Spirit and Dust

16


“YOU RANG?” SAID the shade standing over me. My eyes traveled up her boots, her jodhpurs, and her really great jacket and scarf and found her looking back down at me, one red brow wryly cocked.

This was not how I wanted to meet my idol. I jumped to my feet, but they were still tangled in the cordon, so I just managed to make a lot of noise. “Stop moving!” shouted the docent, and from the dark someone else called, “We’ll be right there. Stay put until the lights come back on.”

“Who are you?” Aunt Ivy asked. She looked as she did in our family photo—late twenties, totally confident. Not nearly as surprised to see me as you might expect. She took in my red hair and amended, “The better question might be when are you? And where are we?”

No wonder I’d had to call so hard. The trace of her must have been faded almost to nothing. It figured a Goodnight wouldn’t stick around anywhere she didn’t want to.

I’m Daisy. Even without the audience I would have spoken silently to her, because it was quicker that way—the speed of thought, literally. Your great-great … Well, it doesn’t matter how many because I’m in trouble and I need to know anything you can tell me about something called the Oosterhouse Jackal.

“I don’t know what that is.” Before I could curse, silently or aloud, she continued. “I know a Professor Oosterhouse. He is—was—faculty here.” She rubbed her forehead, a very living sort of gesture. “Sorry. My times and tenses are all messed up.”

Don’t sweat it. That happens. What could you expect when your past and present and future had all already happened?

She sweated it anyway, as if she sensed my urgency. Her shade flickered with the effort of pulling her memories together, but as I poured more of myself into the psychic link between us, she steadied.

“There was something about him,” she said, “and jackal is sticking in my mind. He left the Institute in the early thirties, under a dark cloud.”

That would be the nineteen thirties. I added together the timeline with the professor’s German last name and made a wild guess. Was he a Nazi sympathizer?

“Not at all,” she said, and that seemed to spark a connection. “I was away when he left, but I came back to wild stories that he’d started a cult and swore he’d found something that would defeat the Third Reich.”

My mind went off in some very insane, very Indiana Jones directions. Like a weapon?

A face-melting Lost Ark kind of weapon? The idea shook me down to my curled-in-horror toes.

“I don’t know. Bollocks!” The air went crisp at her frustrated curse. “I only remember gossip I heard when I came back, and that’s just bits and pieces in my head.”

It’s okay, I assured her. Except that the security guard with the flashlight had finally gotten around to us. As the beam cut across the gallery I curled up in the shadow of the statue, where the guard would miss me until he’d helped the others.

Tell me all the gossip, I urged Ivy. His bio in the archives says nothing about when or why he left.

She spoke fast as the guard went by. “Officially, it was hushed up, but the rumor was he went batty. Got loony ideas based on a translation he’d made of the Book of the Dead.”

I knew what that was. I’d be pretty sucky at my job if I didn’t. It was an instruction manual for how to mummify the body and prepare the soul for its journey into the afterlife. There was no definitive edition because the process and the rituals changed across dynasties.

Ivy went on in a rush. I could see the tumble of memories coming back to her now. “Oosterhouse said he had found a version written by an ancient cult who believed in the magical power of the soul after death. But there was no proof of such a book—not that I could find, and believe me, I looked.”

Of course she would. A Goodnight couldn’t let that sort of thing go uninvestigated. So you don’t know if it was genuine magic or just the professor being fanciful?

“Fanciful is not a word I would apply to Dr. Oosterhouse.” She frowned. “He didn’t voice theories of which he was uncertain. They say—said—the professor tried to re-form this cult among the students. A sort of secret society.”

My heart went graveyard cold. Like a brotherhood?

“Yes! That’s what it was called. The Brotherhood of the Black …” She paused with a little quake of realization, and I knew what she was going to say.

Jackal, I whispered.

Suddenly I was squinting in the glare of a flashlight. “Are you okay, young lady?” asked the security guard behind it.

Ivy’s shade paced to my right, talking angrily to herself. “Why didn’t I remember that as soon as you said the Oosterhouse Jackal? What a ninny I am!”

“It’s fine,” I said—aloud. “You’re just a shade.”

My great-great-aunt drew herself to her full height. “I am Professor Ivy Goodnight. I am not just anything.”

The guard moved the light out of my eyes, and I could see him looking at me like I was the ninny. “Did you hit your head when you fell?”

“No, no,” I assured him. “I’m fine.”

I wasn’t fine. I was trying not to follow Ivy with my eyes and trying not to freak out at the possibility that my brotherhood—the window-smashing, magic-throwing brotherhood from the cemetery—was related to Ivy’s Brotherhood of the Black Jackal.

I hadn’t realized I’d been thinking so loud until Aunt Ivy’s shade flitted to my side, her face tight with worry. “The one thing I do know for certain is that the Brotherhood was real. This Oosterhouse Jackal could well be the thing that the professor believed would stop Germany’s march across Europe.”

Her urgency made my head spin, and it was starting to chill the air. The guard was watching me—no, he was saying something, and I hadn’t answered, and now he was reaching for his radio to call an ambulance and I couldn’t let that happen.

“Sorry,” I told him, and got to my feet on my own power. “I have a phobia about the dark, you see. That’s why I ran and tripped.” I didn’t have to fake a shiver; Ivy’s words had iced my veins.

The lights came back on suddenly, and I gave the skeptical guard an exaggerated reaction. “Oh thank God! I’ll be all right now.”

He reached for my arm. “Let’s just get you out to the lobby and make sure.”

If he took me away from the pharaoh, he took me away from Ivy. I panicked, and Ivy did, too.

“Listen to me,” she said. Words and images and emotions came like falling stars from her mind to mine. Sand and heat, dust and danger. Cold metal tanks and hot furnace fires. “If this jackal is Oosterhouse’s weapon, and the Brotherhood holds the secret, you cannot let them reach it. You cannot let anyone reach it. You have to get to it first, Daisy.”

“Okay,” I said as the guard led me away. I trailed my hand on the statue as long as possible, and Ivy kept pace with me. “Okay,” I said again, because there were enough nonmagical face-melting weapons in the world. And once more, because I couldn’t think of any single person who should have that much power. “Okay.”

That was two triple vows. Rescue the girl, save the world. Lucky thing I’m a Goodnight.

“You are a Goodnight,” said Ivy, quickly, because we were losing touch. “Remember you’re never alone.”

I thought about the five hundred sixty-seven emails in my web mail in-box by now. I was never alone in spirit, but I felt so far away in actuality. How could any of my family help me here?

The guard held my arm like fragile china, walking me out. My eyes finally focused on the physical world, and I saw Carson running toward us. His footfalls hurt my head.

“Are you okay?” He took my shoulders and bent to look into my eyes. He was absolutely not putting on a show. I must look like crap. “What happened?”

“It was dark.” I said, bolstering my white lie to the guard. “And I have a migraine coming on.” That excused a lot of things, including a hasty exit. It also was true. I felt it rumbling toward me like a mudslide down a mountain.

Carson took charge, thanking the guard, sliding his arm around me, ushering me out the door. We were outside in record time.

He pushed something into my hand. “Sunglasses. Put them on.”

“Thanks,” I said, fumbling them into place. Even the overcast sky beat on my eyeballs.

The tide of students hurrying to class flowed around us as we blocked the sidewalk. It was windy and damp and weird to think it was still mid-morning. I checked Carson’s watch and realized the lights in the museum had been out for just a few minutes. I’d been on psychic time while talking with Ivy.

“What happened?” Carson asked. He looked ready to catch me if I started to sway. “Did you reach her?”

“Yes. That’s why the headache. They’re not all as easy as Mrs. Hardwicke.” The ghost-talking itself wasn’t hard, but pulling the shade out of slumber and helping her piece her memory together left me shaking. And, oh yeah, so did the realization that we were up against someone—or someones—willing to commit kidnapping and murder to get their hands on a magical artifact strong enough to stop an army.

“Daisy.” Carson’s voice—firm, steady, just the right amount of bossy—called me back to the present. “You’re about five steps ahead of me right now. Tell me what’s next.”

“Next,” I said, making myself sound a whole lot stronger than I felt, “I need an ocean of Coca-Cola and a ride to St. Louis.”