Spirit and Dust

7


“ASSHOLE,” I GROWLED as soon as we were out of the office. Lauren trailed after us, making choked sounds that I realized were laughter.

“I told you not to antagonize him,” said Carson, setting me onto my feet and slamming the door behind us.

“I wasn’t talking about him,” I snapped, and made sure my clothes were covering all the parts of me they were supposed to. My emotions needed some sorting, too. As much as I hated being manhandled, Carson had kept me from doing something really stupid.

Maguire scared the crap out of me. When I blinked, I could See the glow of his remnant debt stamped on the dark of my eyelids. A man with a conscience would buckle under that weight. Maguire had none, and that gave a concrete reality to his threats.

So what did I do? Threaten him back. It was insanely stupid, but it was the only defense I had left.

Laughter made me jump. The guard from the door and the two gorillas who’d escorted Carson and me were clustered around a smartphone, paying no attention to us at all.

“Play it again!” said the guard, and the goon with the phone tapped the screen. “Look at her go! Like a red-haired gazelle, that one.” I couldn’t see the video, but I could guess they were watching the farce of my escape attempt. Their cackles when I hit Carson and the groans of sympathy when I kneed him were a giveaway.

“Something funny, Murphy?” asked Carson. A rhetorical question, because clearly, it was hilarious.

The goon squad sobered, but Murphy, the guard from the door, didn’t bother to hide his grin, even when he said, “No, sir.” Then he gestured to a cloth-covered tray on a console table tucked against the wall. “Bertram brought this up for your guest.”

Lauren went over and lifted the napkin to reveal a toasted sandwich, an avalanche of potato chips, and a pickle spear. “Do gazelles eat turkey sandwiches?”

Not voluntarily, but I was running on four Cokes and a long-gone snack pack of pretzels from the plane. I snatched up the sandwich before she had a chance to do anything witchy to it. “You,” I said with as much dark venom as I could muster over my growling stomach, “are going to be so sorry.”

She took a handful of potato chips. “You know that thing about magic coming back on you three times is a myth, right?”

“Not where my family is concerned. If anything bad happens to me because of this, the Goodnights will bring the rain. So pack an umbrella.”

Carson grabbed the napkin and handed it to me. “Walk and eat. I want you to get a read on Alexis’s room, see if there are any clues.”

The thought of Alexis made the gourmet turkey and bread about as appetizing as a boot-leather-and-cardboard sandwich, but I wolfed it down anyway. It wasn’t bravado, it was biology. I needed food if I was going to be good for anything.

I followed the platinum cockscomb of Lauren’s spiked hair down another of the house’s hallways into another wing of the building. That made three. I’d lost track of the number of corridors.

Carson had fallen into step beside me. Not crowding, but within arm’s length. He wasn’t taking any chances.

“I don’t know where you think I’m going to go,” I said around a mouthful of sandwich. My aunts would be appalled. “I don’t think I could find my way out of here with a GPS and a team of Army Rangers.”

He shot me a sideways look, and I noticed the darkening bruise on his cheekbone, corresponding to the lump on my head. “I’m not going to underestimate you twice. You just threatened to shove Devlin Maguire into the afterlife.”

I shrugged to hide a shudder. “I was very angry.” I was still angry, which was unusual. Mostly it’s all explosion, no simmer with me, which I hate because I’ve known too many dead people not to have learned where hotheadedness gets you.

But as hunger receded, I still had a knot in my gut—the slow burn of outrage turning into a coiled spring of tension, telling me to move, act, swing for the bleachers.

Unless it wasn’t anger, but something else.

I slowed my steps, wondering what would happen. If I was just pissed, then nothing. But as soon as I started dragging my feet, my muscles tensed and my heart pounded and my chest tightened with term-paper-due-tomorrow tension.

I wasn’t just pissed. I was bound.

Son of a witch.

Whatever I knew, so did the geas. Turning away from Alexis’s room with no other plan would not find the missing girl. The spell gave my subconscious power over me, like OCD dialed up to eleven.

“What’s wrong?” asked Carson, with a sharpness I didn’t understand.

“Seriously?” Stopping to look at him wasn’t difficult. Clearly my subconscious knew the value of venting. “I am ensorcelled. Bound by magic to find Alexis or die trying. Which, by the way, I would have done for free, if your boss had asked politely.”

His shoulders shifted as if he were trying to ease an itch of guilt. It was a small movement, but I was used to reading the slightest inflection in a remnant. Reading this Carson guy was sort of the same. “Then what’s the problem?” he asked.

“The problem,” I said, “is I don’t know what problems this will make. Is it going to cloud my judgment? What if I can’t find her? What if I die—”

Oh God.

It was a prayer, not a curse. If I died, would I still be bound to Devlin Maguire? If I got stuck here because of the oath, who would cut my spirit free? I didn’t know anyone else who could do what I did.

Carson had reached out like he wanted to steady me, but I leveled a glare that made him wisely draw his hand back.

“If I die and get stuck here,” I swore coldly, “I’m going to chew myself loose from your boss and make your life a living hell until you find someone to free me.”

If I hadn’t been glaring at him, I would have missed his flinch, a neuron flash of pain like the dart of a fish beneath a sheet of ice. “That’s not going to happen,” he said. “Lauren said the spell is harmless in the long term, and I’m not going to let you get hurt in the meantime.”

“Dude.” I rolled my eyes. “Did you tell yourself that before or after you kidnapped me from the back of the police station?” Without waiting for an answer, I set off purposefully after Lauren—or rather, the corner she’d disappeared around.

“Trust me,” Carson said, easily matching my pace. “I wasn’t nuts about doing that even before I knew what a pain in the butt you were going to be.”

Weirdly, I sort of believed he hadn’t thought I’d come to harm. Not that it let him off the hook. “Did you dump me in the trunk, or just toss me in the backseat with a blanket over my head?”

“You should thank me for springing you from testosterone central.” He defrosted a little as the argument turned superficial. “Your junior G-man must be half dead not to realize how short that skirt is.”

I refused to blush, even though my strides down the hall sort of emphasized his point. “The skirt is standard issue. My legs are too long.”

“Oh, I disagree,” he said, in a matter-of-fact way that wasn’t matter-of-fact at all. It sounded like approval. Young, handsome Mr. Carson approval. I suspected he was just trading one mask for another, but even I’m susceptible to flattery.

Then he added in a bland tone, “Your knees are a little bony, though.”

They absolutely were not. Unless, I guess, they were making an impact on a delicate area.

I pursed my lips to hold back a vengeful smile. That was mere prudence. The geas had nothing to say about inappropriate banter with the enemy.


Lauren waited for Carson and me at an open door, arms folded, brows pitched at a scornful angle. “Don’t let the mortal peril of our friend hurry you kids up or anything.”

As much as I disliked Lauren—which was a lot—I still felt a little guilty for wasting time on a purely selfish freak-out. Duress or not, the important thing was finding the girl. Okay, maybe this was anything but a normal day. But it was my job to put my psyche on the line for a lost soul. Alexis was no different just because she still had a body attached to hers.

So I squared my shoulders and blew past Lauren into Alexis’s room. It was actually more of a suite, professionally decorated in the violet and green of a pansy patch, but other than the size of the room—and the flat-screen TV on the wall—it wasn’t ostentatious. Maybe because there were so many books.

Lauren and Carson came in and closed the door. They were an odd pair—the witch, with her vintage punk clothes, and the … whatever Carson was, with his stoic face and haunted eyes. They conferred in soft voices while I made a circuit of the room, running my hand over dustless tables and fluffed pillows. Picking up traces of the living was like getting a radio station at the very edge of my reception, but sometimes it was easier when the signal was boosted by a big event or strong emotion—the same kinds of things that make remnants of the dead stick around.

I didn’t get anything like that from Alexis’s room, just the faint static of daily living, as if she hadn’t been there in a while. There was a stronger energy attached to some childhood books and mementos on a shelf and a hot spot near the desk where Lauren leaned, arms folded, watching me. Alexis must have invested a lot of time and emotional effort there. I guess you don’t study Latin and Greek if you don’t like putting in the hours.

There was also a curio case holding trinkets she must have collected. I reached for one, a small human figure carved from reddish stone, and Lauren’s voice stopped me. “Careful. Those are old and delicate. And possibly cursed.”

“Then shouldn’t they be in a museum?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure the piece was fake, maybe a gift-shop replica. If it had been truly old, let alone cursed, I was close enough that I would have been able to tell without touching it. “There are laws about importing artifacts, aren’t there?”

Lauren rolled her eyes, and I remembered who I was talking to. Mafia staff witch.

“Is this important for finding Alexis?” asked Carson. He leaned against a bookcase, arms folded, but his vibe wasn’t relaxed. More like he was hanging back, observing.

“I don’t know what’s important yet.” I tried to think like Agent Taylor had taught me. Focus on the victim. Her path had to have crossed the kidnapper’s somehow. By knowing her habits and haunts, so to speak, eventually I would see the intersection. “Tell me about Alexis. She seems like a bit of a nerd.”

“Being smart doesn’t automatically make you a nerd,” said Lauren. Which I guess was true. Alexis had been heading out for a night of partying when she’d disappeared.

“She is pretty brilliant,” said Carson. “But yeah, I think she’s too cosmopolitan to be called a nerd. I think it was shopping in Rome with her mom that first got her interested in the classical world—ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt.”

Since I doubted Roman gladiators had kidnapped her, I switched directions with my next question. “How much magic are we dealing with?” I asked. “Are there magical protections around the property? Wards on Alexis’s dorm room? Tracking charms sewn into her underwear?”

“Can’t you tell?” Lauren asked—about half real question and half taunt.

“I keep telling you guys,” I snapped, to cover how naive and outgunned I felt. “I read remnants of the dead. Magic isn’t my thing. Mary Poppins could have grabbed Alexis and I wouldn’t know it.”

Carson allowed himself a small smile. “There is a long list of people who would want to stick it to Devlin Maguire. But Mary Poppins isn’t on it.”

“Lord Voldemort, then?” What I really wondered was, if Maguire had an arcane arsenal, what did the kidnappers have in their bag of tricks?

Lauren heaved a sigh. “Magic one-oh-one, Red. This isn’t Harry Potter. There are protection charms here and on the dorm room, of course. Tracking charms are a great idea in theory, but huge power drains. Expensive—magically speaking—to maintain when a GPS chip in her phone works just as well. Most of the time,” she added, preempting my next question.

That part I got. My cousin Phin loved to give me lectures in Magic 101, and now I wished I’d paid more attention. But I did remember that the major impediment to big, flashy magic was the impractical amount of energy required to make something go against its nature. Magic worked on probabilities and enhanced inclinations. That was why fireballs and flying carpets were fantasy.

At least, that was what I had thought until now. Maybe it really was just a matter of getting enough power. But power had to come from somewhere.

Dude, magical theory was a mental labyrinth and I didn’t have a map. So I focused instead on the current problem.

“You said that Alexis was hidden from your locator spell,” I said to Lauren, confirming what she’d said in Maguire’s office. “Do you think the spell was blocked somehow?”

She didn’t have to think about it. “Less blocked, more like scrambled.”

I worked that through. “So someone could be doing it deliberately. Like a radar scrambler.”

She pointed at me like a game show host. “Ding! Give the girl a toaster.”

“Look, you.” She was seriously pissing me off. Worse, her bad vibes were majorly interfering with my mojo. That’s not just an excuse fake psychics use. “You don’t want me to be more useful than this,” I told her, “because it would mean someone is dead. Which I can arrange, if you keep mouthing off.”

She laughed, then pretended she hadn’t meant to. “I’m sorry, kid. You’re about as intimidating as a hissing kitten.”

“Lauren,” said Carson, without moving from his lean against the bookcase, “back off or go away. And you, Sunshine, calm down.”

Has anyone in the history of the planet actually calmed down when someone said “calm down”? All it did was turn up the gas under the teakettle of my temper.

“Why doesn’t Maguire just pay the stupid ransom?” I demanded. “I mean, what are they asking for? His left kidney?”

Carson debated a moment and glanced at Lauren, who gave him a “your call” sort of shrug. “Because it’s not money they want,” he finally said. “It’s a thing. And he doesn’t have it.”

“Why doesn’t he just go get it?” I asked, slightly more calm, but much more confused. “Or send somebody. He seems pretty good at that.” The two of them exchanged another look. “Hey,” I said, at the end of my rope with them. “Stop with the secret eyeball communication. I’m standing right here.”

Carson sighed and reluctantly confessed, “Because we don’t know exactly what it is.”

I eyed him suspiciously, but he didn’t look like he was joking. “That doesn’t make any sense. Are you supposed to just guess?”

He didn’t laugh. “What the kidnappers said was, ‘Bring us the Oosterhouse Jackal.’ But no one here has heard of it.”

“Did you Google it?” I asked, because that’s what I would do.

Lauren slapped her forehead. “Oh my gosh, Carson! Why didn’t we think of that? Google! What a genius idea!”

Carson straightened and jerked a thumb toward the door. “Out, Lauren. Now.”

I expected an argument, or some more eye rolling. Instead, she indulged him, calling, “Don’t let her beat you up again,” before she closed the door behind her.

At least Carson seemed as annoyed by that as I was. So we agreed on something.

The room seemed smaller somehow, once he’d taken charge. He had a trick of fading out when he was with Maguire and Lauren, standing still and contained, as if he were just the muscle, waiting for orders. It would be easy to underestimate him. Maybe that was why he did it.

But now he was all business. “Yes, of course we did an Internet search for the Oosterhouse Jackal. Nothing useful came up, but Maguire has people on it.”

I was sure he did. Scary people without the restrictions of, oh, say, jurisprudence or civil liberties. My job was to follow the clues to Alexis. That was what I’d sworn to do.

But something kept nagging at me. I mulled over what it might be as I went back to the curio case, looking at the stuff Alexis had collected, picking up the figurine Lauren had warned me away from. It actually did look old, even felt that way to the touch. But to my other senses it was oddly … inert. At any rate, it was not cursed from the tomb.

When I turned, Carson was watching me, as if curious when the show would start. “I still don’t get it,” I said, fidgeting with the carved stone. “Why would the kidnappers ask for something that Maguire doesn’t have, or even have access to?”

“Lauren and I have a theory,” he said. “We think Alexis knows what it is or where to find it. So maybe the kidnappers assumed the boss does, too.”

“Her dorm room was totally trashed,” I said. “It could be they were looking there for this jackal thing. Whatever it is.”

He took the stone figurine from my hand and placed it with care back on the shelf. “She wouldn’t keep anything valuable in her dorm. It’s too unprotected.”

No argument there. But his point did spin up a new idea. “This place,” I said, meaning Castle Maguire, “is like a freaking fort. When was Alexis last home? Could she have hidden something here?”

“About a week ago,” he answered. “The mansion would be a safe place to keep something secure from outsiders. We thought of that, and Lauren did her divination thing. There’s no sign of anything on the property.”

“Yeah, but if you don’t know exactly what the Jackal is, any kind of locating spell would be only slightly better than guessing.” I knew that much, because it was usually the same for psychics.

I’d also caught his qualifier—safe from outsiders. Where would Alexis keep something she didn’t want Maguire to know about?

“Is there a picture of Alexis somewhere? Maybe a photo album?” I wanted to get a better image of her physically to see if that helped at all.

Carson nodded to a wall that separated the sitting part of the suite from the bedroom part. It held a decorator-perfect arrangement of frames, but when I went closer I saw that the shots were mostly candid: teenage Alexis with glasses and braces, slightly older Alexis with straight white teeth, arms around her girlfriends, all of them wearing school uniforms a lot like the one I’d worn to Our Lady of Perpetual Snobbery in San Antonio. There was Alexis in front of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, on the ski slopes of the Alps, in front of the British Museum and the Trevi Fountain.

The only picture with her father was also the only formal portrait, one of those where they try to make it look unposed and natural but it just ends up looking like a magazine photo of a happy family. Maybe it was a magazine shoot. In any case, Alexis and her father didn’t look miserable, but their body language was almost businesslike.

Contrast that with the one picture of Alexis with Carson. He wore a tux—and wore it really well—and they leaned into each other, grinning cheekily at the photographer. The photo couldn’t be very old, but the carefree guy in the photo seemed a lifetime of experience from the young man standing nearby, watching me with folded arms.

I pointed to the picture. “Did someone put a happy spell on your prom tuxedo or what?”

He allowed himself a shadow of that smile. “Alexis’s first sorority formal, our freshman year. She went to an all-girls high school and hadn’t dated much until then, and she was wary of asking a stranger.”

Yeah, I could see where having Devlin Maguire as a dad would impede romance, with the bodyguards and all. So who was Carson to her? He would have been too young to be Maguire’s employee then. He still looked too young now.

“How long have you known Alexis?” I asked, moving to the nightstand to poke around. The something was still nagging at me. Something besides curiosity about Carson.

His answer was unobliging. “A while.”

“Since you started college?” I asked, undeterred.

“Since before.” He obviously knew I was fishing for information on more than just Alexis, and he gave me a grudging morsel. “Maguire sent me to school.”

I paused in my drawer rifling. “Is that why you work for him?”

He smiled slightly, but the humor in it was bitter. I’d hit a nerve. “That would be the simplest answer.” It was also clearly the only one I was going to get. “Are you finding anything?” he asked. “Or just pretending to look while you give me the third degree?”

“Trust me,” I said, tough, like I was some badass ghost interrogator. “If I give you the third degree, you’ll know it.”

I shut the bureau drawer. This room was neat as a pin, cleaned regularly, and totally unhelpful on a psychic level. What I needed was a dead person.

“There aren’t any pictures of Alexis’s mom,” I said, suddenly noticing. “Where is she?”

“Gone,” said Carson.

“As in dead?” I asked, maybe a little too hopefully.

The corner of his mouth turned up at my tone. “As in remarried and living in Europe.”

“What about a grandparent or an aunt or uncle?” I asked. “Someone she was close to, who might check in on her from the beyond now and then?”

“Her maternal grandmother.” He must have followed my line of reasoning, and anticipation sparked in his eyes, though he kept it tightly reined in. I suspected Carson kept everything tightly reined in. “Lex—Alexis, I mean—always spoke of her fondly.”

“Excellent. Grandmothers are the worst busybodies.” I rubbed my hands together, shifting into higher gear. I pretty much never reined anything in. “Does Alexis have something of hers? Anything intimate or personal should do.”

“How should I know what’s intimate or personal to her?” asked Carson.

“Dude, you were her backup date. Obviously you’re close.” I had been actively ignoring the “dead” part of the spectrum, so as not to overshadow the “live” part that I didn’t See very well. Now I refocused and scanned the room intently for some hint of remnant.

“What do girls inherit from their grandmothers?” I asked. “China. Knickknacks … How about jewelry?”

Carson, jolted by the suggestion, turned toward a painting on the wall. As soon as I focused on it, I felt a faint psychic hum. A wall safe, maybe?

We nearly raced each other to it. Sure enough, Carson swung the frame from the wall to reveal a safe with a keypad lock, and the something went from nagging to unrelenting.

“It’s been there all along, but I’ve been trying to focus on Alexis.” I felt like an idiot. “We’ve wasted so much time. The jackal might be in there right now!”

Carson shook his head and started keying in a number. “I already looked. There’s nothing in here but jewelry. But maybe there’s something for you to read.…”

He glanced down at me, breaking off when he saw my narrow-eyed stare. So he didn’t know where Alexis kept her intimate stuff, but he knew the combination to her safe? “There’s a master code,” he explained, correctly interpreting my suspicion. “The boss gave it to me this morning so I could search.”

So I was right. The mansion was not the place to keep something hidden from Maguire. Alexis would know that. Carson would, too. But whose side was he on? He was obviously loyal—maybe obedient would be a better word—to the boss. On the other hand, he didn’t seem happy about that. So maybe there was nothing obvious here at all.

I pushed that thought aside as Carson opened the safe door and pulled out a velvet-lined tray full of sparkle. I had never seen so many gemstones up close. The fire inside them was downright hypnotic.

But the stones weren’t what called to me. It was a pile of pearls. Their glow was softer, like warm, pale skin. And more, they seemed to hum, raising gooseflesh on my arms as I dipped my fingers into the tray and pulled them free into a long, perfectly matched strand. The necklace sang with impatient intensity.

“It’s about time,” chided a voice, coming from everywhere and nowhere. “I’ve been waiting an age for you to get to me, young lady.”