They absolutely were not. Unless, I guess, they were making an impact on a delicate area.
I pursed my lips to hold back a vengeful smile. That was mere prudence. The geas had nothing to say about inappropriate banter with the enemy.
Lauren waited for Carson and me at an open door, arms folded, brows pitched at a scornful angle. “Don’t let the mortal peril of our friend hurry you kids up or anything.”
As much as I disliked Lauren—which was a lot—I still felt a little guilty for wasting time on a purely selfish freak-out. Duress or not, the important thing was finding the girl. Okay, maybe this was anything but a normal day. But it was my job to put my psyche on the line for a lost soul. Alexis was no different just because she still had a body attached to hers.
So I squared my shoulders and blew past Lauren into Alexis’s room. It was actually more of a suite, professionally decorated in the violet and green of a pansy patch, but other than the size of the room—and the flat-screen TV on the wall—it wasn’t ostentatious. Maybe because there were so many books.
Lauren and Carson came in and closed the door. They were an odd pair—the witch, with her vintage punk clothes, and the … whatever Carson was, with his stoic face and haunted eyes. They conferred in soft voices while I made a circuit of the room, running my hand over dustless tables and fluffed pillows. Picking up traces of the living was like getting a radio station at the very edge of my reception, but sometimes it was easier when the signal was boosted by a big event or strong emotion—the same kinds of things that make remnants of the dead stick around.
I didn’t get anything like that from Alexis’s room, just the faint static of daily living, as if she hadn’t been there in a while. There was a stronger energy attached to some childhood books and mementos on a shelf and a hot spot near the desk where Lauren leaned, arms folded, watching me. Alexis must have invested a lot of time and emotional effort there. I guess you don’t study Latin and Greek if you don’t like putting in the hours.
There was also a curio case holding trinkets she must have collected. I reached for one, a small human figure carved from reddish stone, and Lauren’s voice stopped me. “Careful. Those are old and delicate. And possibly cursed.”
“Then shouldn’t they be in a museum?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure the piece was fake, maybe a gift-shop replica. If it had been truly old, let alone cursed, I was close enough that I
would have been able to tell without touching it. “There are laws about importing artifacts, aren’t there?”
Lauren rolled her eyes, and I remembered who I was talking to. Mafia staff witch.
“Is this important for finding Alexis?” asked Carson. He leaned against a bookcase, arms folded, but his vibe wasn’t relaxed. More like he was hanging back, observing.
“I don’t
know
what’s important yet.” I tried to think like Agent Taylor had taught me. Focus on the victim. Her path had to have crossed the kidnapper’s somehow. By knowing her habits and haunts, so to speak, eventually I would see the intersection. “Tell me about Alexis. She seems like a bit of a nerd.”
“Being smart doesn’t automatically make you a nerd,” said Lauren. Which I guess was true. Alexis had been heading out for a night of partying when she’d disappeared.
“She
is
pretty brilliant,” said Carson. “But yeah, I think she’s too cosmopolitan to be called a nerd. I think it was shopping in Rome with her mom that first got her interested in the classical world—ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt.”
Since I doubted Roman gladiators had kidnapped her, I switched directions with my next question. “How much magic are we dealing with?” I asked. “Are there magical protections around the property? Wards on Alexis’s dorm room? Tracking charms sewn into her underwear?”
“Can’t you tell?” Lauren asked—about half real question and half taunt.
“I keep telling you guys,” I snapped, to cover how naive and
outgunned I felt. “I read remnants of the dead. Magic isn’t my thing. Mary Poppins could have grabbed Alexis and I wouldn’t know it.”
Carson allowed himself a small smile. “There is a long list of people who would want to stick it to Devlin Maguire. But Mary Poppins isn’t on it.”
“Lord Voldemort, then?” What I really wondered was, if Maguire had an arcane arsenal, what did the kidnappers have in
their
bag of tricks?
Lauren heaved a sigh. “Magic one-oh-one, Red. This isn’t Harry Potter. There are protection charms here and on the dorm room, of course. Tracking charms are a great idea in theory, but huge power drains. Expensive—magically speaking—to maintain when a GPS chip in her phone works just as well.
Most
of the time,” she added, preempting my next question.
That part I got. My cousin Phin
loved
to give me lectures in Magic 101, and now I wished I’d paid more attention. But I did remember that the major impediment to big, flashy magic was the impractical amount of energy required to make something go against its nature. Magic worked on probabilities and enhanced inclinations. That was why fireballs and flying carpets were fantasy.
At least, that was what I had thought until now. Maybe it really was just a matter of getting enough power. But power had to come from somewhere.
Dude, magical theory was a mental labyrinth and I didn’t have a map. So I focused instead on the current problem.
“You said that Alexis was hidden from your locator spell,” I said to Lauren, confirming what she’d said in Maguire’s office. “Do you think the spell was blocked somehow?”
She didn’t have to think about it. “Less blocked, more like scrambled.”
I worked that through. “So someone could be doing it deliberately. Like a radar scrambler.”
She pointed at me like a game show host. “Ding! Give the girl a toaster.”
“Look, you.” She was seriously pissing me off. Worse, her bad vibes were majorly interfering with my mojo. That’s not just an excuse fake psychics use. “You don’t
want
me to be more useful than this,” I told her, “because it would mean someone is dead. Which I can arrange, if you keep mouthing off.”
She laughed, then pretended she hadn’t meant to. “I’m sorry, kid. You’re about as intimidating as a hissing kitten.”
“Lauren,” said Carson, without moving from his lean against the bookcase, “back off or go away. And you, Sunshine, calm down.”
Has anyone in the history of the planet actually calmed down when someone said “calm down”? All it did was turn up the gas under the teakettle of my temper.
“Why doesn’t Maguire just pay the stupid ransom?” I demanded. “I mean, what are they asking for? His left kidney?”
Carson debated a moment and glanced at Lauren, who gave him a “your call” sort of shrug. “Because it’s not money they want,” he finally said. “It’s a thing. And he doesn’t have it.”
“Why doesn’t he just go get it?” I asked, slightly more calm, but much more confused. “Or send somebody. He seems pretty good at that.” The two of them exchanged another look.
“Hey,”
I said, at the end of my rope with them. “Stop with the secret eyeball communication. I’m
standing right here
.”
Carson sighed and reluctantly confessed, “Because we don’t know exactly what it is.”
I eyed him suspiciously, but he didn’t
look
like he was joking. “That doesn’t make any sense. Are you supposed to just
guess
?”
He didn’t laugh. “What the kidnappers said was, ‘Bring us the Oosterhouse Jackal.’ But no one here has heard of it.”
“Did you Google it?” I asked, because that’s what I would do.
Lauren slapped her forehead. “Oh my gosh, Carson! Why didn’t we think of that? Google! What a genius idea!”
Carson straightened and jerked a thumb toward the door. “Out, Lauren. Now.”
I expected an argument, or some more eye rolling. Instead, she indulged him, calling, “Don’t let her beat you up again,” before she closed the door behind her.
At least Carson seemed as annoyed by that as I was. So we agreed on something.
The room seemed smaller somehow, once he’d taken charge. He had a trick of fading out when he was with Maguire and Lauren, standing still and contained, as if he were just the muscle, waiting for orders. It would be easy to underestimate him. Maybe that was why he did it.
But now he was all business. “Yes, of course we did an
Internet search for the Oosterhouse Jackal. Nothing useful came up, but Maguire has people on it.”
I was sure he did. Scary people without the restrictions of, oh, say, jurisprudence or civil liberties. My job was to follow the clues to Alexis. That was what I’d sworn to do.
But something kept nagging at me. I mulled over what it might be as I went back to the curio case, looking at the stuff Alexis had collected, picking up the figurine Lauren had warned me away from. It actually did look old, even felt that way to the touch. But to my other senses it was oddly … inert. At any rate, it was not cursed from the tomb.
When I turned, Carson was watching me, as if curious when the show would start. “I still don’t get it,” I said, fidgeting with the carved stone. “Why would the kidnappers ask for something that Maguire doesn’t have, or even have access to?”
“Lauren and I have a theory,” he said. “We think
Alexis
knows what it is or where to find it. So maybe the kidnappers assumed the boss does, too.”
“Her dorm room was totally trashed,” I said. “It could be they were looking there for this jackal thing. Whatever it is.”
He took the stone figurine from my hand and placed it with care back on the shelf. “She wouldn’t keep anything valuable in her dorm. It’s too unprotected.”
No argument there. But his point did spin up a new idea. “
This
place,” I said, meaning Castle Maguire, “is like a freaking fort. When was Alexis last home? Could she have hidden something here?”
“About a week ago,” he answered. “The mansion
would
be a safe place to keep something secure from outsiders. We thought of that, and Lauren did her divination thing. There’s no sign of anything on the property.”
“Yeah, but if you don’t know exactly what the Jackal is, any kind of locating spell would be only slightly better than guessing.” I knew that much, because it was usually the same for psychics.
I’d also caught his qualifier—safe from outsiders. Where would Alexis keep something she didn’t want
Maguire
to know about?
“Is there a picture of Alexis somewhere? Maybe a photo album?” I wanted to get a better image of her physically to see if that helped at all.
Carson nodded to a wall that separated the sitting part of the suite from the bedroom part. It held a decorator-perfect arrangement of frames, but when I went closer I saw that the shots were mostly candid: teenage Alexis with glasses and braces, slightly older Alexis with straight white teeth, arms around her girlfriends, all of them wearing school uniforms a lot like the one I’d worn to Our Lady of Perpetual Snobbery in San Antonio. There was Alexis in front of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, on the ski slopes of the Alps, in front of the British Museum and the Trevi Fountain.
The only picture with her father was also the only formal portrait, one of those where they try to make it look unposed and natural but it just ends up looking like a magazine photo of a
happy family. Maybe it
was
a magazine shoot. In any case, Alexis and her father didn’t look miserable, but their body language was almost businesslike.
Contrast that with the one picture of Alexis with Carson. He wore a tux—and wore it really well—and they leaned into each other, grinning cheekily at the photographer. The photo couldn’t be very old, but the carefree guy in the photo seemed a lifetime of experience from the young man standing nearby, watching me with folded arms.
I pointed to the picture. “Did someone put a happy spell on your prom tuxedo or what?”
He allowed himself a shadow of that smile. “Alexis’s first sorority formal, our freshman year. She went to an all-girls high school and hadn’t dated much until then, and she was wary of asking a stranger.”
Yeah, I could see where having Devlin Maguire as a dad would impede romance, with the bodyguards and all. So who was Carson to her? He would have been too young to be Maguire’s employee then. He still looked too young now.
“How long have you known Alexis?” I asked, moving to the nightstand to poke around. The
something
was still nagging at me. Something besides curiosity about Carson.
His answer was unobliging. “A while.”
“Since you started college?” I asked, undeterred.
“Since before.” He obviously knew I was fishing for information on more than just Alexis, and he gave me a grudging morsel. “Maguire sent me to school.”
I paused in my drawer rifling. “Is
that
why you work for him?”
He smiled slightly, but the humor in it was bitter. I’d hit a nerve. “That would be the simplest answer.” It was also clearly the only one I was going to get. “Are you finding anything?” he asked. “Or just pretending to look while you give me the third degree?”
“Trust me,” I said, tough, like I was some badass ghost interrogator. “If I give you the third degree, you’ll know it.”
I shut the bureau drawer. This room was neat as a pin, cleaned regularly, and totally unhelpful on a psychic level. What I needed was a dead person.
“There aren’t any pictures of Alexis’s mom,” I said, suddenly noticing. “Where is she?”
“Gone,” said Carson.
“As in dead?” I asked, maybe a little too hopefully.
The corner of his mouth turned up at my tone. “As in remarried and living in Europe.”
“What about a grandparent or an aunt or uncle?” I asked. “Someone she was close to, who might check in on her from the beyond now and then?”
“Her maternal grandmother.” He must have followed my line of reasoning, and anticipation sparked in his eyes, though he kept it tightly reined in. I suspected Carson kept everything tightly reined in. “Lex—Alexis, I mean—always spoke of her fondly.”
“Excellent. Grandmothers are the worst busybodies.” I rubbed my hands together, shifting into higher gear. I pretty much
never
reined anything in. “Does Alexis have something of hers? Anything intimate or personal should do.”