Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,60

next, and I felt weirdly like my head was floating away from my body, and not on purpose. I clung to consciousness with ten fingernails, but I was on the steep slope over the chasm of oblivion.

“Stay with me, Daisy,” said Carson against my ear. I felt it more than heard it, rumbling through my skin where we touched. “He’s almost tapped out.”

So was I. The smell of sulfur and choke of ash rushed in and I slid bonelessly out of Carson’s grip. Dying was such a rotten way to learn I wasn’t nearly the badass I thought I was.

19

“PRIESTESS! WAKE UP.” The words banged my aching skull like the clapper of a bell. “You’re in terrible danger!”

It was reassuring to hear a voice. Less reassuring that it was the ghost of the Egyptian girl, because that didn’t mean I wasn’t dead. Especially since I seemed to be dangling from someone’s shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

Cleo trotted alongside the guy currently carting me like a sack of potatoes through Ancient Greece. A guy who was not Carson.

“Do something, Priestess! I cannot touch this brigand!”

She tried grabbing his arm and jumping in his way, but he literally walked through her.

Some hunch snagged a memory, the image of the guy in the cemetery holding Mrs. Hardwicke’s necklace as she vanished, and the half-formed idea made me warn Cleo away.

“Don’t.” My voice was just a croak, hoarse from the grit of the ash storm. “Don’t touch him.”

The guy adjusted my weight on his shoulders by giving me a toss. I landed hard, knocking the air from my lungs and rattling my brain. “Don’t worry about your boyfriend, sweetheart. You just get your breath back. We’ve got a job for you.”

He patted me on the ass, and I saw red. I mean, more red—beyond the haze of blood rushing to my pounding head. I had a one-abduction-per-twenty-four-hours policy, and this yahoo was over the limit.

Finally, a benefit to being tall besides reaching the top shelf at the supermarket: leverage. I punched him in the kidney—or where I guessed something vulnerable and extremely painful like a kidney would be—and when he cursed and twisted, I let all my weight slide backward. He had to drop me or go down, too.

This was going to hurt.

I curled my arm over my head and tucked my shoulder so that I rolled when I hit the floor. And I kept rolling, all the way to my feet, because the guy was coming after me. I was numb where my hip and shoulder had smacked the marble tile, but at least everything moved.

I don’t think the guy had a plan B. He charged at me, and I grabbed a priceless Greek vase and smashed him over the head with it. He crashed to the floor and went limp.

That’s vases, two; kidnappers, zero.

I checked—quickly—to make sure he was still breathing. And then I checked—not so quickly—his face and my memory. This was not the thief, McSlackerson. This was someone else. I thought he might have been in the cemetery, but I couldn’t be sure.

Cleo popped up beside me, and I jumped—which made every muscle in my body protest. The parts where I hit the floor weren’t so numb anymore.

“That was thrilling!” she cried. “You fight like an Amazon.”

“Thank you,” I wheezed, holding my ribs.

I staggered back through the door to Pompeii like a freshman at her first keg party. After all that sound and fury, I’d expected total devastation, but from what I could tell through the hazy curtain of dust, the damage to the exhibit was cosmetic. There were no piles of ash, no fire, no incinerated bodies.

No Carson.

I remembered him calling my name, his hands tangling in my hair as he kept my head from hitting the floor when I’d gone limp in the volcano attack. After that, there was just the murky twilight of unconsciousness.

“Where’s my friend?” I asked Cleo. Adrenaline hadn’t dismissed my headache but sent it to sit in the corner. “How long was I out?”

“Moments only,” she said, bouncing with excitement. “When you fainted, the magician laid you down so gently, and then he turned on the thief like a lion. The knave took one look and fled, and your magician pursued.”

“He just left me here to get hauled off like yesterday’s trash?”

“That ruffian”—she jerked a thumb toward the unconscious guy in Greece—“was not here then. It was like he stepped out of the air after the other two left. But you can catch them