Spirit And Dust Part 3

This was not a good plan. The house was too big to randomly search for Alexis. I couldn't even find the stairs. But if I did, and I managed to get out, I could bring back help.

I crept to the door, and after a quick check of the hall, doubled back the way I'd come, running as quietly as possible. Except when I rounded the maze corner back to that first hall, there was a wet and cranky henchman intern in my way.

He raised his hands in the international gesture for halt right there. He may have actually said "Stop!" but I had escape ringing in my ears, so I accelerated to ramming speed.

He probably had fifty pounds on me, mostly height and shoulders, but I had inertia and surprise on my side. I knocked him out of my way and kept going.

But now I'd p.i.s.sed him off, and he was fast, with really long legs, even longer than mine. Before I got to the end of the hall with its glimpse (finally!) of stairs, he grabbed me from behind, arms wrapped around mine.

"Calm down," he said in my ear. "I don't want to hurt-"

The rest was just a grunt of pain as I slammed my elbow-and I have really pointy elbows-into his ribs. He doubled over with a wheeze but still had a grip on me, so I kicked him in the instep and he let go.

But only for a second. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d even limped fast.

He grabbed me again, but our feet tangled up and we tumbled forward. I braced for impact, and for all that guy to come down and snap me like a twig, but at the last instant, he twisted to take the brunt of the crash onto the hardwood floor. It knocked the wind out of him, but he was a tough b.a.s.t.a.r.d, so as I squirmed out of his hold I kneed him in the groin just to make sure he stayed down.

I have really pointy knees, too.

Bruised and breathless, I left him in a groaning heap on the floor and ran for the stairs. On my way down I met Jeeves on his way up, my cup of coffee on a tiny tray in his left hand.

"Sorry," I said, breezing past. "Can't stay for refreshments."

The butler didn't say anything. He just grabbed my hand as I went by, and with some twist of physics, mechanics, or magic, I was suddenly pinned to the wall, my arm twisted up behind me, utterly unable to move.

Jeeves hadn't even spilled the coffee. "I apologize, Miss Goodnight," he said with unflappable courtesy. "h.e.l.l out of Dodge isn't on the self-service menu, either."

Reinforcements arrived, cutting off all exits. They were the expected gorilla types, rather than the dapper man who had me tasting wallpaper.

"Thanks, Bertram." It was the intern. I recognized his wheeze. He'd hauled himself up from the floor and limped over to join us. "I'll take it from here."

"Are you quite sure, Mr. Carson?" I could almost hear the butler raise an eyebrow.

I could totally hear the grinding of Mr. Carson's teeth. "Yes. You can let her go."

Bertram did, and I turned around, flexing my arm and viewing the butler with new respect. Poker-faced, he held out the tray to me. "Your coffee, Miss Goodnight."

I took it. Frankly, I was afraid to p.i.s.s him off.

"Mr. Maguire wants to see you," said Mr. Carson a little impatiently, probably because I made him wait while I added cream from the tiny pitcher and stirred with the tiny spoon.

And then the name made it to my brain, and I dropped the spoon onto the tray with a clatter. "Hold on a sec. You mean Alexis Maguire's father? That Mr. Maguire?"

"Yes," said the intern. "That one."

After the initial surprise, the new information sank in. It was almost a relief, because I could imagine what he wanted, just not why he'd gone through this much trouble to talk to me. All he had to do was ask, and I'd tell him Alexis was alive. Somewhere.

I turned to Mr. Carson, planning to say just that, but paused when I got my first good look at him.

My first impression didn't lie. Young. Twenty-one-ish. Younger than Agent Taylor, and almost as tasty. And tall. I'm five foot ten, and I had to tilt my head to look at him. His hair was brown, still wet, and standing up all over. His eyes were a dusky green-no, hazel-and I'd last seen them in the Minnesota cold, just before everything went dark.

"You!" I exclaimed, with all the melodrama his offense deserved. "You're the one who whammied me behind the police station."

He didn't look chagrined or apologetic. He looked annoyed. "I did not whammy you anywhere. You pa.s.sed out without my doing anything to you. Which is more than I can say for what you did to me."

"You kidnapped me! I'd say that's something."

Bertram gave a wordless warning and held the tray under my wildly gesturing cup. Carson-I refused to give him a "Mr."-just stared me down, unfazed. Then he turned, signaling the goon squad to make sure I followed along.

"Come on. You don't want to keep the big man waiting."

6.

MAGUIRE'S INNER SANCTUM loomed ahead like the gates of Mordor, except with fewer orcs. Just one man sitting guard outside the double doors. He'd stood when we came into the office foyer, and he and Carson exchanged nods.

"The boss is expecting us," said Carson, and the guard straightened his jacket before tapping on the door. I knew from my FBI a.s.sociates that jackets never fell quite right over a shoulder holster.

I reached automatically for the psychic lay of the land. Some people do a tactical a.s.sessment, counting exits and potential threats. I read the room for remnants, telling me who to watch out for, which way lay danger.

So far there hadn't been any spirit resonance worth mentioning, but that wasn't weird for a semipublic part of a house. I got a bit of a buzz off the door guardian, like maybe a loved one lost, and the goons behind me carried the whiff of violence and threat, but not actual death. That was good, I guess.

But these rooms where Maguire did business? Unnervingly blank. It was as if all the psychic fingerprints in the place had been wiped clean.

It seriously bothered me, because I didn't know what it meant. I was in enough of a jam without there being something weird about it. The knots in my stomach had knots, and I was only a little ashamed to admit that I really wanted Taylor to show up and handle this. I wouldn't even have minded Agent Gerard. I was plenty proud, but I was even more worried that I was in way over my head.

"It will be all right." I looked up, startled by Carson's low voice in my ear. He stood close, maybe in case I decided to bolt again. His eyes had gone grayer. A trick of the light, but the color matched the steel in his voice.

He might believe his words, but I didn't. "How?" I asked. "It's already not all right. I have a whammied head and bruises to prove it."

A thread of regret laced his tone. "I am really sorry about that." After a beat, he offered, "If it makes you feel better, I think you cracked my ribs."

"It helps." Not much, but a little.

The corner of his mouth tightened, either in a flinch or a microscopic smile. It softened his face, and I remembered how when we fell in the hall upstairs, he twisted to hit the ground first, cushioning my fall. I mean, kidnapped was kidnapped, but still ... there was that.

The guard at the door gestured for us to go in, and Carson took my arm, his grip firm. "Just do as the man says," he told me. "Don't antagonize him and you'll be fine."

Threat or rea.s.surance? Both, I was thinking, plus a small plea for me not to say anything stupid.

Gosh, it was like he knew me or something.

"Let's do this thing," I said, and shook off his hand to stroll into Mordor on my own power.

Easy to say. But as soon as I crossed the threshold, a powerful, undefinable ... something hit me in the psychic solar plexus. It zapped the strength from my knees, and a bright, blinding haze washed my vision. Panic came next-there could be a tiger in the room and I wouldn't even know it.

Then Carson touched my arm again, and the physical touch grounded me. Still shaking, but only on the inside, I was able to dial back my other senses and see the man standing behind the desk.

There was the tiger in the room.

Devlin Maguire was a big man. Big in presence, and tall and broad in an oak tree sort of way. The office was supersized to accommodate him, everything from the ceiling-high bookshelves to the ma.s.sive oil painting on the wall (Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt-very subtle).

His desk was a mahogany acre of real estate, his leather desk chair a throne. He was on the phone, and I hadn't even noticed. "Here's what's going to happen," he said calmly into the receiver. "You're going to have that information in my in-box in one hour, and I am going to keep your helpfulness to me a secret from your boss at Homeland Security." And after a pause, "Yes. I thought you might."

Yeah. Whatever the poor guy on the other line had promised, I bet I might, too, in his shoes.

Wait. I was in his shoes.

Finishing the call, Maguire turned with an air of moving on to the next thing. Which was me. "So, this is the FBI psychic." He came around the desk and looked me up and down. "You are not at all what I expected."

I shrugged. "I get that a lot."

He smiled slightly, though it didn't reach his eyes. "I'll bet you do."

"I'm sorry about your daughter," I said, because it was true. "You must be very worried."

My sincerity seemed to surprise him, but he merely nodded acknowledgment and got down to business. Half sitting on the desk, his fingers laced loosely as they rested on his thigh, he said, "I'm sure you can guess, Alexis is the reason you are here."

"Yeah, about that," I said, with a bravado that made Carson give my arm a gentle warning squeeze. "You couldn't have just sent a limo?"

"Sit down, Miss Goodnight." Mr. Maguire gestured, very civilly, to one of the chairs in front of the desk. I didn't want to sit, but my cousin Amy always says "Pick your battles," so I sat.

This chair was enormous, too, and it swallowed me. I'm sure that wasn't calculated to intimidate his visitors or anything. Carson had moved closer to his boss's right hand, which I didn't think was by accident, either, symbolically speaking.

Maguire continued as if this were a perfectly normal meeting. "I'm sorry that you were inconvenienced, and that the misunderstanding led to such unpleasantness. But I need your a.s.sistance. Without the interference of the FBI."

I didn't need a map as to why he didn't want the feds up in his business. Whereas anything I Saw, psychically speaking, was inadmissible in court. "I'm not sure how I can help you, Mr. Maguire," I said politely, since we were pretending this was all normal. "Your daughter isn't dead."

He seemed unsurprised. "That's good to know, since I received a ransom demand earlier today."

"I knew it!" I slapped the leather of the chair arm. "I totally called it."

Maguire merely raised a brow. "I can see I made the right choice bringing you in to find Alexis before anything bad happens to her."

My elation drained away. "Except what I do is kind of specialized. I can't get any kind of read on the living."

"Can't?" asked Maguire, then after a beat, "Or won't?"

He was studying me as if I was a peculiar specimen. Which, granted, I am. But there was something weighted about his gaze and the significant pause between words.

"Can't," I stated firmly. The truth was close enough that I felt no guilt leaving exceptions off my resume. I can read a man's dying thoughts from the change that was in his pocket when the bus. .h.i.t him. But trying to read the impressions of the living is like trying to answer a cell-phone call in an elevator at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

What I was really leaving out, though, was how much the dead told me about the living. Like how the radioactive concentration of remnant energy in this room should make a normal person twitchy over time, yet there was Maguire, calm as could be. The man had iron will and Teflon nerves, and I was so screwed if he didn't believe that my abilities were of no use to him.

"Miss Goodnight-may I call you Daisy?" He took my agreement as a given, speaking with a we're-all-friends-here candor that let me know exactly how much we were not friends. "I'm giving you the opportunity to be completely honest with me. If I find out you haven't, I'm not going to be happy."

"Look," I said, brazening this out. "It's not a straightforward thing. We're talking about the inexplicable forces of the universe here. Not the rules for Donkey Kong or something."

Carson coughed like he was covering up a laugh. Maguire glanced at him, more calculating than curious, and the younger man sobered up quickly.

Maguire turned back to me, shifting topics suddenly. "Are you hungry? I can have sandwiches brought in."

I wanted to say no, because I didn't think I could swallow past the lump in my throat. But my stomach didn't know how screwed we were and gave a loud growl. "I'll take that as a yes," he said, and pulled out his BlackBerry to fire off a text.

"Mr. Maguire," I began as he sent in his Quiznos order or whatever. "I'm willing to see if I can sense traces of someone-alive or dead-on Alexis's belongings. But I can't promise anything."

"Oh, I think you will." He looked up from the BlackBerry with a basalt stare-cold, black, and smooth. "It's just a matter of finding the right motivation."

The knot of fear in my chest, the one I was trying to pretend wasn't there, looped even tighter. I glanced at Carson, who had promised things would be all right. His gaze was on the floor, and a muscle in his jaw flexed rhythmically but unhelpfully. If he was trying to send me a message, I was out of luck, because I'd never learned Morse Code for a.s.sholes.

The door opened and I flinched. So much for my cool bravado.

I recognized the woman who entered, even though she'd changed from the police uniform into a leather jacket and Union Jack T-shirt. Her platinum hair was cut short and spiky and her makeup was all black eyeliner. She looked like a punk-rock pixie.

"This is Lauren," said Maguire as the blonde took her place beside him. "It was her suggestion we bring you in, when her attempts to locate Alexis by magic met a dead end."

I blinked, because it sounded like he just said he had a witch on the payroll, which was unexpected, even to me. But that did explain how this Lauren person could have walked into the police station and out again with me in tow. I wouldn't have felt an illusion- or misdirection-type spell because that's not my thing.

Oh man. Like getting kidnapped and strong-armed by a normal crime organization wasn't bad enough? I was in so far over my head I couldn't even see daylight.

I'm a psychic. Sensing remnants and spirit traces is more about who I am than something I do. But magic? All I knew about magic came from watching the witches in my family, and I wasn't sure how that compared. Goodnight spells were very low-key, nothing flashy, except when my cousin Phin was involved.

I bet that Maguire wanted a lot of flash from his witch. And from her complacent smile, I imagined he got it.

Carson, when I glanced at him, didn't seem fazed by talk of magic. He didn't seem much of anything, because he hid his feelings well. This time, though, he met my eye, and I remembered him telling me, just do what Maguire says and everything will be okay.

So I put on a face like I was riding the wave and not drowning in it. "What spells have you tried so far?" I asked Lauren, just one professional to another.

She didn't give me the same courtesy. "This and that." She sounded bored, or maybe like she was humoring me. "Divination, location spell ... and a little misdirection to hide your disappearance from your FBI boyfriend. He thinks you're tucked safely in a cot at the office, sleeping off your headache." She looked smug, because she was proud of her spellcraft, or maybe she was just a b.i.t.c.h. "In case you were wondering."

I hadn't been wondering. I'd been sure Taylor would be looking for me soon. The bottom dropped out of my bravado, leaving an empty, sick hole where I'd kept the comforting thought of rescue. But I was on my own. A glance at Carson showed he had gone inscrutable again, avoiding my gaze. He might not wish any harm on me, but that didn't make him my ally.

"Here's what is going to happen," said Maguire, sounding chillingly certain that I would comply. "I think you can do far more for me than you let on. You will follow the clues leading to Alexis. Think of it like a treasure hunt. But you will take this on. And you will give me your oath, three times."

I gripped the arms of the chair. A triple oath was a binding promise. You couldn't break it by your own actions. It was one of the most basic spells, and I bet it came in h.e.l.la handy as a mob boss.

"And if I don't promise more than once?" I asked.

Maguire picked up a phone from the desk. My phone. With a few taps, he scrolled through my pictures. "You have a lovely family, Miss Goodnight. Lots of young cousins, lots of talented aunts. If you won't work with me, I will work through them until I find one who'll do the job." He set the phone on his desk, propped so I could see the screen and the snap of my cousins and me at Aunt Hyacinth's farm, our arms linked, faces flushed with laughter and summer heat.

"And please believe me, Daisy," Maguire added in that same velvet tone, "the inconvenience of that will fray my temper in ways you do not want to imagine."