Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,91
part of me registered guards and police helping the shocked patrons to the exit, but most of me only had eyes for the undead that were backing me toward the towering skeleton of the tyrannosaur.
There were so many of them. My psyche couldn’t reach all of them—
Unless I let them get really, really close.
“Daisy!”
I thought I heard my name, shouted from amid the melee of escapees near the doors, but between the screaming and the yelling and the grinding of the gears on the security doors, I couldn’t be sure, and I couldn’t take my attention from the advancing undead to look.
There’d been a shift in the magic around the walking dead, the ropes of power thinning to mere puppet strings. I wouldn’t have a better chance to shut them down. I hauled up the strength to slam closed a psychic door between the Jackal and the mummies, cutting them off from his control, freeing their abused bodies.
Without magic to knit them together, they crumbled and cracked. Dry, brittle bone and parched flesh turned to rubble and dust around me.
“Those were priceless! Priceless artifacts!” A hysterical woman in a business suit came out of hiding, fueled by outrage.
“They were more than that,” I said, too shaky from the effort to be angry. “They were people.”
The woman was accompanied by a guy in a lab coat and a woman in glasses. Nerd types, straight from central casting. “Forget that, Margo,” said Lab Coat. “Let’s get out of here.”
With an almighty clang, the security doors slammed closed. Margo screamed, then shrieked again when another handful of stragglers, led by a security guard, emerged from one of the exhibit wings.
“You didn’t make it out, either?” asked the guard.
I let the others answer him, and started worrying about Carson. He’d seemed like he knew what he was doing when he ran off, but he’d been gone so long—
A lion’s furious growl rolled out of the wing to my right. I spun toward it—and then whirled again as another roar answered the first. The sounds echoed through the huge hall, but it was unmistakably a second animal.
“That came from the African hall,” said a woman with glasses.
“How many man-eating lions are in this place?” I asked.
“Three,” she said as our band of stragglers clustered together. “One from Mfuwe and two from Tsavo.”
Margo screamed again as the first lion, looking bigger and toothier than ever, burst from the hall of Ancient Americas. Behind him came the glowing shades of a half-dozen ancient Americans, each carrying a spear capable of taking down a woolly mammoth.
Limping behind them, holding a spear of his own, was Carson. As the clan of the cave bear drove the snarling beast toward one end of the Great Hall, he backed toward us, keeping the tribesmen in his eye line.
“Good to see you,” I said—a massive understatement, but I didn’t want to break his concentration. “You found some friends.”
He nodded without taking his gaze from the anthropological apparitions. “So did you. What’s the situation?”
I glanced at the tight knot of stragglers. “Trapped like rats, I think.”
“No service?” Margo tapped her cell phone with rising hysteria. “How can there be no service?”
Lab Coat just looked at her. “How can there be mummies?”
“They know people are trapped inside,” said the security guard. He meant to be reassuring. But my “they” was different from his. The world outside knew we were here, but so did the Brotherhood.
A prowling growl from the shadows raised the hair on the back of my neck. No one screamed this time; they all froze with a collective held breath.
“I don’t think we can hold them all off like this,” said Carson, meaning him and me. “We need a place that we can fortify and make a plan.”
“But where?” I whispered. “This place is full of things that are full of spirits.”
“What about the library?” asked Glasses Lady. She wore a staff ID badge, but I couldn’t see her name. “There’s a landline, and the reading room locks. And if things get really bad, the rare book vault is hermetically sealed and impenetrable.”
“Sounds good,” said Carson. “Daisy, take the lead to feel out anything in the way. I’ll follow—I can at least keep the big lion at bay for a minute or two.”
“Who put the kids in charge?” demanded an old guy with “retired tourist” written all over him. He and the woman with him were the only ones of the seven not wearing museum badges.