Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,26
after a few minutes he broke the quiet. “Can I ask you a question?”
I sighed and answered, “I was born this way.”
“That explains a lot, but it wasn’t my question.” We’d reached a state highway, and cruising speed. “Who is St. Gertrude?”
I fought a wary fidget and played it cool. “The patron saint of the recently dead. And of people afraid of mice, oddly enough. Apparently she had a lot of cats.”
My worry was justified. Carson reached under his coat into his shirt pocket and pulled out my necklace, Saint Gertrude’s medal dangling in the dashboard light. “Then you might miss this.”
It was too dim to make out the saintly nun in her habit, cat cradled in her arms. But I imagined her scowling in disapproval, not because I’d blown the chance to send Taylor a message, but because I’d almost forgotten whose side Carson was on.
I snatched the pendant from his fingers, furious with him and me both. “Jackass.”
A muscle flexed in his jaw, but I didn’t know him well enough to know what that meant. I found out an instant later, when he swerved onto the shoulder, stopped the car, and twisted in the seat. Suddenly he was in my space, with a hand on the dash and another on the headrest, beside my ear. He moved so fast I hadn’t even seen him unbuckle his seat belt. I drew back against the passenger door. It didn’t occur to me to open it; I was that sure he’d stop me if I tried. But really it was the leashed anger in his gaze that trapped me there.
“Yeah,” he said. “I am a jackass. But let me tell you about the guy I work for. If your Agent Taylor interferes with the boss’s plan—any of his plans, but especially any involving Alexis—Maguire will make him wish he’d never been born.”
Hearing their names in Carson’s whipcord threat raised their specters in the cold darkness of the desolate road. My pulse beat so hard that it was difficult to swallow, but I had to before I could speak. With courage as thin as my breath, I challenged, “If you mean a long swim in the river, just say so.”
“The big man doesn’t kill people very often. He just makes them wish they were dead.” Bitterness honed the razor edge of his voice. “At the very least, he will make sure your boy loses his career before it even starts.”
I got his point. Maguire needed me alive and cooperative. But Taylor was expendable, and I had put him in danger by trying to leave him a clue. Worse, Maguire would add him to the list of ways to punish me if I pissed him off.
I have a big family. It’s a long list. Carson couldn’t have struck closer to my heart if he tried. I started to think maybe I should be worried about how well he aimed.
Warm air poured from the car vents, but my insides were icy. “If he’s such a bad man,” I asked, “what does that make you for working for him?”
I’d shot blind, but scored a hit as well. The specters in his gaze flinched, though he didn’t move for a long moment. Then, wordlessly, he took the necklace from my hand and fastened it around my neck.
He clasped the chain over my hair, getting it on the first try, before I even thought of protesting the invasion of my space. Before I thought anything, other than that he smelled really nice for an apprentice criminal.
When he sat back, he was cool and in control. “It makes me a bad man who doesn’t want anything bad to happen to you.” Mood shifting, he turned and put the sedan in gear. “So let’s get to work.”
That was the best idea I’d heard all night. I exhaled my own tension, happy to have a goal. Or the idea of a goal, since I didn’t know what to do next.
“I didn’t read anything at Alexis’s dorm,” I said, dropping the oval pendant under my shirt while Carson pulled back onto the empty state highway. And when I say empty, I mean empty. I’d seen no other cars while we were stopped. “Her bodyguard didn’t have much useful to say. He was escorting her out to the car to take her to a party and”—I didn’t go into detail, just made a fake gun with my fingers and a pistol-shot noise—“that’s all she wrote.”