stopped, too, and though I couldn’t see him well, I thought he softened a bit. “Well, he didn’t lie, did he? You opened the door to the afterlife, and he sure as hell showed us the Jackal.”
I clenched my fists in front of me, like Oosterhouse was standing there. “I’d like to wring his ghostly neck. He had a lot of nerve abusing my secret idealism that way.” A thought occurred to me. “Do you think he heard the whole conversation on the train, and only pretended he’d been awakened just before morning?”
“You’re the spirit expert.” He studied me for a long moment. “When the Jackal pointed out how much good you could do if you joined them, were you tempted at all?”
“I’m already doing good.” I believed that with conviction. At least, on the whole, even if I had screwed the pooch by opening the Veil for Oosterhouse. “And what he actually said was ‘remake the world.’ Not even I am arrogant enough to think I have any business doing that.”
“But we have the book,” said Carson. “And it must be important or they wouldn’t still want it. It has to be the key to their power.” He caught my hand, and I felt a tingle, like when our abilities meshed. “If we could use the secrets in the book, think of how much more good you could do. You wouldn’t just solve murders after the fact. You could stop them from happening. Keep more people from being hurt or killed.”
Back in his aunt’s kitchen, we’d talked about finding the Jackal and using it—if it had turned out to be a powerful artifact and not a megalomaniac überghost—to rescue Alexis. But Carson seemed to be talking about something different.
“This power uses up spirits, Carson. There’s nothing good about that.”
“Until we translate the book, we won’t know if it has to. Your affinity for spirit energy and my ability to channel power into magic might get around that.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly. His reasoning was more tempting than anything the Black Jackal had put before me, but that didn’t make it right. “I could also sprout wings and fly. But I’m not holding my breath.”
“Even with what happened to your parents?” he demanded. “What if you could stop that happening to someone else? What if you could take that guy who killed them and boot him into an early hell?”
“What if?” I echoed. I wanted to be shocked or offended by the idea, except that I didn’t have room to throw stones in my glass house. “You think I haven’t worked out exactly how I could shove Mom and Dad’s murderer through the Veil? But that’s not my job.”
“Right. St. Gertrude. I forgot.” He turned away, taking the flashlight and turning to search for the female archaeologist book. “But I’m just the son of a crime lord.”
The gravel in his voice knocked the wind out of me. How could I not have heard it before? That when he said “your parents” he really meant “my mother”? I was an idiot.
“Carson …”
“Forget it.” He ran the flashlight beam over the spines, reading titles. “Let’s just find your aunt.”
Deal with ghosts long enough and you know when to push the stubborn ones. “Do you know who murdered your mother?”
“Of course I do,” he said, like we were talking about who fumbled the ball in last night’s baseball game. “Devlin Maguire ordered her killed so he could raise his son in his own image. Especially since the kid had some pretty useful talents. And just to make sure the kid follows orders, he finds a witch to put his mother’s soul in a jar that he can keep in his desk.”
Horror washed cold over me. A helpless, trapped soul was more wretched than I could imagine. But it was the flat ribbon of Carson’s voice, the grief and anger ironed out of it by time and helplessness, that cinched the strings of my heart so tight it was hard to breathe. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
His gaze swept over my face, his own expression closed, all business. “Because you would look at me like that. Like one of your lost souls. I’m not. I don’t need your pity.”
“No.” Except yes, more than ever. “But you do need my help.”
“Yeah.” He dropped a book into my hands; I only caught it by instinct. “I need you to translate that computer file so we can use it to rescue Alexis and vanquish this son of a