his cheek, me swimming in his coat, my striped socks up over my knees, my Converse sneakers covered in skulls. We looked one shotgun away from a Kentucky wedding, but the trucker pocketed the money and didn’t ask any questions.

I had plenty of questions—like where were we headed and why had Carson turned off his phone instead of calling for a getaway car that didn’t smell like chewing tobacco and cardboard-pine-tree air freshener. I assumed it was part of the plan where we didn’t get killed or shanghaied, except that I’d always been told that was exactly what to expect if you were foolish enough to get in a car with a stranger.

But true to his word, at the outskirts of the next town, the trucker dropped us in an acre of parking lot that conveniently connected a Denny’s, a La Quinta Inn, and a twenty-four-hour Walmart. For those times when you’re roaming the tundra and have a three a.m. need for a new set of snow tires.

“Come on,” said Carson as the semi pulled away. The fog of his breath gave him an unearned halo under the streetlamps. He left it behind as he grabbed my hand and hustled for the restaurant and out of the cold.


I was rounding third on a Grand Slam breakfast and sliding home into the second helping of pancakes I’d requested instead of bacon. Carson eyed the rapidly disappearing stack with what I decided to interpret as awestruck wonder.

“You’re obviously feeling better.”

“My amazing powers require a lot of sustenance,” I said between bites. “I figure I’d better top off the tank for whatever comes next. Which, by the way, we should probably discuss. You can start with why you turned off your phone instead of calling for a pickup, or getaway car, or agent extraction, or whatever term you people prefer.”

“ ‘You people’?”

“Don’t make me say ‘mobsters’ in the middle of a Denny’s.”

He glanced around the restaurant, which was virtually empty. The waitress had left a carafe of coffee when she’d dropped off our order, and we hadn’t seen her since. “No one’s listening.”

“Good.” I shoveled another bite of pancakes into my mouth. “Because I want to talk about magic.”

“And I want you to tell me everything Alexis’s grandmother said about the guys who showed up at the cemetery.”

“There’s not much.” I stacked my plates and pushed them to the side. “She recognized at least one of them as someone Alexis knew. Maybe they met at a sorority party, which would explain why Alexis had on the pearls. Mrs. Hardwicke said the boys were in some kind of fraternity.”

“Fraternity,” echoed Carson, his tone hard to read. I was going with disbelief.

“She actually said ‘brotherhood,’ which sounds more ominous. I mean, if I was going to form a kidnapping and magic club, I’d go with that over ‘frat house.’ ”

“Are you taking this seriously?” he asked, and I didn’t have any trouble with that tone. I answered it as it deserved.

“Uh, yeah. Dude put an invisible fastball through the back window of a Ford Taurus. Also, Mrs. Hardwicke said she didn’t like them. They made her nervous. I guess for a reason. Kidnapping Maguire’s daughter? I mean, just writing the ransom note would take a pair of titanium cojones.”

It had been hard to really get a look at the three guys in the cemetery, what with the dark and the running for our lives and stuff. But my fleeting impression had been that they were young and would pass for college pranksters if not for a tangible air of menace.

“I joke because they scare me,” I said soberly. “I think they did something to Mrs. Hardwicke’s shade. And the remnants of Bruiser—I mean Walters—were … they weren’t right. I thought maybe it was the bullet to the brain that scrambled his head, but now I’m not sure.”

Carson took that in, expression neutral. “What else would it be?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m still figuring it out.”

He turned to look out the window. I watched his profile, not expecting to read much, and not disappointed. But my mind kept turning the puzzle pieces, and suddenly some of them clicked. Carson’s smile in the photograph with Alexis, the fact he called her Lex and seemed comfortable in her room and around her stuff.

I’d wondered about it before, but now it mattered. It didn’t make finding her any more important than a moment ago. It just made it more … just more.

“Are you and Alexis … um … close?” I asked, going for tactful and just managing awkward. “Romantically, I mean.”

He glanced at me, and whatever he read in my face softened the grim lines of his. “Not like that. She’s like a sister to me.”

“That’s pretty close.” I fiddled with my coffee cup. Living people were much more complicated than shades. “I’m sorry you thought I wasn’t taking this seriously.”

My apology took him by surprise, but he internalized it quickly. “It’s okay,” he said. “Now I know. Sarcastic equals scared.”

“Well, sometimes sarcastic just equals sarcastic.”

I didn’t like this subject. He didn’t need to know that about me. I turned back to important things, like our graveyard adventure. “Why do you think those guys followed us? It seems weird that kidnappers would ask for a ransom and then go looking for it themselves.”

He considered the question. “Did you hear what they said at the cemetery? They thought Alexis had told us where to find something. Maybe they thought following us would let them bypass Maguire. No messy ransom exchange.”

I shuddered. It was one thing to talk about this stuff, another to think about what it meant. Jump us, grab the Jackal, problem solved.

“Only the Jackal wasn’t there,” I said, turning away from dire could-have-beens. “At least they talked about Alexis in the present tense. If they didn’t find what they were looking for, she will be useless to them. So she’s still okay.”

Carson studied me for a moment, more unreadable than usual. “For someone so fond of skulls and black nail polish, you’re actually quite an optimist.”

“Don’t be insulting.” I put my clasped hands on the table in front of me, ready to move on. “Now. What can you tell me about the blown-out car window?”

Carson reached to refill his coffee mug. “That I seriously doubt Geico is going to cover replacing it.”

I snatched the carafe away, holding it hostage. “Enough, Carson. No more caffeine until I get answers.”

“Daisy, it’s four in the morning,” he said, utterly reasonable. “If you want coherent answers, you’d better let me have that coffeepot.” I set it down, then waited while he filled my mug, then his. He pushed the sugar and creamer toward me, and said, “Why do I need to explain this to you? Your family are witches, right?”

“Hedge witches. Herbs, potions, that sort of thing. Nothing like …” I mimed a big pow. “But you didn’t seem surprised by that.”

His brow arched. “Trust me. I was plenty surprised when that meathead blew out the safety glass.”

“But you weren’t surprised that he could.”

“No.” He might be laying his cards on the table, but he was obviously going to do it one at a time.

“Could you blow out a window?”

“Maybe,” he admitted. “Under the right circumstances. The problem is the power it would take. A light flare from a flashlight, for example, doesn’t have a lot of resistance. Kinetic force would be a lot harder.”

“So is what you do a spell?” I asked, wondering if it was more like what Phin practiced, or like my innate ability with spirits. “Or a talent?”

He considered his answer. “I think it’s more like a talent for a certain type of spell, if that makes sense. Lauren—who would know—describes it as magic, but I’ve always just done it, like you and your spirits.” He paused. “I haven’t always understood what it was I was doing, though, and it takes understanding to do anything useful.”

I could relate to that, too. Sensing spirit energy was one thing. Actively using that sense had taken time to learn.

“Are you and Lauren the only ones on the Maguire staff who can do magic? Or is it some kind of job requirement?”

Carson shrugged. “Unless someone has some ESP they’re not telling us about, Lauren and I are the only employees with any, uh, special skills.”

“That makes sense.” I was relieved crime magic wasn’t a whole new fad. “I guess if you had a psychic on staff, you wouldn’t need me.”

A thought struck me. Not from the blue, but from inside my head, as if it had been waiting for me to get around to it and run out of patience.

“What?” asked Carson, because I’m so transparent.

“I don’t know.” The thought didn’t come with helpful context. “It is kind of weird that someone like Maguire couldn’t have gotten his hands on a psychic better at finding live people.”

Carson topped off his coffee mug. “It’s not that weird. You were close by, bona fide, and easily controllable.”

“Easily controllable?” I echoed, because I was also easily insulted.

He raised his hands, fending me off. “I’m just thinking like Maguire. You have a large family that you love.”

Well, he had a point, even if I didn’t like it. “That’s probably the first time in my life I’ve been called convenient,” I grumbled.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Carson. But he turned more serious as he studied me, as if I’d raised some question for him, too. “How many people can do what you do? Out of curiosity.”

Okay, it’s true I like to imagine myself a badass psychic, and I don’t see the point of false modesty when my skills can help someone. But I don’t let on that I’m a little freaky, even for a freak. I’ve met mediums and people who do psychometry or who read auras—which is sort of like what I do with spirits. But all in one package is unusual. And the Veil …? I’ve learned not to talk about that at all.

“It’s not what I can do,” I finally answered, in an I’m-going-to-be-perfectly-honest-with-you tone that wasn’t perfectly honest. “It’s how well.”

Carson rolled his eyes. Distraction objective achieved. I held out my hand. “Give me the doohickey from the mausoleum. Not even I am good enough to raise the spirit of a plastic mummy. But you never know what may have hitched a ride.”

He took the toy out of his pocket and dropped it into my palm. I hadn’t felt anything from it in the cemetery, and a longer, calmer read confirmed that there were no remnant traces attached. But as I rubbed my thumb over the molded ridges of the bandages, I noticed something else. A crack. The mummy’s head and shoulders were the cap to the USB end of a flash drive.

I may have squealed a little bit when I showed it to Carson. “Look! I told you it was important!”

He took it from me and examined it. “Yeah, but we won’t know how until we get it plugged into a computer.”

“Don’t harsh my vibe, dude.” The geas sang along with my excitement. I was doing what Maguire had tasked me to do: follow the clues to Alexis.

There was some writing on the back of the mummy. I could see why Carson hadn’t been able to read it with the flashlight. A lot of the black ink had rubbed off. I could read half the letters; my memory filled in the rest. “This is from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.”

“Is that important?” he asked.

Yes, said my instincts.

“Maybe,” I said aloud. “It’s another coincidence.” Not that a flash drive shaped like a mummy came from a museum specializing in artifacts from Egypt and points East. But that something related to Alexis was related to me.

The waitress came around to collect our plates and ask if we wanted anything else. After she’d left the check, Carson said simply, “Explain.”

I sat forward, elbows on the table. “Alexis is studying classics, right? Latin, Greek, birth-of-civilization stuff. Egyptology isn’t the same thing, but they’re not worlds apart. Then there’s this.” I held up the mummy flash drive, currently headless, and rattled off the links in my logic chain. “So we’ve got the ancient world, this Egyptian mummy, which relates to Anubis, the jackal-headed god of mummification, which makes me think of the Oosterhouse Jackal.”

Carson didn’t seem as amazed by my reasoning as I thought he should be. “It does seem like a coincidence of jackals,” he admitted, and took the flash drive from me again. “Do you think this has the information we need to find the Oosterhouse one?”

“Alexis hid something that those brotherhood creeps wanted.”

“But we’re not sure it’s the brotherhood that kidnapped her,” said Carson, and I couldn’t tell if he was playing devil’s advocate or what. “They may be a second party looking for the Jackal.”

“A second party looking for something that the Internet has never heard of? What are the odds?”

He gave me a look that said what are the odds that a crime boss would have a witch on staff to help him kidnap a teen FBI psychic to look for his kidnapped daughter. Or some other unlikely scenario. “Let’s keep an open mind,” he said aloud. “I agree the brotherhood is connected, just not how.”

“Okay.” Drumming my fingers, I tried to decide how much to tell him about the encounter with the bodyguard-driver, and how to phrase it so I didn’t sound crazy. “Here’s another coincidence. Alexis’s driver—well, his remnant—said something weird about a black dog. Maybe it was something he saw when he died, or something his spirit saw, I don’t know. But a jackal and a dog might look the same. Not that Anubis would terrorize a spirit. He was supposed to be the protector of the dead.…”

I trailed off at Carson’s expression of flat-out disbelief. “You’re not seriously suggesting an ancient Egyptian god has shown up in Minnesota,” he said.

“Of course not,” I scoffed, because that was ridiculous. “Who would come to Minnesota in the winter if they could help it?”

Carson gave me one of his studying looks. “You’re being flippant again.”

He’d figured me out. Flippant equaled freaked. And Bruiser’s shade had me freaked. So had the disappearance of Mrs. Hardwicke. Someone, or something, was messing with the spirit world.

I turned to the last thing I had to offer, putting the head back on the mummy and holding it so the logo showed. “Then there’s this. The Oriental Institute is a research organization and museum of Near East history. It’s one of the top places for Egyptologists to study, and it’s been around for ages. My great-great-aunt went on a few of their expeditions in the nineteen twenties. She’s kind of a family legend.”

His brows arched. “Did she raise a mummy?”

“Not exactly.” Let’s just say I wasn’t the first Goodnight to get in over her head with the dead. “But the Oriental Institute is another tie to ancient Egypt, and we know Alexis has been there.”

Carson took the flash drive from me, holding it up as if to look the mummy in the eye. “You think the Oosterhouse Jackal is there? Or maybe something that will lead to it?”

Did I? The evidence was awfully circumstantial, as Taylor would tell me. Psychic evidence wasn’t admissible; my job was to find links between random-seeming things, which would then point the way to hard evidence. I wished I could offer Carson hard evidence, but all I had was my gut feeling.

“I think our best bet is to follow Alexis’s footsteps. If she was looking for this Oosterhouse Jackal, then backtracking may lead to her kidnappers.” I spread my hands, open palmed, on the table. “It’s just a hunch. But I am psychic.”

Carson didn’t seem to need more than that. He grabbed the check and pocketed the flash drive. “Let’s go. We can be in Chicago in five and a half hours.” Then he glanced at me and changed his mind. “Six, if we stop to get you some less conspicuous clothes.”