Spirit and Dust (36 page)

“Except for the part where you’re possessed by a self-proclaimed demigod!”

“But I’m not!” He squeezed my hands again and drew me
away from Taylor’s sprawled body. “I can feel the Jackal in the back of my head, but he’s not controlling me. Maybe it’s my ability to channel and convert types of energy, I don’t know.” He gave a disbelieving laugh. “Hell, maybe Maguire knew that when he volunteered me, though I think that’s giving him too much credit.”

“Carson,” I said, trying to pull him back to earth. “You are not sounding like yourself.”

“How do you know? I’ve forgotten what ‘myself’ feels like. I haven’t felt normal since my mom died.” He laughed again, with genuine humor and joy. “I can feel her. You’ve got her soul in your pocket. That sounds like it should be a song title.”

I didn’t like buoyant Carson. It just wasn’t right.

“This can be the new normal,” he went on, oblivious to my tension, even when he slid his arms around my waist. He nodded to the prone brethren. “This can be what we do. Doing good. Stopping evil. The weird stuff that your FBI partner isn’t equipped to handle. Now
we are
.”

He was serious, and he was earnest, and he was so
wrong
. Some deep-down part of me wondered what I would say if he was Jackal-less, if he’d never hidden any truth from me. I had a feeling it would be the same thing, it would just hurt even more. “No, Carson.”

“Why not?” He pulled me tighter against him, so I had to lean back to look at him. “Come with me, Daisy. Think of all the good we can do.”

Goodnights don’t run
.

Some memory whispered that in my ear. Maybe even some shade. But it was the truth. I was a face-the-music kind of girl. “Or you could stay,” I said, knowing I’d have to make him somehow.

“I can’t.” He slipped his hand around the back of my neck, pressing his forehead to mine. “So this is where we split.”

Like Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman at the airfield in
Casablanca
. Only Rick hadn’t said goodbye by kissing Ilsa like there was no tomorrow.

That
felt like the real Carson. Not flippant or entitled or arrogant … Okay, maybe just the right amount of arrogant. The kiss was deep and dark and a little bit desperate, as if he had to drink all of me in or never get another taste.

It didn’t last long. Long enough for the ache of loss to blossom. Long enough for the taste to turn to smoke and sand.

I pulled away in horror. Carson looked back at me in confusion turning to alarm. “What?”

My arms had gone around his waist, and I took hold of the tail of his shirt. Twisting out of his arms, I yanked up the fabric and got a look at his tattoo.

He was too stunned to stop me.
I
was too stunned to move.

The inky jackal skulked across his skin. It covered his whole back, and blue eyes glittered like gems. They winked, telling me they’d seen me. Heard me. Tasted me.

I made a noise—disgusted, terrified. I didn’t plan, just reacted. I grabbed the tattoo like I could peel it from his skin. It gave some in the middle like a blistered sunburn, then snapped back. The jackal snarled, lashed at me with gleaming teeth, and a
blast of magic flung me backward, where I hit the floor and kept sliding.

“Daisy!” When my eyes uncrossed, I saw that Carson looked as stunned as I was. But above him I saw the shadow of the Jackal, huge and laughing and triumphant.

I crab-walked backward from the apparition, through the swirls of spirit fog. It tingled in greeting, recognizing me from all my efforts that day. But as the Jackal’s shadow condensed and fell over Carson, fell
into
him, soaking in the way ink soaks into paper, the mist began to scratch and nip and bite.

When Carson looked up, his eyes were brilliant blue.

This was the exact opposite of
all good
. What looked out of his eyes now was inhuman, alien, and merciless.

“Why couldn’t you just cooperate?” said the Jackal. “I could have made the boy happy, given him what he wanted, let him keep the illusion of control. This is all your fault.”

He spread his arms and the spirit mist coiled in on itself, taking a new shape. “Remember that,” said the Jackal. “Though you won’t have to remember it long.”

I couldn’t even say what the thing was, other than
huge
. It had the mane of a lion and the teeth of about fifty sharks, and it bristled with scales and spikes and bones. Every time my eyes focused, it shifted, like trying to catch the red spot on your vision after a camera flash. But it was solid enough. Talons like giant flint arrowheads threw up sparks as they scraped the floor.

It was nightmare given form.

I’d scrambled backward and hit something—the railing
around the tyrannosaur—and I used it to pull myself to my feet. Only hours ago I’d stood in almost the same spot, listening to the symphony of spirits that saturated the museum. I reached for them now, and found the psychic space where they’d been empty, like a raided tomb. What hadn’t been used up by the Brotherhood or the Jackal had been pulled in and warped by the monstrosity in front of me.

Johnson and the brethren lay in a heap, not that they would help me. Taylor hadn’t moved. The doors were locked. The museum was empty, and every shade in it was standing against me.

I’d never felt so alone.

Except … I was never alone.

The nightmare beast churned the air with a semblance of breathing, and it took a lot of willpower to close my eyes and Sense it with only my psyche. I shook out my hands, rushing blood through my veins and energy into my own living spirit. And I reached, harder than I’d ever reached before.

Not out. But in.

I reached into my cells, into my DNA, into the mitochondria that made me. I found that essence of myself that was Goodnight, the daughter of kitchen witches and psychic detectives and interfering busybodies. I was a guide to lost souls and the patron sinner of the recently dead.

I was part of something eternal. And the whole was present in the part.

I knit the strands into threads and the thread into a banner that called my family to aid me. The hot spirit breath of the
nightmare stirred my hair and the flint-on-stone scrape of its talons made my teeth ache before I got an answer.

But it was definite when it came.

The giant bones above me rattled as ghostly lungs stretched skeleton ribs. Sue the Tyrannosaur shuddered awake.

D
INOSAURS DO NOT
have ghosts, as far as I know. I mean, maybe I’ll get to the great beyond and find it’s like Jurassic Park there. But Sue had been imbued with personality by everyone who worked on her bones, and everyone who visited, studied, and virtually lived in that museum. All of Chicago and visitors from all over the world loved her.

In that sense, she did have a spirit, and the collective of Goodnight remnants breathed life into her. The shade of Sue the Tyrannosaur took shape on the bones. Thick muscle and tough hide, gigantic teeth, and forty feet from her nose to the tip of her
whipping tail. Then spirit shook free from fossil, and the shade pulled away from her skeleton with a bellowing roar.

She might not have a ghost, but she sure had a psyche. And she was
pissed
at the mess the Jackal had made of her museum.

Looming protectively over me, she gave another piercing roar at the Jackal’s monster. My ears rang as Sue leapt over the railing and advanced on the nightmare, shaking the building’s foundations as if she were muscle and bone instead of magic and memory.

The beast gave a feline roar in return and pounced, trailing shreds of spirit. Sue batted it away from me with a whack of her tail, sending it streaming across the hall like a comet.

The crash woke the unconscious brethren, and the dinosaur shade stomped toward them, sending them scrambling like cockroaches caught out by the light. Her tail whipped dangerously close to Taylor, who hadn’t moved.

At the end of the great hall, the Jackal gathered his spirits and his strength and re-formed his Frankenstein nightmare. The T. rex headed for a preemptive strike on the monster, but the Jackal, with a push I could feel across the room, sent his creature in a blur past her, not toward me, but toward Taylor, who still hadn’t moved.

Sue made an astonishingly tight turn and ran after the beast, flattening out in the straightaway. I ran for Taylor, too, skidding to a halt beside him and flinging up all the psychic shield I had. It wouldn’t be enough, but it would be a try.

The beast was almost on us when Sue struck, her massive
jaws grabbing the back of the nightmare’s neck with a
crunch
that made my psychic teeth hurt. She shook the construct like a dog shakes a rat, and it flew apart into the remnant wisps that had made it.

What was left of them.

The Jackal stalked toward me. I stood up and squared my shoulders. From far away he looked like Carson, but the closer he came, the more I saw the stranger. “We aren’t done,” he said, when he was very close indeed.

But we were. A gunshot rang through the hall.

I didn’t know how it happened or how I even saw it. Maybe it happened in psychic time, neuron fast. But for an instant of an instant, Carson was Carson again. In the next he slammed into me, knocking me to the floor. And in the next he staggered and pressed a hand to his chest. I felt the pain as if it were my own when I saw the blood bubbling up from under his fingers.

I didn’t think about the Jackal. I didn’t think about the gunshot. I thought only about Carson and jumped to my feet, flinging myself to help him.

Another shot cracked and a bullet thunked into the taxidermic elephant near my head. Sue lowered her head and roared, and I spun like an idiot and just
stood
there as Alexis took aim at my heart.

A trio of gunshots. One. Two. Three. A quick, professional grouping, and then a thud. I was on the floor again, but only because the T. rex’s tail had knocked me down. When I got the nerve to look, I saw Alexis on the ground, sprawled motionless. And
behind me was Taylor, propped up on one hand with his backup revolver in the other.

Sue’s image was fading, as if forcing me to duck had been the last of her—of the remnants’—strength. As for Alexis, Taylor rolled to his feet and hurried over to her, kicking away the weapon, then checking for … just checking.

I turned toward Carson and got another shock. He was still on his feet. Grabbing the hem of his shirt, he pulled it off and threw it aside. The wound frothed with blood, but as I watched, out came the bullet, spit by his body like a watermelon seed.

Carson was gone again, and the Jackal looked at me with his unnatural blue eyes and foreign smile. “Lucky for your friend that you did not pull me loose when you had the chance.”

His shadow on the floor began to lengthen and broaden. I was seeing double: Carson with my eyes and the Jackal in full pharaoh regalia with my Sight.

The Jackal was healing his body—Carson’s body—and strengthening himself, but how? I was tapped out. Where was
his
new power coming from?

A shade appeared beside me in a puff of frigid air and urgent warning. “Call the Veil for the girl,” she said, in a voice I knew only from my lullabies.

“Mom?”

“Call it,”
she said. “Before there’s nothing left of her.”

The girl. There was only one here besides me. My gaze flew to Taylor, still kneeling beside Alexis. He caught my eye and shook his head.

Why hadn’t the Veil appeared? Where was her
soul
?

I heard it then, a tiny keen that faded as the Jackal’s shadow grew more massive.

“You mustn’t call it,” said a gruff voice on my other side. Aunt Diantha, who knew more about shades and remnants than anyone else, even before she was one.

“But Alexis—” I couldn’t let her soul be consumed, no matter what she’d done.

“That
abomination
,” said Aunt Diantha, meaning the Jackal, “is keeping the Veil from opening with his hold on the girl. But you must not call it. That’s what he wants you to do, so he can use the young man’s power to steal yours.”

I had to open the Veil without calling it. Like I hadn’t had enough puzzles today.

“Daisy,” said my mom, “do something! The sound …”

I remembered Ivy’s scream, and I didn’t know how the Jackal was keeping Alexis’s own from me, but Mom could hear it and it had brought her shade to tears.

The Veil … I only called, I didn’t control. It opened when it was needed.

With a bolt of inspiration and trepidation, I reached into my pocket and took out the vial that held the spirit of Carson’s mom. I was taking a huge risk—losing an innocent soul to the Jackal in an attempt to save a blackened one. And one just slightly gray one, if you counted Carson’s.

Everything relied on my timing and my own sagging strength. I dropped the glass to the floor and crushed it with my heel.

Helena!
Her name burst into my mind as her spirit burst from the prison, bright and blinding.

The Veil appeared with a waiting swiftness. It rang with a pure, true note in the middle of the discord. To me and the spirits—my spirits—it sang a welcome.

To the Jackal, it was a warning. He whirled to face me, and the curtain that shimmered open between us. He lost his grip on Alexis, and her racked soul stretched and twisted on its way through the portal, her tortured screams cut off as the surface tension between worlds rippled in her wake.

“You can’t,” said the Jackal, anticipating my plan. “Not without sending your young man through, too. We are
bound
.”

“Help him,”
said the shade—no, the soul—that had taken Mom’s place beside me. Helena pled, “How can I help you help my son?”

“Just hold tight,” I murmured, and shored up my resolve—or at least my bravado. To the Jackal I called, “I unbound you before. I can do it again.”

I hoped.

“But without my magic,” crooned the Jackal, “he’ll die from his bullet wound.” He held up bloody fingers and tsked. “I think it may have gotten his lung.”

This was a chance I had to take. I would gladly risk my life or my soul in place of any of these people. But I couldn’t. I had to do what I did best—talk big, and pray I didn’t screw this up.