around us as we blocked the sidewalk. It was windy and damp and weird to think it was still mid-morning. I checked Carson’s watch and realized the lights in the museum had been out for just a few minutes. I’d been on psychic time while talking with Ivy.
“What happened?” Carson asked. He looked ready to catch me if I started to sway. “Did you reach her?”
“Yes. That’s why the headache. They’re not all as easy as Mrs. Hardwicke.” The ghost-talking itself wasn’t hard, but pulling the shade out of slumber and helping her piece her memory together left me shaking. And, oh yeah, so did the realization that we were up against someone—or someones—willing to commit kidnapping and murder to get their hands on a magical artifact strong enough to stop an army.
“Daisy.” Carson’s voice—firm, steady, just the right amount of bossy—called me back to the present. “You’re about five steps ahead of me right now. Tell me what’s next.”
“Next,” I said, making myself sound a whole lot stronger than I felt, “I need an ocean of Coca-Cola and a ride to St. Louis.”
17
WE MADE GOOD time down the interstate, in our second stolen car of the day. I was so worried about losing the lead on Alexis, so worried about getting to the jackal ahead of anyone else, that one more auto theft didn’t seem that big a deal.
I had thought the headache might be the result of the sextuplet of promises duking it out in my subconscious, but at some point I’d felt one geas knit seamlessly to the other. Alexis’s life came first. But as the clues came together I was convinced that the trail of the Jackal paralleled the trail of Alexis’s kidnappers.
Three Cokes and a thirty-minute nap had banished the migraine by the time we got out of the Chicago traffic. On the open road, Carson drove fast, but not obnoxiously so.
The low-slung bucket seat of the muscle car made me feel like I was reclining on the pavement. “If you showed up at my house in this car,” I said, “my aunt would never let me go out with you.”
Carson glanced at me, then back at the road. “Does she have something against muscle cars?”
“No. Just Corvettes. I think a guy with a Corvette broke her heart once.”
I unfolded—again—the note that Carson had given me from Elbows. “From your boyfriend,” he’d said, once we’d boosted our ride. Elbows apologized for not finding a name, just that the query looking for the field notes of Oosterhouse’s expedition had come from someone with an OI student ID. It kept this Michael Johnson guy in the running.
“Let’s talk about this,” said Carson, picking up the torn pieces of the card with the ear from the car’s cupholder. I’d shown them to him when I’d caught him up on my adventures, and he’d confirmed that it was an eavesdropping spell he’d seen before. My cousin Phin would call it representational magic. Apparently the Maguire operation called it convenient and electronically un-detectable.
“You think the same guys who kidnapped Alexis are responsible for this and for the attack in the cemetery?”
“There’s magic involved in all three things.” I counted them off on my fingers. “The kidnapping, the attack, and the ear spell. Either it’s all one group or the Midwest is overrun by roving gangs of magicians.”
He actually considered that possibility, then discarded it. “And you think they’re related to the Brotherhood of the Black Jackal that your aunt told you about?”
“They have the Institute in common, and it’s hard to ignore the jackal-y theme.” I turned in my seat to face him, the better to make my case. I’d take a hazy theory over clueless stumbling any day. “This is what I think. Oosterhouse’s secret society … say it’s less Dead Egyptians Society and more Magic Fastball Club. And the guys we met in the cemetery somehow found out about it and revived the tradition.”
He looked doubtful. “So a bunch of students stumble across a reference to Oosterhouse in their studies and start experimenting with magic?”
I shrugged. “Why not? Half my dorm mates are experimenting with something or another.”
He slid me a curious glance, then looked back at the road. “What are you experimenting with?”
“A life of crime.” I didn’t want to think about school right now. Especially midterms on Monday—and the fact that I hadn’t studied for them.
Carson ventured his own theory. “Maybe this Brotherhood never really died out. Just went deeper underground.”
“Aunt Ivy did say the one