Spirit and Dust

Maguire’s fingers tightened painfully on mine, snapping the thread of my question, yanking me back to the physical world and my current problem.

  Lauren wrapped the cord around our linked hands, and I understood what she’d meant by “a sense of ceremony.” Symbols had power. The smooth scarlet against my skin elevated the very simple spell from kid stuff to something resonant and far-reaching.

  I’d never felt magic at work before, but I was sure I felt it then—Lauren’s intent, racing along the points of our triangle.

  “Your promise,” said Maguire, straightening his coat with his free hand.

  I grit my teeth, still fighting coercion. “I promise to do everything in my power—”

  “Not good enough,” said Maguire, almost carelessly, though I wasn’t fooled. “You’re a Texan. Where’s that ‘Remember the Alamo’ spirit?”

  “Yeah, that didn’t work out so well for them.”

  “Then you’ll have to do better.”

  Impasse. I could not clever my way out of this situation.

  When I went too long without speaking, Maguire sighed, then grabbed my chin in his free hand, forcing me to meet his gaze. “Repeat after me, Daisy Goodnight,” he said, letting me glimpse beneath his veneer of civility. “Because the lives of the people you love best are at stake.”

  My eyes stung, but crying would help no one, so I shoved the tears down, hard. Carson’s fingers tightened on my shoulders, and he was tense with some inner struggle of his own.

  “Now,” said Maguire, “I, Daisy Goodnight, will follow the trail of Alexis Meredith Maguire and find her without delay.”

  “I promise,” I said, feeling the geas start to take hold. The vow had to be spoken only once, then agreed to. “I promise. I promise.”

  With the third oath, the slipknot of the spell drew tight. It was a yoke on my psyche and a hot pavement under my feet, and it would press at me until I did what I had sworn.

  The thing that happened next, I couldn’t explain. A buzzing, like the hum of feedback from a loudspeaker, filled my skull, pushing out everything else. It crackled like static and lit my nerves—and then Lauren slipped the cord from our hands and the psychic sound vanished, leaving only clear, crisp fury.

  “If you touch any of my family …” I spat the words at Maguire, still clasping his hand, and I was just full of intent. “If you even go near them, I swear I will find a way to curse you all the way to the Veil and push you through. I promise this. I pro—”

  Carson clapped a hand over my mouth before I could complete the vow. Now I struggled, and he wrapped an arm around my waist, pulling me up against him with my elbows tucked against me and my legs unable to do anything but flail uselessly.

  Maguire waved the three of us toward the door. “Get on with it. Tell me when you know something.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Carson, then grunted as my foot found his shin. He adjusted his grip, tucked me under his arm, and marched to the office door.

  7

  “ASSHOLE,” I GROWLED as soon as we were out of the office. Lauren trailed after us, making choked sounds that I realized were laughter.

  “I told you not to antagonize him,” said Carson, setting me onto my feet and slamming the door behind us.

  “I wasn’t talking about him,” I snapped, and made sure my clothes were covering all the parts of me they were supposed to. My emotions needed some sorting, too. As much as I hated being manhandled, Carson had kept me from doing something really stupid.

  Maguire scared the crap out of me. When I blinked, I could See the glow of his remnant debt stamped on the dark of my eyelids. A man with a conscience would buckle under that weight. Maguire had none, and that gave a concrete reality to his threats.

  So what did I do? Threaten him back. It was insanely stupid, but it was the only defense I had left.

  Laughter made me jump. The guard from the door and the two gorillas who’d escorted Carson and me were clustered around a smartphone, paying no attention to us at all.

  “Play it again!” said the guard, and the goon with the phone tapped the screen. “Look at her go! Like a red-haired gazelle, that one.” I couldn’t see the video, but I could guess they were watching the farce of my escape attempt. Their cackles when I hit Carson and the groans of sympathy when I kneed him were a giveaway.

  “Something funny, Murphy?” asked Carson. A rhetorical question, because clearly, it was hilarious.

  The goon squad sobered, but Murphy, the guard from the door, didn’t bother to hide his grin, even when he said, “No, sir.” Then he gestured to a cloth-covered tray on a console table tucked against the wall. “Bertram brought this up for your guest.”

  Lauren went over and lifted the napkin to reveal a toasted sandwich, an avalanche of potato chips, and a pickle spear. “Do gazelles eat turkey sandwiches?”

  Not voluntarily, but I was running on four Cokes and a long-gone snack pack of pretzels from the plane. I snatched up the sandwich before she had a chance to do anything witchy to it. “You,” I said with as much dark venom as I could muster over my growling stomach, “are going to be so sorry.”

  She took a handful of potato chips. “You know that thing about magic coming back on you three times is a myth, right?”

  “Not where my family is concerned. If anything bad happens to me because of this, the Goodnights will bring the rain. So pack an umbrella.”

  Carson grabbed the napkin and handed it to me. “Walk and eat. I want you to get a read on Alexis’s room, see if there are any clues.”

  The thought of Alexis made the gourmet turkey and bread about as appetizing as a boot-leather-and-cardboard sandwich, but I wolfed it down anyway. It wasn’t bravado, it was biology. I needed food if I was going to be good for anything.

  I followed the platinum cockscomb of Lauren’s spiked hair down another of the house’s hallways into another wing of the building. That made three. I’d lost track of the number of corridors.

  Carson had fallen into step beside me. Not crowding, but within arm’s length. He wasn’t taking any chances.

  “I don’t know where you think I’m going to go,” I said around a mouthful of sandwich. My aunts would be appalled. “I don’t think I could find my way out of here with a GPS and a team of Army Rangers.”

  He shot me a sideways look, and I noticed the darkening bruise on his cheekbone, corresponding to the lump on my head. “I’m not going to underestimate you twice. You just threatened to shove Devlin Maguire into the afterlife.”

  I shrugged to hide a shudder. “I was very angry.” I was still angry, which was unusual. Mostly it’s all explosion, no simmer with me, which I hate because I’ve known too many dead people not to have learned where hotheadedness gets you.

  But as hunger receded, I still had a knot in my gut—the slow burn of outrage turning into a coiled spring of tension, telling me to move, act, swing for the bleachers.

  Unless it wasn’t anger, but something else.

  I slowed my steps, wondering what would happen. If I was just pissed, then nothing. But as soon as I started dragging my feet, my muscles tensed and my heart pounded and my chest tightened with term-paper-due-tomorrow tension.

  I wasn’t just pissed. I was bound.

  Son of a witch.

  Whatever I knew, so did the geas. Turning away from Alexis’s room with no other plan would not find the missing girl. The spell gave my subconscious power over me, like OCD dialed up to eleven.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Carson, with a sharpness I didn’t understand.

  “Seriously?” Stopping to look at him wasn’t difficult. Clearly my subconscious knew the value of venting. “I am ensorcelled. Bound by magic to find Alexis or die trying. Which, by the way, I would have done for free, if your boss had asked politely.”

  His shoulders shifted as if he were trying to ease an itch of guilt. It was a small movement, but I was used to reading the slightest inflection in a remnant. Reading this Carson guy was sort of the same. “Then what’s the problem?” he
asked.

  “The problem,” I said, “is I don’t know what problems this will make. Is it going to cloud my judgment? What if I can’t find her? What if I die—”

  Oh God.

  It was a prayer, not a curse. If I died, would I still be bound to Devlin Maguire? If I got stuck here because of the oath, who would cut my spirit free? I didn’t know anyone else who could do what I did.

  Carson had reached out like he wanted to steady me, but I leveled a glare that made him wisely draw his hand back.

  “If I die and get stuck here,” I swore coldly, “I’m going to chew myself loose from your boss and make your life a living hell until you find someone to free me.”

  If I hadn’t been glaring at him, I would have missed his flinch, a neuron flash of pain like the dart of a fish beneath a sheet of ice. “That’s not going to happen,” he said. “Lauren said the spell is harmless in the long term, and I’m not going to let you get hurt in the meantime.”

  “Dude.” I rolled my eyes. “Did you tell yourself that before or after you kidnapped me from the back of the police station?” Without waiting for an answer, I set off purposefully after Lauren—or rather, the corner she’d disappeared around.

  “Trust me,” Carson said, easily matching my pace. “I wasn’t nuts about doing that even before I knew what a pain in the butt you were going to be.”

  Weirdly, I sort of believed he hadn’t thought I’d come to harm. Not that it let him off the hook. “Did you dump me in the trunk, or just toss me in the backseat with a blanket over my head?”

  “You should thank me for springing you from testosterone central.” He defrosted a little as the argument turned superficial. “Your junior G-man must be half dead not to realize how short that skirt is.”

  I refused to blush, even though my strides down the hall sort of emphasized his point. “The skirt is standard issue. My legs are too long.”

  “Oh, I disagree,” he said, in a matter-of-fact way that wasn’t matter-of-fact at all. It sounded like approval. Young, handsome Mr. Carson approval. I suspected he was just trading one mask for another, but even I’m susceptible to flattery.

  Then he added in a bland tone, “Your knees are a little bony, though.”

  They absolutely were not. Unless, I guess, they were making an impact on a delicate area.

  I pursed my lips to hold back a vengeful smile. That was mere prudence. The geas had nothing to say about inappropriate banter with the enemy.

  Lauren waited for Carson and me at an open door, arms folded, brows pitched at a scornful angle. “Don’t let the mortal peril of our friend hurry you kids up or anything.”

  As much as I disliked Lauren—which was a lot—I still felt a little guilty for wasting time on a purely selfish freak-out. Duress or not, the important thing was finding the girl. Okay, maybe this was anything but a normal day. But it was my job to put my psyche on the line for a lost soul. Alexis was no different just because she still had a body attached to hers.

  So I squared my shoulders and blew past Lauren into Alexis’s room. It was actually more of a suite, professionally decorated in the violet and green of a pansy patch, but other than the size of the room—and the flat-screen TV on the wall—it wasn’t ostentatious. Maybe because there were so many books.

  Lauren and Carson came in and closed the door. They were an odd pair—the witch, with her vintage punk clothes, and the … whatever Carson was, with his stoic face and haunted eyes. They conferred in soft voices while I made a circuit of the room, running my hand over dustless tables and fluffed pillows. Picking up traces of the living was like getting a radio station at the very edge of my reception, but sometimes it was easier when the signal was boosted by a big event or strong emotion—the same kinds of things that make remnants of the dead stick around.

  I didn’t get anything like that from Alexis’s room, just the faint static of daily living, as if she hadn’t been there in a while. There was a stronger energy attached to some childhood books and mementos on a shelf and a hot spot near the desk where Lauren leaned, arms folded, watching me. Alexis must have invested a lot of time and emotional effort there. I guess you don’t study Latin and Greek if you don’t like putting in the hours.

  There was also a curio case holding trinkets she must have collected. I reached for one, a small human figure carved from reddish stone, and Lauren’s voice stopped me. “Careful. Those are old and delicate. And possibly cursed.”

  “Then shouldn’t they be in a museum?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure the piece was fake, maybe a gift-shop replica. If it had been truly old, let alone cursed, I was close enough that I would have been able to tell without touching it. “There are laws about importing artifacts, aren’t there?”

  Lauren rolled her eyes, and I remembered who I was talking to. Mafia staff witch.

  “Is this important for finding Alexis?” asked Carson. He leaned against a bookcase, arms folded, but his vibe wasn’t relaxed. More like he was hanging back, observing.

  “I don’t know what’s important yet.” I tried to think like Agent Taylor had taught me. Focus on the victim. Her path had to have crossed the kidnapper’s somehow. By knowing her habits and haunts, so to speak, eventually I would see the intersection. “Tell me about Alexis. She seems like a bit of a nerd.”

  “Being smart doesn’t automatically make you a nerd,” said Lauren. Which I guess was true. Alexis had been heading out for a night of partying when she’d disappeared.

  “She is pretty brilliant,” said Carson. “But yeah, I think she’s too cosmopolitan to be called a nerd. I think it was shopping in Rome with her mom that first got her interested in the classical world—ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt.”

  Since I doubted Roman gladiators had kidnapped her, I switched directions with my next question. “How much magic are we dealing with?” I asked. “Are there magical protections around the property? Wards on Alexis’s dorm room? Tracking charms sewn into her underwear?”

  “Can’t you tell?” Lauren asked—about half real question and half taunt.

  “I keep telling you guys,” I snapped, to cover how naive and outgunned I felt. “I read remnants of the dead. Magic isn’t my thing. Mary Poppins could have grabbed Alexis and I wouldn’t know it.”

  Carson allowed himself a small smile. “There is a long list of people who would want to stick it to Devlin Maguire. But Mary Poppins isn’t on it.”

  “Lord Voldemort, then?” What I really wondered was, if Maguire had an arcane arsenal, what did the kidnappers have in their bag of tricks?

  Lauren heaved a sigh. “Magic one-oh-one, Red. This isn’t Harry Potter. There are protection charms here and on the dorm room, of course. Tracking charms are a great idea in theory, but huge power drains. Expensive—magically speaking—to maintain when a GPS chip in her phone works just as well. Most of the time,” she added, preempting my next question.

  That part I got. My cousin Phin loved to give me lectures in Magic 101, and now I wished I’d paid more attention. But I did remember that the major impediment to big, flashy magic was the impractical amount of energy required to make something go against its nature. Magic worked on probabilities and enhanced inclinations. That was why fireballs and flying carpets were fantasy.

  At least, that was what I had thought until now. Maybe it really was just a matter of getting enough power. But power had to come from somewhere.

  Dude, magical theory was a mental labyrinth and I didn’t have a map. So I focused instead on the current problem.

  “You said that Alexis was hidden from your locator spell,” I said to Lauren, confirming what she’d said in Maguire’s office. “Do you think the spell was blocked somehow?”

  She didn’t have to think about it. “Less blocked, more like scrambled.”

  I worked that through. “So someone could be doing it deliberately. Like a radar scrambler.”

  She pointed at me like a game show host. “Ding! Give the girl a toaster.”

  “Look, you.
” She was seriously pissing me off. Worse, her bad vibes were majorly interfering with my mojo. That’s not just an excuse fake psychics use. “You don’t want me to be more useful than this,” I told her, “because it would mean someone is dead. Which I can arrange, if you keep mouthing off.”

  She laughed, then pretended she hadn’t meant to. “I’m sorry, kid. You’re about as intimidating as a hissing kitten.”

  “Lauren,” said Carson, without moving from his lean against the bookcase, “back off or go away. And you, Sunshine, calm down.”

  Has anyone in the history of the planet actually calmed down when someone said “calm down”? All it did was turn up the gas under the teakettle of my temper.

  “Why doesn’t Maguire just pay the stupid ransom?” I demanded. “I mean, what are they asking for? His left kidney?”

  Carson debated a moment and glanced at Lauren, who gave him a “your call” sort of shrug. “Because it’s not money they want,” he finally said. “It’s a thing. And he doesn’t have it.”

  “Why doesn’t he just go get it?” I asked, slightly more calm, but much more confused. “Or send somebody. He seems pretty good at that.” The two of them exchanged another look. “Hey,” I said, at the end of my rope with them. “Stop with the secret eyeball communication. I’m standing right here.”

  Carson sighed and reluctantly confessed, “Because we don’t know exactly what it is.”

  I eyed him suspiciously, but he didn’t look like he was joking. “That doesn’t make any sense. Are you supposed to just guess?”

  He didn’t laugh. “What the kidnappers said was, ‘Bring us the Oosterhouse Jackal.’ But no one here has heard of it.”

  “Did you Google it?” I asked, because that’s what I would do.

  Lauren slapped her forehead. “Oh my gosh, Carson! Why didn’t we think of that? Google! What a genius idea!”

  Carson straightened and jerked a thumb toward the door. “Out, Lauren. Now.”

  I expected an argument, or some more eye rolling. Instead, she indulged him, calling, “Don’t let her beat you up again,” before she closed the door behind her.