Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,114

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.

37

DINOSAURS 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