Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,72
had listened calmly as I caught him up, but he’d pushed aside his food. By the time I’d finished, his folded hands rested on the table, knuckles white.
“I’m not like them,” he said tightly. “I wouldn’t use up … I didn’t know.…” He broke off, to stare out the window, his jaw muscle working as he struggled with his thoughts and some emotion I didn’t understand.
Finally he turned back and met my gaze. “Daisy, I’m so sorry for hurting you back there.”
I was stunned. It was the most genuine apology he’d given me, for something I would never hold against him. “Carson—I’m fine. I think my mojo will come back, but even if it doesn’t—” My voice broke, and he flinched. Not much, but visibly. I pulled on my brave-girl armor for both our sakes. “Even if it doesn’t, I’m still here. You did it to save both of us, not just yourself. You’re nothing like the Brotherhood.”
He let my assurance stand for a few seconds, maybe letting it sink in. When he did speak, it was like we were going to pretend that moment of weakness hadn’t happened. “I don’t think they were trying to kill us. I think they were trying to do exactly what happened—drain you to exhaustion and distract me while they made off with you and the artifact.”
“How would they know you could make with the deflector shield?” I asked. “You didn’t know until you felt—whatever it was that happened when Pompeii hit me on the first time through. Did you?”
He got a little bit of a dodgy look, like he was about to tell me something else he’d been holding back. “Not on that scale. I did something like it at the cemetery. Remember, I told you to think invisible thoughts? But that was just …” He waved a hand.
“Jedi mind tricks,” I finished. I thought about what Johnson had said about collecting the pieces needed for the fiendish plan. “You did have a theory that a psychic who could talk to the dead was one of the resources the Brotherhood couldn’t get on their own. Why they need the Maguire organization.”
“Yeah, I did suggest that.” He didn’t look happy about being right. “But why?”
“Maybe to read this.” I put my hand on McSlackerson’s messenger bag on the seat beside me. Did I feel a tingle of spirit from the artifact inside, or was that wishful thinking? “Maybe this holds a remnant with a clue to the Black Jackal.”
“Which still leaves the question … What is the Black Jackal?”
I explained what I had put together, leaving out the part about Phin’s help. “I think Oosterhouse discovered how to draw on remnants and shades for magic and somehow left that information for his disciples. The Brotherhood has been doing it all along, just on a relatively small scale. But the Oosterhouse Jackal, or Black Jackal, will let them use that spirit power more efficiently.”
“Like a transistor that amplifies an electronic signal,” said Carson, following the thread.
He was as bad as Phin. “It’s a thingy. It makes it work. I don’t need to know how.” I drummed my fingers on the table. Magical theory really was not my thing, but I didn’t want to risk calling my cousins again and drawing them further into the situation. “I would like to know how they do magic now, without the Jackal. It’s not something everyone can do.”
Carson leaned back in his seat. “Secret societies have secret rituals. Initiations.”
“Symbols!” I pointed to my arm. “Johnson had a tattoo of a jackal. And when I touched it, I got a powerful jolt of remnant energy. Maybe the tattoo links the members of the Brotherhood somehow.”
“Everyone has tattoos these days,” said Carson, and pointed to a family sitting across the aisle from us, enjoying their snack and their train ride. The mom’s pants leg had ridden up to show a butterfly inked on her ankle. “Even nice, normal Midwesterners. Even me.”
“Really?” Curse my vivid imagination. “Where?”
He sipped his soda. “That’s not important.” But he looked pleased that I was curious.
That flustered me. Because I was curious, and we had known each other all of twenty-four hours, and twenty-three and one half of them had been spent on the run.
“Okay, then,” I said. “If you won’t tell me that, tell me about your mother.”
He reacted with a very careful nonreaction. Most people would be at least a little surprised by the non sequitur. “How Freudian of you, Miss Goodnight.”