Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,56

a live wire, Daisy Goodnight. But whatever happened is gone.”

I was saved from having to think of a reply—or think at all—by an announcement over the loudspeaker that the museum would be closing in thirty minutes.

“We’d better hurry,” he said. But he hesitated just an instant before dropping my hand.

We dropped our pretense, too, half running back to the Ancient Cultures wing, through Greece, which was full of beautiful urns and pottery but contained nothing even vaguely jackal-y. “Where the hell is Egypt?”

“In Northern Africa,” said Carson. And he thought I didn’t take things seriously. At the juncture of halls, he glanced in both directions, then said with authority, “That way.”

We went through Mesopotamia, where a stone carving held the spirit echo of a mason. Art was like that, full of shades that had etched bits of themselves into rock or painted bits of their souls onto canvas, fed by the reverent awe of the museum visitors.

I didn’t have time for awe. I caught the ghostly essence of frankincense and myrrh and a whisper that quickened my pace, a hum that sang in my skull and down my spine. Death was my resonant frequency, and something beyond the next arched doorway was playing my tune.

I expected a ghost, but there were two. One was an Egyptian woman, complete with elaborately dressed black hair and exotic makeup. Her clothes were obvious finery, and a heavy bejeweled necklace covered more of her chest than her linen dress did. Her kohl-lined eyes stared in wide dismay at the other ghost, a middle-aged security guard with a crew cut and a thick neck, who looked every bit as surprised as she did.

Maybe because he was standing over his own body, which lay on the floor, blood spreading into a scarlet Rorschach blot across the white marble tile.

18

CARSON STUMBLED TO a stop in the doorway, and the name that burst out of his lips was either profanity or invocation, and I didn’t think he was very religious. Either way, it kicked me out of my shock and into action.

I skidded to my knees beside the guard and searched for a wound, more by touch than by sight. Reaching under his stocky body I found a tear in the soaked polyester of his shirt, and under that, a small, stiletto-sized hole below his ribs. Blood seeped hot over my fingers, and I pressed upward until it stopped.

“Don’t—” warned Carson, too late. I knew I wasn’t supposed to touch anything, but I knew dead, and I knew mostly dead, and this was the latter. What I didn’t know was if I could keep one from turning into the other.

“Get help,” I ordered, then sank into my psychic senses. Everything physical retreated to a shadowed fog, and everything spirit sharpened to cutting clarity. I could see the pale rope of psyche running from the man’s chest to his shade, standing over his own body. When I placed my hand next to it, to better apply pressure to his wound, a tingle crawled up my arms, like I held an alternating current between them. My skin burned with the life and deathness of it.

“Why aren’t the alarms going off?” The dazed question came from the ghost of the guard. He was in shock, but he had a vibrancy about him that I’d never seen in a remnant.

Because he wasn’t a remnant. He was whole. I was looking at a soul, and the psychic thread that tethered him to his body.

For a moment I couldn’t breathe. The current between my hands, the glowing thread that ran between my fingers, wasn’t the ghost of a man, but the life of one.

“He only just left,” said the shade of the Egyptian woman, in a pragmatic sort of voice that drew me back to earth.

“Who did?” I asked, trying to reorient myself.

She looked at me impatiently. She was much younger than I’d first thought. My age, maybe, and strikingly beautiful. “The man who did this—and took the stone jackal.”

The jackal. I didn’t think I had room for any more “Oh hell no” inside of me. But I was wrong.

With an effort, I blinked my psychic senses into the background and focused on the empty pedestal nearby, the glass case lifted off and set aside. The guard’s question had been a good one. Why wasn’t the alarm going off?

And here was another: Why was I seeing some kind of connection between the man’s spirit and the empty display? It was murky and hard to