Chapter 3

“My mother told me to hang out here while she’s working.” Dixon’s voice echoed down the hall and clear to the back of the lab. It sounded like he’d been stopped at the door. “She sent me with keycards.”

“We’re busy.” Dr. Jacobs sounded ready to tan his oh-so-special hide. “Now get.”

Meanwhile, Nuke sat completely clueless in the chicken run, eyeballs pointed in different directions.

As stupid as his gigantic head looked from the front, I looked stupider on my knees, begging him—“Poof. Please. Poof already.”

“Grandpa could, y’know, withdraw them.” The way Mom hissed her words, you’d think we were pulling off a bank robbery. “You can’t take it back?”

“No. I don’t know.” I shoved my curls back with both hands, trying to wring out even the smallest memory of Grandpa John that might help. But in one summer of magic homeschool, he only got a chance to teach me the baby stuff. We never got this far. “Normally we’d just wait fifteen minutes until they fizzled out.”

“I don’t want to bother you,” Dixon said, all springtime-innocent. “But my mother told me to wait here, and you know how she gets when she’s in work mode. If you don’t believe me, I guess I could call her.” Somewhere under all those wildflowers asking for permission was a bear trap daring them to call his bluff. And what kind of a psychopath called their mom mother?

Mom took a sharp breath and grabbed a broom out of the corner. “Hate to do this. But desperate times . . .”

I thought she was going to shoo Dixon away like some dumpster-diving possum. But then she started toward Nuke. Which unfortunately made more sense.

Nuke’s fuzz stood on end, and as he started to realize he was about to get KO’ed, the heart we shared went hyper speed.

I stepped between him and Mom. “Don’t.”

“Baby.” She brushed past me and choked up her grip on the broom for a grand slam. “He’s already dead.”

“And if we dust him again, he’ll be dead and traumatized.” I grabbed her hand. “Dixon wants to hang out. I’ll get him away from here.”

She glanced between me and the pathetic pterosaur. Her firm glare wobbled. “I’m gonna count to twenty.”

I ran around the corner and skidded to a stop at the end of the hall, where Dr. Jacobs and Martina had Dixon blocked at the door.

“You again.” My voice came out flat as cardboard. I just couldn’t help it.

Dixon stretched to pass me two keycards. The one with Mom’s name had a holographic star and MAGE printed on it. The one with my name just had GUEST.

“Yours can open the paleo lab and all the exhibit security doors,” Dixon said.

“Thanks.” I hooked the reel on mine to the hip pocket of my overalls. Better cut to the chase before Mom whacked Nuke into orbit. “You wanted to hang out, right?”

Dr. Jacobs gave me a smile sweet as cobbler, switching from furious to friendly as easy as do-si-do. Seemed she picked up my scheme, because she put a hand on my back and swept me toward the exit. “Why don’t you explore the museum while we finish up here? I’ll bet Dixon gives a mighty fine tour.”

Dixon unreeled his own card from his belt and dangled it on his finger. “All access.”

Martina all but lifted me off my feet and plopped me in front of Dixon like she was putting out the cat. “Soundsgoodhavefunbye.”

The door slammed.

And I was alone in Trinity Hall with Dixon Hemming, the boy who never took no for an answer.

“I know what you’re thinking, and I didn’t plan this,” Dixon said.

“Uh-huh.” I folded my arms. Dixon was a spoiled wonder child from a family that could see into the future. I found it hard to believe that he never gamed that magic to get his way.

“I was hoping we’d get to hang out. But my mother did tell me to wait in the lab. And trust me, you can’t tell her no.” Sounded like he knew better than anybody.

Did I believe him a hundred percent? Not really. But with soft morning light shining down and a chilled-out soundscape of woodblock and chimes playing over the speaker, the stress knot between my shoulders slowly untangled. Soulshine still hung heavy in the air, but with sunbeams glinting off the green tile and bronze exhibit bars, it felt more nostalgic than creepy. As much as I hated leaving Nuke behind, it was nice to finally see Trinity Hall in the daytime.

In the center of the room, a huge, long-necked dinosaur skeleton was posed midstride. Its head reached all the way up to the second-floor balcony.

As I pictured the sauropod from my dream, my stomach twisted up. Nobody warned me I’d get dreams. I had no clue how to take dinosaurs back once I summoned them. What else did Grandpa never get the chance to tell me? When would I discover that stuff on accident?

Dixon must’ve noticed me looking, because he said, “That’s Sauroposeidon. You can go see tracks from those in the Paluxy River.”

I saw those tracks last summer when Grandpa took me to Dinosaur Valley State Park, but I didn’t realize what left them behind was so big. “That thing lived here?”

“Yeah. Everything in this room is local.”

My eyes wandered to the skeleton sharing the same stage, stalking beside Sauroposeidon. It looked a lot like a T. rex—teeny-tiny arms and big, bone-crunching head. But its snout was narrower, slightly downcurved, and it had a tall fence of backbones.

“That’s Acrocanthosaurus,” Dixon said.

I couldn’t break my attention away from its hollow eye sockets. There was just a whisper of soulshine in there—like I could hear the Acro breathing in its sleep.

Bright red, all-caps note to self: DO NOT SUMMON.

“Are these all real?” I was kind of afraid of the answer.

“Partly,” Dixon said. “You can tell from the armature. If the wires go through the bones, they’re manmade copies. But all these mounts have some actual fossil in them somewhere.”

Sure enough, if I looked close, I could see some wires went around the bones instead of through. Great. I was a match in a fireworks factory.

“You really know what you’re talking about,” I said. Dixon had more going on in that baby blond head than I’d thought.

He stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “Nah, I just end up at a lot of auctions.”

On my right, some kind of raptor was frozen in an eternal pounce, fanged mouth open and two wicked toe claws raised for the kill. I took my best shot. “Velociraptor?”

“Deinonychus. Close, though.” He leaned against the glass partition to look at me. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t really seem like a crazy dinosaur kid.”

“It was my grandpa’s thing.”

“And now it’s your thing?”

“Just trying to stay connected to him, I guess.”

Dixon went quiet just long enough for things to get weird. I was starting to worry about what he could see in my future when his eyes lit up. “We should go upstairs. It’s about to get loud in here.”

Just as I opened my mouth to ask what he meant, a mob of screeching preschoolers in matching day camp T-shirts swarmed out of the foyer.

As we waded through a swamp of tiny campers to get to the stairs, Dixon picked up a folded wet floor sign from where it leaned in a corner and grabbed my arm. “Hold it.”

A boy carrying an extra-large gas station soda with both hands tripped right in front of us. He faceplanted on the tile. Sixty-four ounces of Big Red exploded under him.

And Dixon pulled me right out of the splash zone.

He stepped back from the spreading puddle all casual, checked his designer kicks for stains, and set the wet floor sign down.

As a counselor peeled the camper off the ground, Dixon went on up the stairs like nothing special, and I was almost amazed—until I realized.

“Hang on, Mr. Magic Eight Ball.” I jogged up the steps to catch up with him. “You could’ve stopped that before it happened.”

He scoffed. “Maybe if I was on my mother’s level. Little kids are really hard to predict.”

Hmph. Fine. Maybe he wasn’t pure evil. But I had my eye on him.

The second-floor balcony had an ark’s worth of Texan taxidermy. Pronghorn, armadillo, rattlesnake, ocelot, prairie chicken—you name it, and it was hiding somewhere in one of the dioramas.

“So, what can you see?” I asked, circling a stuffed bison with dusty horns.

“Scrying is sort of a wobbly feeling like when something’s about to fall off a counter. I can see where things are leaning. If I practice, someday I’ll be able to see clearer and further. My mother is so good, she can even see a little bit into the past. My great-great-grandmother Blanche saw so far in both directions that she almost drove herself crazy.” Dixon peeked around the bison’s nose. “When are you going to tell me about your magic?”

Ugh. I thought we were past this. “It skipped my generation. End of story.”

He smirked like I just gave myself away.

I fast-walked toward the elevator and smashed the button about a million times. Up, down, who cares. Get me out of here.

“Whatever you’re holding back, it’s safe.” Dixon came up beside me. “I can’t see it. Just so you know.”

I glanced at Dixon from under my curls. He kept his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes on the elevator arrows.

That was a surprisingly not-awful thing to say.

“I wasn’t worried,” I mumbled. But my heart was already slowing down.

The elevator dinged, and the doors opened.

“Is it okay if we rush through the last floor?” Dixon asked. “I wanna show you my favorite part of the museum.”

“Sure.”

We rode up one more level, and the elevator opened to a dark exhibit spotlighting glittering precious stones. Dixon guided me straight through a collection of meteorites to the next room, a big dome with a rumbling thunderstorm projected on the walls.

When we came in, the clouds parted and the projection darkened to reveal twinkling stars. A touchscreen table in the center of the room lit up with a dark mode calendar wheel.

Dixon spun the blue rings representing the date and the time to rotate the sky projection overhead. The glow lit his face like light from a witch’s cauldron. “Do you know any constellations?”

“Let’s see.” I searched the ceiling and pointed. “There’s Orion.” That was pretty much all my star knowledge. I could only find it because of the belt.

He pointed at a square of stars above us. “Pegasus.” He shifted the star chart to bring a cross-shaped constellation into focus. “And Deneb. Saturn should be visible.”

“You’re good at this.”

“I like space.” His smile went sort of soft. “It’s predictable up there.”

I tried to keep my mind on the stars. But all I could think about was that from the first second I learned Dixon was a diviner, I’d been treating him like a disease. He hadn’t even done anything mean. I was just scared of him.

“Hey,” I said in the quiet. “I’m sorry I haven’t been much fun.”

“It’s cool. A lot of people get sweaty around diviners.” For some reason the stars reflected in his eyes made my cheeks hot. “Everybody’s got secrets.”

“Yeah.” The warmth in my face melted the last of the icy wall between us. Good thing it was dark in here. I guess Dixon was all right.

Out of nowhere, soulshine snapped back into me like a hair twisty.

I covered my gasp with a cough. Nuke just came back to me. Finally, I could take a good, deep breath. I didn’t realize until now how much of his nervousness I shared while he was getting stared at and poked in the lab.

I checked my phone. Fifteen minutes. He made it the whole time without getting clubbed out of existence. Good for him.

Guess there was no reason to keep Dixon busy. Too bad. The human horoscope was growing on me.

“So,” Dixon and I said at the same time. We shared an awkward laugh.

I shrugged for him to go ahead. “You first.”

“I’ve been thinking. Those new fossils are the one thing you asked to see.” Dixon unreeled his card and twirled the keyring on his finger. “And I did promise all access.”

It took a heap of self-control to stomp out the spark in my chest. Like I wasn’t aching to know what was giving off that weird soulshine. “I thought those boxes were off limits.”

“Don’t forget, you have a diviner for a day.” The touchscreen lit his face from below like we were telling scary stories in the dark. “Believe me, we won’t get caught.”

“My mom . . .” In just two words, I knew exactly how lame I was about to sound. I fought through the cringe. “She’d be really mad. I shouldn’t.”

“If we do get caught—and we won’t—I’ll take the heat. It’s my idea.”

“No way, that wouldn’t be fair.” But I was already dreaming about how amazing it would feel to cut loose. To hide just one stupid choice from my helicopter mom’s eagle eyes.

Dixon didn’t think we’d get caught, and he knew the odds. Plus—I really, really wanted to know what was in those boxes.

“We don’t have to go if you don’t want to.” Dixon bumped his arm against mine. “I just wanted to show you a good time.”

I rubbed my skin where he touched me, trying to smooth the warm fuzzies away. He was just trying to be nice. After freezing him out all day, maybe I oughta show him some trust. Maybe I didn’t have to run back to the lab right away.

Besides, without my guitar, what was the worst that could happen?

*

Heart pounding, I swiped my brand-new keycard on the first-floor security doors and peeked into the staff hall that ran behind the exhibits.

On my left, the quarantine closet radiated mysterious soulshine.

On my right, Pedro sat at the security desk, scrolling through his phone. I don’t know what he brought for lunch in the Tupperware beside him, but I could smell the mayonnaise from here. Gag.

Dixon poked his head over mine and took something out of his pocket, a blue superball full of glitter with a little floating astronaut inside. A secret weapon he’d picked up earlier from the gift shop in the foyer.

I held my breath as he shut one eye. Aimed. Threw.

The superball pinged off the walls, ricocheted off the ceiling, and whacked into Pedro’s lunch. The container popped into the air like a tin can on a gun range, dumping the grossest egg salad I’d ever smelled into his lap.

Pedro dropped his phone and swore. Smearing the mayo off his black slacks, he lurched out of his seat and left for the bathroom.

The superball, after a couple more bounces, hurtled back into Dixon’s open hand. A perfectly predicted pitch.

“All clear.” Dixon herded me toward the quarantine closet and swiped his card. The reader beeped and the lock clicked. He opened the door a crack.

That strange soulshine spilled out like fog. And when it fell over me, every hair on my body stood at attention. All six of my senses perked like I just heard the peep of a chick inside an egg.

Dixon slipped inside. I followed. And the door swung shut, sealing us in complete darkness.

My sneakers seemed so loud on the cold concrete. When I bumped square into Dixon’s back, my “eep” echoed.

“Sorry.” He switched on his phone light, and I did the same.

The huge, horizontal crates cast heavy shadows. Most of the boxes were marked FRAGILE, and all of them had been crowbarred and left open—a quick check after shipping, I guess.

I moved between the boxes slow like a sleepwalker, listening hard for the source of that strange soulshine.

After a minute of rummaging around in some packing peanuts, Dixon said, “Look look look.” He lifted a mounted deer head with gigantic antlers out of a box and held it in front of his face.

I didn’t want to be a total buzzkill, so I forced a laugh. But I also poked a thumb at one of the screaming red FRAGILE stamps. “Read the sign, Rudolph.” Some of this stuff was irreplaceable. I could literally feel it my bones.

“Ah, they’re insured,” Dixon scoffed. But he placed the head back in the box.

After another quiet minute of sweeping the closet like a human metal detector, I found two sarcophagus-sized boxes resting side by side. These were the crates I was looking for.

I knelt beside the crate on the left, put my phone in my overalls pocket so that the light peeked out, and used both hands to slide the lid aside. And I was suddenly struck by this weird softness—like I’d opened the crate to a lost kitten, not drifts of Styrofoam snow.

I shoved the staticky pellets aside and uncovered a stack of black, plastic cases, the kind you’d keep an instrument or a camera in. I turned the case on top toward me. My slightly shaky fingers found the clasps. Flipped them. When the rubber-sealed lid unlocked, the box almost seemed to breathe.

I paused—not nearly long enough to wonder if this was a bad idea—and opened the case.

For a second, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking at.

It was brittle, broken, brown. A jawbone. I could tell because of the teeth.

Flat, square, hide-under-your-pillow teeth.

Human teeth.

My stomach dropped like a broken elevator. I slammed the case shut, rattling every container in the crate.

Dixon jumped at the sound and swung his light in my direction. “Geez.”

Something lit up behind me. I turned to see the right-hand crate shining from the inside like a jack-o’-lantern. A golden glow blazed through the wooden slats and cast bars of light all around the room. It was so bright I had to shield my eyes.

Dixon squinted past his hands. “What the . . .”

As suddenly as the light in that second crate flashed on, it went out.

And then, I felt something I’d never felt before.

That strange soulshine—human soulshine—punched through my back so hard I fell on my hands and knees. It grabbed me by the heart. Twisted it like a knob. Forced the door to my magic open.

Power burst out like wild horses.

“Cecelia.” Dixon was by my side, hand on my back. “What’s wrong?”

I grabbed a fistful of shirt over my heart. Magic gushed out of me like blood I couldn’t see.

“No,” I choked. Nonono. But whatever chain reaction I just set off was already picking up speed. The air burned like somebody opened an oven, whipping my curls and kicking up Styrofoam dust devils.

Dixon got up, backed away. “Is this your magic?”

“I’m not doing this!” I could hardly hear myself over the roaring wind.

In the first crate—the crate with the teeth—something shot up out of the packing peanuts.

A square-palmed, short-fingered, tender-pink human hand.

The crate tipped. The upper half of a partly formed, person-shaped thing spilled out and grabbed my ankle.

A shudder shook my whole body like somebody injected ice water straight into my spine. That deep-down quake was gonna come out as a scream or a kick. Fifty-fifty.

So I kicked. Caught the monster right in the face.

The thing spattered Styrofoam. Its head dripped pellets as they mashed and shifted, reworking into a face.

I scrambled backward till I hit the wall. My skin crawled with ten-thousand-cockroach terror.

The thing lifted its head in my direction, and just as its features started to solidify—

BAM. Dixon rammed a ten-point rack of deer antlers through its back. “Got you!”

It broke down in an avalanche of packing peanuts.

The one half of my brain screaming kill it made me shout, “Yes!” But the other half, the smarter half, ran cold. “Wait—I mean no.”

I almost forgot what came after. I didn’t even have time to try to stop it.

Without a body, the free soulshine flowed to the only open space it could find.

Sitting in the dark, in the fading heat, in a pile of clingy Styrofoam, I felt it.

A heartbeat.

Right next to mine.