Spirit and Dust

36


“OH MY GOD, Carson. Stop doing that! You’re going to give someone brain damage.”

My flippancy was a facade. Inside, my heart pounded like a subwoofer in a dance club, but running to Taylor’s unconscious body gave me an excuse to hide my horror. Showing fear would let the Jackal know I’d seen him.

“He’s fine, right?” Carson wasn’t careless, but his tone was casual. No damage done, so what’s the harm?

He walked toward me, his shoulders loose, his gait easy. He moved like a complete stranger, and I had to force myself not to back away.

“Stop worrying,” he said. “The brethren are rounded up for the police, and we’ll have Alexis in a few minutes. I’ve taken their power back. And if she does manage to get out, we’ll track her down. It’s all good.”

“It’s all good?” I echoed, flummoxed and frightened. Forget the fact that it was not all good. It was anything but good. This was not the Carson I’d spent the past forty-eight hours with.

“Carson, you need to let me unbind the Jackal from you. Now.” As illogical as it was, I whispered that last part, as if the parasitic spirit couldn’t hear me. “While you still have a little bit of control.”

He caught my hand and, with a grin, pulled me close. “I have complete control. Let me show you.”

I held him at arm’s length and powered up my deflector shields. “Listen to yourself. You’re trying to kiss me in a room full of shades, with six unconscious bodies on the floor. Does that seem normal to you?”

He’d kept his hands on my waist, but drew back to consider me. “And that’s worth putting up the psychic force field?”

“Do you blame me?” I asked. “I’ve had all the whammy I can take today.”

He took my hands and squeezed them in apology. “I was just trying to protect you. I had no idea what I was doing, other than that. But, Daisy, this worked out better than any plan I could have made.”

“Except for the part where you’re possessed by a self-proclaimed demigod!”

“But I’m not!” He squeezed my hands again and drew me away from Taylor’s sprawled body. “I can feel the Jackal in the back of my head, but he’s not controlling me. Maybe it’s my ability to channel and convert types of energy, I don’t know.” He gave a disbelieving laugh. “Hell, maybe Maguire knew that when he volunteered me, though I think that’s giving him too much credit.”

“Carson,” I said, trying to pull him back to earth. “You are not sounding like yourself.”

“How do you know? I’ve forgotten what ‘myself’ feels like. I haven’t felt normal since my mom died.” He laughed again, with genuine humor and joy. “I can feel her. You’ve got her soul in your pocket. That sounds like it should be a song title.”

I didn’t like buoyant Carson. It just wasn’t right.

“This can be the new normal,” he went on, oblivious to my tension, even when he slid his arms around my waist. He nodded to the prone brethren. “This can be what we do. Doing good. Stopping evil. The weird stuff that your FBI partner isn’t equipped to handle. Now we are.”

He was serious, and he was earnest, and he was so wrong. Some deep-down part of me wondered what I would say if he was Jackal-less, if he’d never hidden any truth from me. I had a feeling it would be the same thing, it would just hurt even more. “No, Carson.”

“Why not?” He pulled me tighter against him, so I had to lean back to look at him. “Come with me, Daisy. Think of all the good we can do.”

Goodnights don’t run.

Some memory whispered that in my ear. Maybe even some shade. But it was the truth. I was a face-the-music kind of girl. “Or you could stay,” I said, knowing I’d have to make him somehow.

“I can’t.” He slipped his hand around the back of my neck, pressing his forehead to mine. “So this is where we split.”

Like Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman at the airfield in Casablanca. Only Rick hadn’t said goodbye by kissing Ilsa like there was no tomorrow.

That felt like the real Carson. Not flippant or entitled or arrogant … Okay, maybe just the right amount of arrogant. The kiss was deep and dark and a little bit desperate, as if he had to drink all of me in or never get another taste.

It didn’t last long. Long enough for the ache of loss to blossom. Long enough for the taste to turn to smoke and sand.

I pulled away in horror. Carson looked back at me in confusion turning to alarm. “What?”

My arms had gone around his waist, and I took hold of the tail of his shirt. Twisting out of his arms, I yanked up the fabric and got a look at his tattoo.

He was too stunned to stop me. I was too stunned to move.

The inky jackal skulked across his skin. It covered his whole back, and blue eyes glittered like gems. They winked, telling me they’d seen me. Heard me. Tasted me.

I made a noise—disgusted, terrified. I didn’t plan, just reacted. I grabbed the tattoo like I could peel it from his skin. It gave some in the middle like a blistered sunburn, then snapped back. The jackal snarled, lashed at me with gleaming teeth, and a blast of magic flung me backward, where I hit the floor and kept sliding.

“Daisy!” When my eyes uncrossed, I saw that Carson looked as stunned as I was. But above him I saw the shadow of the Jackal, huge and laughing and triumphant.

I crab-walked backward from the apparition, through the swirls of spirit fog. It tingled in greeting, recognizing me from all my efforts that day. But as the Jackal’s shadow condensed and fell over Carson, fell into him, soaking in the way ink soaks into paper, the mist began to scratch and nip and bite.

When Carson looked up, his eyes were brilliant blue.

This was the exact opposite of all good. What looked out of his eyes now was inhuman, alien, and merciless.

“Why couldn’t you just cooperate?” said the Jackal. “I could have made the boy happy, given him what he wanted, let him keep the illusion of control. This is all your fault.”

He spread his arms and the spirit mist coiled in on itself, taking a new shape. “Remember that,” said the Jackal. “Though you won’t have to remember it long.”

I couldn’t even say what the thing was, other than huge. It had the mane of a lion and the teeth of about fifty sharks, and it bristled with scales and spikes and bones. Every time my eyes focused, it shifted, like trying to catch the red spot on your vision after a camera flash. But it was solid enough. Talons like giant flint arrowheads threw up sparks as they scraped the floor.

It was nightmare given form.

I’d scrambled backward and hit something—the railing around the tyrannosaur—and I used it to pull myself to my feet. Only hours ago I’d stood in almost the same spot, listening to the symphony of spirits that saturated the museum. I reached for them now, and found the psychic space where they’d been empty, like a raided tomb. What hadn’t been used up by the Brotherhood or the Jackal had been pulled in and warped by the monstrosity in front of me.

Johnson and the brethren lay in a heap, not that they would help me. Taylor hadn’t moved. The doors were locked. The museum was empty, and every shade in it was standing against me.

I’d never felt so alone.

Except … I was never alone.

The nightmare beast churned the air with a semblance of breathing, and it took a lot of willpower to close my eyes and Sense it with only my psyche. I shook out my hands, rushing blood through my veins and energy into my own living spirit. And I reached, harder than I’d ever reached before.

Not out. But in.

I reached into my cells, into my DNA, into the mitochondria that made me. I found that essence of myself that was Goodnight, the daughter of kitchen witches and psychic detectives and interfering busybodies. I was a guide to lost souls and the patron sinner of the recently dead.

I was part of something eternal. And the whole was present in the part.

I knit the strands into threads and the thread into a banner that called my family to aid me. The hot spirit breath of the nightmare stirred my hair and the flint-on-stone scrape of its talons made my teeth ache before I got an answer.

But it was definite when it came.

The giant bones above me rattled as ghostly lungs stretched skeleton ribs. Sue the Tyrannosaur shuddered awake.