“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.
“Enough chitchat,” I said. “Let’s dance.”
I let my psyche slip away from my physical form, a shade of my own self. Unconfined by distance, I grabbed at the jackal mark on Carson’s back, the spot where the two were knit together. The threads had tightened, and somehow I had to unstitch them without unraveling the half that I cared about.
The more the Jackal struggled, the more blood ran down Carson’s chest. The Veil hummed and shimmered with infinite patience as I picked at the tight snarls of the binding, but the longer it took, the paler and weaker the living body became, so weak I worried Carson’s soul would make the trip, too.
I needed to rip the Jackal off like a Band-Aid and get him through the Veil. My psyche was strong, but I needed force and inertia. I needed the weight of a soul.
Carson’s mom was no more than a translucent vision, and no less than everything that made her human. “You wanted to help? It’s risky.”
“He’s my son. This is no risk.” Then she laughed. It was a beautiful sound, of someone used to laughing. “It beats the purgatory of Devlin Maguire’s office for eternity.”
I smiled in spite of myself and held out the threads of the Jackal’s binding to her. She took them, smiled back—a devilish smile—and ran for the Veil, painting the air with light as she leapt through.
The Jackal gave an angry shout as he was yanked toward the curtain of eternity, scrabbling to hold on to this world with psychic tooth and claw. At the tipping point, he began sliding toward the Veil without my help. But he was taking Carson’s spirit, unconscious and unable to fight, with him.
“If I go,” sounded the Jackal over an intangible roar of wind, “he goes, too.”
“You don’t get to say who stays and who goes, you son of a bitch.”
Neither did I, but I knew how to fight for a spirit. As the last thread of binding pulled loose, I grabbed Carson, body and soul, and anchored us in the here and now. But he was so heavy, and all of eternity yawned before me.
The open Veil offered tantalizing glimpses outside the walls of time and space. It awed but didn’t frighten me. Maybe it should have. I was so small and eternity pulled at the fragile bond of my body. I was an atom and a star, an infinitesimal speck of identity suspended before the gravity well of fathomless eons of souls.
Daisy … A woman’s lullaby voice from beyond, chiding me gently. The job is done. Let the Veil close.
“Daisy!” A guy’s voice. A young man. Naming me and calling me back. “You did it. It’s over … and we need your help with your relatives.”
I sat up, unable to remember lying down. But I had, in a position that strongly indicated that Taylor had caught me when I collapsed and held me safely until I came to.
The shade of the T. rex was gone, and when I looked at the skeleton, the only hint of her adventures was a fading green glow in the sockets of her skull. The color was all Goodnight, but the wink—there was no mistaking it for anything else—I was sure that belonged to Sue.
“What relatives?” I asked, seeing no other remnants. I would be sad that Mom hadn’t said goodbye, except we didn’t need to.
Then I heard them, the unmistakable rallying shouts of Goodnights on the march, coming from outside and demanding to be let in. The museum doors stood open and the hall was flooded with cops, armed response officers, museum officials, and paramedics—
Carson. They surrounded him. I’d been holding on to him—no, that was just with my psyche. Now all I could see were his shoes. I started to get up, but Taylor’s hand on my shoulder kept me where I was. “He’s fine,” Taylor assured me. “The fuss is because they can’t figure out why he’s fine.”
“Oh.” I took a moment to look around. What a mess, with mummy dust and toppled totem poles and the museum store looking like it had had a retail explosion. “Did you See anything?” I asked Taylor, meaning the big battle.
“Besides the big dinosaur rampage? Not really. The temperature dropped about fifty degrees and you said ‘Basingstoke’ and collapsed.” He pointed at his eyes. “Serious REM going on, though.”
“Great. Phin will want to hook me up to brain electrodes next time.”
Jeez, I hoped there wasn’t a next time.
Taylor ducked his head to catch my gaze, studying my face and heaven only knew what was written there. “Are you okay?” he asked gently, and he wasn’t talking about three days’ worth of psychic backlash headache that I could feel looming like a pain tsunami.
Blushing made me feel disloyal to Carson. Which was stupid, because wanting to go over to Carson made me feel disloyal to Taylor, who had never lied to me, even by omission … and who had killed his first person today.
For me.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” he said.
I allowed myself a smile. “You keep saying that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
He couldn’t—quite—let himself laugh. Instead, he looked over my shoulder. “You’d better slide in there and say what you’ve got to say while you’ve got the chance.”
That sounded very dire, but I realized he didn’t necessarily mean life or death. Police swarmed the place, and I saw Gerard waiting like a middle-aged vulture, and any minute now my family was going to storm the barricade and drag me home to Texas tied to their broomsticks.
Taylor got to his feet and gave me a hand up. I was shakier than I liked to admit, and he squeezed my hand before letting go and flashing his badge so the crowd around Carson would let me through.
He looked awful. The blood loss had made his old bruises appear even more livid, and his new ones were watercolor blotches over just about every inch of him. And that was only the inches that were showing.
When he saw me, he winced. And I hadn’t even said anything yet.
“So …,” I started. What do you say to a guy who unwittingly uses you to get a magical artifact ahead of a secret organization that he lies about not knowing, and maybe breaks a little bit of your heart, even though you’ve only known each other a couple of really intense days, right before he jumps in front of a bullet for you.
I mean, what do you say?
You say nothing. Because just then, Agent Gerard arrived, and wouldn’t be put off. “Christopher Carson Maguire, you are under arrest—”
“Christopher Carson?” I interrupted. “Your name is Kit Carson?”
“You,” said Gerard, aiming his laser stare at me. “I’ll get to you in a minute, Peanut.”
“No you won’t,” Carson said, in his most steely voice ever. “She didn’t do anything. And if you want all the information I have on Maguire Enterprises, all their holdings and financial dealings, you’d better remember that.”
Maybe “I’m not a nice guy” really was the biggest lie he ever told me.
38
THE JUDGE’S GAVEL fell, and Carson was off the hook for everything but the motorcycle theft, since two FBI agents had actually seen him do it. Some of that might have been luck, or extenuating circumstance, or even a lot of payoffs—like two car owners and some museum boards—or the fact that when it came right down to it, no one could really explain what happened at the Field Mus
eum that day.
And of course, Carson had all the dirt on his father’s criminal activities. Not just a whale, but a whale of a whale with a really big headline takedown. The making of a DA’s career. I wasn’t in on the details, but I bet they were happy to work with Carson and his high-priced lawyer.
At the verdict, the courtroom erupted in camera flashes and reporters calling out questions. From a few rows back, I watched Carson stand and shake his lawyer’s hand. He was looking a lot better than the last time I’d seen him. Which, really, was not a stretch. It had been two months, and I’d only seen his picture on news websites until I returned to Chicago with Agent Taylor to testify at the hearing.
My cousin Amy, who’d come from Texas for moral support, asked, “Ready to get out of here? Or do you want to say hi?”
“He knows I’m here. Trust me. If he wants to talk to me, he’ll find me.”
She gazed at me for a long moment, ignoring all the people trying to get past us in the busy courtroom gallery. “You know, guys are weird. Sometimes, when they think they’ve offended you—because they have—they don’t know how to come talk to you, because they think you don’t want them to, and they’ve been raised to respect when a girl doesn’t want them around.”
I took that advice for what it was worth. “Sorry, Amaryllis. You’re not exactly the expert on smooth-sailing romance.”
She frowned in equal parts annoyance and embarrassment. “Well. Things sometimes work out for the best in spite of our best efforts to screw them up.”
The crowd was getting to be too much for me. Because you know who has a lot of ghost baggage hanging around them? People who spend time in courthouses. “Let’s get out of here.”
We grabbed our things and headed out to the hall. Winter involves a lot more stuff in Chicago than it does in Texas. Coats, hats, scarves, gloves. I don’t even own half that gear.
A couple of reporters waved recorders at me, asking questions, but I’d gotten good at ignoring them, and Amy had always been good at spin-doctoring the weird parts of Goodnight life without actually lying. She’d helped both Taylor and me prepare our testimony, because we didn’t want to lie and we couldn’t tell the weird parts. Not even the Goodnight charm could handle faux demigods, real mummies, and spirit dinosaurs.
Agent Taylor was down the hall, talking to the judge, who’d ditched his robe for shirtsleeves in the overheated courthouse. He waved me over, and I approached warily, worried we’d been caught out in the spin-doctoring, but it seemed His Honor was just being nice.
“I wanted to thank you for your help with this case, young lady.” The judge held out his hand and shook mine heartily when I took it. “It sounded like Carson got tangled up in things way beyond his control.”
“We both did,” I said, the rote response.
The judge started rolling down his sleeves. “Well, I’d better get back to work. Thank you again, Agent Taylor. And you, Miss Goodnight.”
An unexpected glimpse of black distracted me, and Taylor had to nudge me to respond. “You’re welcome, Your Honor.”
The judge went back to his chambers, or wherever, and Taylor and I began strolling down the hall, to where Amy waited. “What bee got in your bonnet?” he asked.
“What bee in my … What are you, ninety?” I glanced over my shoulder, but the judge had disappeared. “He had a tattoo on his arm.”
“Well, yeah. Lots of people have tattoos, Daisy. Don’t get weird.”
I snorted. “Too late. So, when can I start working murders again?”
“Anytime. I’m back on duty, and you’re cleared of everything. In fact, that was why I was talking to the judge. To make sure there are no surprises here in Illinois. You’re good to go, Jailbait.”
“In two more weeks, you’ll have to stop calling me that, Jack.”
“In two more weeks, I’ll still be too old for you.”
I stared at him, stunned that he’d actually said it. Okay, he’d said it before, which was how the whole jailbait thing started. But this time, he said it like he was reminding both of us. And I wasn’t sure why it made a difference, but it did. I liked knowing it was safe to have a crush on him. But maybe not too safe.
With a careless shrug, I started walking again. “It doesn’t matter. We could never date anyway. Doesn’t the FBI have rules against partners dating? Even if I am just an unpaid consultant.”
“I’d certainly never want to date Gerard, so I never asked.”
We reached Amy, who was pretending to check her text messages, or maybe really was reading them, but also keeping an eye down the hall, where Carson was talking to his lawyer and his aunt.
Talking to them, and sliding glances my way.
“When he breaks free of them,” said Amy from the corner of her mouth, “go over there. Have pity on the guy and let him say what he has to say.”
I didn’t have to go over. When Carson wrapped up his conversation, he headed toward me. I looked around for an escape route, but Amy grabbed my arm and made me stay until Carson reached us.
He nodded to Taylor and to Amy. Then to me he said, “Hey, Daisy.”
“Hi, um, is it Chris? Christopher?”
“It’s still Carson.”
“So you’re going for the one-name celebrity thing?”
He frowned. “I was going for the ‘come over and see how you’re doing’ thing.”
“Oh.” I folded my arms and wished I knew what to do with my hands other than flap them around nervously while I talked. “Sorry.”
The four of us stood there awkwardly until Amy turned to Taylor and said, “Is there a place to get a cup of tea around here?” She blew on her hands. “Even my insides are cold. We’re a long way from Texas.”
Taylor looked reluctant to leave us, but Amy was sort of a force to be reckoned with when she got going. Then they were gone and Carson and I were standing in the hall on our lonesome. Well, as lonesome as you can be in a really busy hallway full of reporters and stuff.
“Do you want to walk for a bit?” Carson asked. “I can guess where your cousin and Taylor are going. We can walk that way and you can join them.”
I couldn’t think of a reason to say no, and there were several reasons to say yes. Just because closure is a pop-psychology cliché doesn’t mean it’s not true. My talent with the dead was sort of all about closure.
We walked all the way to the front doors in silence, and then he helped me with my coat, also in silence, and then we stepped outside, where a bunch of reporters nearly went into raptures when they saw us together. Then I stayed silent, and Carson said, “No comment, no comment,” as we shouldered through the crowd.
Which was how I found out Carson had a bodyguard. He stopped the guy from following us down the street.
“He’s just for times like this,” Carson explained. “The rest of my days are very normal.”
“Uh-huh.”
We walked for a few steps, and he said, “You look great in that suit.”
“I hate it. It looks like something a sexy TV lawyer would wear.”
“Which is probably why I like it.”
I turned to him, skipping to the entrée in this three-course dinner of awkward. “This is crazy. Why are we talking about my clothes? Why are we here at all? Do we have anything to talk about with no mummies rising or dinosaurs stepping on us? With no one trying to hijack or kill us—?”
I clapped my hand over my mouth, because that was tactless, even for me. His father was going to jail for a very long time, and his half sister was dead, which deserved respect even if she was a homicidal nut job. Not that I would put it that way to Carson.
“We’re talking,” he said, in that composed voice he used when he wasn’t feeling very composed at all, “because I want to see you.” He cleared his throat. “Like, socially.”
I folded my arms. “How is that going to work, Chicago and Texas? Do you have some frequent-flier miles to burn through?”
“Well, you’re off from school for the wi
nter break, right? Do you have a passport? The Cayman Islands …”
“Oh. My. God. Just … no.” I started walking again, at a good clip, thanks to my long legs and a tailwind. The Windy City for sure. “I’m not going to the freaking Cayman Islands with you. Why would you even want to?”
He caught my elbow and drew me to a stop. “Because I want to find out if we have anything to talk about when not …” He tightened his jaw, then went on. “When not all those things you said.”
I folded my arms and studied him. There was no doubt he was sincere. “Why?”
“Because I like you. I like the way we fit.”
“Carson, you raised the dead. And that was before you were possessed.”
“Only once. And you put them back down again. It sounds like we’re a great team.”
“That’s why you want to see me? Because we’d make a good crime-fighting team? I already have that.”
He gave me a look. A we’re-standing-on-a-busy-sidewalk-and-people-are-taking-our-picture-but-if-we-weren’t-I-would-let-you-know-exactly-why-what-you-just-said-is-stupid look.
And suddenly Chicago didn’t seem so cold after all.
“Okay,” I said. “This is how it’s going to be. If you want to see me, you come down to Texas for the holidays. You spend them on the Goodnight farm with all my family, which contains several very intimidating chaperones. Much better chaperones than your aunt.”
He blinked. And maybe paled a little. “All your family? Can’t we just go on a date? I promise not to pick you up in a Corvette.”
“You can pick me up in a not-a-Corvette on the twenty-third. But the next two days …” I chewed my lip for a second, analyzing this impulse. “You need to see how a real family works, Carson.”
He thought about it until my nose started to run in the cold. “That sounds a lot like taking my medicine.”
“Dude!” I threw my hands in the air. “Do you want to get to know me, or do you just want a holiday hookup?”