THE ART OF POMPEII
.
Great. Just to make absolutely sure this situation sucked as much as it could.
“What’s wrong?” Carson asked when I didn’t immediately follow him up the steps.
“Freaking Pompeii. That’s what’s wrong.”
He didn’t ask. Maybe it was self-explanatory. Artifacts of large-scale death are a pretty obvious problem for me. “Let’s just go in, reconnoiter, look for any clues. We’re not sure the jackal that’s here is the
actual
Jackal.”
“Okay,” I said, pushing aside my nerves.
Some
of my nerves.
“Just stay under the radar,” he said. “I’m sure by now there’s an APB out on a giraffe-legged goth member of the Weasley family.”
“Gazelle,”
I corrected him. Like I could play it cool with that much adrenaline zipping through my system.
“If any cops look at you cross-eyed, nudge me, and I’ll do my thing.”
“Anything else, Jedi Master?”
“Yes. Assume there are security cameras and don’t strike up
any conversations with people no one else can see. Try to look like we’re just a couple of normal people out on a date or something.”
How the hell was I not going to think about all those things? Did he not realize how much stuff was in my brain
all the time
?
But I just said, “Sure. Life-and-death situations make great first dates.”
“Think of it this way,” he said, grabbing the door handle and giving it an effortless pull. “It’s better than a graveyard.”
Inside, the lobby was a soaring marble vault, all curves and columns and clean lines. The soft voices of patrons sang in the barrel arch of the ceiling. Admission was free, but Carson put some money in the donation box. I knew he was keeping our cover, but it didn’t
feel
contrived. I supposed he was a civic-minded and generous crime trainee.
“Where do you want to start?” he asked.
A sign warned that the museum would close in an hour. “We don’t have much time.” I looked for some clue to the layout of the place. Sculptures and bronzes stood sentry in the main hall, keeping the ancient and pre-Renaissance art from mingling with the post-Enlightenment stuff. I glimpsed a hall of white marble statues and nodded. “Let’s try this way.”
We passed a security guard, and I slipped my hand into Carson’s, entwining our fingers. He shot me a startled glance, and I said, “We’re on a date, remember? That was your idea.”
He glanced, almost imperceptibly, over my shoulder, then smiled. “One of my better ones.” He bent his head close to mine,
murmuring into the space behind my ear, “Security camera in the corner.”
When he straightened, it took me two swallows before I could get my voice to work. “You better not be making that up,” I said, covering flusterment with a whitewash of grumpy. “Or I’ll kick your ass when this is over.”
He didn’t grin, but there was a devilish gleam in his eye and he kept hold of my hand as we passed a row of Roman statuary. “You already kicked my ass when this started.”
I gave the cracked marble figures the once-over for any psychic hot spots or auras, playing it cool, like the scratch of his chin on my neck didn’t dress me up in goose bumps. “That wasn’t your ass.”
He laughed, a surprised guffaw that drew stares and a “Shhh” from the docent in the corner. Which made
me
laugh, which earned a basilisk glare, which made it harder to smother the hysteria and, jeez, maybe I was punch-drunk from lack of sleep and too much soda.
“Nice job if you get us kicked out,” said Carson, no longer laughing as he hustled me into the next room.
I was still giggling, which made it that much further to crash when I sputtered out, like a jet reaching max altitude.
The dusty weight of death pressed down on me like a ton of ash. Old and communal, preserved and petrified, it filled up my lungs, coated my throat, and choked off my breath.
Carson caught me around the waist when my knees buckled. He didn’t ask what was wrong, just, “What do you need?”
I needed to get my defenses in place. I needed all my concentration to push the force field of my psyche out, holding back the echoes of the crushing weight of rebel earth, the staggering impact of thousands of simultaneous deaths preserved by the very cataclysm that had killed them.
This
was what flirting got me. I’d known the exhibit was there, but I’d blundered in unprepared anyway. I couldn’t blame anyone but myself.
“Daisy.” Carson gave me a shake, sounding honest-to-God worried. “Are you in there?”
“Yeah,” I wheezed. I’d gotten my feet literally and figuratively back under me.
The room had been set up like a Roman villa, to showcase the art in the mosaics and statuary. The pieces were all in excellent shape, but the scale of death they’d witnessed had soaked into the stone, so the fractures and patches showed on the psychic surface. On small platforms around the room were plaster casts made from the hardened ash molds of the dead, preserved where they fell when the volcano erupted. They were part of the whole display, like Mother Nature’s grisly art.
“Come on,” Carson said, steering me toward a rear exit. There was a sign that pointed to the restrooms, and in the empty hallway he propped me up against the wall and asked, “What just happened?”
“Stupid Pompeii.” I pushed off from the wall and staggered to the water fountain. My throat felt like I’d lived through the pyroclastic cloud.
He followed me, standing by until I finished my slurping gulps. “Daisy … I mean, what did you do? I
felt
that.”
That got my attention, and I straightened, wiping a drop of water from my lip with a shaking hand. “What do you mean? You felt the remnants?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know.” He grabbed my hand and held it up between us. “When you choked and doubled over, holding on to you was like holding on to a live wire. I thought my heart was going to stop. And then I felt like I could breathe fire.”
I stared at him, wide-eyed, over our clasped hands. “What does that mean?”
“I have no idea.”
Maybe not, but he was thinking something. I could see the wheels turning down deep, where he kept the whole of himself from public view.
“Do you feel anything now?” I asked, and by Saint Gertrude’s many cats, I swear I only meant anything magical. I mean,
literally
magical. I did not mean, Do you feel how close we’re standing, or the way my arm is pressed against your chest and yours against mine? I most especially didn’t mean, Do you feel how
my
heart is going to stop if you pull me any closer?
“No,” he said, with a slow smile that addressed all the things I hadn’t meant but sort of did. “You’re a live wire, Daisy Goodnight. But whatever happened is gone.”
I was saved from having to think of a reply—or think at all—by an announcement over the loudspeaker that the museum would be closing in thirty minutes.
“We’d better hurry,” he said. But he hesitated just an instant before dropping my hand.
We dropped our pretense, too, half running back to the Ancient Cultures wing, through Greece, which was full of beautiful urns and pottery but contained nothing even vaguely jackal-y. “Where the hell is Egypt?”
“In Northern Africa,” said Carson. And he thought
I
didn’t take things seriously. At the juncture of halls, he glanced in both directions, then said with authority, “That way.”
We went through Mesopotamia, where a stone carving held the spirit echo of a mason. Art was like that, full of shades that had etched bits of themselves into rock or painted bits of their souls onto canvas, fed by the reverent awe of the museum visitors.
I didn’t have time for awe. I caught the ghostly essence of frankincense and myrrh and a whisper that quickened my pace, a hum that sang in my skull and down my spine. Death was my resonant frequency, and something beyond the next arched doorway was playing my tune.
I expected a ghost, but there were two. One was an Egyptian woman, complete with elaborately dressed black hair and exotic makeup. Her clothes were obvious finery, and a heavy bejeweled necklace covered more of her chest than her linen dress did. Her kohl-lined eyes stared in wide dismay at the other ghost, a middle-aged security guard with a crew cut and a thick neck, who looked every bit as surprised as she did.
Maybe because he was standing over his own body, which lay on the floor, blood spreading into a scarlet Rorschach blot across the white marble tile.
C
ARSON STUMBLED TO
a stop in the doorway, and the name that burst out of his lips was either profanity or invocation, and I didn’t think he was very religious. Either way, it kicked me out of my shock and into action.
I skidded to my knees beside the guard and searched for a wound, more by touch than by sight. Reaching under his stocky body I found a tear in the soaked polyester of his shirt, and under that, a small, stiletto-sized hole below his ribs. Blood seeped hot over my fingers, and I pressed upward until it stopped.
“Don’t—” warned Carson, too late. I knew I wasn’t supposed to touch anything, but I knew dead, and I knew mostly dead, and
this was the latter. What I didn’t know was if I could keep one from turning into the other.
“Get help,” I ordered, then sank into my psychic senses. Everything
physical
retreated to a shadowed fog, and everything
spirit
sharpened to cutting clarity. I could see the pale rope of psyche running from the man’s chest to his shade, standing over his own body. When I placed my hand next to it, to better apply pressure to his wound, a tingle crawled up my arms, like I held an alternating current between them. My skin burned with the life and deathness of it.
“Why aren’t the alarms going off?” The dazed question came from the ghost of the guard. He was in shock, but he had a vibrancy about him that I’d never seen in a remnant.
Because he wasn’t a remnant. He was
whole
. I was looking at a soul, and the psychic thread that tethered him to his body.
For a moment I couldn’t breathe. The current between my hands, the glowing thread that ran between my fingers, wasn’t the ghost of a man, but the life of one.
“He only just left,” said the shade of the Egyptian woman, in a pragmatic sort of voice that drew me back to earth.
“Who did?” I asked, trying to reorient myself.
She looked at me impatiently. She was much younger than I’d first thought. My age, maybe, and strikingly beautiful. “The man who did this—and took the stone jackal.”
The jackal. I didn’t think I had room for any more “Oh hell no” inside of me. But I was wrong.
With an effort, I blinked my psychic senses into the background and focused on the empty pedestal nearby, the glass case
lifted off and set aside. The guard’s question had been a good one. Why
wasn’t
the alarm going off?
And here was another: Why was I seeing some kind of connection between the man’s spirit and the empty display? It was murky and hard to sharpen with
any
of my senses, and I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it.
Then I felt something I did recognize, a familiar vibration humming on my skin, singing through my psyche. For the first time in memory, my heart didn’t sing along with it.
“No you don’t,” I growled to the powers of the universe. Because it always helps to order the Almighty around when you’re already neck deep in alligators.
The guard stared at the curtain of air, wavering like a heat mirage on hot summer asphalt, and a spark of interest penetrated his numb shock. “What’s that?”
The Veil, shimmering between worlds, waited with neutral, eternal patience while I
literally
held this guy’s life in my hands.
“No,”
I ordered him. “Do
not
go there.”
“But I see my mom.” He lifted a hand with a childish wave. “Hi, Mom!”
“Not yet.” I tried to sound commanding and not pleading, but pretty much failed. “The EMTs will be here soon. You’ll have plenty more days to walk these halls telling people to step back from the paintings.”
The Egyptian girl gave a delicate snort. “If you wish him to stay, you might offer better temptation than that.”
“Look!” said the guard as the pulse of his blood under my fingers stumbled. “There’s my dog!”
“That is
not
playing fair.” I ground my teeth on the bit of my determination and pressed more firmly on the wound so not a drop more blood would escape. “Dogs and moms are not fair!”
Cleopatra walked around us both, kicking out her linen skirts with fancy gold- and jewel-covered sandals. “Are you some sort of priestess? You have a funny way of talking to your god.”
“That’s what Sister Michaela always told me.”
She made a tutting sound. “I think perhaps you aren’t very good at this. His soul is fading.”
“What?” My vision wavered, and I dredged up the effort to bring the guard into sharper focus. It was more than difficult. His image was washed out, like a photo left to fade in the sun.
“Let him go,” said Cleo, not quite an order, “while his soul is still strong enough to make the journey to the afterlife.”
I didn’t want her to be right, but I could feel the electric current fizzle and spark. If anyone could recognize the end of life and the beginning of death, it should be me. But I didn’t want to lose. I wanted to grab hold of this ghost—this
soul
—and tie it to his body so he couldn’t die.
I could hear, out of the fog of reality, the pounding of running feet on the marble floor. Just a moment longer. I couldn’t let him slip when help was so close.
Death wasn’t my enemy. But the jerkwad who thought it was his to hand out on a whim
—he
was going to get a kick into the next world when I caught up with him.
Carson was back, crouching beside me. “The guards are coming, and they’re on the phone with nine-one-one.”
“Okay,” I said tightly, startled by how little time must have gone by since he left. “Do you think, with your superpower, you could use my energy or whatever to give this guy a boost so he’ll make it long enough for the EMTs to get here?”