Spirit and Dust

14


WE SPRINTED ACROSS the acre of parking lot to the Walmart, not slowing down until we reached the air lock of shelter between inner and outer doors, beside the shopping carts and stacks of shoppers’ guides. I breathed on my hands and stuck them under my arms. “How does anyone live through the winter here?”

Carson laughed. The longer we were away from the Maguire complex, the easier that seemed to happen. “This isn’t winter. It’s autumn.” He took out his wallet and handed me a thick wad of bills. “Get a change of clothes and whatever else you want.”

“Holy cats!” I stuffed the money into my pockets like contraband. “What is it you think I’m going to need? A mink coat?”

“It doesn’t have to be mink. When you’re done, meet me out front.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked, mentally wrestling with pockets full of cash and freedom.

“I’m going to go buy a toothbrush, and then I’m going to get us some transportation.”

“Where are you going to do that at this hour? Are you even old enough to rent a car?”

He stared at me like he couldn’t believe I’d just said that, and after the mental lightbulb snapped on, I couldn’t believe I had either.

“Oh my God! You’re going to steal one?”

Fortunately, I had not said this nearly as loud as it sounded in my head, which was very loud indeed, since it was accompanied by police sirens and clanging prison doors.

Carson gave me a long, patronizing look. “Would you prefer to walk to Chicago?”

“You can’t call Maguire to send one of his fifteen cars for us?”

He hesitated as if considering it, then said slowly, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Maguire’s giving me a long leash on this, but it’s still a leash.”

I thought about Maguire behind his square mile of desk, surveying his kingdom, with armed guards and, for all I knew, flying monkeys at his command. If Carson had some reason he wanted to stay under the boss’s radar, I was okay with that.

I wasn’t okay with stealing, but we needed a car, and the binding promise muzzled my objection. I stood there wrestling my conscience for so long that Carson’s expression softened in sympathy.

“Here,” he said, taking the coat from my shoulders and sending me into the store with a little shove. “Fifteen minutes. Shop fast.”


I had fifteen minutes and four hundred dollars. Carson had given me a lot of rope with which to hang myself. Did he trust me to come back, or did he trust the geas?

Fulfilling my vow was nonnegotiable, but I had some choice about how to go about it, as long as my subconscious believed it would work. Telling the security guard who watched me load my handbasket with toothpaste and clean underwear at three a.m. that I’d been kidnapped? Spiking pulse—and common sense—nixed that idea.

I could go out the back door and find a taxi or a phone. I could call Agent Taylor. I could share with him everything I knew, and give evidence against Maguire in exchange for immunity on my crimes so far.

Then he’d ship me back to Texas by Express Mail. The geas would put me in the bughouse and Maguire would take revenge on my family, or Taylor, and that would finish me off.

But most important, with me in jail or exile, the FBI would have no psychic on the job. Alexis’s best chance was for me to do what I was doing—throw in my lot with Carson and follow her trail. We had to get to her, or get to the jackal, before the kidnappers did.

“Are you all right, miss?”

My dilemma had brought me to a halt by a counter full of accessories. The clerk behind it was a doughy-looking woman wearing a blue smock and a name tag that said DORIS. In my distracted state, it took me a moment to realize she was not wholly there.

“I’m fine,” I assured her. Especially compared with someone stuck for eternity as a greeter at Walmart. I think that’s what Sister Michaela called purgatory.

“Can I help you find something?”

I sighed, wishing it were that easy. “Do you have something that will help me rescue a girl from kidnappers who might also possibly be a fraternity of wizards?”

Doris cocked her head, pondering my problem. “Maybe something from the hunting and outdoors department?”

Very tempting. “I have to find her first. The only things I have to go on are a hunch and a plastic mummy flash drive.”

“A flash drive?” she asked, blinking behind cat-eye glasses. “Would that be in camera equipment?”

“It’s a computer …” I eyed her seventies shag hairdo and went with, “… thingy.”

“Oh, we have computers,” said Doris happily. “Aisle thirty-two. Cutest little netbooks for surfing that World Wide Web.”

That would teach me to judge a shade by her hairstyle.

“Thanks, Doris.” Her faded form had sharpened at the edges while we’d talked. How long had she been asking “Can I help you?” and getting no answer? I made a point of telling her, “You’ve been a real help.”

She beamed, literally brightening with her smile. “You’re welcome! Have a nice day!”

Grabbing my shopping basket, I hurried to the aisle I wanted. I didn’t linger over my choices, just snagged the cheapest netbook that would serve. My fifteen minutes was almost up, but as I headed for the front of the store, a thought slowed me down. How long had Doris been greeting people who couldn’t hear her?

I went back to Accessories. Doris’s shade still stood behind the counter, still smiling, still in the loop that had been her life.

“Hello!” she said, starting from the beginning. “Welcome to Walmart! Can I help you find something?”

“Would you like to go home, Doris?” It was hard not to speak to her like a child. That was sort of what she was. A lost lamb, all habit, no home.

Her eyes were pale, in a face that hadn’t seen sunlight in years, expression numbed by endless, mindless repetition. And that was before she died. The pattern was slow to break, but finally comprehension sparked, like light in a curtained window of a vacant house.

“You mean my shift is over?”

“Yes.” I set down my shopping basket, glancing at the big clock at the front of the store. This crossing would have to be quick and dirty.

I pictured my psyche rushing to my skin like a blush, pulsing with my heartbeat—not fast and frantic like when the geas had hold of me, but a strong and powerful song. The air around me hummed an echo, and the Veil appeared in front of us like a beaded curtain of glass.

Doris gasped. “My dogs! They’ve been waiting for me all this time I’ve been at work. They must be so hungry!” She took a step forward—through the counter, feeling the pull of the next world.

I loved this part. It made everything else worthwhile. “Your dogs are going to be really happy to see you,” I said with a grin. “Ditch the apron and go, Doris.”

Pulling off the smock, she let it fall into nothingness and ran through the mercury beads that gated her eternity. As she disappeared, I caught a whiff of candle wax and a strain of Conway Twitty.

She didn’t say thank you. They never did. They were too excited about what was ahead to think about what was behind, and that was all the thanks I needed.

The Veil blurred and softened to a silk ripple, and I reached with my psyche to close it, to still its vibrations like damping a ringing bell.

But I stopped when I glimpsed a black figure on the other side, like a stalking shadow on a moonlit curtain.

Free me, Daughter of the Jackal.

The words whispered through my head as the Veil closed.

My ears rang. My head rang. Nothing had ever spoken through the Veil before. Eternity was hidden from the living. That was the rule.

At least, that was my rule, because I’d never seen anything different. I was ninety-nine percent convinced I’d imagined this in some sort of stress-and-magic-induced waking fever dream.

The other one percent was certain I shouldn’t be certain of anything.


I made for the checkout on shaking legs and paid for my stuff. I’d barely stepped outside when a late-model Mazda sports sedan zoomed up to the curb.

“Get in,” Carson said through the open passenger window. I could tell he was pissed because he was so careful not to look that way.

I popped open the door and jumped in. Carson hit the gas as soon as my foot left the pavement, trusting me to get the door closed before we were up to speed.

“What part of ‘fifteen minutes’ was hard to understand?” he asked with icy calm. “The part where I was idling around the corner in a stolen vehicle?”

“Sorry,” I said. But some emotion must have laced my voice, because he spared me a glance as he pulled onto the service road to the interstate.

“What happened?” he asked. “Are you okay? Did you have trouble with a guard?”

“No. Something with a remnant.” I shivered in spite of myself. Remnants saw things beyond the Veil. I did not. Ever. Until tonight.

“Is that why you didn’t manage to buy a coat?” He leaned over to turn up the heater.

His tone ignited my temper, burning off the shivers. “I didn’t manage to buy a coat,” I said, reaching into one of the bags and yanking out the netbook in its box, “because I was blowing my cash on a way to look at that flash drive. Ingrate.”

He smiled and turned his gaze to the road. “That’s better.”

“I should have just taken the money and run,” I grumbled. “How did you know I wouldn’t?”

When he glanced at me again, he summed me all up, and it was somehow not smug, just droll. “I don’t know, Gertrude. You tell me.”

Obviously I didn’t have to. I reached up to touch my medal. Symbol or saint, I’d picked her for a reason.

And Carson was right. There’d never been any question what I’d do. It was what I always did. I found lost souls and brought them home. I had to do the same for Alexis, no matter what it took.