Spirit and Dust (19 page)

I couldn’t look away from the ghosts, but based on the jolt of tension where Carson’s shoulder pressed against mine, the idea must have shocked him. His voice, though, was level and businesslike. “I could try, but I don’t know what that would do to you.”

“Look at the floor,” I said. “That’s lifeblood there. It’s the total opposite of my thing, but even
I
can feel the energy in it. If you could use even a
little
of it …”

“Yeah. Okay. I’ve got it.”

Most people would take a deep breath before diving in. Carson just slid in close, getting one hand down where the blood was freshest and warmest and putting his other on the guard’s chest. I felt a tug of friction, like something pulling against the cat’s cradle of invisible string between me, the ghost, the Veil, and his body.

“Over his heart,” said Cleopatra, watching with clinical interest. “That is where the soul resides.”

It was also what pumped the blood to the brain and the lungs, so I relayed the message. “Over his—”

“I heard you,” said Carson, and adjusted his hand up and slightly left. He’d heard
her
, which was interesting, but not something I could analyze just then. The tingle of friction became a burn, as if a binding rope were dragging across my arms where
they held the guard’s soul to his body. Whatever Carson was doing, it was working, but something was pulling the spirit in another direction, and it wasn’t the Veil.

“His heart is beating stronger,” said Carson, effort in his voice. “I think maybe—”

The Veil shimmered closed, its hum ceasing without flourish. An instant later, the guard’s image vanished and I felt him snap back into his body like a rubber band.

And in the very
same
instant, which I couldn’t dismiss as coincidence, but couldn’t explain, either, the alarm began to wail.

For two people who wanted to stay under the radar, Carson and I had been spectacularly unsuccessful.

The museum staff poured though the doorway, the vanguard pulling up short at the amount of blood and the waxy pallor of the man on the floor. But when I said, “He’s still breathing,” the woman in front dropped the wholly inadequate-looking first-aid kit, pulled on some latex gloves, and told me to get out of the way.

I yielded my spot, but not until she’d gotten her own hand on the trickling wound in the man’s back. Then Carson helped me to my feet—adding bloody handprints to the gory blotches already staining my shirt. My jeans were soaked from the knees down, and I looked like I’d stabbed the guy myself.

“Do not move,” said another guard, pointing to me and Carson. “The cops are going to want to talk to you.”

Someone had turned off the alarm, and now I could hear sirens.
The familiar choke hold of the geas hardly registered in the grappling sea of knots twisting up in my chest.

“Priestess!” Cleo appeared in the archway, shouting. “The thief is this way!”

I don’t know what possessed me—desperation, vengeance, or the certainty I couldn’t really get in any deeper. I got my gazelle on and shot for the door, leaping over the circle of first-aid workers around the fallen guard and slingshotting out of Egypt and into the Mesopotamian Hall.

Shouts of surprise burst out behind me, and an instant later Carson did the same, hard on my heels.

The Egyptian girl had popped to the next junction, and I sprinted past winged figures, stone seraphim watching our footrace through the climate-controlled sterility of their exile.

In the main hall of the Ancient World wing, I saw a blur of a figure, heard Cleo calling, “That’s him!”

And then, at the
end
of the hall, blocking the way out, two police officers, guns drawn.

“Stop! Police!”

The thief cut right, between the marble-draped goddesses that marked the hall into Rome. Shoes squeaking on slick tile, I made an abrupt turn, too, into the hallway to the restrooms. Carson caught up with me there, grabbing my arm and stopping my headlong rush.

“Come on,” I said, pointing toward the door we’d come through earlier. “We can cut him off in Pompeii.”

He pushed me behind him and took the lead. “Stay back and let me handle this.”

There was no time to argue about misplaced chivalry. Plus, it wasn’t misplaced. The guy had a knife, and considering his employer, Carson was surely better suited to handle that than I was.

But like hell was I staying in the hall. I shored up my defenses against the death echoes of Mount Vesuvius and ran after Carson, into the exhibit.

The thief was coming in the other way. He drew up, panting, in the center of the reconstructed villa, surrounded by the plaster casts of the volcano’s victims. He made a weird double image to my senses, like I was seeing him with my physical and psychic vision and they didn’t quite match up. Maybe because in his corduroy trousers and unfashionable sweater and dark-rimmed glasses he looked like a coffeehouse slacker and not a stiletto-wielding art-museum robber.

He had a fat messenger bag over his shoulder, and I guessed the artifact he’d stolen was in there, because his hands were empty. But his face was full of smirk. “Too slow, Team Maguire,” he taunted. “Better step it up.”

Carson surprised me with the outrage in his voice and the clenched fists at his side. “You nearly killed someone, asshole!”

“But you saved him, so boohoo,” drawled the thief. “That was really impressive, by the way.”

There was a weird dynamic here, though I didn’t always trust my read on the living. This guy knew who we were, and something about Carson’s accusation had a personal edge to it, like maybe he knew who the guy was, too.

“You two work well together,” said Smirky McSlackerson. “Too bad you don’t work a little faster.”

The sneer just made everything that much worse, picturing this guy grabbing Alexis, stabbing the guard, all with that superior smile on his face. Throw in my fury at myself that we hadn’t gotten here first and a whole lot of pissed-off in general, and it was a good thing that Carson stood a protective step in front of me.

“Look, asshole,” I said, trying and failing to get around the arm Carson put up to stop me. “Tell us where Alexis is. You have the Jackal. You don’t need her.”

McSlackerson blinked, as if the suggestion surprised him, and then he laughed. “This isn’t the Black Jackal. I’m just here collecting the pieces we need to get it. And that’s all I’m going to tell you of my fiendish plan, Supergirl. I’ve been monologuing long enough.”

Right on cue, two of St. Louis’s finest burst into the room behind the thief, weapons drawn, shouting, “Freeze!”

I’d never stared down a real gun barrel before. This day was just full of new and unpleasant experiences.

Carson relaxed his shoulders, the way he did when he was anxious or pissed and was pushing it back where it wouldn’t interfere. He looked perfectly cool as he held his empty—and very bloody—hands out to his sides. I copied him, right down to the blood, which couldn’t possibly make us look harmless.

“Turn around slowly,” one of the cops barked at McSlackerson. “Hands where we can see them.”

The thief smiled—an I-love-it-when-a-plan-comes-together smile—and raised his arms to his sides. As he turned, his hand crossed the plane of one of the exhibits, and he flexed his fingers over a plaster cast of a volcano victim, like he was testing the
temperature. I did that move so often, my fingers twitched like
I
was the one feeling for spirit traces.

That was what he was doing. I had no time to think
why
before the world—both my worlds—went sideways.

Since we’d come in, I’d been braced against the echoes of thousands of hot, smothering deaths. I was not prepared for the groaning shift of the psychic air pressure, like a volcanic cone crumbling in on itself. I staggered, as if I’d been leaning against a wall that suddenly just … vanished.

Which was impossible, because two millennia of psychic energy didn’t just
go away
.

Carson tensed, too, and I knew something
bad
was going to happen. When it did, that seemed impossible, too. The thief pushed his empty hand toward the cops. A wall of acrid wind blasted them into the next room. Over the roar in my ears I heard the crash of bodies and a second later, the crack and thunder of toppling stone. They’d hit the statues, any one of which was heavy enough to crush a man’s skull.

I moved instinctively to help—somehow, anyhow—but Carson caught me around the waist, pulling me tight against him as McSlackerson swung around, his smile cracking the layer of ash on his face. Between his hands he gathered the ghost of a pyroclastic cloud, and all six of my senses said it was
totally
possible we were going to die.

Carson wrapped himself around me, my back against his chest, and yelled in my ear, “Make like the Millennium Falcon, Sunshine, and do
not
drop those deflector shields!”

At the first blast of heat, I pushed all I had left into my
force field. What McSlackerson threw at us wasn’t psychic but physical—intangible energy turned into magical heat and wind. My defenses should have been useless. But I felt the moment when Carson mirrored what the other guy had done, transforming my psychic defenses into something invisible but solid.

Everywhere we touched was an electric zing, an icy burn that pulled a helpless gasp from my throat. The grit-laced gale scoured the floor around our untouched island. It ripped tiles from the mosaic and fired them like bullets into the plasterboard walls of the exhibit. Pillars toppled and paperboard markers scorched around the edges.

This was not the best time to discover the limits of my resources. Deep inside, I shuddered like a sputtering engine, and the muscles of my legs trembled as I braced with Carson against the wind that pounded our shield. He felt it, too, and took more of my weight, but he couldn’t hold us both up and he couldn’t hold the defenses at all if I didn’t give him something to work with.

I thought the ash cloud was darkening around us, but I realized it was my vision. Sparkles came next, and I felt weirdly like my head was floating away from my body, and not on purpose. I clung to consciousness with ten fingernails, but I was on the steep slope over the chasm of oblivion.

“Stay with me, Daisy,” said Carson against my ear. I felt it more than heard it, rumbling through my skin where we touched. “He’s almost tapped out.”

So was I. The smell of sulfur and choke of ash rushed in and I slid bonelessly out of Carson’s grip. Dying was such a rotten way to learn I wasn’t nearly the badass I thought I was.

“P
RIESTESS!
W
AKE UP
.” The words banged my aching skull like the clapper of a bell. “You’re in terrible danger!”

It was reassuring to hear a voice. Less reassuring that it was the ghost of the Egyptian girl, because that didn’t mean I wasn’t dead. Especially since I seemed to be dangling from someone’s shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

Cleo trotted alongside the guy currently carting me like a sack of potatoes through Ancient Greece. A guy who was
not
Carson.

“Do something, Priestess! I cannot touch this brigand!”

She tried grabbing his arm and jumping in his way, but he literally walked through her.

Some hunch snagged a memory, the image of the guy in the cemetery holding Mrs. Hardwicke’s necklace as she vanished, and the half-formed idea made me warn Cleo away.

“Don’t.” My voice was just a croak, hoarse from the grit of the ash storm. “Don’t touch him.”

The guy adjusted my weight on his shoulders by giving me a toss. I landed hard, knocking the air from my lungs and rattling my brain. “Don’t worry about your boyfriend, sweetheart. You just get your breath back. We’ve got a job for you.”

He patted me on the ass, and I saw red. I mean,
more
red—beyond the haze of blood rushing to my pounding head. I had a one-abduction-per-twenty-four-hours policy, and this yahoo was over the limit.

Finally, a benefit to being tall besides reaching the top shelf at the supermarket: leverage. I punched him in the kidney—or where I guessed something vulnerable and extremely painful like a kidney would be—and when he cursed and twisted, I let all my weight slide backward. He had to drop me or go down, too.

This was going to hurt.

I curled my arm over my head and tucked my shoulder so that I rolled when I hit the floor. And I kept rolling, all the way to my feet, because the guy was coming after me. I was numb where my hip and shoulder had smacked the marble tile, but at least everything moved.

I don’t think the guy had a plan B. He charged at me, and I grabbed a priceless Greek vase and smashed him over the head with it. He crashed to the floor and went limp.

That’s vases, two; kidnappers, zero.

I checked—quickly—to make sure he was still breathing. And then I checked—not so quickly—his face and my memory. This was not the thief, McSlackerson. This was someone else. I thought he might have been in the cemetery, but I couldn’t be sure.

Cleo popped up beside me, and I jumped—which made every muscle in my body protest. The parts where I hit the floor weren’t so numb anymore.

“That was thrilling!” she cried. “You fight like an Amazon.”

“Thank you,” I wheezed, holding my ribs.

I staggered back through the door to Pompeii like a freshman at her first keg party. After all that sound and fury, I’d expected total devastation, but from what I could tell through the hazy curtain of dust, the damage to the exhibit was cosmetic. There were no piles of ash, no fire, no incinerated bodies.

No Carson.

I remembered him calling my name, his hands tangling in my hair as he kept my head from hitting the floor when I’d gone limp in the volcano attack. After that, there was just the murky twilight of unconsciousness.

“Where’s my friend?” I asked Cleo. Adrenaline hadn’t dismissed my headache but sent it to sit in the corner. “How long was I out?”

“Moments only,” she said, bouncing with excitement. “When you fainted, the magician laid you down so gently, and then he turned on the thief like a
lion
. The knave took one look and fled, and your magician pursued.”