Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,58

rope were dragging across my arms where they held the guard’s soul to his body. Whatever Carson was doing, it was working, but something was pulling the spirit in another direction, and it wasn’t the Veil.

“His heart is beating stronger,” said Carson, effort in his voice. “I think maybe—”

The Veil shimmered closed, its hum ceasing without flourish. An instant later, the guard’s image vanished and I felt him snap back into his body like a rubber band.

And in the very same instant, which I couldn’t dismiss as coincidence, but couldn’t explain, either, the alarm began to wail.

For two people who wanted to stay under the radar, Carson and I had been spectacularly unsuccessful.

The museum staff poured though the doorway, the vanguard pulling up short at the amount of blood and the waxy pallor of the man on the floor. But when I said, “He’s still breathing,” the woman in front dropped the wholly inadequate-looking first-aid kit, pulled on some latex gloves, and told me to get out of the way.

I yielded my spot, but not until she’d gotten her own hand on the trickling wound in the man’s back. Then Carson helped me to my feet—adding bloody handprints to the gory blotches already staining my shirt. My jeans were soaked from the knees down, and I looked like I’d stabbed the guy myself.

“Do not move,” said another guard, pointing to me and Carson. “The cops are going to want to talk to you.”

Someone had turned off the alarm, and now I could hear sirens. The familiar choke hold of the geas hardly registered in the grappling sea of knots twisting up in my chest.

“Priestess!” Cleo appeared in the archway, shouting. “The thief is this way!”

I don’t know what possessed me—desperation, vengeance, or the certainty I couldn’t really get in any deeper. I got my gazelle on and shot for the door, leaping over the circle of first-aid workers around the fallen guard and slingshotting out of Egypt and into the Mesopotamian Hall.

Shouts of surprise burst out behind me, and an instant later Carson did the same, hard on my heels.

The Egyptian girl had popped to the next junction, and I sprinted past winged figures, stone seraphim watching our footrace through the climate-controlled sterility of their exile.

In the main hall of the Ancient World wing, I saw a blur of a figure, heard Cleo calling, “That’s him!”

And then, at the end of the hall, blocking the way out, two police officers, guns drawn.

“Stop! Police!”

The thief cut right, between the marble-draped goddesses that marked the hall into Rome. Shoes squeaking on slick tile, I made an abrupt turn, too, into the hallway to the restrooms. Carson caught up with me there, grabbing my arm and stopping my headlong rush.

“Come on,” I said, pointing toward the door we’d come through earlier. “We can cut him off in Pompeii.”

He pushed me behind him and took the lead. “Stay back and let me handle this.”

There was no time to argue about misplaced chivalry. Plus, it wasn’t misplaced. The guy had a knife, and considering his employer, Carson was surely better suited to handle that than I was.

But like hell was I staying in the hall. I shored up my defenses against the death echoes of Mount Vesuvius and ran after Carson, into the exhibit.

The thief was coming in the other way. He drew up, panting, in the center of the reconstructed villa, surrounded by the plaster casts of the volcano’s victims. He made a weird double image to my senses, like I was seeing him with my physical and psychic vision and they didn’t quite match up. Maybe because in his corduroy trousers and unfashionable sweater and dark-rimmed glasses he looked like a coffeehouse slacker and not a stiletto-wielding art-museum robber.

He had a fat messenger bag over his shoulder, and I guessed the artifact he’d stolen was in there, because his hands were empty. But his face was full of smirk. “Too slow, Team Maguire,” he taunted. “Better step it up.”

Carson surprised me with the outrage in his voice and the clenched fists at his side. “You nearly killed someone, asshole!”

“But you saved him, so boohoo,” drawled the thief. “That was really impressive, by the way.”

There was a weird dynamic here, though I didn’t always trust my read on the living. This guy knew who we were, and something about Carson’s accusation had a personal edge to it, like maybe he knew who the guy was, too.

“You two work well together,” said Smirky McSlackerson. “Too