TEN
In Wednesday’s Martial Arts Class, Dylan broke Kylee’s arm while the two of them were sparring.
Spirit was paired up with Nadia for the free-form sparring because, although Mr. Wallis was a maniac, he actually did his best to match them with opponents close to their own skill level for the free-form stuff. It was a ninety-minute class, and overall they covered four different elements. There was drill and free-sparring in karate, and drill and katas (in pairs) in kendo. One of the four elements was dropped each session so that they could do half an hour each on the other three. Of the four elements, the sparring was the one in which you could get into the most trouble, because there was no set pattern to follow.
Since Thanksgiving, Dylan had been quiet in the classes he and Spirit shared—that was only Math and Martial Arts—and Spirit had been just as glad, since she’d had a lot of other things on her mind, and trying to defend herself from Dylan Williams and his brutal form of teasing would have been the last straw. She doubted he’d forgotten who’d been at the table that day. She’d just hoped he’d decided to make someone else his target.
And as it turned out, he had.
Nadia gasped in surprise just as Spirit heard the choked scream from behind her. Spirit’s immediate reaction was to step out of range, fearing some trick on Nadia’s part, before turning to look over her shoulder. Kylee was down on her knees, rocking back and forth in agony, cradling her arm against her stomach and crying.
“Not such a big mouth on you now, huh?” Dylan said in a low vicious voice.
“He punched her,” Nadia whispered in disbelief. “She tapped out, and he just . . . punched her.”
“She should have expected it,” Spirit heard herself say. “You were at our table at Thanksgiving. What did she expect?”
The moment the words were out of her mouth, she felt sick. Sick at herself. Sick at what she had just said. She should have been horrified, and instead she’d been . . . cold. What is Oakhurst turning me into? she thought wildly. And how can I stop it?
Burke showed up at Kylee’s side half a step before Mr. Wallis did. From the expression on Burke’s face, Spirit knew he’d guessed the truth of what had just happened, but when—in response to Mr. Wallis’s brusque question—Dylan said it had been “an accident,” Kylee didn’t contradict him. Neither did anyone else in the class, though at least a few of them must have seen it happen besides Nadia.
Fortunately one of the students in the class was a Healing Mage. Burke helped Kylee over to the bleachers, and Claire Grissom followed them over. The moment she placed her hands on Kylee’s arm, Kylee’s pain-filled gasping eased.
“What are you all standing around gawking for?” Mr. Wallis barked. “This isn’t a rest period! Back to work—unless you’d rather be running laps for the rest of the lesson?”
Why didn’t you say anything?” Spirit asked quietly.
They were all in the Girls’ Locker Room. Most of them didn’t shower at the end of class, since it was only a short walk back to their rooms where they could shower in privacy, but everybody changed back into their regular clothes. There was no actual rule about wandering around in your gi outside of class, but the minute someone did it, there probably would be.
Kylee looked up, her expression guarded. “Because nothing happened.” She studied Spirit’s face for a moment, then sighed. “Look, Spirit. A little advice. You don’t get the teachers involved, ever. No matter what. You do that, and you’ll be looking over your shoulder for the Gatekeepers.”
What Gatekeepers? What’s a Gatekeeper? Spirit wanted to ask. But she was too late. Even as she was forming the words, Kylee hefted her bag of equipment onto her shoulder and turned and walked out, leaving Spirit staring after her.
But figuring out Kylee’s cryptic comment was the least of her worries. This was December eighth. They had less than two weeks to figure out not one, but three plans of attack, and figure out how to use them.
Slow, Spirit. We’re going half-speed. Let’s walk that block through one more time. And blessed salt will banish a wandering spirit,” Burke said reassuringly. “That’s in pretty much every tradition I’ve found. So that takes care of any possible ghosts.”
They couldn’t risk being seen together as a group anymore. With the winter break coming up, everybody at Oakhurst was excited and on edge—and some of the excitement was playful, and some of it was malicious, and it wouldn’t really matter either way if it made the teachers notice the five of them and decide to do something to break them up. But pairs didn’t come up as high on the Oakhurst radar as a group of five would. So Addie and Muirin were researching the best way to destroy the Wild Hunt if it was composed of elves, and Spirit and Loch were looking for a good way to banish a demonic force. Fortunately at Oakhurst, neither research project looked at all out of the ordinary to anyone who might notice it. They might even be able to use what they found for an extra-credit paper when this was over. Right now, though, an extra-credit paper was the last thing on Spirit’s mind, because even now none of them could stop doing everything they were officially supposed to be doing. And that meant homework, and extracurricular activities, and going to the Friday night basketball games. Spirit had begun to cherish the few hours a week she got to spend practicing her martial arts with Burke; it was starting to seem like the only chance she got to actually relax.
At least when she wasn’t worrying about how they were going to destroy the Wild Hunt.
“But I—Burke, how are you going to get anything like that?” she asked, trying to keep her voice from rising in a wail of despair. “You can’t go into Radial. And I don’t think that Doctor Ambrosius is an actual minister. Even if he’d—”
Burke shook his head at her, smiling gently. “Anyone who believes can bless salt, so long as they’re acting with respect and mean to do good with it. And I guess keeping folks from being murdered—and letting some poor spirits find their rest—counts as good.”
“I guess,” Spirit echoed, confused. Burke was the last person in the world she would have imagined to be a devout Christian—he certainly didn’t spend his time either quoting Bible verses at the drop of a hat or ranting about the evil of “witches” and “magic.” I suppose that wouldn’t go down too well at a school for magicians, she thought irreverently. And apparently Burke had read the “other” Bible, the one that contained such verses as: Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself . . .
How had he managed to keep Oakhurst from poisoning him? He’d been here longer than any of them.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Burke asked.
“Oh, nothing,” Spirit said, and grimaced. “I just hope taking out the elves will be as simple. Walk me through the block again?”
After a solid week of research—more search than research, as Addie said to Spirit one evening when Addie and Spirit were studying in Spirit’s room—Addie and Muirin had settled on iron (“cold iron” as it was called in all the folklore databases) to get rid of the Wild Hunt if it turned out to be composed of elves. As Addie explained (sounding more than a little frustrated, but if Oakhurst’s graduates were expected to deal with supernatural creatures, they hadn’t been given any hint of it yet), there were a number of different ways to simply protect yourself from elves, but that wasn’t what they were going to need. What they needed was a form of attack—something that would make elves go away—and for obvious reasons, there wasn’t much reliable information about things like that available. People in the past—especially non-magicians—had been more interested in protecting themselves from the powerful magical creatures than doing something that might make them angry.
“We found other methods that might work, but they either involve things we can’t get, or we couldn’t find clear enough information to risk using them,” Addie said, propping her chin on her hand. “So it’s too much of a risk.”
“Like what?” Spirit asked curiously.
Addie smiled briefly. “Well, there’s St. John’s Wort—you know, that stuff that comes in pills that’s supposed to cure just about everything? That’s supposed to work. Like garlic with a vampire. Only it’s not like we could get a truckload of it shipped in here in a week. And I’m not sure if it has to be fresh or dried or what. And then there’s bread.”
“Bread?” Spirit asked in disbelief.
Addie nodded vigorously. “Stale bread. I know! It seems ridiculous, but just about all the books and folklore databases say ‘stale bread.’ Only the only kind of bread we can get is out of the kitchens, and the books don’t say what kind or how much—and what if what we’ve got is the wrong kind? Nope. I’m sticking to iron. Now all we have to do is get enough of it,” Addie said, looking down at the pile of books. “And figure out what to do with it, because I’m pretty sure that just having it won’t be enough. But Murr says she’s got some ideas.”
“I hope so,” Spirit said in a low voice. She tried as much as possible not to think about what they were going to do; if getting yelled at by Mr. Wallis in martial arts class scared her, how was she ever going to go off and actually fight something for real?
“So how are you and Loch coming along?” Addie asked. “You’ve got demons.”
Spirit had managed to stop being startled by hearing sentences like that, although she still couldn’t decide whether they were funny or bizarre. “Loch says demons are the worst,” she said slowly, “because they’re powerful and evil by definition. But he says the good thing about demons—”
“Assuming there is anything good about demons,” Addie interjected, and Spirit smiled ruefully.
“—is that they’re also really vulnerable, if you can hit them just right.”
“You mean like with a spell?” Addie asked.
“Or something,” Spirit sighed. She was pretty sure that when she found out what the “or something” Loch would come up with was, she wasn’t going to like it.
I can’t do that!” she hissed at Loch. Spirit was keeping her voice low by habit—and a good thing, too, because she could get together with Addie in her dorm room, and with Burke in the gym, but the only place she could meet with Loch was either the Library or one of the student lounges, and the Library offered slightly more privacy.
“You have to,” Loch said simply. “You’re the key to making all of this work.” He tapped the cover of the very large, very dusty book. He’d spent the last several days copying drawings and paragraphs of text out of it—and then double-checking them everywhere else he could. “We don’t know which demon-or-demons we’re dealing with, or if there are any demons at all. If we did know, it would be a lot easier. But whatever the Wild Hunt is, if it’s demons, this should work. It’s sort of a General Purpose Dismissing Spell, and what it will do is send a demon back to Hell. It comes in two parts: a spell-trap, and a spell. Once the demon-or-demons is inside the spell-trap, the spell has to be read out, and that will make the spell-trap send whatever’s in it back to Hell. So one of us has to be ready to decoy the demon-or-demons into the spell-trap . . . and the other one has to be ready to work the spell.”
“I—But—Why me?” Spirit demanded, starting to get angry. “You know damned well I don’t have any magic!”
“I know damned well you do—or you wouldn’t be here at Oakhurst,” Loch retorted just as hotly. “And we’d just better hope your Mage Gift doesn’t show up in the next week, or we are really, really in trouble. Look. Based on everything I’ve researched, a demon will sense magic, so it will sense me. That makes me the logical one to be bait. It-or-they will chase me to the spell-trap, and the spell-trap will hold it-or-them for a few seconds all by itself. That’s where you come in. I’ll set the spell-trap up in that little stand of woods up by the boundary stone. There’s less chance of somebody else coming across it ahead of time. Then—that night, when the Wild Hunt comes—you have to wait by the spell-trap for the demon-or-demons to enter it, and as soon as it-or-they’re caught, you do the spell. It-or-they won’t know you’re there, because your Mage Gift hasn’t shown up yet. That’s why it has to be you, and why it can only be you.”
“But Ms. Groves always says that the reason spells don’t work most of the time is because non-magicians do them,” Spirit blurted out, feeling more than a little trapped and desperate. “If ordinary people can’t make spells work, what makes you think I can?”
“Because you’re a magician,” Loch repeated patiently. “The power is in you. There’s no such thing as a false positive for magical power, okay? Just trust me. You can do it, Spirit. But you’ll need to learn it by heart—and every word has to be exactly right.”
Oh my God, no pressure, right? Spirit thought for the ten thousandth time since she’d come to Oakhurst. What if Loch was wrong? What if she did something wrong?
That was too unbearable to even think about. If there were demons—If they followed Loch—If she did something wrong—
Then both she and Loch were dead.
But did she have a choice?
“Okay,” she said, resigned. “Give it to me.” She was going to say she’d try, but then stopped herself.
If they turned out to really need this spell—and she screwed it up—it wouldn’t just be her and Loch who’d be dead. Once the demons got through with her and Loch, they’d be mad, and they’d go hunting, and they’d find whoever was out that night.
They’d all be dead.
The next several days passed in a blur for Spirit. Fortunately she had a good excuse when Ms. Smith took her aside after Math Class and asked her if she was feeling okay. Spirit forced a smile and said she was feeling a little down because of the holidays. It hurt to use her parents’ memories like that—as part of a lie—but she knew they’d have understood. Especially Mom. Mom had always agreed with Davy Crockett: “Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.” Mom had always had a saying for every situation. Spirit wondered which one she would have used this time, and knowing that she’d never know—that she’d never know what saying Mom would have applied in any situation for the rest of her life made Spirit want to lie down and howl.
But she was too busy.
The spell Loch needed her to learn was long. And it wasn’t in English. Most of it was Latin—which was okay, since she had Latin three days a week now—but a lot of the words in it weren’t even Latin.
And it wasn’t as if she had any more free time than she did before. She actually had less. The Christmas tree had been brought into the Main Entry on the twelfth, and the whole enormous room—including the balcony—was garlanded in pine boughs. There’d been a lottery to see who’d get to decorate the tree and the garlands, and of course it had been Spirit’s bad luck to be chosen, so there went more precious free time, because this was Oakhurst, and it wasn’t as if you could just hang a couple plastic balls around and throw on some tinsel and call it done. Most of the ornaments were glass, and looked as old as the house, and each of them was probably worth more than the White family’s entire decorated tree.
In addition, everyone in the school was learning Christmas carols, because they’d be singing them every Sunday from here to Christmas, and on the twenty-fourth, too, when presents from Oakhurst were handed out. There’d be a few other presents, too; because while they weren’t allowed to shop on the Internet even if they had money, there was no rule against making gifts for their friends, so Spirit had been making book covers and matching bookmarks, since they did a lot of crafts in Art Class and Ms. Holland was willing to let them have stuff for special projects. Some of the other girls had seen her working and offered to trade for some to give as gifts, so Spirit was doing that, too, since it would look odd if she didn’t.
She didn’t dare do anything that would look odd.
The most frustrating thing about the so-called vacation was that everyone got extra-heavy homework assignments and “special projects” to do during their week off, just as if they weren’t already snowed under with homework all the rest of the year. That at least Spirit could ignore—there’d be time enough after the twenty-first to do it. Memorizing this spell was more important. Because if she didn’t memorize it perfectly, it wouldn’t matter whether she’d done her homework or not.
And Oakhurst seemed determined to present her with the whitest of White Christmases; because it hadn’t stopped snowing once in the past seven days.
How are we going to get out of the school without being noticed? Spirit thought, staring out her window in anguish. She thought she knew now why so many kids preferred second floor rooms—the windblown snow had already drifted as high as her windowsill. Even if they could manage to walk through it, they’d leave footprints that would be visible for miles.
Someone else is going to have to come up with a solution for that one. I’ve got enough to do with this, she thought grimly. Jaw set, she reached under her mattress and pulled out the sheet of paper that held the written-out spell.
Today was December eighteenth.
She had three more days.
From the end of the day on Friday—when classes were over for an entire week—the entire student body took to the great (and cold) outdoors. Even kids who’d loudly complained about the weather from the fall of the first snowflake spoke excitedly of their plans. And no wonder: winter at a school for magicians was a whole different season from winter anywhere else.
The first inkling Spirit had of that fact was when she looked up from her study of the spell on Saturday to discover that the snowdrift outside her window had vanished.
It hadn’t melted. It had been removed. The snow looked as if someone had come along with a giant ice-cream scoop and just scooped it all away. What the heck?
Maybe the snow’s demonic, she thought, faintly dazed. She’d certainly been doing the Spell of Dismissal enough times to banish every demon in the entire state of Montana. But there wasn’t any time to really ponder the question. It was nearly lunchtime, and she couldn’t skip going to the Refectory, no matter how little she felt like eating. It wasn’t that anybody would actually care if she skipped a meal, but Kelly would be sure to ask her if anything was wrong, and . . . Spirit wasn’t sure she could survive anybody being nice to her. Not right now.
It was just as well she did decide on lunch in the Refectory, because she received her answer to the puzzle of the missing snowdrift.
“—not enough snow yet to make a proper rink,” Burke was saying to Loch as she arrived, “but everyone’s impatient, so the Jaunting Mages are grabbing it from everywhere.”
“You wouldn’t think you’d need any Ice Mages in this weather,” Loch said. His skin was red with cold. He must have been outside all morning, Spirit thought, and repressed a flash of irritation. Why shouldn’t he goof off? Loch doesn’t have a whole spell to learn by heart!
“But the water just won’t freeze fast enough—no matter how cold it is out there,” Addie said. “So the Jaunting Mages help the Air Mages pile up a big snowdrift, and the Fire Witches turn it into water. Then a Water Witch—or two—holds it steady until an Ice Mage can turn it into ice.”
“Presto—instant skating rink!” Loch said. “Wow, that’s some trick!”
“Not quite ‘presto,’ Loch,” Addie said, smiling. “But they built the rim for the rink this morning and filled in a lot of it. Once there’s a solid block of ice, it won’t matter if it warms up outside—and a Fire Mage can just melt the top when the surface gets too cut up.”
“Better than a Zamboni,” Burke added lamely.
“Not that I’d call fifteen below zero warm,” Muirin muttered, shivering ostentatiously. She darted a questioning look at Spirit.
“Me, either,” Spirit said unconvincingly. How could they all sit here and talk about ice skating rinks when in a few days they’d all be . . . well, be facing something horrible. Or . . . Addie looked cool, as usual. And Loch . . . gah, she just wanted to strangle him! And Muirin.
At least Burke didn’t look as if he didn’t have a single worry on his mind. He just looked like he was doing his very best to pretend he didn’t. She remembered what he’d said the night he’d taken her out to see the ice sculptures: “I hate it. I hate lying. I hate going to bed at night knowing I’m keeping secrets from Doctor Ambrosius.”
And it would be nice to think it would be over soon, but it wouldn’t be. This was only the beginning.
The morning of the Winter Solstice dawned bright and clear. Spirit watched the sun rise from a chair looking out her window. She’d been completely unable to sleep.
Full Moon tonight. Plenty of light. Chris Terry was a Weather Mage, and he’d said on Monday it would be clear for the next few days, to the disappointment of everyone who wanted more snow for the skating rink, and the Winter Carnival, and all the other things that were utterly meaningless to Spirit right now. Chris’s Gift wasn’t accurate past seventy-two hours, but that made him more accurate than the National Weather Service. And Spirit didn’t need to know what the weather would be like on Christmas. Just tonight.
It’s going to be a beautiful day, she thought, and felt like bursting into tears. As she got to her feet, she heard the crackle of paper from the pocket of her robe. The spell. Maybe I should? . . .
But no. If she hadn’t learned it by now, she wasn’t going to. She carried the incriminating sheet of paper into the bathroom, tore it into tiny scraps, and flushed it down the toilet.
At breakfast everyone in the Refectory was so noisy the proctors actually had to stand up and ask them to quiet down a couple of times. Spirit had managed to forget the Winter Dance was tomorrow until Brendan asked her who she was going with.
“To the dance? The Winter Dance?” he asked in disbelief as she just stared blankly.
“Oh, Spirit’s going with Burke!” Muirin announced, bursting into a peal of mocking laughter. “Spirit likes having her feet stepped on!”
Spirit just stared down at her plate and shoved her eggs around with a piece of toast. While she was grateful to Muirin for the quick save, she did wish Muirin had been less cruel about it.
“It’s okay,” Burke said quietly. “You don’t have to.”
“I’d love to,” Spirit said defiantly. She liked Burke a lot. At least with Burke she didn’t have to watch her back—like she did with most of the Oakhurst boys—or try to figure out what he meant by anything—the way she did with the other ones. Even Loch. She trusted Loch, more or less, but she didn’t understand him at all.
Once breakfast was over, Spirit wasn’t sure whether to spend time with the others or avoid them. She was too nervous about tonight to read or to work on any of her homework assignments, and too irritable to go outside and take “advantage” of their vacation time the way the other students were. Instead, she wandered around indoors for a while and then ended up back in her room. Only that turned out not to be a good choice either, as Kristi and Madison both came and asked if they could use her room to stash presents in until Christmas, and then Sarah Ellis came looking for Kristi because they were going to go skating, and by that time Spirit gave up and went and hid in the back of the Library until lunch.
At lunch everybody was talking about how Claire Grissom had fallen while she was out skating and broken her ankle. Mr. Bridges had driven her to the hospital in Radial.
Or had he?
“When Kylee broke her arm in karate a couple of weeks ago, she didn’t have to go to Radial,” Spirit said carefully. “In fact, Claire Healed her.”
“No,” Loch said slowly. “She didn’t, did she? And Claire’s not the only Healing Mage here.” His expression was grim, and Spirit knew that he was thinking the same thing she was: Claire was tonight’s Tithe to the Wild Hunt.
“But that was different,” Addie countered. Spirit couldn’t tell whether Addie was speaking for Spirit’s benefit—or for the benefit of whatever unseen listeners they might have. “Claire’s a Healing Mage. It’s a lot harder to Heal a Healing Mage than it is to Heal a regular person. And if their Healing Gift is strong enough, it’s impossible.”
“Sucks, huh?” Muirin said, reaching for her cup.
“In a word,” Loch agreed.
During lunch Loch complained about the lack of proper winter sports equipment, saying that this was the perfect weather for cross-country skiing, and Muirin pointed out that you couldn’t ski very far before you were off the grounds, and Addie said she was tired of listening to the two of them squabble. When lunch was over, Burke said he was going to go practice, and nobody even asked what he was going to practice, since Burke did just about every sport Oakhurst had to offer.
If Spirit had been restless in the morning, she was even more restless in the afternoon—but she felt as confined being indoors now as she’d been unwilling to venture out earlier. She went back to her room and changed into her heaviest outdoor clothes. Maybe a walk would clear her head.
The brick walkways were clear as always—in fact, right now they radiated heat, as the Fire Witches had heated them to turn some stubborn ice into water that the Water Witches could whisk away. Which sure beat the heck out of having to shovel them, even if she did still think it was a little creepy. There hadn’t been a lot of sunny days lately—and when there had been, she’d been stuck inside studying—and the combination of bright blue sky and sunlight on white snow was dazzling. Despite the fact that the hours were ticking inexorably away until the time the Wild Hunt rode out, Spirit felt her mood lighten. For a little while she could almost pretend that tonight wasn’t going to come, because she’d spent the last four months learning about all the bad ways life was different at Oakhurst, but today seemed determined to show her there were good ways, too. She spent a solid fifteen minutes watching two groups of Air Mages having a snowball fight—only the way they did it, the snowballs hovered in midair between the two teams, buffeted back and forth on gusts of wind, until they finally fell apart.
When she got tired of watching them, Spirit walked on, to where another group of kids were standing around a mound of snow. Bare patches on the ground and a couple of discarded snow shovels showed where the snow had come from. But why? . . .
Suddenly the snow mound began collapsing inward, melting down into water, but before it could trickle away, it swirled upward. First into a column, and then making a lightning transformation through a dozen different shapes: tree, dancing figure, rearing horse, bird in flight, leaping tiger. Each shape was shimmering and transparent like the water it was composed of, and as realistic as if it were the living thing it was modeled after. Each new shape was greeted with laughter and cheering until at last the water took the form of a dragon with spread wings and arched neck. Amid whistles and applause, the glistening water of the draconic form silvered over as it was turned to glittering ice.
But Spirit had only a moment to admire the ice dragon before the unbalanced weight of its own form fragmented it. The delicate outstretched wings snapped off and shattered, the head broke from the slender coiled neck, and the whole sculpture lurched to one side, toppled, and shattered. Its fall was greeted by groans of disappointment from the onlookers, then the Fire Witches began melting the ice so they could begin the game again.
Of course, not everyone who was enjoying the winter holiday was using magic to get pleasure from it. There were ordinary snowball fights going on, and Spirit even saw a couple of snowmen, looking a little odd decked out in Oakhurst caps and scarves. But she didn’t want to get into a snowball fight with anyone, and the snowmen only reminded her of building snowmen with Phoenix. She walked quickly past them, staring straight ahead.
Spirit was a little surprised to find that she’d walked all the way down to the train station. Surprised—and cold. But it was interesting to see that the tracks were completely clear of snow, just as the walkways were. She glanced back over her shoulder at the house, then along the tracks. Even if there is a full moon tonight, if someone took the path down to the train station, and then followed the tracks as far as they could before heading out into the snow, I bet their tracks wouldn’t be visible from the house. . . .
Spirit had reason to be grateful for that forethought not too many hours later, as the four of them crept out of the classroom wing of the main building. Muirin had passed her a note at dinner, telling her to be ready to go at eleven. Dorm curfew was at ten, lights out was at eleven . . . but somehow Spirit suspected nobody would look too closely at anyone sneaking out on a night that the Tithe to the Wild Hunt had to be paid.
We’re only hoping it’s just one teacher who’s working for the Bad Guys. It could be two, or three, or half a dozen. And it isn’t as if we even know what their Mage Gifts are!
But she could worry about that later. If she worried about it now, she’d make mistakes she couldn’t afford to make. “Never borrow trouble,” Dad always said. “The world gives enough of it away free.”
Oh, God, she just wanted to go home.
But you don’t have a home anymore, remember? Spirit told herself viciously. The Bad Guys took it away from you. They sent a monster to kill you, and all they managed to do was kill your whole family instead. And someday you’ll be able to pay them back. But you have to survive Oakhurst first.
So she was waiting in her room, dressed and ready to go, when Muirin came to get her.
To Spirit’s surprise, they didn’t go directly out of the building, but into the classroom wing and then down to the basement. Muirin opened the door to one of the practice rooms. Addie was already there, and so was Burke.
Spirit was distracted from wondering where Loch was by the sight of Burke, because he had a shotgun under one arm and he looked as if he certainly knew how to use it. “I, uh, what?” she said.
“Skeet shooting,” Burke explained. “There’s a whole room full of shotguns and rifles here. It wasn’t too hard to get in and borrow one, especially since I’m on the rifle team and the skeet-shooting team during the season. Talking Muirin out of her skeleton keys—twice—now that was the hard part, but I figured I was going to need it.” He pulled a shotgun shell out of his pocket and held it up. “They’re filled with salt,” he explained simply. “Blessed salt. I’ve been making them all week. Should have enough to take out a whole army of ghosts without having to get too close.”
“Technically you ‘lay’ a ghost,” Addie said pedantically. She picked up her own “weapon” from the table and brandished it. “Meanwhile, this should take care of any elves we meet.”
“Say hello to my little friend,” Muirin said, and snickered.
Spirit blinked in perplexity at Addie’s choice of armament: It was a large green-and-silver plastic thing that looked like a sci-fi movie ray gun. She wondered where Addie could have gotten it on such short notice.
“A Super Soaker with a modified pressure relief valve, increased aperture, and a four-liter reservoir. It has maybe a fifteen-yard range, but fortunately I’m not limited to its range—and there are enough iron filings in the water to send any elf, fay, or fairy I hit with it straight back to the Hollow Hills with its tail tucked between its legs. It’s a good thing Oakhurst has a metal shop,” Addie said. “Believe it or not, this is actually something I borrowed from the lab. There are times when it’s good to be a Water Witch.”
“Me, I’m going with a slingshot and some iron balls. They used to be glass marbles, but . . . I’ve got connections.” Muirin smirked. “Too bad illusions won’t be much use tonight.”
“Okay, we’re all here, let’s go,” Burke said, ignoring Muirin’s last comment. “Spirit, maybe you could carry that? Loch told me he was going to need it.”
He gestured at the table. There was still a leaf blower sitting on it, one of the self-contained gas-powered kind. “But . . . where is he?” Spirit asked. “Aren’t we waiting for him?”
“He’s already up there,” Burke said grimly. “He’s been sneaking up there for days to work on the spell-trap, but he said he wanted to put the finishing touches on it tonight.”
Spirit felt horribly exposed as she walked out of the building with the others. What if someone saw them carrying all this stuff? The moon was full and bright, and there were still lights on in the main building.
“Don’t you get it yet?” Muirin said, seeing her expression. “Nobody’s going to stop us. There are eight nights of the year that somebody on this campus is sure to make it easy for anyone who wants to go out of bounds. Why not? I bet an extra Tithe or two only makes things better for whoever’s doing this.”
Spirit swallowed hard. Muirin was right. She wondered where Claire Grissom was right now. Out there somewhere shivering with fear and cold and pain? Unconscious? She couldn’t be dead: If there was one thing that Spirit had picked up from all the lore about the Wild Hunt, it was that it ignored dead things.
They followed the brick walkways down to the little private train station, then walked along the tracks for about half a mile. This far away from everything, the wind cut like a knife, and even in her warm clothes, Spirit shivered constantly. She was surprised—and grateful—to find, when they finally had to abandon the tracks to head for the stand of pines, that the snow was only a few inches deep.
“The wind blows it and scours it off the open plain. It piles up around the buildings, because the buildings are the only things out here to stop it,” Burke said, when she exclaimed in surprise. “It shouldn’t be too deep out here for a few weeks yet.”
At least something’s going right tonight, Spirit thought. She did her best to smother the thought, hoping it wouldn’t jinx everything else that was going to happen.
Loch was waiting for them in the tiny pine forest. The moonlight was bright enough that even under the trees he was plainly visible. “Oh, good,” he said, taking the leaf blower from Spirit. “You brought it.”
“No,” Muirin said. “We thought we’d just leave it behind and ruin your plans.”
“Fun-nee,” Loch said, deadpan. He set the leaf blower carefully behind a tree. Spirit looked around, but she couldn’t see anything anywhere that looked like the drawing of the spell-trap she’d seen in Loch’s notes.
Loch looked at the others. “Okay. I guess we’re ready.”
“Except for . . . how do we make sure the Hunt comes after us—and not after somebody else?” Addie asked.
This is a fine time to wonder that! Spirit thought, even as she realized that hadn’t occurred to her, either. What if they just missed them?
“North,” Loch said with certainty, glancing toward the white pillar that marked the edge of the school bounds. “Just head north and keep heading north. The Hunt should show up pretty quick as soon as we’re off the school grounds—and outside the wards.”
Burke nodded, and pulled off his heavy gloves, exposing the thin glove liners underneath them. He stuffed a hand into his pocket and pulled out two shells, dropping them into the barrels of the shotgun he held. When he slammed it shut, the sound echoed through the trees with a terrible finality.
With Burke in the lead, they stepped from beneath the shadow of the trees and began walking north.