ELEVEN
Spirit knew it was probably her imagination that made the night suddenly seem colder the moment the five of them passed the boundary stone. The wards were impalpable, intangible spell barriers that only served to keep baneful creatures and uninvited guests outside them. Magicians would experience a ward as a barrier as real and solid as a stone wall. Normal non-magical people would simply choose not to go through a ward—and their minds would come up with a dozen different reasons why. They’d forget where they were going, or get lost, or think of something they suddenly needed to do somewhere else, or even get sick and need to leave.
All that aside, there was no way any Oakhurst student would actually be affected by them. The wards weren’t designed to keep anyone in, nor were they designed to keep the Oakhurst students out. No, thinking she could feel them was only nerves.
Their boots crunched over the frozen surface of the snow as they walked, and the night air was so utterly still that the sound of their footsteps was the loudest sound there was. The full moon was almost directly overhead, and the stars were brilliant in the clear night sky. They were so far from any city that the Milky Way was even visible.
When they’d gone about a hundred yards from the trees, Muirin stopped, reached into her pocket, and made a tossing motion.
“What’s that?” Spirit asked, her voice barely a whisper. She’d seen something leave Muirin’s hand, and heard a faint pattering sound as something hit the icy unbroken crust of the snow, but she wasn’t sure what Muirin had thrown. She knew she didn’t have to whisper out here—no one from Oakhurst could hear them, and whatever else was out here was something they wanted to hear them, but in the utter silence she couldn’t help it.
“Shoeing nails,” Muirin said, and Spirit noticed that Muirin was whispering, too. “You know, like for shoeing horses? Soft iron, and the lore mentions horseshoe nails—specifically—a lot. There’s a whole big keg of them down in the stable. They won’t miss a few.”
Muirin stopped to scatter them again when they’d walked on for a few more minutes. “We’re going to feel pretty stupid if all that happens is we end up walking all the way to Radial,” she said.
She was about to keep walking when Spirit grabbed her arm. “Wait,” she said. “Listen. Do you hear it? Horns.” The sound was so faint she could barely hear it, even in the silence: a mellow sweet sound that reminded her of French horns. It was so beautiful that she took a step toward it, wanting to hear it better.
“There aren’t any roads out here,” Muirin said, suddenly sounding rattled.
“Not car horns,” Burke replied grimly. “Hunting horns.”
“I don’t hear anything,” Addie said nervously.
“Doesn’t matter,” Burke answered bleakly. “I do. And so does Spirit.”
Suddenly Spirit felt the first faint breath of wind touch her cheek. The horns sounded again—louder, closer—and abruptly she felt a wild stab of panic. They were doing this all wrong! They’d never stopped to think—if just meeting up with the Wild Hunt drove you insane, how were they supposed to destroy it?
“Only the Wild Hunt’s actual victims can hear the horns of the Hunt,” Loch said. He didn’t just sound nervous, Spirit realized with another pang of fear, he sounded terrified. “I never counted on one of us hearing—being—” He gulped. “Look. We might be in real trouble here. We’d better—”
“Listen!” Muirin cried, her voice cracking.
In the distance they could hear the sound of engines.
A lot of them.
We need to get back to the trees!” Loch cried frantically.
The current of air Spirit had felt earlier wasn’t just a faint breeze now. It was an actual wind, ice cold and skin-numbing, blowing straight from the north. She glanced at Burke. He looked grimly determined.
“No,” she said quickly, hating the way her voice shook. “If we turn and run, we’re doing just what they want. If we run, we’ll panic, and if we panic, we’ll forget what we have to do. We can’t give in to fear. We have to—” She broke off as a chorus of howls filled the night, momentarily drowning out the sound of engines. The howls seemed to echo inside her skull, half wolf-howls, half too-human screams of agony. “We have to see what they are,” she finished in a shaking whisper. But inside, it felt like everything was turning into cold water. They know about us. They’re coming for us.
Only Burke stood still. Loch was edging back the way they’d come and so was Muirin. Even Addie looked as if she was going to drop her Super Soaker at any moment.
If they broke and ran—
Every horror movie she’d ever seen told her what would happen. Separate and run and everyone dies. She dug deep inside herself and found one tiny crumb of courage. Maybe I’m going to die, but I won’t let them get the others!
“Come on!” Spirit shouted at the top of her lungs, turning to face the other three. “We came here to do this! We have to! Loch! The wards aren’t going to protect us! Not tonight!”
It was as if her shouting broke the spell of fear the approach of the Hunt had cast over them. Spirit saw Addie draw a deep breath and take a firmer grip on her squirt gun. Loch nodded. And suddenly Muirin screamed—a high wavering fingernails-on-a-blackboard sound—and pointed.
The Hunt was here.
Spirit turned back just in time to see them appear. “Appear” was the word for it: One moment there was nothing on the endless white moonlit snowfield, and the next moment there was a line of vehicles heading right for them. They left no tire tracks in the snow, and they were running without lights.
As the vehicles got closer, the five of them could see they—Jeeps, SUVs, a couple of pickup trucks—were all rusted, burned, and half-wrecked, as if they’d come from some supernatural junkyard. Their windshields were shattered, their tires were flat—and some had no tires at all. Lashed to every grille or hood was a set of antlers: deer, elk, even moose. And every set of antlers was garlanded with a withered wreath of evergreen.
But that wasn’t the most terrifying thing about them. Because each vehicle held passengers.
Some leaned out the sides of doorless roofless SUVs. Some stood in the passenger seats of roofless Jeeps. Some stood in the beds of pickup trucks, whooping and hollering and urging the drivers onward. All of them were dressed in the ragged remains of hunting clothes—hunter’s orange and red-and-black buffalo plaids and woodland camo—and every single one of them was dead. Skeletal hands gripped roll bars and steering wheels and door frames. Eyeless skulls covered in tatters of rotting flesh gazed avidly toward their prey. All of them were carrying shotguns or rifles.
Suddenly all the headlights of the Hunt’s vehicles came on at once. For a handful of seconds the five teenagers stood petrified in the glare as the Wild Hunt raced closer.
Then Burke raised his shotgun to his shoulder and fired.
The sound of the gunshot was loud enough to shock them out of their terrified stupor. Even through the dazzle of the headlights, Spirit could see Burke’s first shot had taken the driver of one of the Jeeps square in the chest. The hunter had dissolved into smoke, but the Jeep seemed capable of acting on its own. Burke fired again—at the Jeep itself this time—but his second shot had no effect.
“It’s not a ghost! Run!” he shouted.
But Addie had already raised her Super Soaker. She’d said its maximum range was fifteen yards—but Addie was a Water Witch. It didn’t matter that she was firing into the wind; when she pumped the trigger, the jets of water flew from the nozzle and kept going, as if they were arrows—or bullets. When the jets of iron-laden water struck the same Jeep Burke had ineffectually fired at, there was another ear-splitting howl—like an animal in pain—and the Jeep suddenly reared up on its back wheels and sank beneath the snow. It vanished without leaving any trace behind it—aside from its undead occupants, now sprawled in the snow. They scrambled to their feet and ran to one of the trucks, climbing aboard quickly, and left no footprints behind them.
Burke had already reloaded. He didn’t bother to shoot at the vehicles now; he aimed only for their occupants. When he hit them, they vanished. Banished.
The wind was almost a gale now, chilling them even through their warm coats and boots, numbing exposed flesh, making it hard to hear anything other than the howls of the Wild Hunt. As soon as they’d begun fighting back, the Wild Hunt had changed its tactics. It wasn’t approaching them at a slow stately pace any longer. Now the remaining vehicles were speeding up, driving back and forth, trying to confuse them.
Trying to surround them.
“Run!” Burke shouted again, but it was already too late. Now they were in the center of a ring of trucks and Jeeps and SUVs, and any time he or Addie fired at one of them, their target would simply dodge out of the circle so that their shot went wild. Soon they would have used up all their ammunition.
They’d be helpless.
“Fish in a barrel!” Muirin snarled, brandishing her slingshot. “Come on, Ads! Let’s give these losers a run for their money!”
“Glad to!” Addie shouted back. She and Muirin both targeted the same vehicle. The SUV swung out of the circle. Muirin’s iron missile whistled harmlessly past it . . . and Addie’s jet of water made a right-angle turn in mid-flight, spraying the unsuspecting truck behind it.
Once again, her target screamed and sank beneath the snow, bolting for the Hollow Hills and leaving its skeletal passengers afoot. The pickup truck behind it swerved to avoid running them over, and Burke took advantage of the moments that the hunters were afoot and vulnerable to empty both barrels into them. The shotgun shells filled with blessed salt did their work, and the ghostly huntsmen vanished.
Then, for an instant, there was a gap in the line. Loch grabbed Spirit and dragged her through it. She was running with him before she realized what she was doing. “What—? We—We can’t!” she gasped.
“Ghosts—Elves—” Loch panted. “Have to lead them—Back over Muirin’s—Traps—”
The nails in the snow! Would they work if the elf-trucks just drove over them? Were they even touching the ground? Could the others get away, too? She ran beside Loch, back along the footprints they’d left in the snow, and didn’t dare stop to look back. Ohgodohgod, we left them, we left them . . . Behind her she heard Burke fire again and again, the sound loud even over the wail of the wind and the engines and the howling of the hunters. Tears of relief mingled with those of terror as Spirit heard running footsteps crunching and skidding in the snow behind the two of them—she was certain on an instinctive level that the Wild Huntsmen didn’t make those sounds.
She thought she was running as fast as she could, but Muirin passed her and Loch—and then, incredibly, skidded to a stop. Muirin slid to her knees in the snow and didn’t bother to get to her feet as she readied her slingshot again.
Spirit hesitated, but Loch grabbed her arm again and yanked her onward so violently she slipped and nearly fell before she could recover her balance. Her throat was raw and burning with cold, and her chest ached as if she’d been punched. If she hadn’t survived the accident that had killed her family, if she hadn’t undergone months of painful grueling physical therapy to learn to walk again, she could never have kept up the pace that Loch set. But pain was an old friend to Spirit White. It was the one thing she wasn’t afraid of. This wasn’t any worse than the hospital. This wasn’t any worse than waking up, knowing her whole family was dead, so broken that there weren’t enough drugs in the world to keep her from feeling the pain of broken limbs and a broken heart.
Behind her Spirit heard another eldritch shriek as another of the not-trucks was sent back to the Hollow Hills. She heard Burke fire again—two shots, then he had to stop to reload—she heard Addie shout for Muirin to come on, come on—
“Okay, okay,” Loch said, gasping for breath and slowing to a staggering walk. He waved behind him, obviously wanting to convey information but too winded to do it. Spirit stopped, leaning over, hands pressed against her thighs, breath whistling in her throat, coughing and choking as she sucked in great lungfuls of the bitterly cold dry air. She reeled, staggering as she finally turned to look behind her, squinting as she was painfully buffeted by the storm-wind the Hunt had summoned.
There were only five vehicles now instead of the dozen there’d been at the beginning. The Wild Hunt could have overtaken them in seconds if it had wanted to, Spirit thought, but the vehicles were moving forward at a speed no faster than a slow walk. Her friends were running away—but so slowly! And they were staggering as if they were sick or hurt.
“Come on, come on,” Loch muttered.
Then Addie fell. The Super Soaker skittered out of her hands, spinning out of reach across the surface of the snow. She lunged for it, but Burke hauled her to her feet and dragged her onward.
“What’s—?” Spirit gasped, still panting for breath. What’s wrong with them?
Then she felt it. A wave of abyssal cold, rolling toward her through the wind as if somebody had just opened a giant freezer. It made the bone-chilling temperature of a moment ago seem balmy by comparison. Too cold to breathe, too cold to do anything but lie down and . . .
“Come on,” Loch said, but this time he was speaking to her. “We have to . . . get out of . . . range.”
Out of range of the spell, Spirit supplied mentally. But for a moment she couldn’t move. She was staring at the driver of the single surviving SUV. The rider, rather, because he was standing on the front seat staring at them intently. Though he was dressed like his hunters in ragged hunting clothes, he had antlers—either attached to his cap or growing directly from his skull—and beneath the shadow of the cap’s brim, his eyes glowed with a baleful crimson light.
“—demon—” Spirit gasped breathlessly. Not just ghosts. Not just elves. There was a demon as well. They’d need Loch’s spell-trap. And they’d need her spell. But I don’t remember the words!
For the first time since that terrible night when she’d lost her family, Spirit believed—she knew—she was going to die. They were all going to die. Banish the ghosts, banish the elves, none of it would matter, because the demon would call up more for its Hunt.
But first—now, tonight—it was going to kill all of them.
Once more she and Loch began their nightmare flight across the snow. It was agony to Spirit to turn her back on her friends—on Burke!—but Loch wouldn’t let her go. Tears froze on Spirit’s cheeks as she staggered across the snow, every muscle aching with cold. The trees were just ahead, and with them the school boundaries, but there was no safety there. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t want to leave you, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way . . . She didn’t have enough breath to tell Loch it was useless, all of this was useless—she didn’t remember the spell, there was no point in luring the demon into the spell-trap, she didn’t remember the spell . . .
She was so convinced she’d abandoned her friends to death that Muirin’s whoop of triumph took her by surprise. “Keep going,” Loch said as she hesitated. “Trees. Hide. Wait.”
Spirit staggered on as fast as she could—alone now, because Loch was staying behind. She could see the trees shaking, tossing in the wind so violently they were shaking off all the snow on their branches. At the edge of the stand of pines, despite herself, Spirit turned back to look. Addie was slogging determinedly onward, staggering with exhaustion, but Muirin and Burke—and Loch—were just standing in the snow. Waiting for the Hunt—for the demon—to come within range. As Burke raised his shotgun again, the five remaining vehicles revved their engines and leaped forward. Burke fired methodically, reloaded, and fired again, and Spirit sobbed aloud in despair. She was going to have to watch them die, and she couldn’t bear it!
As she watched, she saw Muirin get off a couple of shots with her slingshot, saw another of the Jeeps let out one of those bone-chilling screams before it sank down through the snow, but then Muirin threw her only weapon aside. Spirit knew without needing to see it that the intense cold had made the elastic snap.
And there were still four of the vehicles left: an SUV, two Jeeps, and a pickup truck.
Muirin and Burke both turned and ran, but Loch—much closer to safety—didn’t move. Three of the vehicles followed—including the SUV with the demonic Hunt Lord in it—but the truck had circled back to pick up the hunters who’d been set afoot by the destruction of their eldritch vehicle. The other three sped toward them—
—and struck the scattering of horseshoe nails Muirin had strewn across the snow.
This time the mingled wails of agony were loud enough to make Spirit want to cover her ears. The three vehicles reared back and twisted and vanished beneath the snow.
Now the Hunt Lord was afoot, along with perhaps a dozen ghosts. He gestured imperiously, and the last remaining vehicle zoomed forward at full speed, intent on running Burke and Muirin down. It crossed the second scattering of iron nails just as Burke turned back and fired. This time he’d loaded his shotgun with some of Muirin’s iron balls as well as his own blessed-salt shells. The salt struck the eerie forms crowding the front seat and the iron balls buried themselves in the seat behind them. The truck shrieked in agony and fled back to the Hollow Hills. Spirit didn’t know how many of its passengers Burke had also dispatched with those two shots, but as the rest of the ghosts ran across the snow toward him, Burke calmly reloaded, fired, reloaded, and fired again.
Run, Burke! You have to run! Spirit thought desperately, pressing her hands over her mouth to muffle her sobs. With every second Burke spent destroying the ghostly members of the Wild Hunt, its demonic Hunt Lord came closer. And closer.
And Loch still stood unmoving.
“Spirit! Hide!” Addie gasped, reaching the edge of the trees.
“But—Loch—Burke—”
“Loch has to lure him in—Burke has to kill the rest of them,” Addie said, dragging Spirit back into the false safety of the trees. Their branches were still shaking, showering the ground below with snow.
A moment later Muirin joined them. “Where do we—What do we—How can we—” she babbled frantically. Addie simply grabbed her and hauled her—silently—to the far edge of the little woods.
Everyone had told Spirit to hide, but nobody had told her where. She didn’t even know where the spell-trap was. They’d been spending so much time staying away from each other that they hadn’t done all the planning they needed to. Next time we set out to kill some demons we’re going to plan things better, she thought wildly. Only there won’t be a next time! I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I wasn’t good enough to do what you needed me to do—I’m sorry—
The only place she could think of to hide was behind the tree where Loch had propped the leaf blower. She clung to it and rested her forehead against the trunk, trying to slow her breathing and stop crying. When Loch got the Lord of the Wild Hunt into the spell-trap, she was supposed to say the spell she was supposed to have memorized. And she couldn’t remember the words!
A moment later Burke came running past her, staggering with weariness. She wanted to call out to him, to ask him where Loch was. But I know where Loch is. He told me where he’d be. He’s still out there luring that . . . thing . . . in here. That’s why the others haven’t just run for home. It would just follow their magic the way it’s following Loch’s.
But it can’t see me at all.
They’d only been guessing about that. She could only hope they’d guessed right.
It was quiet. It was too quiet. It was taking too long. It got him. The certainty of it settled on her like lead. Everything they had planned had fallen apart. Everything they had done was for nothing. Loch was dead—that thing had gotten him, and it was going to come and take the rest of them because the whole plan depended on her and she couldn’t do what she was supposed to do. She blinked back tears. It was so cold out here they were freezing on her eyelashes.
It was so cold . . . .
Suddenly Loch came stumbling and staggering into the clearing. He grabbed the leaf blower and slung the carrying strap over his shoulder. He scrabbled for the starter cord, but he couldn’t grip it in his heavy gloves. He pulled them off and flung them aside, then yanked at the starter cord over and over.
But nothing happened.
Spirit looked back the way they’d come. The Lord of the Hunt was only a few yards away from the edge of the stand of pines now, walking toward them with a slow measured tread. With each step he took, his appearance changed. Tattered hunting clothes became a long fur cloak over armor. Battered work boots became high black boots with jeweled spurs. A bill cap and deer horns became a helmet with stag’s antlers. Only the glowing red eyes were the same. She was shaking so hard with fear and shame that if she hadn’t been holding onto the tree, Spirit would simply have fallen to the ground. All for nothing. It’s all been for nothing. . . .
As the Hunt Lord walked into the grove, the temperature dropped so sharply that Spirit heard the trees crack and groan as they froze. Loch was still working with single-minded determination at the little engine of the leaf blower as the demon lord silently paced toward him.
And—finally—the little engine caught.
The demon was so close Spirit ached with cold. So close every breath she took was like breathing liquid fire. It was too cold for anyone to be able to smell anything, but despite knowing that, Spirit had the relentless sense that she could smell some horrible combination of sun-heated decaying garbage and burnt rubber and rotten eggs. And though she knew the only sounds in the pine grove were the sounds of the wind in the branches and of the leaf blower’s two-stroke engine, she had the conviction she could hear screaming—as if the sound of something in terrible pain was stuck in her head like one of those earworm songs you just couldn’t shake.
And there was one more thing she knew: When the demon Huntsman touched Loch, Loch would be dead. She knew Loch knew it, too, but Loch didn’t move. He just stood there like some maniac groundskeeper as the demon stepped closer, and closer . . .
And then, just as it reached out its hand to touch him, Loch swept the leaf blower down toward the ground.
Pine needles blew upward, skirling everywhere, and beneath them, Spirit could see the ground had been scraped down to bare earth, and then carved, carefully and elaborately, with the lines of the spell-trap, and the lines of the carving filled in with a mixture of charcoal and sulfur and saltpeter. She knew that was what Loch had used, because those were the materials the spell-trap had to be drawn in if you were drawing it on a bare floor. He must have used water to bind it all together and hold the mixture to the ground—frozen—when he blew the leaves away.
The demon looked down at the intricate design beneath its feet, and as it did, all the marks flared blue, burning with a literally unearthly light. It hissed—the first sound Spirit had heard it make—and when it tried to step out of the design again, it couldn’t.
Loch shut down the leaf blower. “Gotcha,” he whispered into the sudden silence.
Spirit stared at the tableau before her, her mind utterly blank, knowing that Loch was waiting for her to do her part. The lines of the spell-trap were already dimmer than they had been a moment before. When they went dark, the demon would be free. She closed her eyes, knowing she’d failed them all.
I—Can’t—
“Spirit?” Loch said, and she heard the confused fear in his voice. “Spirit, why? . . .”
“‘Can’t’ isn’t in our vocabulary, Spirit.” The words in her mother’s voice cut through the cold, through her paralysis.
Suddenly she felt an uprush of heat through her entire body, as intense as if she, not the spell-trap, was aflame. She took a deep breath and began to speak, her mind automatically translating the Latin into English as she went.
“Hear me, ancient Abomination, firstborn of Creation, you who have rejected your birthright to reign over the charnel-houses of the Uncreated: I cast you forth from this place! I revoke your license to trespass here, in the name of those who have kept faith: in the name of those who have kept faith, I take from you the name you have been given in this place and name you outcast! I cast you out, to reign in the place of skulls! I cast you out, to reign on the field of blood! I cast you out, to reign over the Uncreated! You have no dominion here!
I charge you to go from this place! By the power of this seal and this covenant: I charge you to go forth from this place! By the power of this ancient spell and working: I charge you to go forth from this place! By the power of your true name, to be spoken upon the day of reckoning: I charge you to go forth from this place! Come here no longer—stay here no longer—return here no more! I take your name—I take your form—I send you forth! Begone! Begone! Begone!”
By the time she’d reached the end of the Spell of Dismissal, Spirit was shouting as loud as she could. And as she reached the last syllable of the dismissal, suddenly the spell-trap flared up even more brightly than before.
It was as if the carved design on the ground and the demon huntsman were both just water in a bathtub and somebody had suddenly opened the drain. The edges of the spell-trap started to draw inward—sliding across the ground just as if the entire design were a puddle of water being sucked down a drain—and the demon trapped inside began to sink down beneath the earth, its body stretching and narrowing as if it were being sucked down a straw. In moments both it and the spell-trap were gone completely, and there was nothing left behind but bare earth.
At the instant the demon vanished, the air went completely still. Spirit staggered out from her hiding place on unsteady legs, feeling as if the air were not only warmer, but cleaner than it had been a moment before. Loch stared at her, the expression on his face slowly moving through baffled confusion to realization toward joy. He raised a hand and took a step toward her—
And suddenly Spirit was seized and lifted off her feet and spun around in a rib-cracking hug as Burke reached her.
“You did it! Spirit! You did it!” he cried. He set her down a moment later, but only so he could reach out an arm to hug Loch, too.
“We all did it,” Muirin complained, coming back into the woods. But her voice still shook, and Spirit could tell that her heart wasn’t in her usual griping.
“That we did, Murr-kitty,” Burke said, his own voice giddy with relief. Spirit hugged him very hard. She’d almost lost him—lost all of them—tonight. And she didn’t think she could bear losing anyone else. Not now. Not ever again.
“Oh my God,” Loch said, laughing. “We won. We did it. I don’t believe it.”
“Well, you better believe it,” Burke said. “With Spirit here on our side, how can we lose?” As if realizing he’d been holding her too close for too long, Burke let go and both he and Loch reluctantly stepped away from her.
“Oh but I—” I don’t have any magic. Spirit had been about to make her habitual protest, when suddenly she stopped. Loch said there were no “false positives” in magic, and . . . if she didn’t have her magic yet, then just what had she felt when she’d spoken the spell that sent the Lord of the Wild Hunt back to Hell? She knew she’d felt something. Something new. Something strange. She just wasn’t sure what yet.
“—are a good person to have on our side, no matter what,” Loch finished for her. “I’m sorry I doubted you, even for a moment.”
“I never did,” Addie said firmly, walking up to Spirit and hugging her very hard. “I’m so glad we’re all still alive!” she added.
“So am I,” Spirit said. “Oh, Addie—Muirin—Loch—all of you—”
“Hey,” Muirin said shakily. “Don’t get all emo. We’ve still got to sneak back into the dorms. And we’d better hurry. I’m freezing!”
“Not to mention putting back what we borrowed,” Burke said.
Addie snorted. “If anyone thinks I’m going after that Super Soaker, they can think again.”
“Come on,” Muirin said impatiently.
But the shocks and impossibilities of the night weren’t over yet. When they walked from the little grove of trees—Loch carrying the leaf blower and Burke carrying the shotgun—they saw . . .
“Uh . . . Guys, isn’t that the sun coming up over there?” Muirin asked, sounding baffled. “You know? In the east?”
“That’s where it usually comes up—okay, more to the south this time of year, but—” Loch broke off as he glanced at his watch. “It’s stopped. Burke?”
“Mine, too,” Burke said, confused.
Muirin wasn’t wearing a watch, and when she checked, Addie discovered she’d lost hers some time during the night. Spirit checked hers, and found it had stopped as well. When she and Burke and Loch compared notes, they found that their watches had all stopped at exactly the same time: 12:46 A.M. Or . . . probably just about the time she’d first heard the horns of the Wild Hunt. Despite herself, Spirit shuddered. As if she needed something else to have nightmares about!
“But I know we haven’t been out here this long,” Burke said in bewilderment. “We left at eleven p.m., and okay, it’s been maybe—what? Three hours?” He looked at them. Spirit nodded—that felt about right to her.
“Maybe four at the outside,” Loch said. Addie and Muirin just shrugged.
“Okay,” Burke said. “But that is definitely dawn over there. And sunrise is at 7:48 on December twenty-second. And this is December twenty-second . . .” His voice trailed off as if he wasn’t quite sure.
“We’re busted,” Muirin said gloomily.
“It was the elves!” Addie said abruptly. “Spend a few minutes—or an hour—with the Fair Folk, and when you get home, months or . . . years . . . have passed.”
“It can’t have been that long!” Loch said in horror. “It’s still winter! It is!”
“It might be winter again, Loch,” Burke said with a frightening gentleness. “We’d better get back—take our lumps—and find out how long we’ve really been gone.”
It isn’t fair! Spirit thought angrily. A moment before, they’d all been so happy. They’d won. The Wild Hunt was gone. Nobody else was going to have to die. And now . . . who knew what they’d find when they got back?
But what they found—as they neared Oakhurst—was their fellow students. The sun had just been rising as they left the forest, so by now it was about eight-thirty in the morning. Breakfast had been over for half an hour, and cold as it was, a lot of kids were already outdoors.
Kristi and Cadence were the first ones to spot them. They came running over and then simply stopped and stared.
“Oh my God, Burke, is that a gun?” Kristi said, her blue eyes very wide. “Addie, I was trying to IM you all last night and all this morning! The dance is tonight! You can’t just go running off like that the night before the Winter Dance! Oh my God!”
“I’m really sorry,” Addie said, and Spirit resisted the urge to break down in hysterical giggles, because this was just so ridiculous. I’m so sorry I couldn’t stick around to deal with your emo pain! I was busy saving the world. . . .
“Oh, Addie, you are in so much trouble,” Cadence added. “All of you are. Where have you been? You are in so much trouble,” she repeated. “You just—they didn’t make an announcement or anything, but everybody knows.”
“Well isn’t that special?” Muirin snarled.
“Hey, uh, Claire. Is she back yet?” Burke asked hopefully.
“Sure.” Cadence stared at him as if he’d grown an extra head. “They kept her overnight down in Radial because they had to do surgery to fix her ankle, she said, but she’s back now. And she’s excused from all of her sports for the next three months,” she added, a little enviously.
Burke glanced at Spirit and smiled, and she smiled back. This is why we did it, she thought. The rest really doesn’t matter.
By now the five of them had attracted everyone’s attention. Their fellow students were standing around them, staring at them as if they’d just come back from the dead—although of course none of them could possibly realize how right they were. Everyone was talking at once, asking the same questions over and over. Some of the questions were utterly inane (yes, Burke really did realize he was carrying a shotgun) and some of them were questions none of the five of them intended to answer—like where they’d been and what they’d been doing—because answering those questions would just get everyone, including them, into a lot more trouble. It was almost a relief when Angelina Swanson and Gareth Stevenson showed up from the house.
“Okay you guys, break it up, nothing to see here,” Gareth said with kindly ruthlessness. “You guys don’t want to get points, you know. The dance is tonight.” Amid groans of disappointment, the students began moving away. Standing beside Gareth, Angelina simply regarded the five of them coldly. “All of you. Inside. Now,” she said, when the last of the other kids had moved away.
At least we know it hasn’t been seven months or seven years or, or, or something like that, Spirit told herself reassuringly. The Hunt is gone, Claire wasn’t Tithed to it, and we’re back more or less the same day.
Gareth took charge of Burke’s (long since empty) shotgun, and the two proctors brought the five of them inside to the Entry Hall. Angelina told them to wait right there at the foot of the staircase as she went off to inform someone in authority that they were back, but Gareth didn’t protest when they all walked over to the enormous fireplace and stood in front of its roaring heat.
“I will never be warm again,” Loch said solemnly, setting the leaf blower down at a careful distance from the heat and walking right up to the edge of the hearth.
“Thought you liked winter sports,” Burke said teasingly.
“From now on, the only winter sports I like are the ones you can do indoors,” Loch answered with feeling.
“I think you were very brave out there, Loch,” Addie said softly.
“No,” Loch said, after a moment’s startled hesitation. “Burke was brave. He stood and fought back. All I did was run. I’m good at that.”
“That’s not what you did!” Spirit said fiercely. “You let that . . . thing . . . walk right up to you so you could trap it. You were brave. As brave as Burke was. Or Addie. Or Muirin—oh, Muirin, I couldn’t believe it when I heard you call them ‘losers.’ ”
“Yeah, well, they were, weren’t they?” Muirin said, staring at the ground. “They lost, anyway.”
“We were all brave,” Burke said firmly. “I’d just rather not have to be that brave again,” he added softly.
Spirit bit her lip. They were already in trouble. She wasn’t going to make it worse by mentioning that their troubles were far from over, no matter what else happened today.
They’d just gotten warm enough to unbutton their coats and take off their hats and gloves and scarves when the tik-tik-tik of high heels on the tiled floor alerted them to someone’s approach. To nobody’s particular surprise, it was Ms. Corby. Despite her festive scarlet business suit and the glittering enamel holly-wreath brooch pinned at its collar, she was nobody’s idea of a jolly Christmas elf. Instead, Doctor Ambrosius’s personal assistant seemed a lot more like the elves they’d spent most of last night dealing with. She looked more than angry. She looked enraged.
“Doctor Ambrosius is taking time out of his very busy schedule to deal with all of you,” she said, her words clipped and precise. “He expects a full explanation of your behavior. And so do I.”
Asking isn’t getting . . . Now, instead of Mom’s voice or even Dad’s, it was Phoenix’s voice Spirit heard in her mind, in the bratty sing-song Fee used to put on when she wanted to drive Spirit absolutely crazy. Ask-ing is-n’t get-ing, ask-ing is-n’t get-ing . . .
Ms. Corby followed them into Doctor Ambrosius’s office, instead of just ushering them in and shutting the door this time, as she had the day Spirit and Loch had come to Oakhurst. Spirit glanced quickly at the others, but Loch was the only one who looked unsettled by her presence.
There was no question of them being permitted to sit, even if there’d been enough chairs here for the five of them. In fact, today there were no guest chairs in the study at all. The five of them stood in front of the desk like errant children as Ms. Corby walked around behind the desk and stood beside Doctor Ambrosius.
“I’ve brought the five missing students, Doctor,” Ms. Corby said. “They walked right back in at dawn, after being gone all night.”
Doctor Ambrosius was sitting at his desk, looking over a folder of paperwork. It was nearly a minute before he looked up from the folder. His blue eyes were as piercing as they’d been that first day, and Spirit shivered as he locked eyes with her, but despite herself, she couldn’t look away.
“You have all disappointed me greatly,” he said at last. “Mr. Hallows, I had hoped for great things from you. Miss Lake, you were doing so very well in your studies. And you, Miss Shae. You had shown such great improvement. As for you, Mr. Spears, Miss White, certainly one’s transition to the larger reality represented by Oakhurst is a great shock, following as it necessarily does the loss of one’s family. But I had not yet been dissatisfied in either of you.”
There was another long silence as he continued to study them.
“I suppose you have an explanation for your behavior?” he said at last. “Miss White, you may begin.”
“I, um, I—” Spirit was utterly flustered at the thinly veiled demand that she explain her—explain their—actions. She saw Doctor Ambrosius frown at her panicked stammering, and a combination of anger and determination made her take a deep steadying breath. I faced down ghosts and killer elves and a demon tonight. I can face down one headmaster.
Who also happened to be a magician.
“It began when we realized that whatever had happened to Seth Morris, Camilla Patterson, and Nick Bilderback was related, and was magical in nature,” she said carefully.
It took the five of them over an hour to tell the story of the Wild Hunt. Of coming to realize that the Wild Hunt was riding through the hills around Oakhurst during the eight ancient Festivals, of researching its probable elements, of seeking out suitable weapons, of going out to stop it. Doctor Ambrosius let them tell the story in their own words and their own ways, only speaking when one of them hadn’t made something clear enough, or when he wanted to hear a portion of the story from someone else.
The one thing they all avoided, just as if they’d rehearsed what they were going to say ahead of time, was any mention of an “insider” at Oakhurst working with the Hunt. Ms. Corby was standing right there, and while she didn’t have any magic of her own, that was no proof she wasn’t working with someone who did.
Their story was plausible enough without bringing up the trip to the subbasement and their discovery of Camilla Patterson’s file. Loch told of sneaking in to visit Nick in the Infirmary, and Muirin confessed to manipulating Eddie Abbott into Scrying for her because she suspected Seth had been a victim of the same attacker. And as for Camilla’s disappearance . . . well, they only had Nick’s word to go on that she’d been on the grounds when she vanished.
“So you see, sir, we weren’t really sure whether the Hunt would come at all,” Loch said earnestly. “If it didn’t, well, we’d just hope to get back to our rooms with nobody being the wiser. And if it did, well, we just didn’t want anybody else to die.”
“I . . . see,” Doctor Ambrosius said. There was a long tense moment, then he smiled. “Miss Corby, I have to say that these five young persons have acted in the finest tradition of Oakhurst. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Ms. Corby looked as if her face was about to crack, but she smiled anyway. “Yes, Doctor Ambrosius. The finest tradition.”
“And certainly there will be no demerits for any of you,” Doctor Ambrosius continued, still smiling and nodding benignly. “Quite the contrary. Commendations all around, I should say. Yes indeed. Commendations. Splendid work. Excellent work. Now run along and enjoy your day. Oh, and I’m sure you’ll be wanting nice hot breakfasts after that long cold night outdoors. Miss Corby, do see to it that the young people are provided with everything they need.”
“Of course, Doctor Ambrosius,” Ms. Corby said. She gestured toward the doors of the study and they began to move toward it.
“Oh, and just one last thing,” Doctor Ambrosius said.
Everyone froze.
“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you not to gossip about this,” Doctor Ambrosius said. “It would only upset your classmates. We wish them to think of Oakhurst as a place of safety. Of refuge. If you five have been forced to discover far too soon how fragile a refuge that is . . . I can only hope that strengthens your resolve to defend it on behalf of your friends. The day is coming, my young warriors, when you will be called to a greater battlefield.”
His voice had become deeper and more sonorous as he spoke, and even though they were exhausted, all of them stood straighter upon hearing it.
“Yes, sir,” Burke said proudly. “You can count on us, sir. We won’t fail you.”
“I know you won’t, Mr. Hallows,” Doctor Ambrosius said. “I know some day you—all of you—will make me proud. But today, please enjoy yourselves. You’ve earned your rest.”
Ms. Corby gestured them toward the door once more.
The interview was over.
Ms. Corby was her regular self: cold, formal, and pissy. Spirit thought it was really hard to cast her in the mental role of Secret Mastermind of the Evil Plot Behind The Wild Hunt.
“Do any of you need to visit the Infirmary?” she asked, gazing at all of them clinically. “No? Then I suggest that you go back to your rooms and change into clothing that looks less as if you’ve been rolling around on the ground in it all night, and present yourselves in the Refectory in thirty minutes.”
It was only when the door to her room closed behind her that Spirit could feel as if it were all—finally—really truly over. Her dorm room looked strange, at the same time unfamiliar and exactly as she’d left it. But I never expected to see it again, she thought. Not really.
She would have liked to linger in a long hot shower, but now that the danger was over, her stomach was telling her forcefully that nerves had kept her from eating much yesterday and—according to the clock on her desktop—it was nearly three hours past her normal breakfast time, and on top of everything else, she’d been up all night. That shower would have to wait.
She pulled off her coat and tossed it on the love seat, then sat down in the chair to drag off her heavy snow boots. Doing that made her aware of aches and bruises she hadn’t noticed until now—and Ms. Corby had been right; her clothes really did look as if she’d been rolling around in the dirt all night. She pulled out a set of clean ones and struggled quickly into them, only then noticing the state of her hair. She’d started the night with it in a long braid down her back under her coat, but somewhere along the way it had come undone, and now it was a mass of tangles.
As she stood beside her bed, muttering crossly as she dragged her hairbrush hastily through her hair, Spirit suddenly remembered what Kristi had said before they’d all come inside.
“The dance is tonight! You can’t just go running off like that the night before the Winter Dance!”
“The dance is tonight—and I don’t have a single thing to wear!” Spirit announced to the empty room. She sat down on the edge of her bed and laughed until her ribs hurt.