Spirit and Dust (26 page)

He finished pouring before he answered. “One, cars are just
things
. Two, my plan was to take good care of the psychic and return her undamaged. A grave, though … that’s like spitting on someone.”

The coffee he held out to me was extra light and extra sweet, exactly the way I’d fixed mine at the diner forever ago. When I reached for it, he didn’t let go until I met his eye.

“Three,” he said, with the ring of an oath, “I’m not drawing the line. I’d do whatever it takes to rescue Alexis. And if this Jackal
is
an unlimited power supply, it’s almost as important.”

“Okay,” I said, solemnly accepting his promise and noting his priorities. “Let’s say we manage to find the Jackal. I think maybe it’s time to talk about what we’re going to do with it.”

We
had
to rescue Alexis. But I didn’t want to hand over that kind of power, infinite or not, to the Brotherhood. Or, for that matter, to Maguire.

“We use it to get her back,” said Carson, without hesitation. “To find her and rescue her.”

“And not hand it over?” I asked, making sure we were clear on that.

“And not hand it over.”

There were so many problems with that idea, but I wanted to believe we could do it. That
I
could do it. Rescue Alexis … and Carson, too, from the hold Maguire had on his loyalty.

“I’m in,” I said, offering my own promise. “And it has nothing to do with the triple swear or any threat from Maguire. This has been voluntary ever since I realized they were messing with my remnants. And whatever is between you and your father—”

He gave me no warning before he kissed me. Didn’t move closer, didn’t take me in his arms, just swooped in and stopped my words with his mouth. Thoroughly. He drank down whatever I was going to say, and when I was speechless, only then did he lift the coffee cup from my hand and put it on the counter behind me. I almost didn’t notice because he did it without taking his lips from mine.

It was a perfectly choreographed move, a short step to wrap his arm around me and press me up against the cabinet. Not that I offered any resistance. I kissed him back, savoring the play of his lips on mine and the taste of black coffee on his tongue. I was revising my preference for cream and sugar, and revising my stance on guys who made me feel melty inside. Because I was melting like ice cream on a hot San Antonio sidewalk.

His free hand came up to my neck, lacing his fingers in my tangled hair as he kissed along my jaw, his chin deliciously scratchy on the ticklish skin under my ear.

“Maguire owns this apartment,” he whispered. “It might be bugged.”

It took me a moment—or two, or three—to figure out what that had to do with our current entanglement. I couldn’t remember if I’d been saying something we wouldn’t want Maguire to know. Jeez, I couldn’t remember how to
talk
.

Oh, wait, yes I did. I jabbed a finger into his shoulder and pushed him back so I could see his face. “You kissed me to shut me up?”

Carson met my narrow-eyed glare with humor and zero apology. “No. But it makes a good excuse. And paybacks are hell.”

So I gave him a punch in the ribs, but not very hard at all. “You’re a pretty good kisser for a jackass.”

His brow lifted. “Have you kissed a lot of jackasses?”

I pretended I wasn’t leaning on the counter because I was weak in the knees. “At least one too many.”

“Ouch.” His hands slid off the silk of my pajamas with only one side trip over my hips, almost brief enough to be accidental. Then he pointed to a computer tucked away on a small built-in desk. “I’ll take care of breakfast. You find us a grave to rob.”

Okay. So I guessed we were moving on now. But something had changed, not because he’d kissed me. Because I’d confessed what I’d known since last night—that I was here voluntarily. I guess that made us partners.

I went to the desk, woke the computer, and pulled up a browser. Researching obituaries was nothing new to me, and I remembered the year of the professor’s death, which was an advantage. So I felt strangely optimistic as I went to one of my
favorite online obit archives and started a search for Carl Oosterhouse, date of death, 1941. Maybe it was the familiar territory. Maybe it was the concrete goal.

It didn’t take me long to find the obituary, and I started reading the important parts aloud to Carson. “Noted German-American archaeologist Carl Oosterhouse … emigrated before World War I … numerous expeditions … University of Chicago … blah blah blah stuff we know …” Then my heart took a dive, along with every hope of solving this problem with a shovel and a bit of nerve.

I must have made a sound or cursed or something, because Carson came to see what I was reading. I pointed to the screen. “… was returning from an expedition to Northern Africa for the purpose of saving as many artifacts as possible from the destruction of war, when the British transport ship was sunk by a German U-boat. All hands and all cargo were lost.”

Blessed Saint Brendan. Those poor sailors. I had a short list of ways I would prefer to go—my gift gave me a bit of insight on the subject—and drowning was not on it.

The shipwreck was a dead end for Carson and me, too. “That means no grave to dig up,” I said. “Not unless Maguire has a sideline in deepwater salvage.”

Carson turned away from me, paced to the toaster, and stared into it, hard enough to brown the bread himself. His arms were braced on the counter, his shoulders tight with frustration.

“Dammit,” he said.

“Yeah,” I answered. My heart was on the floor and I was tempted to crawl down there and join it.

He turned back abruptly, still vibrating with tension. “Google
deepwater salvage
and
Egyptian artifacts
.”

I supposed a shot in the dark was better than giving up. Pulling myself out of my dejected slump, I typed the terms into the search field.

“There’s a lot of hits, but they’re really scattershot.”

“Add
Chicago
.” I did, and he came back to read over my shoulder, pointing at a news article from the
Chicago Tribune
. The headline:
EGYPTIAN MINISTER OF ANTIQUITIES SEEKS RETURN OF SALVAGED ARTIFACTS
.

I glanced at him, too close to really focus. “Are you the psychic now?”

He shrugged and continued to read the article. “A hunch. Something lodged in my subconscious.”

“What?” I asked, trying not to suspect he was holding back information.

“Something I read a while back.” Before I could push for more than that, he gave me the recap of the article. “A deepwater salvage company, funded by a private collector, recovered some artifacts from a shipwreck, one that sounds a lot like what you just described.”

“Who’s the private collector?” I asked.

He pointed to a name. “It says the Beaumont Corporation. So whoever owns that.” I’d rolled the chair to the side to give him a better view of the screen, and me a better view of his face as he read. “But there’s no written provenance to say whether the stuff was removed from Egypt before or after it was illegal to do so,
and the British have their noses out of joint since the wreck may fall under the underwater war grave protection act …”

“I get it,” I said. “Big legal battle. Where are the artifacts now?”

He smiled as if he’d conjured them himself. “On display here in Chicago.”

Holy cats, what a lucky break. Maybe too lucky. Maybe too convenient. Maybe I didn’t care, if it led to the Jackal, the Brotherhood, and Alexis.

“Are there pictures?” I asked, reclaiming the computer mouse. I clicked on a link (helpfully labeled
PHOTOS
). The first was of a team working to restore and preserve the items. The next, a picture of the collection in an exhibit. The caption said
ON LOAN FROM THE BEAUMONT CORPORATION
, and prominently featured, was a large basalt statue of the god Anubis in his animal form.

A black jackal.

So close. Light-at-the-end-of-the tunnel close.

What had the shade said?
Find the artifacts that lie with my bones
. “If that statue sank with Oosterhouse, it
did
lie in his grave—his watery, unmarked one. If it’s the one, I’ll know as soon as I see it.”

“Seeing it is going to be the easy part.”

He tapped the banner of the Web page and I understood what he meant. Stealing from the Field Museum was going to be a helluva lot harder than jumping another cemetery wall and digging up a grave.

F
IRST, WE HAD
to case the joint.

“We have to what?” asked Carson, when I’d put it in those words. “Are we in a gangster movie?”

I shrugged. “Outdated slang is sort of an occupational hazard.”

We were walking through the park that housed the museum and it was raining—a cold, miserable, umbrella-defeating drizzle that hung in the air and seeped through my clothes. Aunt Gwenda had had too much fun dressing me. I looked like a refugee from an Anthropologie catalog.

To top it off, we’d parked in the farthest possible parking lot.
“Dude,” I said, shivering in my raincoat. “What if we need to make a quick getaway?”

Carson gave me the side-eye, one brow raised. “Have I yet failed to provide timely transportation?”

He had a point.

A tunnel under Lake Shore Drive gave a break from the rain, but when we came out the other side, my feet failed me. I could only gaze in awe at the huge—sweet Saint Gertrude,
really
huge—neoclassic home of the Field Museum of Natural History. City-block huge, so large that the far edges of the building’s wings disappeared in the misty drizzle.

“Three stories of exhibits,” said Carson, stopped beside me as I stared. “More levels of storage below. Over twenty million artifacts, only a fraction on display.”

“Stop,” I said. “You’re making me dizzy.” I hoped it was simple intimidation and panic. But that was a lot of artifacts. That was a
lot
of people’s history. If only a little bit of it was haunted, I might be in trouble.

“You’ll be fine.” Ducking under the edge of my umbrella, he put his arm around me and started walking again. “You had a hearty breakfast, a second breakfast, and elevenses. You should be ready for anything.”

I decided to accept the encouragement and ignore the teasing as we climbed the stairs—there were a lot of them—and went in. While Carson bought our tickets, I scoped out the steel gates and doors that would seal the museum shut after closing time, not to mention the security cameras with their eagle eyes.

Another day, another museum. I only wished I felt as confident as I had the day before.

This place wasn’t just bigger in size. It hummed with a hundred years of visitors and curators and researchers, the living, breathing stuff that was only background noise to my particular psychic channel.

But as for that—I’d
never
felt such an orchestra of remnant sensation. It sang to me, pulled me like gravity, but in all directions. Up, down, sideways. It was so finely tuned, so well balanced, no one part stood out. The harmonic vibration of it made me feel a little drunk.

“Hey,” said Carson. “Come back to earth and have a map.”

“Thanks.” I unfolded it, reading as I trailed behind him. He gave our tickets to a guard and our raincoats and my umbrella to the coat check attendant, all while I got my bearings from the exhibit descriptions on the diagram.

“The man-eating lions of Tsavo,”
I read. “That would be one of the things ringing my bell. The
Grainger Hall of Gems
. Haunted jewelry would do it.” Once I identified the things tripping my radar, I felt more secure, knowing what to avoid. “Oh, super. The
Inside Ancient Egypt
exhibit features twenty-three human mummies. That would
definitely
do it.”

Carson plucked the map from my hands, forcing me to look around. We stood in a vaulted marble hall that made the twenty-foot totem poles beside me seem like a pair of toothpicks. It looked as long as a football field. Columns lined the first floor, leading to the wings on either side, and above that was a gallery that wrapped around the central space. In the middle were two
full-grown elephants—taxidermic specimens, that is—and far,
far
on the other end was a dinosaur.

I may have squealed with excitement.

“Throttle back, Sunshine,” Carson said with a laugh.

“I can’t help it.” I bounced on the balls of my feet in spite of myself. “I
love
the T. rex.”

“Of course you do.”

The Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton—the most complete ever found, according to the brochure—had been posed as if frozen midrun, her body stretched out, her tail horizontal to balance her gigantic skull and rudder her massive body through the Cretaceous swamp. Her bones had a beautiful fluidity that simulated motion so well, I almost thought I was Seeing her with my psychic senses.

Of course, remnants required a human involved somewhere, and there were no people around when dinosaurs ruled the earth. On the other hand, humans had dug up these fossils and cleaned them and mounted them with dedication and care. She was viewed by millions of people, and even had a name. Sue. Maybe she
did
have some kind of remnant.

But dinosaur bones weren’t why we were there. Though just for a moment, I wished they were. I wished Alexis were safe and Maguire were arrested and Carson were happy. I wanted to hold his hand with no ulterior motive, and see if we had anything to talk about if we weren’t chasing jackals and running from everything else.

“We should get on with it,” I said, squaring my shoulders, at least figuratively.

The museum would have been crowded if it were smaller. It was Friday afternoon, and the place was full of schoolkids on field trips. It was hard to maintain the proper tension levels about the twenty-three mummies while fourth graders raced to the ancient Egypt exhibit, daring each other to descend into the replica tomb.

Mastaba
. The proper name for the tomb entrance slid into my mind as if someone had whispered it.

Carson and I let the fourth graders get ahead of us and entered the antechamber of the tomb, hung with slabs of real hieroglyphs that made my vision go double between the then-and-there and the here-and-now.