Spirit And Dust Part 10

"Are you and Alexis ... um ... close?" I asked, going for tactful and just managing awkward. "Romantically, I mean."

He glanced at me, and whatever he read in my face softened the grim lines of his. "Not like that. She's like a sister to me."

"That's pretty close." I fiddled with my coffee cup. Living people were much more complicated than shades. "I'm sorry you thought I wasn't taking this seriously."

My apology took him by surprise, but he internalized it quickly. "It's okay," he said. "Now I know. Sarcastic equals scared."

"Well, sometimes sarcastic just equals sarcastic."

I didn't like this subject. He didn't need to know that about me. I turned back to important things, like our graveyard adventure. "Why do you think those guys followed us? It seems weird that kidnappers would ask for a ransom and then go looking for it themselves."

He considered the question. "Did you hear what they said at the cemetery? They thought Alexis had told us where to find something. Maybe they thought following us would let them bypa.s.s Maguire. No messy ransom exchange."

I shuddered. It was one thing to talk about this stuff, another to think about what it meant. Jump us, grab the Jackal, problem solved.

"Only the Jackal wasn't there," I said, turning away from dire could-have-beens. "At least they talked about Alexis in the present tense. If they didn't find what they were looking for, she will be useless to them. So she's still okay."

Carson studied me for a moment, more unreadable than usual. "For someone so fond of skulls and black nail polish, you're actually quite an optimist."

"Don't be insulting." I put my clasped hands on the table in front of me, ready to move on. "Now. What can you tell me about the blown-out car window?"

Carson reached to refill his coffee mug. "That I seriously doubt Geico is going to cover replacing it."

I s.n.a.t.c.hed the carafe away, holding it hostage. "Enough, Carson. No more caffeine until I get answers."

"Daisy, it's four in the morning," he said, utterly reasonable. "If you want coherent answers, you'd better let me have that coffeepot." I set it down, then waited while he filled my mug, then his. He pushed the sugar and creamer toward me, and said, "Why do I need to explain this to you? Your family are witches, right?"

"Hedge witches. Herbs, potions, that sort of thing. Nothing like ..." I mimed a big pow. "But you didn't seem surprised by that."

His brow arched. "Trust me. I was plenty surprised when that meathead blew out the safety gla.s.s."

"But you weren't surprised that he could."

"No." He might be laying his cards on the table, but he was obviously going to do it one at a time.

"Could you blow out a window?"

"Maybe," he admitted. "Under the right circ.u.mstances. The problem is the power it would take. A light flare from a flashlight, for example, doesn't have a lot of resistance. Kinetic force would be a lot harder."

"So is what you do a spell?" I asked, wondering if it was more like what Phin practiced, or like my innate ability with spirits. "Or a talent?"

He considered his answer. "I think it's more like a talent for a certain type of spell, if that makes sense. Lauren-who would know-describes it as magic, but I've always just done it, like you and your spirits." He paused. "I haven't always understood what it was I was doing, though, and it takes understanding to do anything useful."

I could relate to that, too. Sensing spirit energy was one thing. Actively using that sense had taken time to learn.

"Are you and Lauren the only ones on the Maguire staff who can do magic? Or is it some kind of job requirement?"

Carson shrugged. "Unless someone has some ESP they're not telling us about, Lauren and I are the only employees with any, uh, special skills."

"That makes sense." I was relieved crime magic wasn't a whole new fad. "I guess if you had a psychic on staff, you wouldn't need me."

A thought struck me. Not from the blue, but from inside my head, as if it had been waiting for me to get around to it and run out of patience.

"What?" asked Carson, because I'm so transparent.

"I don't know." The thought didn't come with helpful context. "It is kind of weird that someone like Maguire couldn't have gotten his hands on a psychic better at finding live people."

Carson topped off his coffee mug. "It's not that weird. You were close by, bona fide, and easily controllable."

"Easily controllable?" I echoed, because I was also easily insulted.

He raised his hands, fending me off. "I'm just thinking like Maguire. You have a large family that you love."

Well, he had a point, even if I didn't like it. "That's probably the first time in my life I've been called convenient," I grumbled.

"I wouldn't go that far," said Carson. But he turned more serious as he studied me, as if I'd raised some question for him, too. "How many people can do what you do? Out of curiosity."

Okay, it's true I like to imagine myself a bada.s.s psychic, and I don't see the point of false modesty when my skills can help someone. But I don't let on that I'm a little freaky, even for a freak. I've met mediums and people who do psychometry or who read auras-which is sort of like what I do with spirits. But all in one package is unusual. And the Veil ...? I've learned not to talk about that at all.

"It's not what I can do," I finally answered, in an I'm-going-to-be-perfectly-honest-with-you tone that wasn't perfectly honest. "It's how well."

Carson rolled his eyes. Distraction objective achieved. I held out my hand. "Give me the doohickey from the mausoleum. Not even I am good enough to raise the spirit of a plastic mummy. But you never know what may have hitched a ride."

He took the toy out of his pocket and dropped it into my palm. I hadn't felt anything from it in the cemetery, and a longer, calmer read confirmed that there were no remnant traces attached. But as I rubbed my thumb over the molded ridges of the bandages, I noticed something else. A crack. The mummy's head and shoulders were the cap to the USB end of a flash drive.

I may have squealed a little bit when I showed it to Carson. "Look! I told you it was important!"

He took it from me and examined it. "Yeah, but we won't know how until we get it plugged into a computer."

"Don't harsh my vibe, dude." The geas sang along with my excitement. I was doing what Maguire had tasked me to do: follow the clues to Alexis.

There was some writing on the back of the mummy. I could see why Carson hadn't been able to read it with the flashlight. A lot of the black ink had rubbed off. I could read half the letters; my memory filled in the rest. "This is from the Oriental Inst.i.tute of the University of Chicago."

"Is that important?" he asked.

Yes, said my instincts.

"Maybe," I said aloud. "It's another coincidence." Not that a flash drive shaped like a mummy came from a museum specializing in artifacts from Egypt and points East. But that something related to Alexis was related to me.

The waitress came around to collect our plates and ask if we wanted anything else. After she'd left the check, Carson said simply, "Explain."

I sat forward, elbows on the table. "Alexis is studying cla.s.sics, right? Latin, Greek, birth-of-civilization stuff. Egyptology isn't the same thing, but they're not worlds apart. Then there's this." I held up the mummy flash drive, currently headless, and rattled off the links in my logic chain. "So we've got the ancient world, this Egyptian mummy, which relates to Anubis, the jackal-headed G.o.d of mummification, which makes me think of the Oosterhouse Jackal."

Carson didn't seem as amazed by my reasoning as I thought he should be. "It does seem like a coincidence of jackals," he admitted, and took the flash drive from me again. "Do you think this has the information we need to find the Oosterhouse one?"

"Alexis hid something that those brotherhood creeps wanted."

"But we're not sure it's the brotherhood that kidnapped her," said Carson, and I couldn't tell if he was playing devil's advocate or what. "They may be a second party looking for the Jackal."

"A second party looking for something that the Internet has never heard of? What are the odds?"

He gave me a look that said what are the odds that a crime boss would have a witch on staff to help him kidnap a teen FBI psychic to look for his kidnapped daughter. Or some other unlikely scenario. "Let's keep an open mind," he said aloud. "I agree the brotherhood is connected, just not how."

"Okay." Drumming my fingers, I tried to decide how much to tell him about the encounter with the bodyguard-driver, and how to phrase it so I didn't sound crazy. "Here's another coincidence. Alexis's driver-well, his remnant-said something weird about a black dog. Maybe it was something he saw when he died, or something his spirit saw, I don't know. But a jackal and a dog might look the same. Not that Anubis would terrorize a spirit. He was supposed to be the protector of the dead...."

I trailed off at Carson's expression of flat-out disbelief. "You're not seriously suggesting an ancient Egyptian G.o.d has shown up in Minnesota," he said.

"Of course not," I scoffed, because that was ridiculous. "Who would come to Minnesota in the winter if they could help it?"

Carson gave me one of his studying looks. "You're being flippant again."

He'd figured me out. Flippant equaled freaked. And Bruiser's shade had me freaked. So had the disappearance of Mrs. Hardwicke. Someone, or something, was messing with the spirit world.

I turned to the last thing I had to offer, putting the head back on the mummy and holding it so the logo showed. "Then there's this. The Oriental Inst.i.tute is a research organization and museum of Near East history. It's one of the top places for Egyptologists to study, and it's been around for ages. My great-great-aunt went on a few of their expeditions in the nineteen twenties. She's kind of a family legend."

His brows arched. "Did she raise a mummy?"

"Not exactly." Let's just say I wasn't the first Goodnight to get in over her head with the dead. "But the Oriental Inst.i.tute is another tie to ancient Egypt, and we know Alexis has been there."

Carson took the flash drive from me, holding it up as if to look the mummy in the eye. "You think the Oosterhouse Jackal is there? Or maybe something that will lead to it?"

Did I? The evidence was awfully circ.u.mstantial, as Taylor would tell me. Psychic evidence wasn't admissible; my job was to find links between random-seeming things, which would then point the way to hard evidence. I wished I could offer Carson hard evidence, but all I had was my gut feeling.

"I think our best bet is to follow Alexis's footsteps. If she was looking for this Oosterhouse Jackal, then backtracking may lead to her kidnappers." I spread my hands, open palmed, on the table. "It's just a hunch. But I am psychic."

Carson didn't seem to need more than that. He grabbed the check and pocketed the flash drive. "Let's go. We can be in Chicago in five and a half hours." Then he glanced at me and changed his mind. "Six, if we stop to get you some less conspicuous clothes."

14.

WE SPRINTED ACROSS the acre of parking lot to the Walmart, not slowing down until we reached the air lock of shelter between inner and outer doors, beside the shopping carts and stacks of shoppers' guides. I breathed on my hands and stuck them under my arms. "How does anyone live through the winter here?"

Carson laughed. The longer we were away from the Maguire complex, the easier that seemed to happen. "This isn't winter. It's autumn." He took out his wallet and handed me a thick wad of bills. "Get a change of clothes and whatever else you want."

"Holy cats!" I stuffed the money into my pockets like contraband. "What is it you think I'm going to need? A mink coat?"

"It doesn't have to be mink. When you're done, meet me out front."

"What are you going to do?" I asked, mentally wrestling with pockets full of cash and freedom.

"I'm going to go buy a toothbrush, and then I'm going to get us some transportation."

"Where are you going to do that at this hour? Are you even old enough to rent a car?"

He stared at me like he couldn't believe I'd just said that, and after the mental lightbulb snapped on, I couldn't believe I had either.

"Oh my G.o.d! You're going to steal one?"

Fortunately, I had not said this nearly as loud as it sounded in my head, which was very loud indeed, since it was accompanied by police sirens and clanging prison doors.

Carson gave me a long, patronizing look. "Would you prefer to walk to Chicago?"

"You can't call Maguire to send one of his fifteen cars for us?"

He hesitated as if considering it, then said slowly, "I don't think that's a good idea. Maguire's giving me a long leash on this, but it's still a leash."

I thought about Maguire behind his square mile of desk, surveying his kingdom, with armed guards and, for all I knew, flying monkeys at his command. If Carson had some reason he wanted to stay under the boss's radar, I was okay with that.

I wasn't okay with stealing, but we needed a car, and the binding promise muzzled my objection. I stood there wrestling my conscience for so long that Carson's expression softened in sympathy.

"Here," he said, taking the coat from my shoulders and sending me into the store with a little shove. "Fifteen minutes. Shop fast."

I had fifteen minutes and four hundred dollars. Carson had given me a lot of rope with which to hang myself. Did he trust me to come back, or did he trust the geas?

Fulfilling my vow was nonnegotiable, but I had some choice about how to go about it, as long as my subconscious believed it would work. Telling the security guard who watched me load my handbasket with toothpaste and clean underwear at three a.m. that I'd been kidnapped? Spiking pulse-and common sense-nixed that idea.

I could go out the back door and find a taxi or a phone. I could call Agent Taylor. I could share with him everything I knew, and give evidence against Maguire in exchange for immunity on my crimes so far.

Then he'd ship me back to Texas by Express Mail. The geas would put me in the bughouse and Maguire would take revenge on my family, or Taylor, and that would finish me off.

But most important, with me in jail or exile, the FBI would have no psychic on the job. Alexis's best chance was for me to do what I was doing-throw in my lot with Carson and follow her trail. We had to get to her, or get to the jackal, before the kidnappers did.

"Are you all right, miss?"

My dilemma had brought me to a halt by a counter full of accessories. The clerk behind it was a doughy-looking woman wearing a blue smock and a name tag that said DORIS. In my distracted state, it took me a moment to realize she was not wholly there.

"I'm fine," I a.s.sured her. Especially compared with someone stuck for eternity as a greeter at Walmart. I think that's what Sister Michaela called purgatory.

"Can I help you find something?"

I sighed, wishing it were that easy. "Do you have something that will help me rescue a girl from kidnappers who might also possibly be a fraternity of wizards?"

Doris c.o.c.ked her head, pondering my problem. "Maybe something from the hunting and outdoors department?"

Very tempting. "I have to find her first. The only things I have to go on are a hunch and a plastic mummy flash drive."

"A flash drive?" she asked, blinking behind cat-eye gla.s.ses. "Would that be in camera equipment?"

"It's a computer ..." I eyed her seventies s.h.a.g hairdo and went with, "... thingy."

"Oh, we have computers," said Doris happily. "Aisle thirty-two. Cutest little netbooks for surfing that World Wide Web."