Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,37

turned, wary at my preparatory tone. I pushed my wind-tangled hair behind my ears and squinted up at him. “Have you lost someone close to you?”

“Why do you ask?” His cheeks were bright red with cold. “Do I have someone checking up on me?”

I shook my head gently. I admit I can be abrasive with the living. But I know how to be kind with the grieving. And bone-deep instinct told me that Carson, despite the careful casualness of his tone, had lost someone important to him. “I don’t sense anyone around you. But I can look more closely if you want.”

There was a nanosecond when he thought about it. And then we’d moved on. “Don’t bother.” He hooked a hand under my arm and hurried us into the outpost of transportation and commerce. “Come on. I’m freezing and you’re starving. I’ve been listening to your stomach growl for the past ten minutes.”

Nice. I’d been expounding on the metaphysical mysteries of the universe and that was all he noticed?

Except I wasn’t fooled. His demeanor was only a part of the whole. The Carson he let people see was just a remnant, with his soul hidden in an unknown beyond.

13

AT THE TRUCK stop, three twenty-dollar bills convinced the driver of an eighteen-wheeler to give us a lift to the next town on his route. The guy looked us over—Carson in his button-down and muddy trousers, two a.m. shadow on his jaw and a cut on his cheek, me swimming in his coat, my striped socks up over my knees, my Converse sneakers covered in skulls. We looked one shotgun away from a Kentucky wedding, but the trucker pocketed the money and didn’t ask any questions.

I had plenty of questions—like where were we headed and why had Carson turned off his phone instead of calling for a getaway car that didn’t smell like chewing tobacco and cardboard-pine-tree air freshener. I assumed it was part of the plan where we didn’t get killed or shanghaied, except that I’d always been told that was exactly what to expect if you were foolish enough to get in a car with a stranger.

But true to his word, at the outskirts of the next town, the trucker dropped us in an acre of parking lot that conveniently connected a Denny’s, a La Quinta Inn, and a twenty-four-hour Walmart. For those times when you’re roaming the tundra and have a three a.m. need for a new set of snow tires.

“Come on,” said Carson as the semi pulled away. The fog of his breath gave him an unearned halo under the streetlamps. He left it behind as he grabbed my hand and hustled for the restaurant and out of the cold.

I was rounding third on a Grand Slam breakfast and sliding home into the second helping of pancakes I’d requested instead of bacon. Carson eyed the rapidly disappearing stack with what I decided to interpret as awestruck wonder.

“You’re obviously feeling better.”

“My amazing powers require a lot of sustenance,” I said between bites. “I figure I’d better top off the tank for whatever comes next. Which, by the way, we should probably discuss. You can start with why you turned off your phone instead of calling for a pickup, or getaway car, or agent extraction, or whatever term you people prefer.”

“ ‘You people’?”

“Don’t make me say ‘mobsters’ in the middle of a Denny’s.”

He glanced around the restaurant, which was virtually empty. The waitress had left a carafe of coffee when she’d dropped off our order, and we hadn’t seen her since. “No one’s listening.”

“Good.” I shoveled another bite of pancakes into my mouth. “Because I want to talk about magic.”

“And I want you to tell me everything Alexis’s grandmother said about the guys who showed up at the cemetery.”

“There’s not much.” I stacked my plates and pushed them to the side. “She recognized at least one of them as someone Alexis knew. Maybe they met at a sorority party, which would explain why Alexis had on the pearls. Mrs. Hardwicke said the boys were in some kind of fraternity.”

“Fraternity,” echoed Carson, his tone hard to read. I was going with disbelief.

“She actually said ‘brotherhood,’ which sounds more ominous. I mean, if I was going to form a kidnapping and magic club, I’d go with that over ‘frat house.’ ”

“Are you taking this seriously?” he asked, and I didn’t have any trouble with that tone. I answered it as it deserved.

“Uh, yeah. Dude put an invisible fastball through the back window