Spirit and Dust

19


“PRIESTESS! WAKE UP.” The words banged my aching skull like the clapper of a bell. “You’re in terrible danger!”

It was reassuring to hear a voice. Less reassuring that it was the ghost of the Egyptian girl, because that didn’t mean I wasn’t dead. Especially since I seemed to be dangling from someone’s shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

Cleo trotted alongside the guy currently carting me like a sack of potatoes through Ancient Greece. A guy who was not Carson.

“Do something, Priestess! I cannot touch this brigand!”

She tried grabbing his arm and jumping in his way, but he literally walked through her.

Some hunch snagged a memory, the image of the guy in the cemetery holding Mrs. Hardwicke’s necklace as she vanished, and the half-formed idea made me warn Cleo away.

“Don’t.” My voice was just a croak, hoarse from the grit of the ash storm. “Don’t touch him.”

The guy adjusted my weight on his shoulders by giving me a toss. I landed hard, knocking the air from my lungs and rattling my brain. “Don’t worry about your boyfriend, sweetheart. You just get your breath back. We’ve got a job for you.”

He patted me on the ass, and I saw red. I mean, more red—beyond the haze of blood rushing to my pounding head. I had a one-abduction-per-twenty-four-hours policy, and this yahoo was over the limit.

Finally, a benefit to being tall besides reaching the top shelf at the supermarket: leverage. I punched him in the kidney—or where I guessed something vulnerable and extremely painful like a kidney would be—and when he cursed and twisted, I let all my weight slide backward. He had to drop me or go down, too.

This was going to hurt.

I curled my arm over my head and tucked my shoulder so that I rolled when I hit the floor. And I kept rolling, all the way to my feet, because the guy was coming after me. I was numb where my hip and shoulder had smacked the marble tile, but at least everything moved.

I don’t think the guy had a plan B. He charged at me, and I grabbed a priceless Greek vase and smashed him over the head with it. He crashed to the floor and went limp.

That’s vases, two; kidnappers, zero.

I checked—quickly—to make sure he was still breathing. And then I checked—not so quickly—his face and my memory. This was not the thief, McSlackerson. This was someone else. I thought he might have been in the cemetery, but I couldn’t be sure.

Cleo popped up beside me, and I jumped—which made every muscle in my body protest. The parts where I hit the floor weren’t so numb anymore.

“That was thrilling!” she cried. “You fight like an Amazon.”

“Thank you,” I wheezed, holding my ribs.

I staggered back through the door to Pompeii like a freshman at her first keg party. After all that sound and fury, I’d expected total devastation, but from what I could tell through the hazy curtain of dust, the damage to the exhibit was cosmetic. There were no piles of ash, no fire, no incinerated bodies.

No Carson.

I remembered him calling my name, his hands tangling in my hair as he kept my head from hitting the floor when I’d gone limp in the volcano attack. After that, there was just the murky twilight of unconsciousness.

“Where’s my friend?” I asked Cleo. Adrenaline hadn’t dismissed my headache but sent it to sit in the corner. “How long was I out?”

“Moments only,” she said, bouncing with excitement. “When you fainted, the magician laid you down so gently, and then he turned on the thief like a lion. The knave took one look and fled, and your magician pursued.”

“He just left me here to get hauled off like yesterday’s trash?”

“That ruffian”—she jerked a thumb toward the unconscious guy in Greece—“was not here then. It was like he stepped out of the air after the other two left. But you can catch them if you hurry.”

With her urging me on, I did hurry, into the main hall where I tried to get my bearings. I couldn’t believe no one was investigating why the police hadn’t arrived downstairs, or wondering about the almighty racket.

“This way!” said the Egyptian girl. “Through the hall of the bearded old white men.”

That narrowed it down to just about all of Western Civilization. I had to cross the big, open space to get there, but a bang and clatter from the front doors sent me diving for cover behind a nude statue with a conveniently large … pedestal. A squad of EMTs ran by, their bright yellow stretcher garish in the monochrome decorum of marble and bronze.

It gave me a chance to catch my breath. This ache was different than the usual rebound migraine. I felt stripped and raw, and drained like an old car battery. My thighs shook like I’d run a marathon.

Worse, I couldn’t seem to bring my second Sight into focus. In the pale light of the hall, Cleo looked translucent, like a hologram. The vibrancy that had earlier colored the museum, the pieces of their souls that the artists put into their work, none of it sang to my extra senses.

Was this what normal felt like?

“Something is wrong,” I said, trying, and failing, to keep a lid on rising panic. “I can barely See you. And I can’t feel any echoes or remnants.”

She gave me a pitying look. “Do you think power is inexhaustible? You are a very formidable priestess, but you are not a goddess.”

I got a grip on my panic and sorted through events. Carson had turned my psychic defenses into a shield against the magical attack—and as crazy as my life was by normal people’s standards, that was even crazier. The whole thing must have lasted just seconds, but I was totally spent.

Why was McSlackerson still on his feet?

Other pieces started to come together, too: Mrs. Hardwicke’s weird and sudden disappearance. The muting of every trace of death echo in the Pompeii exhibit. A translation of the Book of the Dead that spoke of—or instructed how to use—the power of the afterlife. My subconscious had figured it out already, because I’d warned Cleo away from my abductor. Somehow this Brotherhood was using remnants to do real magic. Big magic.

The idea violated my entire purpose in life and in other people’s deaths. But I couldn’t do anything about it with my current problem.

“Why can I still See you?” I asked the Egyptian girl.

She shrugged. “Your senses are dulled, not gone. And I will that you should See me.”

Some remnants can and do appear to the average Joe, but the clarity of our current interaction was impressive for someone who looked like an Egyptian teen princess. “You can do that?”

“I am the daughter of Isis.” Another shrug. “I can do whatever I wish.”

She had the supremely casual tone of the truly arrogant, and I had a bad feeling I sounded like that sometimes. Maybe a lot of the time.

But not just then. Despair took my heart in its fist. “What if it doesn’t come back?” I didn’t know how to be normal. My Sight … it wasn’t just what I did, it was what I was.

“This I do not know,” said Cleo, impatiently. “But what I do know is that when you fell, your magician looked like someone had put a sword through his heart, and you’ve been so long feeling sorry for yourself that he probably thinks you are dead and is killing the knave now in vengeance and you are missing it!”

She was right. Bloodthirsty, but right. I was feeling sorry for myself, and I had important things to do, like stop Carson from doing something rash.

Not that he ever seemed to be without a plan, even when taken by surprise. Especially when taken by surprise. I really hoped he had a plan for stopping the attempted murderer from getting away, and for us not getting caught by the cops ourselves.

I used the statue’s pedestal to haul myself up. Cleo had popped up across the hall and was gesturing for me to hurry, which I did. The wing with the old masters had bigger rooms and higher ceilings, almost like ballrooms. In the first gallery hung life-sized portraits. A huge Gainsborough and two sober Dutch masters gazed in painted disapproval as I ran past.

My steps slowed as I neared the door to the next gallery, partly because I wasn’t sure what waited inside—like police or more magic or just an armed and smirking sociopath—and partly because I heard voices in taunting tones that raised more questions than they answered.

“Have you figured it out yet, Maguire?”

The voice was McSlackerson’s. He was breathing hard, like he’d paused in running, but it was the name that made me stop outside the door and press against the wall to listen.

“Don’t call me that,” Carson snapped, as discomposed as I’d ever heard him. There was something very personal about his anger that made it sound like they’d argued before. “I just work for him.”

“Does he know you’ve gone rogue, you and little Miss Ghost Whisperer?”

Had we gone rogue? This was news to me. Or maybe not. There was Carson turning off his phone, using cash at the Walmart, refusing to call Maguire for a car. Another one of those things more clear in retrospect.

“If anything happens to Daisy,” Carson said, so low I strained to hear, “if she’s not all right when she wakes up, I am going to stake you like you did that guard.”

I believed him. There was an unshakable vow in his voice. Hearing a guy threaten to kill someone—or at least maim him—for my sake shouldn’t make me feel a rush of warmth around my heart. But it did, just a little.

“Hey,” said the thief, in a tone that made me loathe him even more, “if she’s not all right when she wakes up, it’s your fault. And you know it, or you wouldn’t be so—”

Wait. Did Carson care or did he just feel guilty? I leaned forward to hear, but a crack of fist hitting bone cut him off. I really was missing the exciting stuff.

I burst into the room in time to see McSlackerson reeling back, his hand clamped to his jaw, Carson going for the follow-through punch to the gut. His fist landed with an awful, dull thud, and it looked terribly effective and efficient.

Cleo had appeared beside me, delighted by Carson’s show of force. “Oh, look. He’s going to kill him with his hands. Very satisfactory.”

I echoed with a bloodthirsty “Very.”