Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,5

pebble into a pond. The Veil shimmered with a promised glimpse into a place outside the walls of time and space, lingered until the moment when my curiosity became a longing ache, then vanished.

It was always that way. I could almost hear a whisper. There’s something stupendous here, but not for you. Not yet.

But this time … this time, in the closing shudder in the surface tension between there and here, I thought I saw a shape. Something that might have been the inky silhouette of a lean, feral-looking dog.

That was all I got, a corner-of-the-eye impossibility. Then the recoil of all that effort to hold Bruiser together slammed a ball-peen hammer of a headache right between my eyes.

“Basingstoke,” I gasped.

But not in time for Taylor to catch me before I face-planted into the Minnesota mud.

3

“REALLY,” I TOLD Taylor for the fiftieth time, “I’m fine.”

I admit, I might have been more convincing if I weren’t sitting in Alexis Maguire’s desk chair with my head between my knees.

On the plus side, I’d known as soon as I stepped into her dorm room that she wasn’t dead. I was less certain I wasn’t dying a slow death by migraine.

Taylor twisted the top off a bottle of Coke and handed it to me. “It’s not usually this bad.”

I finished half the soda in three long gulps, then held the cold plastic to my pounding temple. It was my second bottle. He’d had the first waiting for me as soon as he’d picked me up from the mud behind the dorm.

“It’s not usually this hard.” I didn’t mind admitting that to Taylor, since Agent Gerard was on the other side of the room with Chief Logan and his two detectives. The older officers had their heads together, maybe debating whether to take my word that Alexis was still alive, maybe debating whether to take me to the funny farm.

My cousin Amy swears there is some Goodnight charm that protects us from men in white coats, so I wasn’t worried about the second possibility. But I would be monumentally pissed if I’d gotten this headache just to have the police dismiss the few clues I could give them.

Goodnights and law enforcement go way back. Supposedly, one of my ancestors consulted on the Jack the Ripper case, though maybe that’s not a ringing endorsement. My track record for solving cases was a lot better.

Not that you’d know it, from the way Gerard bitched about working with a psychic. When he came to San Antonio he got Taylor as a partner, which meant he got me. Until this trip, he’d talked to me as little as possible.

Of course, back when Agent Taylor and I first met, he hadn’t known what to make of me, either. He was straight out of the academy, and he’d inherited me from his predecessor. I’d inherited the gig from my late aunt Diantha, and though I’d done a good bit of work for the local and state police, I was still earning my cred with the FBI.

Our very first case together, Taylor and I were stuck in the car on a ride to a crime scene in the Rio Grande valley. That was nearly a year ago, back when Aunt Pet still rode along with us. She’d been my legal guardian until a judge awarded me emancipation at seventeen so that I could do my civic duty without her having to take off from her job every time someone died or disappeared in the South Texas desert.

“So … forgive me if this is a rude question,” Taylor had begun. There was no radio reception and the only sound in the car was the click of Aunt Pet’s laptop keys as she worked in the backseat.

“Born this way,” I answered. I didn’t need to read minds—which I can’t do—to know what rude question he wanted to ask. I’d only been surprised it had taken him so long.

“Just born psychic?” he’d asked. “Not hit by lightning or something?”

“Nope.” I leaned forward to search for a radio station. Any radio station. “No brain fever, no head trauma, no near-death experience.”

“No traumatic death of a loved one?”

I sat back and gave him the stink eye. He had to know about my parents. There was no way the details of their murder hadn’t been passed along in office gossip.

“Look,” I said. “If we’re going to work together, let’s get a few things straight. I won’t do any of that TV-psychic flimflammery and you won’t ask me trick