Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,84

as a whole, time eroding personality. Their bodies remained, scraps of leather over brown bone, but the individual spirits had melded into one collective consciousness.

Just as well. I gazed at the unwrapped mummy, pretty certain that gawping ten-year-olds weren’t what he had in mind when planning for eternity.

Carson tapped my shoulder from behind and I jumped, because I might be all enlightened and respectful of mortal remains, but dude … mummies. They were always tapping people on the shoulder right before they strangled them.

“Over here,” he said. “I think I found it.”

Around the corner, the exhibit was set up to look like a preparation room. Murals showed priests readying a body for the afterlife, presided over by the canine-headed Anubis. And in the center, guarding the entrance to the tomb, was the god in his animal form.

A black stone jackal. The basalt statue had a polished gleam and an ageless stare. But was it our Black Jackal?

It was on a pedestal with no glass and very dramatic overhead lighting. I glanced around for spectators—a guard and a museum guide were both busy with fourth graders—then flexed my fingers to get my blood flowing. Careful of alarms, I held my hands toward the statue and let my psyche scan its points and curves, reaching toward its stone heart for anything that remained inside.

“Is this it?” Carson asked.

There was certainly power and potential, but it was locked down deep somehow. I answered him slowly. “I expected more of a kick, maybe something from the sailors that died on the same ship only eighty years ago. There’s just a faint trace of them.”

“But it is the artifact from the news article?” he asked.

“I’m sure.” We stood shoulder to shoulder, gazing at the statue like it was the Mona Lisa and we were trying to solve the Da Vinci Code. “What do we do now?” I asked.

Carson ran his eyes over the lean canine shape. “Now we make a plan for how to get it out of here.”

“I’m open to suggestions.” That was going to take a lot more than a Jedi mind trick. The statue was actually dog-sized. Not Chihuahua tiny, either. Even if we could get it off the pedestal without triggering an alarm, we weren’t going to be able to walk out with it in my purse.

“Can we use magic?” he asked, under cover of the kids squealing over the mummies. “The Brotherhood used it to break into that case in St. Louis.”

“Yeah, but they had to stab a guard to get the energy for it. That’s sort of a deal breaker for the good guys.”

Circling the statue, he asked, “Can we use the Jackal itself? Is there an on switch?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let me just look that up in the instruction manual.”

Carson glanced at me over the statue’s back, calmly intent, reflecting none of my frustration. “Hey. I’m just pitching ideas here. Don’t bite my head off.”

He was right, and I gave a guilty squirm. “Sorry. I just hate not having the answers.” It was painful to be so close but still lack the one variable to let me solve for x. “Plus, all this”—I waved a hand to encompass the mummies, the museum, all of it—“isn’t helping. It’s like standing in an electrical field.”

“It’s okay. Let’s just focus on the Jackal.” He was right about that, too. “Is any of that electricity coming from the statue?”

I focused my other Sight to look again. “Barely. Which is weird. I wouldn’t expect ancient pharaoh, but I should be getting more from the deaths of the crew of the transport ship. Not to mention Oosterhouse.”

“No,” said Carson, hiding none of his dislike for the professor. “Let’s not mention Oosterhouse.”

Behind him, one of the field trip teachers wrapped her sweater tighter, glancing around for a draft. The room had chilled, so slowly I’d only just noticed it. I didn’t fool myself that it was the air-conditioning. Some very real spirit had slipped into the replica tomb.

It didn’t come from the crumbling mummies or the artifacts of embalming. This was something familiar.

The shade of Oosterhouse appeared, fading in like breath fogging on glass. He looked exactly like the remnant on the artifact we’d left at the apartment, but he shouldn’t have been able to travel so far from it. Yet he looked at me with recognition.

“How are you here?” I whispered. “Do you haunt this jackal, too?” No one else—including Carson—reacted to anything but the chill. The shade must be drawing a