Spirit And Dust Part 13

As he took the book from me, something slipped from the pages. We both bent to grab it and nearly b.u.mped heads. He got fl.u.s.tered, and I got the manila card that had fallen to the tile floor. At first I thought it was the catalog card, but when I turned it over I saw, drawn in what looked like Sharpie, an ear. Vaguely anatomical, definitely recognizable.

"That's an odd sort of bookmark," said Elbows.

Yes, it was. I had no sense for magic, but I had two brain cells to rub together and a bad feeling about this. If it was some kind of spell, what else would an ear mean but that someone was listening?

So much to think about, but the clock in my head was ticking. I ripped the card in half, hoping it would break the spell, then turned again to Elbows. "Can you look up who last checked out this book?"

"Well, you can't check out books from the archives," he said, sending that lead into a nosedive. Then he added, "But I can probably see who last pulled it up in the catalog."

"That would be so great." Maybe I laid it on a little thick, but my grat.i.tude was very real. Spell or not, whoever last looked up Oosterhouse and his Jackal could be the best lead for finding Alexis.

It would be even more awesome if he could go look that up quickly so I could get downstairs in the next two minutes and fifty-seven seconds. When the silence stretched to awkward, I pointed toward the stairs. "I'll be right back. I just need to, um ..."

"Oh!" He blushed again, and I was happy to let him a.s.sume whatever kept him from asking for details. "I'll just be in the ..." He sidled back the other way.

"Awesome."

The instant his back was turned, I hurried down the steps, with the pieces of the manila card still in my hand. I put the sc.r.a.ps in my pocket as I reached the ground floor, and not-quite-ran toward the Egyptian gallery. I reached it with a minute to spare ...

... and no privacy. The gallery was full of people. I mean, not packed, but inconveniently occupied. It had to be some kind of tour or cla.s.s, because a docent was giving a talk around a sarcophagus and showing no signs of moving on.

Whatever Carson was going to do was going to happen in twenty seconds. Short of yelling "Fire," I didn't know how to get the group out of there. The mummy inside the sarcophagus might be quietly sleeping, but the guide was going to have plenty to say if I stepped over the low velvet cordon to put my hands on King Tut.

I was still racking my brain when the lights went out, plunging the gallery into pitch-black, holy-c.r.a.p-I'm-in-the-dark-with-a-mummy darkness.

"Everyone hold still," the docent ordered. "We don't want you crashing into anything in the dark."

Forget that. The faint remnant traces on the artifacts in the cases mapped out the room for me as I ran for the majestic sentry at the other end of the room. But I'd forgotten about the ankle-high cordon. I tripped with an almighty clatter of the bra.s.s stanchions, fell flat on my face, and only dumb luck kept me from concussing myself on the basalt pedestal.

"I said don't move!" shouted the docent.

"I'm okay," I yelled back, worried someone would come check on me. But I was not okay. I had to make contact before the lights came back on.

The stone was cool under my hands, and the hieroglyphs carved into the base were rough under my fingers. I called into the past, not as far as the ancient artists with their chisels but a hundred years back, in the psychic equivalent of a shout from the rooftop. Ivy Goodnight, if there's any trace of you here, please answer.

Silence.

Aunt Ivy, I need your help!

All I got were approaching footsteps and the bobbing glow of flashlights.

Hope collapsed under the crushing weight of failure, and I dropped my head onto the floor with the rest of me. What now? This was the one thing I could do-talk to the dead. If this didn't work, what good was I to Alexis?

There was the lead I'd emailed to Taylor. Michael Johnson. And the fact that Alexis had been here with him. And the clue of the ear card. And the jackal statue that was in the St. Louis museum. And the flash drive we hadn't yet unlocked.

There were all those things, waiting for me to get up off the floor.

There was also a pair of worn leather boots right in front of my nose. Sand-dusted boots that I could see perfectly well in the pitch-dark, what-did-I-summon blackness.

16.

"YOU RANG?" SAID the shade standing over me. My eyes traveled up her boots, her jodhpurs, and her really great jacket and scarf and found her looking back down at me, one red brow wryly c.o.c.ked.

This was not how I wanted to meet my idol. I jumped to my feet, but they were still tangled in the cordon, so I just managed to make a lot of noise. "Stop moving!" shouted the docent, and from the dark someone else called, "We'll be right there. Stay put until the lights come back on."

"Who are you?" Aunt Ivy asked. She looked as she did in our family photo-late twenties, totally confident. Not nearly as surprised to see me as you might expect. She took in my red hair and amended, "The better question might be when are you? And where are we?"

No wonder I'd had to call so hard. The trace of her must have been faded almost to nothing. It figured a Goodnight wouldn't stick around anywhere she didn't want to.

I'm Daisy. Even without the audience I would have spoken silently to her, because it was quicker that way-the speed of thought, literally. Your great-great ... Well, it doesn't matter how many because I'm in trouble and I need to know anything you can tell me about something called the Oosterhouse Jackal.

"I don't know what that is." Before I could curse, silently or aloud, she continued. "I know a Professor Oosterhouse. He is-was-faculty here." She rubbed her forehead, a very living sort of gesture. "Sorry. My times and tenses are all messed up."

Don't sweat it. That happens. What could you expect when your past and present and future had all already happened?

She sweated it anyway, as if she sensed my urgency. Her shade flickered with the effort of pulling her memories together, but as I poured more of myself into the psychic link between us, she steadied.

"There was something about him," she said, "and jackal is sticking in my mind. He left the Inst.i.tute in the early thirties, under a dark cloud."

That would be the nineteen thirties. I added together the timeline with the professor's German last name and made a wild guess. Was he a n.a.z.i sympathizer?

"Not at all," she said, and that seemed to spark a connection. "I was away when he left, but I came back to wild stories that he'd started a cult and swore he'd found something that would defeat the Third Reich."

My mind went off in some very insane, very Indiana Jones directions. Like a weapon?

A face-melting Lost Ark kind of weapon? The idea shook me down to my curled-in-horror toes.

"I don't know. b.o.l.l.o.c.ks!" The air went crisp at her frustrated curse. "I only remember gossip I heard when I came back, and that's just bits and pieces in my head."

It's okay, I a.s.sured her. Except that the security guard with the flashlight had finally gotten around to us. As the beam cut across the gallery I curled up in the shadow of the statue, where the guard would miss me until he'd helped the others.

Tell me all the gossip, I urged Ivy. His bio in the archives says nothing about when or why he left.

She spoke fast as the guard went by. "Officially, it was hushed up, but the rumor was he went batty. Got loony ideas based on a translation he'd made of the Book of the Dead."

I knew what that was. I'd be pretty sucky at my job if I didn't. It was an instruction manual for how to mummify the body and prepare the soul for its journey into the afterlife. There was no definitive edition because the process and the rituals changed across dynasties.

Ivy went on in a rush. I could see the tumble of memories coming back to her now. "Oosterhouse said he had found a version written by an ancient cult who believed in the magical power of the soul after death. But there was no proof of such a book-not that I could find, and believe me, I looked."

Of course she would. A Goodnight couldn't let that sort of thing go uninvestigated. So you don't know if it was genuine magic or just the professor being fanciful?

"Fanciful is not a word I would apply to Dr. Oosterhouse." She frowned. "He didn't voice theories of which he was uncertain. They say-said-the professor tried to re-form this cult among the students. A sort of secret society."

My heart went graveyard cold. Like a brotherhood?

"Yes! That's what it was called. The Brotherhood of the Black ..." She paused with a little quake of realization, and I knew what she was going to say.

Jackal, I whispered.

Suddenly I was squinting in the glare of a flashlight. "Are you okay, young lady?" asked the security guard behind it.

Ivy's shade paced to my right, talking angrily to herself. "Why didn't I remember that as soon as you said the Oosterhouse Jackal? What a ninny I am!"

"It's fine," I said-aloud. "You're just a shade."

My great-great-aunt drew herself to her full height. "I am Professor Ivy Goodnight. I am not just anything."

The guard moved the light out of my eyes, and I could see him looking at me like I was the ninny. "Did you hit your head when you fell?"

"No, no," I a.s.sured 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 G.o.d! 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 nonmagical 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 c.r.a.p. "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. "Sungla.s.ses. Put them on."

"Thanks," I said, fumbling them into place. Even the overcast sky beat on my eyeb.a.l.l.s.

The tide of students hurrying to cla.s.s 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 someones-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."

17.

WE 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 s.e.xtuplet 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 c.o.kes 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 Inst.i.tute 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."