Spirit and Dust

18


CARSON STUMBLED TO a stop in the doorway, and the name that burst out of his lips was either profanity or invocation, and I didn’t think he was very religious. Either way, it kicked me out of my shock and into action.

I skidded to my knees beside the guard and searched for a wound, more by touch than by sight. Reaching under his stocky body I found a tear in the soaked polyester of his shirt, and under that, a small, stiletto-sized hole below his ribs. Blood seeped hot over my fingers, and I pressed upward until it stopped.

“Don’t—” warned Carson, too late. I knew I wasn’t supposed to touch anything, but I knew dead, and I knew mostly dead, and this was the latter. What I didn’t know was if I could keep one from turning into the other.

“Get help,” I ordered, then sank into my psychic senses. Everything physical retreated to a shadowed fog, and everything spirit sharpened to cutting clarity. I could see the pale rope of psyche running from the man’s chest to his shade, standing over his own body. When I placed my hand next to it, to better apply pressure to his wound, a tingle crawled up my arms, like I held an alternating current between them. My skin burned with the life and deathness of it.

“Why aren’t the alarms going off?” The dazed question came from the ghost of the guard. He was in shock, but he had a vibrancy about him that I’d never seen in a remnant.

Because he wasn’t a remnant. He was whole. I was looking at a soul, and the psychic thread that tethered him to his body.

For a moment I couldn’t breathe. The current between my hands, the glowing thread that ran between my fingers, wasn’t the ghost of a man, but the life of one.

“He only just left,” said the shade of the Egyptian woman, in a pragmatic sort of voice that drew me back to earth.

“Who did?” I asked, trying to reorient myself.

She looked at me impatiently. She was much younger than I’d first thought. My age, maybe, and strikingly beautiful. “The man who did this—and took the stone jackal.”

The jackal. I didn’t think I had room for any more “Oh hell no” inside of me. But I was wrong.

With an effort, I blinked my psychic senses into the background and focused on the empty pedestal nearby, the glass case lifted off and set aside. The guard’s question had been a good one. Why wasn’t the alarm going off?

And here was another: Why was I seeing some kind of connection between the man’s spirit and the empty display? It was murky and hard to sharpen with any of my senses, and I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it.

Then I felt something I did recognize, a familiar vibration humming on my skin, singing through my psyche. For the first time in memory, my heart didn’t sing along with it.

“No you don’t,” I growled to the powers of the universe. Because it always helps to order the Almighty around when you’re already neck deep in alligators.

The guard stared at the curtain of air, wavering like a heat mirage on hot summer asphalt, and a spark of interest penetrated his numb shock. “What’s that?”

The Veil, shimmering between worlds, waited with neutral, eternal patience while I literally held this guy’s life in my hands.

“No,” I ordered him. “Do not go there.”

“But I see my mom.” He lifted a hand with a childish wave. “Hi, Mom!”

“Not yet.” I tried to sound commanding and not pleading, but pretty much failed. “The EMTs will be here soon. You’ll have plenty more days to walk these halls telling people to step back from the paintings.”

The Egyptian girl gave a delicate snort. “If you wish him to stay, you might offer better temptation than that.”

“Look!” said the guard as the pulse of his blood under my fingers stumbled. “There’s my dog!”

“That is not playing fair.” I ground my teeth on the bit of my determination and pressed more firmly on the wound so not a drop more blood would escape. “Dogs and moms are not fair!”

Cleopatra walked around us both, kicking out her linen skirts with fancy gold- and jewel-covered sandals. “Are you some sort of priestess? You have a funny way of talking to your god.”

“That’s what Sister Michaela always told me.”

She made a tutting sound. “I think perhaps you aren’t very good at this. His soul is fading.”

“What?” My vision wavered, and I dredged up the effort to bring the guard into sharper focus. It was more than difficult. His image was washed out, like a photo left to fade in the sun.

“Let him go,” said Cleo, not quite an order, “while his soul is still strong enough to make the journey to the afterlife.”

I didn’t want her to be right, but I could feel the electric current fizzle and spark. If anyone could recognize the end of life and the beginning of death, it should be me. But I didn’t want to lose. I wanted to grab hold of this ghost—this soul—and tie it to his body so he couldn’t die.

I could hear, out of the fog of reality, the pounding of running feet on the marble floor. Just a moment longer. I couldn’t let him slip when help was so close.

Death wasn’t my enemy. But the jerkwad who thought it was his to hand out on a whim—he was going to get a kick into the next world when I caught up with him.

Carson was back, crouching beside me. “The guards are coming, and they’re on the phone with nine-one-one.”

“Okay,” I said tightly, startled by how little time must have gone by since he left. “Do you think, with your superpower, you could use my energy or whatever to give this guy a boost so he’ll make it long enough for the EMTs to get here?”

I couldn’t look away from the ghosts, but based on the jolt of tension where Carson’s shoulder pressed against mine, the idea must have shocked him. His voice, though, was level and businesslike. “I could try, but I don’t know what that would do to you.”

“Look at the floor,” I said. “That’s lifeblood there. It’s the total opposite of my thing, but even I can feel the energy in it. If you could use even a little of it …”

“Yeah. Okay. I’ve got it.”

Most people would take a deep breath before diving in. Carson just slid in close, getting one hand down where the blood was freshest and warmest and putting his other on the guard’s chest. I felt a tug of friction, like something pulling against the cat’s cradle of invisible string between me, the ghost, the Veil, and his body.

“Over his heart,” said Cleopatra, watching with clinical interest. “That is where the soul resides.”

It was also what pumped the blood to the brain and the lungs, so I relayed the message. “Over his—”

“I heard you,” said Carson, and adjusted his hand up and slightly left. He’d heard her, which was interesting, but not something I could analyze just then. The tingle of friction became a burn, as if a binding rope were dragging across my arms where they held the guard’s soul to his body. Whatever Carson was doing, it was working, but something was pulling the spirit in another direction, and it wasn’t the Veil.

“His heart is beating stronger,” said Carson, effort in his voice. “I think maybe—”

The Veil shimmered closed, its hum ceasing without flourish. An instant later, the guard’s image vanished and I felt him snap back into his body like a rubber band.

And in the very same instant, which I couldn’t dismiss as coincidence, but couldn’t explain, either, the alarm began to wail.


For two people who wanted to stay under the radar, Carson and I had been spectacularly unsuccessful.

The museum staff poured though the doorway, the vanguard pulling up short at the amount of blood and the waxy pallor of the man on the floor. But when I said, “He’s still breathing,” the woman in front dropped the wholly inadequate-looking first-aid kit, pulled on some latex gloves, and told me to get out of the way.

I yielded my spot, but not until she’d gotten her own hand on the trickling wound in the man’s back. Then Carson helped me to my feet—adding bloody handprints to the gory blotches already staining my shirt. My jeans were soaked from the knees down, and I looked like I’d stabbed the guy myself.

“Do not move,” said another guard, pointing to me and Carson. “The cops are going to want to talk to you.”

Someone had turned off the alarm, and now I could hear sirens. The familiar choke hold of the geas hardly registered in the grappling sea of knots twisting up in my chest.

“Priestess!” Cleo appeared in the archway, shouting. “The thief is this way!”

I don’t know what possessed me—desperation, vengeance, or the certainty I couldn’t really get in any deeper. I got my gazelle on and shot for the door, leaping over the circle of first-aid workers around the fallen guard and slingshotting out of Egypt and into the Mesopotamian Hall.

Shouts of surprise burst out behind me, and an instant later Carson did the same, hard on my heels.

The Egyptian girl had popped to the next junction, and I sprinted past winged figures, stone seraphim watching our footrace through the climate-controlled sterility of their exile.

In the main hall of the Ancient World wing, I saw a blur of a figure, heard Cleo calling, “That’s him!”

And then, at the end of the hall, blocking the way out, two police officers, guns drawn.

“Stop! Police!”

The thief cut right, between the marble-draped goddesses that marked the hall into Rome. Shoes squeaking on slick tile, I made an abrupt turn, too, into the hallway to the restrooms. Carson caught up with me there, grabbing my arm and stopping my headlong rush.

“Come on,” I said, pointing toward the door we’d come through earlier. “We can cut him off in Pompeii.”

He pushed me behind him and took the lead. “Stay back and let me handle this.”

There was no time to argue about misplaced chivalry. Plus, it wasn’t misplaced. The guy had a knife, and considering his employer, Carson was surely better suited to handle that than I was.

But like hell was I staying in the hall. I shored up my defenses against the death echoes of Mount Vesuvius and ran after Carson, into the exhibit.

The thief was coming in the other way. He drew up, panting, in the center of the reconstructed villa, surrounded by the plaster casts of the volcano’s victims. He made a weird double image to my senses, like I was seeing him with my physical and psychic vision and they didn’t quite match up. Maybe because in his corduroy trousers and unfashionable sweater and dark-rimmed glasses he looked like a coffeehouse slacker and not a stiletto-wielding art-museum robber.

He had a fat messenger bag over his shoulder, and I guessed the artifact he’d stolen was in there, because his hands were empty. But his face was full of smirk. “Too slow, Team Maguire,” he taunted. “Better step it up.”

Carson surprised me with the outrage in his voice and the clenched fists at his side. “You nearly killed someone, a*shole!”

“But you saved him, so boohoo,” drawled the thief. “That was really impressive, by the way.”

There was a weird dynamic here, though I didn’t always trust my read on the living. This guy knew who we were, and something about Carson’s accusation had a personal edge to it, like maybe he knew who the guy was, too.

“You two work well together,” said Smirky McSlackerson. “Too bad you don’t work a little faster.”

The sneer just made everything that much worse, picturing this guy grabbing Alexis, stabbing the guard, all with that superior smile on his face. Throw in my fury at myself that we hadn’t gotten here first and a whole lot of pissed-off in general, and it was a good thing that Carson stood a protective step in front of me.

“Look, a*shole,” I said, trying and failing to get around the arm Carson put up to stop me. “Tell us where Alexis is. You have the Jackal. You don’t need her.”

McSlackerson blinked, as if the suggestion surprised him, and then he laughed. “This isn’t the Black Jackal. I’m just here collecting the pieces we need to get it. And that’s all I’m going to tell you of my fiendish plan, Supergirl. I’ve been monologuing long enough.”

Right on cue, two of St. Louis’s finest burst into the room behind the thief, weapons drawn, shouting, “Freeze!”

I’d never stared down a real gun barrel before. This day was just full of new and unpleasant experiences.

Carson relaxed his shoulders, the way he did when he was anxious or pissed and was pushing it back where it wouldn’t interfere. He looked perfectly cool as he held his empty—and very bloody—hands out to his sides. I copied him, right down to the blood, which couldn’t possibly make us look harmless.

“Turn around slowly,” one of the cops barked at McSlackerson. “Hands where we can see them.”

The thief smiled—an I-love-it-when-a-plan-comes-together smile—and raised his arms to his sides. As he turned, his hand crossed the plane of one of the exhibits, and he flexed his fingers over a plaster cast of a volcano victim, like he was testing the temperature. I did that move so often, my fingers twitched like I was the one feeling for spirit traces.

That was what he was doing. I had no time to think why before the world—both my worlds—went sideways.

Since we’d come in, I’d been braced against the echoes of thousands of hot, smothering deaths. I was not prepared for the groaning shift of the psychic air pressure, like a volcanic cone crumbling in on itself. I staggered, as if I’d been leaning against a wall that suddenly just … vanished.

Which was impossible, because two millennia of psychic energy didn’t just go away.

Carson tensed, too, and I knew something bad was going to happen. When it did, that seemed impossible, too. The thief pushed his empty hand toward the cops. A wall of acrid wind blasted them into the next room. Over the roar in my ears I heard the crash of bodies and a second later, the crack and thunder of toppling stone. They’d hit the statues, any one of which was heavy enough to crush a man’s skull.

I moved instinctively to help—somehow, anyhow—but Carson caught me around the waist, pulling me tight against him as McSlackerson swung around, his smile cracking the layer of ash on his face. Between his hands he gathered the ghost of a pyroclastic cloud, and all six of my senses said it was totally possible we were going to die.

Carson wrapped himself around me, my back against his chest, and yelled in my ear, “Make like the Millennium Falcon, Sunshine, and do not drop those deflector shields!”

At the first blast of heat, I pushed all I had left into my force field. What McSlackerson threw at us wasn’t psychic but physical—intangible energy turned into magical heat and wind. My defenses should have been useless. But I felt the moment when Carson mirrored what the other guy had done, transforming my psychic defenses into something invisible but solid.

Everywhere we touched was an electric zing, an icy burn that pulled a helpless gasp from my throat. The grit-laced gale scoured the floor around our untouched island. It ripped tiles from the mosaic and fired them like bullets into the plasterboard walls of the exhibit. Pillars toppled and paperboard markers scorched around the edges.

This was not the best time to discover the limits of my resources. Deep inside, I shuddered like a sputtering engine, and the muscles of my legs trembled as I braced with Carson against the wind that pounded our shield. He felt it, too, and took more of my weight, but he couldn’t hold us both up and he couldn’t hold the defenses at all if I didn’t give him something to work with.

I thought the ash cloud was darkening around us, but I realized it was my vision. Sparkles came next, and I felt weirdly like my head was floating away from my body, and not on purpose. I clung to consciousness with ten fingernails, but I was on the steep slope over the chasm of oblivion.

“Stay with me, Daisy,” said Carson against my ear. I felt it more than heard it, rumbling through my skin where we touched. “He’s almost tapped out.”

So was I. The smell of sulfur and choke of ash rushed in and I slid bonelessly out of Carson’s grip. Dying was such a rotten way to learn I wasn’t nearly the badass I thought I was.