Spirit and Dust

  There were so many of them. My psyche couldn’t reach all of them—

  Unless I let them get really, really close.

  “Daisy!”

  I thought I heard my name, shouted from amid the melee of escapees near the doors, but between the screaming and the yelling and the grinding of the gears on the security doors, I couldn’t be sure, and I couldn’t take my attention from the advancing undead to look.

  There’d been a shift in the magic around the walking dead, the ropes of power thinning to mere puppet strings. I wouldn’t have a better chance to shut them down. I hauled up the strength to slam closed a psychic door between the Jackal and the mummies, cutting them off from his control, freeing their abused bodies.

  Without magic to knit them together, they crumbled and cracked. Dry, brittle bone and parched flesh turned to rubble and dust around me.

  “Those were priceless! Priceless artifacts!” A hysterical woman in a business suit came out of hiding, fueled by outrage.

  “They were more than that,” I said, too shaky from the effort to be angry. “They were people.”

  The woman was accompanied by a guy in a lab coat and a woman in glasses. Nerd types, straight from central casting. “Forget that, Margo,” said Lab Coat. “Let’s get out of here.”

  With an almighty clang, the security doors slammed closed. Margo screamed, then shrieked again when another handful of stragglers, led by a security guard, emerged from one of the exhibit wings.

  “You didn’t make it out, either?” asked the guard.

  I let the others answer him, and started worrying about Carson. He’d seemed like he knew what he was doing when he ran off, but he’d been gone so long—

  A lion’s furious growl rolled out of the wing to my right. I spun toward it—and then whirled again as another roar answered the first. The sounds echoed through the huge hall, but it was unmistakably a second animal.

  “That came from the African hall,” said a woman with glasses.

  “How many man-eating lions are in this place?” I asked.

  “Three,” she said as our band of stragglers clustered together. “One from Mfuwe and two from Tsavo.”

  Margo screamed again as the first lion, looking bigger and toothier than ever, burst from the hall of Ancient Americas. Behind him came the glowing shades of a half-dozen ancient Americans, each carrying a spear capable of taking down a woolly mammoth.

  Limping behind them, holding a spear of his own, was Carson. As the clan of the cave bear drove the snarling beast toward one end of the Great Hall, he backed toward us, keeping the tribesmen in his eye line.

  “Good to see you,” I said—a massive understatement, but I didn’t want to break his concentration. “You found some friends.”

  He nodded without taking his gaze from the anthropological apparitions. “So did you. What’s the situation?”

  I glanced at the tight knot of stragglers. “Trapped like rats, I think.”

  “No service?” Margo tapped her cell phone with rising hysteria. “How can there be no service?”

  Lab Coat just looked at her. “How can there be mummies?”

  “They know people are trapped inside,” said the security guard. He meant to be reassuring. But my “they” was different from his. The world outside knew we were here, but so did the Brotherhood.

  A prowling growl from the shadows raised the hair on the back of my neck. No one screamed this time; they all froze with a collective held breath.

  “I don’t think we can hold them all off like this,” said Carson, meaning him and me. “We need a place that we can fortify and make a plan.”

  “But where?” I whispered. “This place is full of things that are full of spirits.”

  “What about the library?” asked Glasses Lady. She wore a staff ID badge, but I couldn’t see her name. “There’s a landline, and the reading room locks. And if things get really bad, the rare book vault is hermetically sealed and impenetrable.”

  “Sounds good,” said Carson. “Daisy, take the lead to feel out anything in the way. I’ll follow—I can at least keep the big lion at bay for a minute or two.”

  “Who put the kids in charge?” demanded an old guy with “retired tourist” written all over him. He and the woman with him were the only ones of the seven not wearing museum badges.

  “Do you have a better idea?” asked a quiet man with a Morgan Freeman soul patch. “I, for one, refuse to be done in by a scientific impossibility.”

  “Then let’s go,” said the security guard, and we started for the stairs, the snarls of the lions snaking after us.

  I prayed I wasn’t leading everyone from the frying pan to the fire. Remnants respected certain barriers … but these weren’t ordinary shades. These were weapons made of spirit, memory, and magic.

  Please, God, don’t let me be the scientific impossibility that does us all in.

  29

  AS WE MADE our breathless way to the third floor, Glasses Lady introduced herself as Marian. Marian the Librarian. Once the nine of us—the security guard and Carson bringing up the rear—had filed into the large reading room, Marian pulled her key card from under her sweater, ran it through a reader next to the door, then entered a code, locking us in.

  It seemed like an electronic lock would be particularly easy to undo with magic. But I was just guessing. Until two days ago, I hadn’t thought magic could materialize stuff out of thin air. Maybe a physical lock wouldn’t make any difference.

  The security guard—his name tag said SMITH—went directly to a phone on the desk and punched in a number. Besides him and Marian, there were Lab Coat, Soul Patch, Margo the administrator, and the retired couple, all anxiously watching Smith, waiting for word of rescue from outside the museum.

  “Bad news,” he said as he hung up. “There’s some sort of problem with the computer that controls the locks. We’re stuck here for a little while.”

  Carson pointed to the door. “Is this lock controlled by the same computer?”

  “Hey,” said Lab Coat, “if they hacked the computer to bring down the security gates, they could open this one.”

  “Who are they?” asked Margo.

  “Whoever’s behind the mummies rising and stuff,” said Lab Coat, almost laid-back in comparison with the administrator’s tightly wound hysteria. “Someone’s got to be, right?”

  The question was half rhetorical, half aimed at Carson and me. Instead of answering, Carson propped the spear he was carrying against the wall and gestured to one of the massive library tables. “Let’s move this in front of the door.”

  It took four of us to get the barricade in place, which seemed to make everyone feel better. Everyone but me. Walls seemed so flimsy next to the power I’d felt from the Jackal and his minions.

  Going on instinct, I climbed onto the table so I could put my hands on the wall near the electronic lock. I’d kept a thin trickle of contact with the museum’s ghosts, but the connection swelled in a rush of approval when I focused my intent on protection. The collective remnant pulsed through the walls like the building’s own psyche; it took only a little direction from me to shield this room from spirit animal attack. I felt the defenses take hold, almost like a change in the air pressure in the room, and I let myself take one long breath of relief.

  “Okay,” I said to Carson, who I sensed standing protectively close as I worked. “I’m not sure it will hold against the Jackal if he goes thermonuclear, but it should keep the minions and their magic out.”

  Carson cleared his throat and I turned to find our whole band of refugees staring at me, eyes full of questions. “Maybe it’s time for you two to tell us what’s going on here,” said Smith.

  The Goodnight ability to make fantastic things sound reasonable saved a lot of hassle, but took some faith, because you just had to jump in with the truth. So I did, keeping it simple: “Evil secret brotherhood. Raising the dead. Taking over the world.”

  They stared at me for such a long moment that I w
ondered if the Goodnight charm had failed me. Then Soul Patch said, “Is that all? Secret brotherhoods have been trying that since the beginning of time.”

  “If we’re going to be here a while,” said Marian the Librarian, “I have an electric kettle and instant coffee in my desk.”

  The group dispersed. Except for Carson, who offered a hand to help me down from my perch on the table. He kept his voice a low rumble, and a bemused smile hinted at one devilish dimple. “You are impressive, Daisy Goodnight.”

  “Yes, I am,” I said through my blush.

  He grinned. “I wish I’d met you in a normal week.”

  I snorted to cover another flustered rush of heat. “In a normal week, we never would have met.”

  The others had clustered around one of the library computers. “Come look at this,” said Lab Coat. There was a breaking-news Web page with the headline HOSTAGE CRISIS AT NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM. HALLUCINOGENS USED TO CAUSE PANIC.

  “Hallucinogens,” Carson said, reading over Lab Coat’s shoulder. “That’s the story they’re going with?”

  “Just wait.” Lab Coat switched to a grainy video of the patrons running from blurry, dark figures, and one really good shot of my face as the mummies converged on me. “You’re a YouTube sensation!”

  “Awesome,” I said, not feeling awesome about it at all. “Famous on the Internet.” Then a detail from the news site’s splash registered in my brain. “Go back to the main story for a sec.”

  When he did, I scanned quickly, finding the line right away. FBI agents already on the scene. So it was more than possible I hadn’t imagined someone calling my name in the chaos. Since Taylor had Johnson’s name, he could have tracked him back to Chicago.

  First things first. I turned to Carson and held out my hand. “Flash drive.” FBI or police, sooner or later, someone was going to send in a SWAT team to rescue the hostages, and that would be the end of my chance to put an end to the Black Jackal. I had to figure out how to do that before he worked loose of my binding or I got arrested.

  Carson dropped the drive into my palm. It seemed to have faired well even after we’d gotten drenched. The plastic case was damp, but under that it was totally dry.

  Marian had straightened from the YouTube watching and stepped over to watch us instead. “What do you need?” she asked.

  “Answers,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, with a hint of a smile. “This is a library. So we came to the right place.”

  Finally a glimmer of hope.

  Right before the lights went out.

  30

  THE GOOD NEWS? There was still emergency lighting. It cast the room in a garish red glow, and Smith explained that the security system was on a different power grid. Or something. All I knew was it wasn’t completely dark and the doors were still locked. The psychic defenses were still in place, too.

  The bad news was we were cut off, trapped without phone, Internet, or Coca-Cola. Every once in a while we could hear a far-off bang, and Margo would fret over something else being broken. Stranger still, I could feel subtle, earthquakelike shifts in the psychic atmosphere, deep in the infrastructure of the building, as the Jackal tried to get free.

  A rumble echoed from below, and Margo groaned in harmony. “Please don’t let it be Sue,” she whispered like a mantra. “Don’t let it be Sue.…”

  “She is seriously worried about that dinosaur,” I whispered to Marian.

  The librarian glanced at Margo with sympathy. “Sue may be one of the most valuable things in the museum. She’s truly one of a kind.”

  “Let’s focus,” said Carson, drawing me back to the current task. I sat in front of the librarian’s laptop, where we’d plugged in the flash drive and were trying every password we could think of. Fortunately the computer had a full charge.

  Not only were we trying words in English, but we tried them all in Spanish, French, Italian, Latin, Arabic, and Greek (ancient and modern), thanks to Marian and Soul Patch, whose name was Fred.

  “How do you say ‘Black Jackal’ in Egyptian?” I asked, feeling like we were missing something obvious.

  Fred considered the translation. “Try ‘Kemet Sab.’ ”

  I did. Nothing.

  Carson had been standing behind me, leaning over to see the screen. He straightened, rubbing his shoulder. I was sure it was one of many bruises. “This is crazy. For all we know, it could be some random string of numbers or letters. And time is running out.”

  Lab Coat started whistling the theme to Jeopardy! Carson shut him up with a knife-edged glare. “That’s not helping.”

  “Chill,” I said, trying to hide my own nerves. “I know you’re worried about Alexis. I’m worried about the city of Chicago. These people are worried about getting out of here. We’re all worried.”

  He didn’t apologize, but he did compose himself. Not that I’d go so far as to say chill. “Okay. What languages haven’t we tried?”

  Fred suggested, “German. A lot of Egyptology papers are written in German.”

  So we started trying things in German, except now I had the theme from Jeopardy! stuck in my head. I’d never even asked how Alexis had done on the contest—

  My fingers stilled on the keyboard as one half of my brain slapped the other half for being an idiot.

  “What’s wrong?” Carson asked.

  “Jeopardy!” I said. “Your answers must be given in the form of a question.”

  I typed into the password field: What is the Black Jackal?

  A new window telescoped open, filling the screen. I crowed in triumph, and Marian and Fred jumped from their seats and crowded in to see.

  My bubble of victory popped. “It’s in hieroglyphs.”

  Fred turned the laptop to get a better look. “Not hieroglyphs. It’s hieratic. A sort of transitional stage between picture writing and cursive-type writing called demotic. Hieratic was the language of the priests.” He followed the first line of text with his finger. “Ah yes. This is a Book of the Dead.”

  “So you can read this?” Carson asked, sounding hopeful.

  Fred shook his head as he scrolled down. “I recognize the opening passages. A proper translation of the details and specific semantics would take months. At least.”

  A groan rumbled through the room, and it wasn’t from me. Though it could have been. The sound came from far below us, like the protest of a gigantic radiator.

  What were the Jackal and his minions doing down there? The more time we spent here, the more time they had to fortify and prepare for whatever they were planning.

  While Fred studied the document on-screen, I turned to Carson. His expression was stoic, but I could feel the tension in him. “When you asked Johnson about Alexis,” I asked softly, “what did he say?”

  “Nothing.” He scrubbed a hand over his tired face. “But I get the feeling she’s close. I can’t explain how.”

  “You don’t have to explain it to me.” I wished I were the type who could take his hand and comfort him, or that he were the type to invite sympathy. But all his walls were up, so I went back to the matter of the book.

  This was one of those times when some Harry Potter–esque magic would be helpful, if I could just wave a wand and say some faux Latin and the words would realign themselves on the page. But I doubted even mad scientist Phin could pull that out of her bag of tricks.

  A lightning bolt of an idea goosed me out of my slump, so abruptly that I startled a shriek out of Margo. No, not Phin. That was the wrong Goodnight to ask.

  Turning to Marian, I said, “I need a book.”

  “Well, I am a librarian.” She pointed to her glasses and bun.

  Casting back through the week that I’d lived in the past twenty-four hours, I recalled the title I wanted. “Female Pioneers in Archaeology. Or something like it. I need pictures of women archaeologists of the nineteen thirties.”

  “Ancient Egypt is nine-three-two,” she said, giving the reference number. “I can’t be more specific because the
catalog is all on our mainframe, and that’s down with the power.”

  See? Sometimes you needed drawers full of manila cards.

  Marian found a flashlight in her desk, and Carson insisted on going back into the stacks with me. As if I had the least interest in going there by myself. In the reading room with the others, there was an illusion of security. The looming shelves of books were dark and cold, and the emergency lights didn’t reach into the corners. I stuck so close to Carson that I could feel his body heat.

  “You really think you can call up your aunt Ivy from a picture in a book?” he asked. I hadn’t told him what I’d planned, but I didn’t suppose it had been hard for him to guess.

  “I’m going to try.” For a moment there was just the sound of our steps on the tile floor. With the others around, we hadn’t had time to debrief or compare notes. “How did you manage to raise the shades of those Neanderthal warriors?”

  “Desperation.” He shone the flashlight at the end of each row of shelves, looking for the 900s.

  “I suppose the fact that the Brotherhood was here and waiting for us supports your theory that they knew all along where the Jackal was. Or rather, the artifacts they needed to raise him.”

  “And now we know why they needed you,” Carson said, with no hint of I told you so.

  “To open the Veil.” A knot of emotions twisted in my chest, all having to do with how stupid I’d been. “I can’t believe Oosterhouse played me that way.”

  “I did say I didn’t trust him.”

  There it was. The I told you so. I stopped in the aisle, in spite of the dark. “But remnants cannot lie! They can’t.”

  Carson stopped, too, and though I couldn’t see him well, I thought he softened a bit. “Well, he didn’t lie, did he? You opened the door to the afterlife, and he sure as hell showed us the Jackal.”

  I clenched my fists in front of me, like Oosterhouse was standing there. “I’d like to wring his ghostly neck. He had a lot of nerve abusing my secret idealism that way.” A thought occurred to me. “Do you think he heard the whole conversation on the train, and only pretended he’d been awakened just before morning?”