Spirit and Dust (17 page)

“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
non
magical 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 some
ones
—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.”

W
E MADE GOOD
time down the interstate, in our second stolen car of the day. I was so worried about losing the lead on Alexis, so worried about getting to the jackal ahead of anyone else, that one more auto theft didn’t seem that big a deal.

I had thought the headache might be the result of the sextuplet of promises duking it out in my subconscious, but at some point I’d felt one geas knit seamlessly to the other. Alexis’s life came first. But as the clues came together I was convinced that the trail of the Jackal paralleled the trail of Alexis’s kidnappers.

Three Cokes and a thirty-minute nap had banished the migraine
by the time we got out of the Chicago traffic. On the open road, Carson drove fast, but not obnoxiously so.

The low-slung bucket seat of the muscle car made me feel like I was reclining on the pavement. “If you showed up at my house in this car,” I said, “my aunt would never let me go out with you.”

Carson glanced at me, then back at the road. “Does she have something against muscle cars?”

“No. Just Corvettes. I think a guy with a Corvette broke her heart once.”

I unfolded—again—the note that Carson had given me from Elbows. “From your boyfriend,” he’d said, once we’d boosted our ride. Elbows apologized for not finding a name, just that the query looking for the field notes of Oosterhouse’s expedition had come from someone with an OI student ID. It kept this Michael Johnson guy in the running.

“Let’s talk about this,” said Carson, picking up the torn pieces of the card with the ear from the car’s cupholder. I’d shown them to him when I’d caught him up on my adventures, and he’d confirmed that it was an eavesdropping spell he’d seen before. My cousin Phin would call it representational magic. Apparently the Maguire operation called it convenient and electronically un-detectable.

“You think the same guys who kidnapped Alexis are responsible for this
and
for the attack in the cemetery?”

“There’s magic involved in all three things.” I counted them off on my fingers. “The kidnapping, the attack, and the ear spell.
Either it’s all one group or the Midwest is overrun by roving gangs of magicians.”

He actually considered that possibility, then discarded it. “And you think they’re related to the Brotherhood of the Black Jackal that your aunt told you about?”

“They have the Institute in common, and it’s hard to ignore the jackal-y theme.” I turned in my seat to face him, the better to make my case. I’d take a hazy theory over clueless stumbling any day. “This is what I think. Oosterhouse’s secret society … say it’s less Dead Egyptians Society and more Magic Fastball Club. And the guys we met in the cemetery somehow found out about it and revived the tradition.”

He looked doubtful. “So a bunch of students stumble across a reference to Oosterhouse in their studies and start experimenting with magic?”

I shrugged. “Why not? Half my dorm mates are experimenting with something or another.”

He slid me a curious glance, then looked back at the road. “What are you experimenting with?”

“A life of crime.” I didn’t want to think about school right now. Especially midterms on Monday—and the fact that I hadn’t studied for them.

Carson ventured his own theory. “Maybe this Brotherhood never really died out. Just went deeper underground.”

“Aunt Ivy did say the one thing she was sure of was that the Brotherhood did exist. And that we had to stop them from getting the Jackal.”

He let that sink in while he passed a slow-moving minivan.
“Did she specifically say that it was some kind of weapon of mass destruction? Maybe it’s just power, not inherently good
or
bad.”

“Don’t give me that ‘magical artifacts don’t kill people, people kill people’ business,” I said. “You can pry my Goodnight Farms magical bath products out of my cold dead fingers, but I’m one hundred percent in favor of Nazi-face-melting artifacts control.”

An awkward pause sucked the air out of the car. I was actually relieved when Carson called me out. “Are you seriously going to turn this into a debate about the Second Amendment?”

It
was
ridiculous, considering him, organized crime management in training, and considering me, unpaid psychic consultant for the FBI. But I pretended it wasn’t. “I’m from Texas.
Everything
is about the right to bear arms. It’s kind of annoying, no matter which side you’re on.”

I caught him smiling at that before he turned serious again. “What about this Book of the Dead that your aunt couldn’t find?”

“I don’t know.” I closed my eyes, trying to recall exactly what the guys had said at the mausoleum. “In the graveyard, the Brotherhood was looking for something, but it wasn’t the Jackal. They said if they couldn’t find it, the Jackal wouldn’t matter, and Alexis would be useless. Maybe they’re still looking for the book.”

He took the flash drive out of his pocket and handed it to me. “Do you think there’s a clue to the book on there?”

I looked into the mummy’s nonexistent eyes, then back at Carson. “I’m sorry. I can only talk to the real dead, not the plastic kind.”

“Cute. But maybe Alexis found a clue in her studies—the ancient world seems to be the connecting thread. She knows about
magic, so she might look at information differently from other students. Some link that’s been missed for eighty-odd years.”

“Eighty years is a long time.” Also, what were the odds she found something my aunt couldn’t?

“Alexis is genius smart. She was on college week on
Jeopardy!
” He glanced at me. “Maybe she knew these guys, but when she found out what the jackal was, she refused to give them information about it.”

The theory held together loosely, but there were still a lot of unraveling threads.

“Did you really not know she was thinking of going to grad school at the Institute?” I asked.

“No. She didn’t tell me.” Carson had his game face on, but he couldn’t quite hide that her silence bothered him. A lot. “Maybe she thought I would tell Maguire.”

I left that thread alone. We drove in silence, Carson passing another car at faster-than-posted speed. I assumed he knew what he was doing, because we couldn’t afford to get pulled over. There was almost certainly an APB out for me, or him, or both of us by now.

“So what did the Brotherhood overhear?” he finally asked.

It took me a second to rewind as far as the eavesdropping spell. “That the jackal—or
a
jackal—is in St. Louis. Which, since the spell was in the book, they knew already. Now they just know we know.”

Carson was quiet another long moment. “Did Tweed Jacket call you by your name?”

Oh yeah. Now they knew that, too.

“Just my last name.”

Whatever he was thinking made him flex his hands on the wheel. I tried to let it pass, but all I could imagine was my family caught between the Maguire operation and the Brotherhood of the Magical Jackasses. I hoped Saint Gertrude had reinforcements, because it was going to take a truckload of angels to protect my nearest and dearest.

“What?” I demanded. “What are you thinking?”

Another eternity went by before he let me know. “We’ve been wondering why they asked Maguire to get the jackal, when they know more about it than we do. Maybe they need his resources. Especially if this is a group of students.”

“And Maguire has lots of resources,” I said, not seeing what that had to do with me.

“Money, magic, and muscle,” Carson agreed. “But by killing Alexis’s bodyguard and kidnapping her, the kidnappers made sure we got one more thing: a psychic who could talk to the dead.”

I shivered despite the warm air blowing through the vents. “How could they have known about me?”

“There’s this new invention called the Internet.”

I didn’t give that the answer it deserved because he was driving. “How did they know Maguire would grab me?”

Carson had an answer for that, too. “It’s not a secret that Maguire likes things his own way. But even if you’d stuck with the FBI, you’d be on Alexis’s trail.”

I stared at him, my brain stalling on the implications of that theory. “But
why
?”

“That, Sunshine, is the face-melting question.” He looked
at me—held my eyes with a sober intensity that made my heart race in a way that had nothing to do with him taking his eyes off the road at eighty bajillion miles an hour. “Maybe I should drop you off at the next police station. You can call your junior G-man from there.”

That was
so
not an option. I was way past any magical compulsion now. This was all me.

“Maybe you should shut up and put your eyes on the road,” I said.

Carson almost smiled, and as he turned his gaze back to the highway, he moved his hand like he would take mine, squeeze it, say we were in this together.

Instead, he just reached for the radio and turned up the volume on some vintage Kings of Leon.

St. Louis’s Forest Park was home to the zoo, a couple of museums, a theater, some sculptures, a greenhouse, and lots of winding paths. The lanes were full of strollers and joggers and the air was crisp and the afternoon sun set fire to the autumn leaves. It was exactly what fall should be, except for the part where lives were at stake.

“Maybe the museum will have a café,” I said, stretching five hours of driving out of my back as we walked through the parking lot.

Carson gave me a look, sort of droll, sort of disbelieving. “What happened to the milk shake and french fries you ate two hours ago?”

“That was two hours ago.” Thinking about food helped me not think about kidnappers and killers.

Our destination was a large Art Deco building, set on a hill that swept steeply down to a lawn and an ornamental lake. I was already viewing it anxiously, hoping the jackal was there, praying the Brotherhood was not. The knot in my gut made another tight loop when I saw the banner fluttering across the museum’s facade.