TWO
It took Muirin about half an hour to wolf down three heaping plates of gooey sugary treats. On her last trip back to their table she brought two more plates heaped so high with brownies and chocolates that Spirit was amazed they didn’t spill. It was obvious Muirin was settling in for the long haul, and with good reason: You couldn’t take anything out of the Refectory—though you could eat as much as you wanted while you were here—so most of the other kids were hanging around, too. Spirit didn’t have any appetite for the desserts, but the chance to mainline as much Diet Pepsi as she wanted was too good to pass up.
When Addie said she wanted to try out her new Monopoly game, it didn’t take much coaxing for her to get all of them to agree to play, because really, it was a game with them Addie wanted for Christmas, not the set itself. Addie chose the Moneybag token (with a faint smirk), and Loch chose the Top Hat (with an ironic bow). Burke chose the Race Car (he was from Indianapolis, home of the Indianapolis 500), and Muirin (surprisingly) chose the Scottie Dog. Spirit didn’t care what piece she picked, so just reached in and grabbed one at random. It turned out to be the Cannon. I wish I did have a cannon, she thought with irritation. I’d blow up Oakhurst. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t really solve anything. She tried to concentrate on the game, but her mind kept wandering—and not to good places. She was just as glad she’d taken her new ring off again—Loch hadn’t, and he kept looking at it with an expression of pleased wonder that was kind of sick-making. She wondered if Loch would find a “Destiny” in his stone when it finished changing color. Hearing about them had absolutely creeped her out.
And at least part of what creeped her out was that no one else seemed creeped out. She wouldn’t have known if the other kids were—from what Burke had said, you weren’t even supposed to know what a “Destiny” was until your Senior Year here—but even her friends just seemed to shrug the whole idea off.
That wasn’t all they were shrugging off, either. They’d defeated the Wild Hunt three days ago. They should still have been trying to deal with their very-near-death experience at the cadaverous claws of a collection of ghosts, demons, and—oh yeah—evil elves. She certainly was! She’d had nightmares about the battle in the snow every single night. But from the way the other four acted—and everything they said—it was as if that fight had happened three years ago, not three days ago. And that was just crazy.
She wanted a break. Needed a break. They’d taken on one of the nastier things in Celtic mythology—and won—and an all-expenses-paid month in Disney World—anywhere but here!—was the least of the things she would have liked as a follow-up. But she had the horrid feeling that things were only going to get worse from here on in. And fast.
So … get a break? Shoot, she hadn’t even gotten enough time to sit down and think. Too much wasn’t adding up, and that was terrifying. If the Wild Hunt showing up the way it had was the start of the wizard war, why wasn’t Doctor Ambrosius stocking up on magical nukes and having everyone build barricades? (Or, hey, just warning people, because that’d be nice.) And if the people here were the good wizards, where were all the bad wizards coming from? Didn’t anybody care?
She frowned, tuning out the sound of Loch and Muirin arguing—just as if it mattered—about whose turn it was, and whether or not Loch owed Muirin rent. There was another thing that had been bothering her for a while. If the only kids allowed here were magicians, but all the children of former Oakhurst students were eligible to come to Oakhurst, where did the kids who weren’t magicians go? Was there another school—a kind of Shadow Oakhurst—where the non-magical kids were sent?
“—so I got permission to have Admin ask the Trust peeps to send my formals, and—quelle surprise—she actually did, and I only fit the black one anymore,” Muirin was saying, as Spirit tuned back in to the conversation. “But that’s okay, since the others are like so last century and you gotta know if I fit one of them, that’d be the one Ms. Corby’d say I had to wear.” Muirin shuddered. “Seafoam! Come on! Maybe if I was thirteen and still into Magical Girl animé!”
Spirit frowned harder. Formals? What was Muirin going on about?
“The Trust sent me another new one,” Addie said, sighing faintly. “Just like the old one, only blue this time.”
Spirit glanced around the table. The guys were exchanging “I hope they’re not going to talk about dresses all night” looks. Formals? We escaped death three days ago and they’re talking about—
“You guys seriously aren’t talking about the New Year’s Dance are you?” she asked incredulously.
Muirin gave her a slanty look. “Why not? We get graded on it, you know. Ballroom dancing, deportment, blah blah blah.”
“Don’t worry. You won’t get graded on the dancing, Spirit,” Addie said in a kindly tone of voice. “You weren’t here for the Summer Term, so you didn’t get Ballroom Dance. They only give it in the Summer Term.”
Spirit was so shocked all she could do was stare at the two of them with her mouth slightly open. “But we—But you—” She gathered her scattered thoughts. “But— We can’t just go on as if nothing happened! It isn’t over! You know it isn’t over!”
She would have said even more, but suddenly a sharp pain in her ankle interrupted her—Loch had kicked her!—and his equally sharp elbow hit her in the ribs for the second time that day.
“Let’s get something to drink,” he said. “That diet stuff might be okay for some people, but Real Men want real high fructose corn syrup.” He grabbed her wrist and practically hauled her out of her seat and off toward the Viennese Table. By now there wasn’t a mob of kids surrounding it, but about half the Refectory tables were full. They weren’t the only ones here playing a board game, and she glimpsed some kids playing card games, or just reading books and listening to music, either on Oakhurst iPods (easy to spot, since they were in custom colors) or on ones of their own.
Loch dragged her past the table, over by the kitchen doors. It was about as private as they could get without leaving. And the others would notice that—their table was right by the door.
“What do you think you’re—” she began, as soon as he stopped.
“Leave them alone, Spirit,” he hissed in an undertone. “You deal with stuff your way, let them deal with it their way.”
She blinked at him. This was the last thing she would have expected to hear, from the last person she’d have expected to hear it from. “But, Loch—”
“Don’t you ‘but’ me, Spirit White! Yeah, the New Year’s Dance is stupid, but if that’s what they want to focus on, you let them. Get it? If they want denial, whose job is it to tell them they can’t have it? Yours? Are you some kind of super-shrink now? Are you going to tell me you can help them deal when you can’t even stop moping around over your family and that’s half a year ago? Okay, we saw awful things, we almost died, but we won, game over, now let it go.”
The injustice of Loch’s accusation made her want to erupt with anger—just because he didn’t care whether or not he’d been orphaned didn’t mean she hadn’t loved her family and didn’t still miss them—and it took all her willpower to answer him instead of slapping his face and storming off. “But it’s not over! Loch, you know it’s not over! We still have to—”
“I don’t know any such thing.” Loch pulled himself up to his full height and folded his arms over his chest. “I know none of us—including you!—knows what Doctor Ambrosius and the teachers did after we told him what happened. I know they’re a million times better magicians than we are. And I know all this time he’s been telling us there’s danger out there. So what do you know? Did you follow all of them around for the last three days and see they aren’t taking what we told them seriously and beefing up the security? Have you got some kind of super Magic 8-Ball you can listen in on the meetings with?”
“But— But—” But why do you think they’ll take it seriously now when kids were vanishing for the last forty years and nobody cared? Why do you want to trust them when we know one of them was in league with the Wild Hunt? How can you think they’re going to take us seriously after you saw the basement, with all the dead kids’ stuff stored down there and their school records stamped “Tithed”? How could she explain any of this if he was so determined to deny what he’d seen with his own eyes? How could she make him see she wasn’t being crazy or paranoid, that all of her instincts were shouting at her that this wasn’t the end, it was only the beginning. What am I going to do if I have to do this all alone?
At the expression on her face, Loch’s softened a little. “Look, Spirit, I understand why you’re doing this. Your magic hasn’t developed yet and you feel like you’re the only normal kid in Super-Hero High. And you did get us all together and get us to see there was something wrong, and I know that had to feel pretty damn good. And it must have felt even better to face down those things without magic—and I’m not lying when I say if you hadn’t been there, we’d all be dead now. Nobody wants to take that away from you. But you have to accept that, well, you did win. It’s over. And trying to relive it and make it happen again so you don’t have to think about not having your magic yet is … it’s unworthy of you, Spirit. Just be patient. Your magic will show up soon enough. Meanwhile, it’s time to let go and stop trying to get attention and make yourself feel special by coming up with crazy conspiracy theories.” He smiled faintly. “We like you whether you have magic or not.”
He thinks this is all about me? That I’m just thinking of myself, and about not having magic? That this is all some sick way for me to try to get attention by crying wolf and making up imaginary enemies? She was so outraged by his accusation that for a moment her voice wouldn’t work.
“Is that what you really think?” she finally choked out. “That I’m acting out because I don’t have magic?” She stared hard into his eyes until he was the one who had to look away. “Well. Then what about this: Someone set up all those kids as sacrifices to the Hunt. It didn’t get here all the way from Ireland or Wales or whatever by itself. And someone opened the wards so it could get onto the school grounds. And whoever that was, we never found them. Do you think they’re going to stop now? Do you think the Administration can find them? What if it is the Administration—or some of it?”
“I—” It was Loch’s turn to be at a loss for words. “I don’t know—”
“Whoever called the Hunt has been doing it for years, Loch! And Doctor Ambrosius hasn’t figured out who they are, either! He would have stopped them a long time ago if he had!”
“We don’t know that—” Loch said weakly.
“Yes we do!” she snapped. “We know it had to be someone inside the school to take down the wards, because they were taken down and put back up—not broken. So—if you’re right, and the teachers are handling this and not telling us—who on the staff isn’t here anymore?”
“Uh … We wouldn’t notice someone gone from the kitchen or maintenance—” Loch said helplessly.
“Oh, give me a break,” Spirit said in contempt. “You think someone from the kitchen or maintenance is that good a magician? We don’t even know that any of them even are magicians—do we?”
He withered a little under her glare. “I— Um— Well—”
Now she was the one crossing her arms over her chest. “I’ll take that as a ‘no’—that the Housekeeping Staff aren’t magicians. And none of the teachers or the Admin staff have ‘left to pursue other opportunities’ in the last three days. So? Still think I’m creating crazy conspiracies to get attention?” It made her sick with anger to think he’d actually accused her of that.
“Look, just cut Addie and Muirin some slack,” he finally said. “It’s not like they—we—aren’t cutting you plenty.”
She started to snap back at him, then forced herself to nod. As much as it galled her to admit it, there was some justice in that. All four of them had put up with a lot from her since she’d arrived at Oakhurst. And she had to admit they’d all been on board with finding out what was hunting Oakhurst students and putting a stop to it.
“Having a good Monopoly game is making Addie happy. Stuffing herself with cookies and candy until she’s sick and babbling on about what she’s going to wear to the prom is making Muirin happy,” Loch went on. “It’s Christmas, for heaven’s sake, Spirit. Give them at least one day off from being The Mystery Gang. You owe them that.”
Her throat suddenly filled with a big lump. “As long as I don’t have to be the goofy mascot,” she managed to whisper.
Loch gave her his sunniest smile—looking relieved, she thought. “Nah. I always thought of you as more the ‘cute cheerleader’ type.”
All she could do after that was nod, and let him lead her back over to the soda table, and fill her arms with cold cans.
She followed him back to their table, still gulping back tears of grief and humiliation, and if she couldn’t manage to smile and chatter cheerfully, she could at least pay attention to the game to give Addie a good one, and nod when Muirin went on about what an ordeal and a torture session the New Year’s Ball was going to be.
Because, yeah, Loch was right.
She did owe them that much.
But they owed her, too.
* * *
The next day—Boxing Day—was the day when the students at Oakhurst traditionally exchanged their “personal” gifts with each other. Spirit had made book covers and matching bookmarks out of felt. Privately, she thought the gifts were a little cheesy, but they were all she could manage, and she’d wanted to give her friends something, at least. When the other girls on her floor had seen Spirit’s bookmark-and-book-cover combinations, some of them had asked her to make some for them. She’d done it, even though it had taken precious time from figuring out how to destroy the Wild Hunt, because she’d been terribly conscious of needing to behave as if everything was completely normal. And since the student body at Oakhurst had a flourishing barter economy going, it had meant she at least had some pretty and colorful paper to wrap her gifts for her friends in.
By prearrangement, the five of them met in their favorite student lounge, the one beside the Library. Spirit had been worried she’d receive gifts far more elaborate and expensive than the ones she gave, but the one good thing about the draconian way Oakhurst ran things was that nobody could give expensive presents, even if they had a lot of money waiting for them in the outside world. So Loch gave her a flash drive full of music, which surprised and touched her, since she missed her music collection, and Loch had taken pains to track down (and trade for) most of her favorite songs, and Addie (who knitted) gave her a scarf that wasn’t cream, gold, or brown: It was knitted out of soft wool and striped in every color of the rainbow. Spirit was surprised to get a second gift from Muirin, as Muirin had already given Spirit her Christmas gift a few days earlier. But now Muirin presented her with one of the Oakhurst blouses, which would have been an insulting kind of gift if Muirin hadn’t covered it with intricate embroidery on the collar, the cuffs, the placket, and the back yoke. Spirit was grateful, but she couldn’t help wondering if it was some subtle Muirin-type commentary on her fashion sense.
Burke gave her a necklace. He’d made it in Wood Shop, he told her after she opened it: It was a pendant in an oval shape, about two inches long, made with elaborate marquetry work and polished to a mirror smoothness.
“Figured you might like to have something to wear that, well, wasn’t Oakhurst-y,” he said awkwardly.
“I love it. I do,” she answered, reaching out to give him an impulsive hug.
Muirin applauded mockingly—drawing irritated hisses from the other kids in the lounge, since even on Boxing Day there were always people studying—and Burke pulled away, blushing.
“Um, so, it’s kind of stuffy in here, isn’t it?” he said clumsily. “Want to go outside and—uh, look at the stuff?”
“What, go out where it’s cold enough to freeze your assets off and pretend the snow statues haven’t been there for the last three weeks?” Muirin mocked. “No, thanks. I am staying right here where it is nice and warm.”
“I—” Loch began, and to her astonishment, out of the corner of her eye Spirit saw Addie’s elbow connect with Loch’s ribs, hard and fast. After what had happened Christmas Day, it was actually gratifying to see Loch on the receiving end of a “shut up” elbow. But why?…
“You two go out and freeze your toesies off in the nice healthy subzero air,” Addie said cheerfully, as Loch gave her a look of blank astonishment. “The rest of us will keep the fire going for you.”
Burke hadn’t missed the byplay, either, Spirit noticed—the color was back in his cheeks. If she’d met him back in Indiana (while she’d still been going to public school, before Dad decided the School Board wasn’t fit to raise hyenas, let alone set curricula), she’d never have given him a second glance. Sure, he was really good-looking—in a football-player way—but he was also quiet, bashful, self-effacing, and devout. So not what she’d been looking for in a boyfriend!
But that had been when she was fourteen, not almost seventeen. When she’d still had a family, when magic was something you only found in books, before she’d come to Oakhurst and found out she’d been drafted into a wizard war and there were people out to kill her. She hadn’t made up her mind about whether she wanted any boyfriend at all—let alone Burke Hallows—but now she didn’t automatically dismiss him as too boring to be likable.
Burke walked her down to the Entry Hall, where the two of them separated to get their coats—and in Spirit’s case, to get every other warm thing she could think of to bundle up in, because nothing in her life had prepared her for the cold of a Montana winter—and then met up again just inside the front door. Most of the Winter Carnival was on what would be the “front lawn” of any other place, but in the case of Oakhurst, it was the “front acreage.” It was almost as if the school was trying to shout to any (rare) visitor, “Look! See our Happy Students! See them Frolic at the Winter Carnival! And see how they are so much better at this than your kids are!”
No wonder everyone from Radial hates us, she thought sourly. A few visits to Oakhurst and they’d have to be thinking we’re a bunch of stuck-up rich kids. She supposed they were lucky that Radial was twenty miles away as the crow flew—an odd expression she’d never understood—and thirty-five by road—when the road was even passable, which it really wasn’t for a lot of the winter. There was a reason everybody at Oakhurst used the private railroad set up by Arthur Tyniger, the nineteenth-century railway tycoon who’d built the place.
She stepped out the front door, blinking at the bright glare of sun on snow. When she’d gotten here four months ago, the front lawn—the Oakhurst literature referred to it as the “Grand Lawn,” big whoop—had been as green and flawless as AstroTurf. When it started to snow, it had been just the same (only white)—a smooth sloping expanse leading down to the front gate.
Now? Now it had been turned into a showpiece, a set piece, and once again Spirit wondered just who the Oakhurst Staff and Faculty were trying to impress, because really, there wasn’t anybody here but them. Even the Alumni didn’t visit until summer. Despite that, it was almost obscene, how professional—how posed—the scene before her looked.
First of all, the whole Carnival had been carefully laid out beforehand by the teachers, with each piece of the Carnival to be placed exactly so. None of the ice sculptures were allowed to be an inch off the centers of their allotted spaces, and they all had to face the carefully sculpted and groomed avenue that threaded through them. Spirit supposed (grudgingly) the avenue was a good idea, since it was carpeted with pale blue AstroTurf so no one slipped and broke something. The thing was, Spirit had seen pictures of professional competitions in Sapporo and Montreal that hadn’t looked any better than this, and she wished she could stop wondering what invisible watchers Oakhurst was trying to impress, but she couldn’t. Maybe they’re just trying to suck all the fun out of it, she thought. Loch liked to quote something he called “The Litany Against Fun” (it was from a parody of a science fiction novel he liked): “I must not have fun. Fun is the time-killer. I will forget fun. I will take a pass on it. When fun is gone only I will remain—I, and my will to win…”
She wondered if Oakhurst had read the same books, because not only was the Carnival laid out with all the spontaneity of a chessboard, all the kids who had to do the Carnival (three-person teams, whose Gifts were mostly from the School of Air and the School of Water, though there were a few Fire Witches involved) were given a theme and not allowed to deviate from it. This year’s theme was “Famous Statues and Monuments” (Spirit had seen it because Addie had to compete, of course) and the handout had been very clear that the statue of the little Belgian boy taking a whiz—the Manneken Pis—was so not on the list. So there was the armless Venus de Milo, and the headless Winged Nike (Addie’s team had done Laocoön and His Sons, but Spirit was already pretty much on board with the idea that Addie was a major-league overachiever), the statue of the Little Mermaid from Copenhagen, the Sphinx from Giza (with its face miraculously restored, though Spirit thought it would have been more of a challenge to reproduce the battered and eroded version), the Lincoln Memorial from Washington D.C., and—probably the most ambitious of all, because of the almost-unsupported “zodiacal zone” ring—the reproduction of Prometheus, who loomed over the Oakhurst skating rink just like he did over the one at Rockefeller Center.
In keeping with Oakhurst’s general suck-all-the-fun-out-of-this tradition, there was a little plinth in front of each statue, and each plinth had a waterproof notebook on it, and each notebook contained a five to ten page essay about the original statue, with the pages inserted neatly in clear plastic sleeves to protect them from the weather.
Not that anyone was reading them.
Behind Prometheus (extending out toward the side lawn) was the maze, a duplicate in snow of the hedge maze at Hampton Court Palace. (Spirit knew the Jaunting Witches teleported snow from all over the place so there’d be enough for everyone to work with at Oakhurst, and frankly, she thought it was a wonder there was any snow left on the ground anywhere in McBride County.) And on the other side of the maze was the snow castle.
It could have been fun. Even with all the regimentation, all the rules, all the grading as a class assignment, it still could have been fun. But even now, the teachers prowled among the statues taking notes, and watching the skaters, and she just knew they were even being graded on that—though she couldn’t imagine what the grades were in. Advanced sense of balance? Intermediate speediness? Whether or not the Chicago Blackhawks would like to recruit you?
I am so not getting out there on the ice, she decided.
“So, um, you want to skate?” Burke asked.
She did her best not to facepalm. Guys! Every time they started to learn to read minds, they always got it completely wrong! “Not with the teachers watching,” she said truthfully. “Can we just walk and pretend to read the essays? Maybe get lost in the maze?”
“Sure!” Burke said, more cheerfully than her suggestion really called for.
The two of them walked along the AstroTurfed path, pausing at each plinth to leaf through the essay books as if they were reading them. Even though Burke was carefully not touching her—not even getting too close—he kept glancing over at her with this soft puppy-dog look, and she was starting to get the idea that he was working his way up to talking about Feelings. She wasn’t ready for that conversation right now, and she wasn’t really sure whether she ever wanted to have that conversation, but the thought of what it might involve gave her a warm fluttery feeling in her stomach. She wondered what he was going to say. She wondered what she’d say back. She wondered if—
“Hey! Burke! Spirit!”
Oh … damn. So much for finding out what Burke’s feelings were. Or hers, for that matter. It was Kelly Langley—one of the nicer proctors—but she wasn’t alone. She was more-or-less herding another girl along, kind of like a determined sheepdog with a stubborn sheep. Kelly was a Fire Witch, so she was out in only a jacket and a knitted gold Oakhurst cap, but the girl with her was bundled up to the eyebrows in so-new-it-crackled Oakhurst gear with no personalizing touches. Her shoulders were hunched, her collar was up, and her face was buried in the scarf that swaddled her almost to her ears.
New girl? Spirit wondered. Belatedly she realized she’d heard the train during breakfast this morning. But there hadn’t been any kind of an announcement.…
Well, maybe they never make an announcement. How would I know? Loch and I were the last kids to come here. There hasn’t been anyone after us.…
“This is Elizabeth Walker,” Kelly said briskly. “She just got here this morning. Lizzie, this is Burke Hallows and Spirit White.” Spirit tried not to roll her eyes; poor kid, whether or not she liked the nickname “Lizzie,” she was going to be stuck with it now.
“Hello,” came the voice faintly from behind the wool.
“I need to report to the coach, so I’ll just leave her with you. I know you can show her the rest of the place,” Kelly said, and without even waiting to hear them agree, she turned abruptly and strode off, not quite running, but at a “walking” pace that would leave most people gasping in her wake.
The three of them just stared awkwardly at one another for several minutes. Spirit couldn’t see much of the new girl, just brown eyes and light brown hair that looked as if it was probably long. She was an inch or two taller than Spirit—which meant she’d tower over Muirin and be just about Addie’s height—and in her stiff heavy coat it was hard to tell whether she was plump or thin. After the silence had stretched so long Spirit wondered if they were all going to stand there silently until they froze, Elizabeth said, in a wispy voice, “You don’t have to go to all that trouble. I can find my room from here.”
“No, it’s okay, Elizabeth.” Spirit was half amused, half miffed to see that Burke was putting on his best “big, friendly dog” routine. “We don’t mind, do we, Spirit?”
“I only got here this fall myself,” she admitted, a little relieved because Elizabeth’s arrival had saved her from the Feelings conversation, and a little irritated for the same reason. Then, for some reason even she couldn’t fathom, she suddenly blurted out, “I hate this place. I’d give anything to—”
Then she stopped. Don’t drag anyone else into this mess. It was almost Loch’s voice Spirit heard in her imagination, but Loch wouldn’t say anything so sensible. Especially since you don’t even know her yet.
Elizabeth nodded in a jerky sort of way. “It’s not home,” she said softly. “And it won’t ever be. And Doctor Ambrosius…” She cut off whatever she was going to say, glancing skittishly from side to side as if she was looking for something. Or someone.
“Did he give you the ‘Oakhurst is your family’ lecture?” Spirit asked, bitterly.
Another jerky nod. Burke snorted rudely, surprising Spirit. She kept forgetting that Burke wasn’t the rah-rah “Be True To Your School” guy he seemed so much as if he ought to be.
“I— They were all out on snowmobiles. Out on the lake. I didn’t go ’cause I had Hamthrax. Um … flu. You know? The ice was supposed to be really thick. It was really thick! There were fishing shacks out there with ice-holes a foot or more thick!” Elizabeth’s voice shook, and when she put her hands up to her face to push the scarf out of the way, Spirit could see her hands were shaking, too. Spirit felt her own grief welling up in her throat again, and she felt a fierce uprush of pity for Elizabeth. “They said it was a freak warm spot that thinned the ice, and you couldn’t see under the snow. The temperature was twenty below. They didn’t have—” Her voice broke in a sob that called answering tears from Spirit’s eyes. “They didn’t have a chance in the water—”
Spirit made an abortive gesture toward her, wanting to show sympathy, but Elizabeth wrapped her arms around herself as if trying to protect herself and backed away. “I—I’m sorry. I—I’ll just go back now—” And she turned and scuttled away, head down, shoulders hunched.
Burke and Spirit looked at each other. Burke looked as if he wanted to say something, then just shrugged. “We can try talking to her later,” he suggested. “She sure seemed skittish though.”
Spirit sighed, watching Elizabeth pull open the door just enough to slip inside. “But not the pep talk Murr-cat and Addie gave me when I got here,” she said, a little acidly. “And do you blame her for being nervous? I wonder how Doctor Ambrosius tortured her? She probably expected us to turn into wolves and vampires.”
And it won’t do her any good to hear that the ice probably wasn’t thin, and her family’s death probably wasn’t an accident. It’s nothing I can prove, anyway—any more than I can prove what I know I saw the night our car went off the road …
Burke had been staring after Elizabeth. Now he turned back to her. “I don’t know. You know this place. She’s going to have to toughen up fast or—”
Spirit sighed. “Yeah. Or she might as well be surrounded by wolves and vampires for real.” She made a face. “Well, I’m cold. Mind if I go inside?” She was kind of hoping Burke would go with her, but it looked like the mood was broken, because he shook his head.
“You go ahead. I need to hit the gym for my workout, and since I’m halfway there I might as well do it now.” With a cheerful wave, he trudged off in the direction of the stand-alone Gymnasium complex.
Spirit’s mood soured even more. She shoved her hands in her coat pockets and turned toward the terrace door that Elizabeth had vanished through. She had some vague idea of tracking Elizabeth down and—
And what? Trying to make her feel better? Like that would happen! She hugged herself tightly, trying to warm up. With Burke gone, it seemed even colder out here. She might as well go in and tell the others there was a new inmate in the asylum.
Once she stepped off the AstroTurf carpet, her feet crunched through a heavy crust of snow. It came all the way up to mid-calf, and the drifts were even higher—even in her snow boots she was freezing. She couldn’t wait to get inside, and the two of them had walked so far that the terrace entrance was closer than the Entry Hall entry she and Burke had come out through.
But as she started along the side lawn, she saw a sudden flurry of snowballs appear in the distance. “Appear” was exactly the right word: One moment there’d been nothing, the next, the air was full of snowballs. Hovering. It was hard to decide what Gifts were involved in the snowball fight, though it was pretty clear most of the “combatants” were School of Air: Jaunting, Telekinesis, and just plain Weather Witchery combined to turn what might otherwise be an ordinary snowball fight into something more like a snowball apocalypse.
No way was she walking into something like that, even if it did mean spending a lot longer out here in the cold. Grumbling under her breath, Spirit turned around and trudged back to the main entrance.
When she got there, she struggled up the steps—everything she wore was caked with snow by now—and pulled open the enormous (pretentious) heavy oak door with a certain amount of struggle. Burke made it look easy. Of course, Burke made everything look easy, even living here.
For a moment she indulged herself in the wistful fantasy of not being here, but still having met the other four. Would they still have been friends if they hadn’t been stuck here in High School Hell? She thought she and Burke might have been more than friends—Loch was dazzling, and she liked him a lot (maybe loved him, maybe just crushed on him), but Loch came from an entirely different world. She and Burke were a lot alike, really. She thought about having a boyfriend. A real boyfriend. Her first.
And suddenly she realized she didn’t dare.
It didn’t matter if it was Loch, or Burke, or even someone she hadn’t met yet (hard as that was to imagine)—Oakhurst didn’t even like you to have friends, let alone a boyfriend. The fact that she and Addie and Muirin were friends had been a secret they’d needed to hide as carefully as they’d hidden the knowledge that their fellow students were dying, not “leaving to pursue other opportunities.” If Oakhurst realized you had friends, they did everything they could to destroy the friendship.
Suddenly she realized she’d been thinking “Oakhurst” and not “the teachers” or “the Administration.” It was as if Oakhurst itself was some kind of malevolent entity.
It’s like that hotel in that horror novel. The haunted one that everybody who stayed at went insane.
She shuddered faintly, and distracted herself by stomping her feet to get the last of the snow off her boots. The Entry Hall was completely empty—it wasn’t a place people lingered—and even the fire roaring in the fireplace couldn’t make it look cheerful and inviting. The huge cheerless Christmas tree only made things worse, somehow. She wished they’d take it down now, but Burke said it would be up until after New Year’s. She didn’t see why. It wasn’t as if any of the students spent their time admiring it. And a thirty-foot tree? Quelle overkill. She wasn’t even sure how they’d gotten it in here. Maybe it’s always here, and they just make it invisible for the rest of the year. Maybe old Mr. Tyniger built the place around it.
As if anyone would want to build a room around a tree.…
Then she blinked and shook her head. What the—? Because, of course, this room was built around a tree. And for one moment, staring at the Christmas tree, she had utterly and completely forgotten that, even though the tree Oakhurst was built around was there, right in front of her—that huge oak trunk in the middle of the Entry Hall.
It should have been the focus of the entire room, actually. And it … wasn’t.
She tried to stare at it—really tried—and after a very little time she found her eyes sort of shifting away from it. For some reason, after glancing at it, she kind of found herself dismissing it. As if it was nothing more imposing than a lamp. Instead of being a tree trunk at least twelve feet in diameter and two stories high.
She would never have thought about that twice—she certainly didn’t when she first got here—except for the whole Hunt business. The Wild Hunt was another thing people should have noticed immediately and didn’t … Little alarms went off in her head. If something was making her “forget” about an oak tree that an entire building was built around, she wanted to know why.
Slowly, she walked across the inlaid stone floor toward it; warily, with a creepy feeling as if she was halfway expecting a door in the trunk to open and some horror-movie monster to pop out. When she got up close to it, she studied it, only to see that there were marks all over its smooth time-polished surface. They were faint—but they were there.
And they’d been made by someone. Or something. She would have dismissed them as natural—and a part of her really wanted to do that, because didn’t worms and beetles crawl under tree bark and leave marks on the wood?—but there was something about the marks that kept her from doing that. She couldn’t swear to it—not exactly—but she had the vague feeling the marks on the wood looked familiar.
That was even creepier.
Well, one thing was certain. She didn’t want anyone to catch her looking so closely at that tree or those marks. She was pretty darn certain that if they had something to do with Oakhurst tradition that the kids were supposed to know, Doctor Ambrosius or the teachers would have been all over the story at every given opportunity.
So— They weren’t. And maybe she needed to find a way to look at those marks without being seen.
She moved along, as if she’d been on her way back to her room all along, and resolved to tell the others. With any luck, one of them would have an idea about the best way to get a really good look at the Oakhurst Oak—and its marks—without anyone noticing. With a little more luck, she might be able to get them to wake up to the fact that there was still a lot going on here at Good Old Oakhurst that was just not right.