SEVEN
If Spirit had found it difficult to concentrate that morning just knowing Nick was gone, it was a hundred times harder that afternoon, knowing he’d run into something last night that had fried his brain. And whatever it was, it seemed like the administration didn’t think a Healing spell would do any good. Were Healing spells no use on someone who’d been traumatized so badly that he’d completely flipped out?
Maybe they thought whatever had happened to Nick might be contagious. Was that even possible? Spirit didn’t know.
Or maybe there wasn’t anyone here who could Heal him? That didn’t seem right, either.
It couldn’t just be that they wanted to conceal what had happened from the students, because with so many magicians among the teachers, the odds were that one of them must be a Healer as well. Had to be. How could they not have a Healer? It had to be Doctor Ambrosius, if nobody else.
Or . . . maybe not Ambrosius. Transformation was a Water Gift, and Healing was a Fire Gift. Even if somebody had Gifts from two Schools, it was usually from Schools of compatible Elements, so maybe Doctor Ambrosius was out of the running for School Healer.
True, Loch had three Gifts, but Kenning and Shadewalking were both from the School of Air, and apparently Pathfinding—School of Earth—wasn’t that incompatible.
On the other hand, you were only supposed to be able to Transform yourself, not somebody else; and he’d certainly turned her and Loch into mice. So what School did that make Doctor Ambrosius?
Could you have Gifts from several Schools? Or was there a secret School that let you do things they didn’t talk about in class?
She chewed on the end of her pen. Why hadn’t anybody ever thought about these things before? (Maybe they had, a little voice inside her suggested. Maybe the kids who think about things like this are the ones who vanish.) The more Spirit thought about Oakhurst, the more she realized there were so many things none of them knew, and more things that just didn’t make sense.
She was so distracted that Ms. Groves caught her not paying attention in Magic Class, and as a result she got an extra assignment—write a ten-page paper on how the traditional folklore practices of Wiltshire were adapted when the English emigrated to the New World, due Monday. There went every scrap of free time over the weekend, not that there was much to begin with. And last Sunday Doctor Ambrosius had finished making his “first pass” through the student body for Sunday Afternoon Tea, which meant she could get chosen again for that honor at any time, since student’s names were chosen at random. It would be just her luck to make the list this Sunday, and how would she be able to sit there and smile nicely and pretend that there was nothing wrong, that Seth and Camilla weren’t missing, that Nick hadn’t had his mind destroyed?
To top off what was turning out to be a really awful day, Mr. Wallis was in a horrible mood during karate class. Not only did he pick Spirit to come up to the front of the class to demonstrate a new form with, when she screwed up—she had only been in the class for a month and a half!—he did a foot-sweep that knocked her sprawling and then spent five minutes shouting at her about what a clumsy useless loser she was. The dojo had an exhibition coming up at the end of the month (for “exhibition” read “competition,” even if they were only competing against the other students in the class), he announced—as if he let any of them forget it for an instant—and he was not going to have them all made to look ridiculous by a lazy, untalented, good-for-nothing, spoiled little princess like her. He made her do forms with the other students for the rest of the class—even when she should have been working on her kendo—and of course Dylan Williams took the opportunity to hit her—and hit hard.
By the time the lesson was over, Spirit was bruised, nearly crying from sheer rage, and just about ready to run away from Oakhurst herself. As the other students folded and packed away their kendo equipment in their gym bags, Spirit strode toward her unopened one. It was probably just as well that she didn’t have a real sword. She’d probably have beheaded somebody.
“If you’d like, I could do some extra practice with you,” Burke said softly.
He’d come up behind her so quietly she hadn’t even heard him approach. If she had her magic, she’d have known he was there, Spirit thought, gritting her teeth. Over the last several weeks she’d noticed how all of the other students—even Loch, and that really hurt—seemed to notice whenever one of the others was there. How many times had she seen Muirin trying to sneak up on Addie, or Brendan, or even (she winced mentally) Nicholas, only to have her intended victim spin around just as she reached them? She was the only one who couldn’t tell. Spirit White. The loser. The cripple.
She was about to tell Burke that she didn’t need any more charity, and forced herself to bite back the words unsaid. Burke wasn’t offering charity. Burke was her friend. He wanted to keep her from collecting any more bruises from Mr. Wallis. And if she was honest, she’d have to admit she needed the help.
“I don’t know when you’d have the time,” she said grudgingly. The football team was playing under lights now, and they had practices every afternoon and a game every Saturday. Burke was heading off to football practice now.
“Evenings after dinner,” he said promptly. “We can get in an hour or so as often as we can. It’ll help.”
She straightened up and turned around, heaving the bag of armor and padding up onto her shoulder. If there had been the least scrap of pity or sympathy on Burke’s face, she would have refused: she refused to accept pity and she rejected the entire idea that she needed sympathy. But his face showed nothing but kindness, so she nodded. “Okay.”
The horrible session with Mr. Wallis had driven everything else out of Spirit’s mind. It was only when she was on her way into the Refectory for dinner that she remembered that Loch had been supposed to be sneaking back into the Infirmary while she’d been collecting a choice set of new bruises. When she saw him sitting at their table, she felt a sharp pang of relief. It would have been unbearable if Loch had vanished, too.
If any of the others had.
Camilla’s disappearance and Nick’s accident were the main topics of conversation at dinner—apparently everyone had heard that he’d been found and was going to be in the hospital for a long time. Listening to Brendan talking about it with Troy Lang and Eric Robinson, though, Spirit realized that nobody knew Nick was here at Oakhurst right now. Everyone thought that he’d been found in Radial—that much was true—and was still in the hospital there.
The rumor about his accident and Camilla’s disappearance having something to do with “drugs” was making the rounds, too. Sarah Ellis and Cadence Morgan were both sticking up for Camilla, but Spirit doubted it would matter much. If she didn’t go to Oakhurst and know how impossible it was to get even an unapproved aspirin here—if she hadn’t known everyone involved and known that Nick would rather die than touch anything harder than caffeine—it would probably seem like a plausible explanation.
Only Brendan, Troy, and Eric—and Jillian Marshall and Kristi Fuller—did go to Oakhurst, and they sounded as if they believed it. That just was such a WTF moment it almost made Spirit’s eyes cross.
And then she realized something else; never mind why the other kids believed the bogus story. That didn’t matter. The real question was, how did the rumor get started in the first place?
Loch didn’t say anything at all about Nicholas during dinner, even though Muirin kept giving him Meaningful Looks. Loch pretended not to notice, insisting on talking to Cadence about tonight’s basketball game, and Burke about tomorrow’s football game. Addie said that the football team played their last game the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and after that, a lot of the other Oakhurst sports took over Saturday afternoons—the swim team, and the fencing team, the gymnastics teams, and (of course) the martial arts club.
“You should take up tennis in the spring,” Addie said to Spirit. “And there’s a golf course, too.”
“Golf?” Loch asked, looking interested.
“Just nine holes,” Addie said. “But”—she dropped her voice conspiratorially—“at least we don’t have to compete at it.”
Loch smiled at her, understanding her perfectly. They want us to compete at everything here, Spirit thought—not for the first time. And against each other. It’s almost as if somebody’s trying to make sure that only a few of us survive to graduate, and that none of us make good friends.
“Hey, at least the skeet range is open for a few more weeks,” Burke said. “You might like that, Loch. You need to do something besides swimming and chess. And shooting’s fun.”
“I don’t like guns,” Loch said, his smile fading as he looked away. “I don’t think they’re fun at all.”
“I didn’t—” Burke began, looking hurt.
“Archery,” Spirit said quickly. “That’s outdoors, right? Or—I don’t know—just pick something that’s going to get snowed under six weeks from now. Then they’ll be happy, and you won’t have to think about it again until March.”
“April, actually,” Addie said drily. “There’s soccer. Or field hockey—we’d love to have you on our team, Loch.”
Loch snorted rudely. Field hockey was one of the few sports at Oakhurst—football was another—that didn’t have both a boys and a girls team.
“Croquet,” Muirin said instantly.
“Shuffleboard,” Spirit said. It was the most ridiculous thing she could think of.
“Hopscotch,” Loch said, capping both of them, and the somber mood was broken.
The five of them had gone to the Friday night basketball game as a group every week—at least since Spirit and Loch had arrived at Oakhurst—and by unspoken agreement, they went tonight as well. If you were forming a secret cabal (even if you didn’t know what your secret cabal was for just yet) the first thing you had to remember was to keep behaving exactly the way you had before you’d formed your secret cabal.
But at least they could all sit together at the top of the bleachers without doing anything unusual. And not everyone came to the Friday games—or to the basketball games at all (not like the football games that practically the whole school attended). So they could hide in plain sight—and talk.
Loch sat in the middle, with Spirit on one side of him and Muirin on the other. Addie and Burke sat on the ends. Most of the other kids either didn’t want to climb up that high, or wanted to sit at the ends near one or the other of the baskets. All the Oakhurst teams played full-court, and the court was regulation size—94 by 50—so that left plenty of room in the middle for them to have privacy.
“Well?” Muirin demanded, as soon as Mr. Gail had blown the whistle to start the game and the ball was in play. The sound system was blasting a techno mix version of “Oakhurst We Shall Not Forget Thee” (Spirit had nearly died laughing the first time she’d heard it, but she had to admit it kind of grew on you), and everybody was whistling and shouting.
“Okay,” Loch said, leaning forward. “I went down to the Infirmary after class, instead of going to the Chess Club—”
“Wow, I bet that took real courage,” Muirin said snidely.
“You’ve been here longer than I have, Muirin—you know they like us to be where we’re supposed to be all the time,” Loch snapped.
“He’s right, Murr,” Burke said. “That was a real risk you took,” he added, and Loch smiled at the praise.
“So I eavesdropped on Ms. Bradford. You know how everybody was talking at dinner about how Nick’s going to be in a hospital for a long time? Well he is, but not in Radial. Ms. Bradford was making the arrangements on the phone with somebody to have an ambulance meet her and him at the train station in Billings.”
“When?” Addie asked tensely.
“They’re going first thing in the morning,” Loch said. “If you’re thinking about—about breaking him out, or—or anything—there isn’t any point. I tried talking to him.”
He sighed, and looked really upset. But he was laughing and joking all the way through dinner, Spirit thought. She didn’t know whether to be proud of Loch for being able to lie so well—or worried, because if he could lie that well to them about something like this—something they all knew about—what else might he lie about later?
“I had to wait almost an hour for her to leave. Ms. Holland says that when I’m a full-fledged Shadewalker, I’ll be able to fool security cameras into not seeing me, and walk right up to people and have them not see me even if they’re looking for me, but right now it’s more like they just happen to not look where I am. I didn’t dare try to walk past her desk and try to talk to Nick while she was there.”
“But she did leave,” Muirin said impatiently. “And then what happened?”
“They have him strapped into a bed, with an IV in his arm, and one of the bags was just saline, but the other one was really small, and I figured it was some kind of sedative. So I stopped the drip and tried to wake him up, and—stop hitting me, Muirin. I’m going to tell this my own way.”
“It’ll go faster if you don’t try to hurry him, Murr,” Burke pointed out.
“I was scared to death,” Loch said shakily. “If Ms. Bradford came back, she’d be sure to see me. And Nick wouldn’t wake up. He looked so awful—pale, and . . . I don’t know how to describe it. Kind of . . . starved.” Loch stared off into space for a long moment, and even Muirin didn’t try to hurry him this time. “Like he hadn’t just been gone for a few hours. Like he’d been gone a really long time. But I remembered something I read in a book once, how to wake somebody up if you really had to, so I pinched his earlobe as hard as I could. And he did wake up—at least a little—and I asked him what had happened to him.”
On the floor below, the game had reached the end of the first quarter. The break in the action meant a drop in the noise level, and Loch stopped talking until the ball was back in play again.
“I don’t know if he was really awake. I don’t know if he knew I was me,” Loch said. “All he’d say—over and over—was: ‘the horns—the horns.’ I couldn’t get him to say anything else—and he started getting louder and louder—and trying to get loose. So I started the IV again and got out of there. Maybe I should have brought Brendan with me to talk to him—his Gift is Animal Communication,” Loch added bitterly.
Spirit blinked in surprise; she’d never heard Loch say anything that cruel before, especially about a friend who was hurt. But then she thought about how guilty he must feel at having to leave Nick there. He’d said Nick had been trying to get loose. And he’d sedated him and run.
“You did the right thing,” she said firmly, and Loch glanced at her warily. “Hey,” she added, forcing a smile. “At least Nick gets to leave Oakhurst, right? Maybe he’ll get better in Billings.”
“I hear Billings’s the garden spot of Montana,” Addie drawled.
“I do not want to know what the garden spot of Montana could look like,” Muirin said feelingly.
“Well, it would have streets and buildings, just for starters,” Burke said, and they all made wry faces of agreement.
“So I guess what he said doesn’t mean anything to any of you?” Loch asked. And, when they all shook their heads, he added: “Well, we’d better find out what it does mean, because Nick ran into something out there that did something to his mind, everybody’s covering it up, and I have the feeling that at least some of them already know what did that to him. And if it happened to Nick—it can happen to any of us.”
On Monday afternoon, in the hour before dinner, Muirin and Spirit were in the Oakhurst Library trying to follow up on the clue Loch had gotten from Nick. So far it had been slow going: Spirit had been occupied with the surprise paper from Ms. Groves all weekend, and Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were martial arts class, which ate up another hour and a half after regular classes. Muirin had fencing classes in another section of the gym complex that the fencers shared with the gymnasts, and despite her boasts that she was “so advanced” as an Illusion Mage, she still had to practice, and constantly, because the teachers always wanted to see improvement in your spellwork.
Not that Spirit would know anything about that.
In addition to everything else, Spirit was doing her best to squeak out the promised hours to practice with Burke. She’d only managed it once so far—on Sunday afternoon—but she could already tell it had made a difference. Burke was a kind and patient teacher. He didn’t expect her to know any of this stuff already, but he had an unswerving belief that she could learn it. And he was willing to demonstrate the basic moves as many times as she needed, gently point out her mistakes, and show her how to fix them.
Spirit thought he’d make a much better teacher than Mr. Wallis.
“I just like people,” Burke had said, shrugging. “They’re basically good, you know. Or they want to be. Sometimes they get scared, or confused, but underneath that, they’re really good.”
While Spirit could definitely see what Muirin meant about Burke being “too good to live,” she thought his attitude was . . . kind of nice. And even one lesson had made a difference in class that day. She thought if it kept up, she might manage to get through the exhibition at the end of the month with all her limbs intact.
But classes and exhibitions and their “regular” lives at Oakhurst had suddenly become nothing more than an elaborate lie they were telling everyone. Their real lives revolved around solving the mystery of Nicholas Bilderback’s last words to Loch.
“The horns—the horns.” They could only hope they could figure it out before anyone else vanished.
Their research would have gone much faster online, but as Muirin had pointed out, online research left online traces. And besides, some of the sources they needed were only actual, not virtual. At least it wasn’t unusual for them to be in the Library at all hours. Mr. Jackson and Ms. Anderson were the librarians who took care of the collection, and the rest of the work was done by the students.
The five of them had tacitly decided that Nick must have been attacked by magic. If he’d been attacked by someone and drugged, there would have been marks on him—and the hospital would have tested for drugs, and the police in Radial would have had actual facts to go on, rather than just a story they really liked. The only thing that really fit the few facts they had—Camilla just vanishing and Nick turning up in the condition he had—was magic.
There were a lot of references to horns in magic and folklore, but so far none of them were very useful. Muirin and Spirit had ruled out the Horn of Gondor, since that was fictional. But that left Gjallarhorn, which the Norse God Heimdall would blow to announce Ragnarok; the Amalthean Horn, which some legends said gave forth food and drink and other legends said spewed out demons; the Horn of Roland, which had the power of summoning Arthur’s Knights from their enchanted sleep; and a number of references to things like unicorn’s horns. None of those things would have hurt Nick—at least not without leaving a lot more evidence behind, like a plague of demons or the end of the world.
“This is useless,” Spirit said in frustration, closing the latest book. It was about the size of a telephone book and weighed more than all her schoolbooks combined. “How can we figure out what’s going on if there isn’t any pattern to it?”
Muirin looked up from behind her own pile of books. “Maybe there is.” Her green eyes gleamed brightly in the gloom; they’d chosen the darkest, most secluded corner of the Library to work in. “Halloween is one of the four Fire Festivals.”
“I know,” Spirit said, rolling her eyes. “Halloween, and Imbolc—February second, and Beltane—May first, and Lammas—August first. And then there are the four Cross-Quarter Days between them, the summer and winter solstices, and the spring and fall equinoxes.”
“Ms. Groves would be so proud,” Muirin murmured sweetly.
“But so what? Nick wasn’t hurt on Halloween. And Seth didn’t disappear either on Halloween or on the Autumn Equinox,” Spirit pointed out.
“I take it back,” Muirin said. “Nick left Halloween night, so he ran into whatever grabbed Camilla. And . . .” She stopped, and stared down at her notepad, and when she continued speaking, it was in a small reluctant voice. “Seth . . . had been talking about leaving for a while. He’d been going to go next summer. During ‘Alumni Days,’ because, you know, it’s warmer in June. And he said everybody would be distracted then.”
“So he did really run away,” Spirit said quietly. Muirin had been adamant for weeks that Seth wouldn’t have done any such thing.
“He wouldn’t have run away in September,” Muirin said flatly. “Too cold, no tourists going through he could hitch a ride with, and all his contacts in Radial in school with no reason to go out after dark. Not unless . . . Not unless he thought he had a really good reason.”
“Okay,” Spirit said. She thought about Murin’s first point, how cold September here was, and shivered. “So say he had a really good reason. Then . . . If whatever took Camilla and hurt Nick grabbed him, it did it because he went outside the wards and it knew he was running away. So it’s sort of like a watchdog.”
“Not one I ever want to meet,” Muirin said, hugging herself and staring off into the distance.
The television in the little lounge had a DVD of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in it; supposedly they were all studying it, but they all knew the play practically by heart, so it made a good excuse to get together that wouldn’t attract anyone else. “But why didn’t the—the whatever-we’re-looking-for take Nicholas the way we’re assuming it took Camilla and Seth?” Addie asked. “He was out at Halloween—it’s Halloween—well, Samhain Night—from sunset until dawn.”
“Because in magic, a day starts at dawn, not at midnight,” Loch said. “And it ends at sunset. So the hours between sunset and dawn belong to the Otherworld.”
They hadn’t been able to get together in one of the lounges to compare notes until after nine. Loch was proctoring a tournament for the Chess Club, and Addie and several of the other Water Witches had magic practice after dinner, because the swim team was using the pool in the afternoon. And none of them dared to make changes to their routine they couldn’t explain. At least it gave Spirit and Burke another hour of practice time in the gym while Muirin did some more digging on her own.
“Maybe the Whatever couldn’t grab Nick,” Muirin said, frowning thoughtfully. She waved the spiral notebook she was holding. She’d told the others that they didn’t dare keep a single thing on their computers—not even if they were sure they’d saved it to a disk and deleted the copy on their computer—so all their notes were being kept in pencil on paper . . . and carefully hidden. Spirit kept hers between the mattress and the box spring on her bed. “Loch said he heard the cops say they found Nick a little after dawn. Maybe dawn meant the Whatever had to stop chasing him.”
“But by then the damage had already been done,” Burke said grimly.
“Yeah,” Muirin said. “I’ve found something else you aren’t going to like. I think I have, anyway. Okay, June is when Graduation is.”
“Right,” Addie said. “That and Alumni Days. Same week.” She glanced toward Spirit and Loch, the newcomers. “Doctor Ambrosius doesn’t make a really big thing of graduating, and . . . you know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody talk about what they’re planning to do after they leave Oakhurst?” She frowned, wearing the same baffled expression Spirit was starting to become all-too-familiar with—as if thinking about life after Oakhurst was a concept that had never occurred to her before.
Spirit sighed. “Anybody have any idea of about how many alums come to the Alumni Days?” she asked hopefully.
“Twenty? Thirty?” Burke said. None of the three who’d been here for Alumni Days—Burke had been here for four of them, beating out Muirin by one and Addie by two—seemed to know.
“The point is,” Muirin said determinedly, “that Alumni Days is held during the week of the Summer Solstice—June 21—and that’s also the week that the students who take ‘early graduation’ leave. Surprise. And I’ve been making a list of all the kids I can remember who’ve just left—no matter what reason Oakhurst gave—and okay, I didn’t exactly keep track of when they went. But it looks like we’ve got them vanishing at least in the right months for this to have something to do with the Quarter Days and Fire Festivals. Ads, didn’t Jimmy Richardson leave last October?”
“He didn’t leave. He broke his leg the week before the Halloween dance. Down at the stables,” Addie said, sounding indignant. “Ms. Wood drove him down to Radial to get it x-rayed.”
“He never came back,” Muirin said simply, and the five of them looked at each other for a long moment.
“I broke my collarbone in the first game in the spring, when Blake Watson clotheslined me,” Burke said, looking stunned. “I made it to the sidelines, and Colin Harrington Healed me right back up. I played the whole second half. Why didn’t someone just Heal Jimmy?”
“Maybe there was . . .” Addie said, and stopped. She looked at the others, but Healing was a Fire Gift, and none of them were School of Fire.
“Far as I know,” Burke said, after a pause, “the only reason to not Heal somebody is if you’re afraid you might make it worse—or if you’re too tired. ‘Too tired’ wouldn’t be a reason not to Heal Jimmy. And a broken leg isn’t that complicated.” Burke wasn’t a Healing Mage, but he’d certainly been Healed often enough to know things like that.
“So there was something more than a broken leg wrong,” Addie said determinedly. “They don’t tell us everything. Why should they?”
“So we find out for sure,” Loch said. “Muirin said—the other day—that Oakhurst might . . . benefit . . . from people like me—or Addie—dying while we’re here. If that happens, you can bet it’s going to be investigated by somebody higher up than the cops in a no-horse town. And magic or no magic, everything will go a lot more smoothly with the right paperwork. A place like this has to keep records. It’s insured, certified by the County Health Department, has a state license to operate, is accredited at the state and national level—that’s a lot of paperwork. You can’t just pretend you filed all of it. Or maintain an illusion from here to the State Capitol for years.”
“So . . . what?” Spirit asked. “We’re looking for a book that says ‘There’s a Portal To Hell In The School Basement’ with a list of names in it and the dates the teachers threw them in?”
Loch coughed, unsuccessfully trying to hide a laugh. “More like old files on former students. Maybe even death certificates, if they’re admitting that anyone died here. At the very least, a better list of who ‘ran away’ from Oakhurst.”
“Or graduated early,” Burke said.
“Whatever that means,” Loch muttered.
“Like Tabitha Johnson and Ryan Miller,” Muirin added.
Thanksgiving was coming, and Spirit kept thinking about last year, when she’d still had a family. She remembered grumbling and griping through the whole day—they’d driven into town to volunteer at the local shelter to serve Thanksgiving dinner to a couple of hundred people, then come home to eat their own with a bunch of Mom and Dad’s hippy-dippy friends, all of whom brought weird “organic” casseroles. They hadn’t even had a real turkey—because so many of their guests were vegetarians—it had been Tofurky, and Spirit and Phoenix both hated that. And all she’d been able to think about all day was that she wished she had a normal life, with normal parents, where she could eat a normal Thanksgiving dinner, without arguing whether or not something was “ethical,” “vegan,” or “green,” with sugary cranberry sauce and an actual turkey, and pie and ice cream for dessert, and not have to listen to a bunch of people who thought that Woodstock Was Not Dead.
She’d give anything to be able to step back into that life again.
The week seemed to drag on forever. It was boring and terrifying at the same time: they had to behave exactly as they had been—right down to hanging out on IM at night—and they could never even hint to someone outside their group that they suspected there was something going on.
At the same time, they couldn’t let Oakhurst notice there was an actual them, either. Spirit had started out only suspecting that Oakhurst didn’t want you to make good friends—not the kind of friends you’d be drop-dead loyal to—and the more she looked around, the more hints she found that she was right.
Zoey Young and Jillian Marshall were the two girls who’d arrived at Oakhurst before Spirit, and they’d become close friends. Both of them—and Spirit—were in the same afternoon History of Magic class with Ms. Groves. Then Zoey got switched to the morning class, and Ms. Groves announced—in class, so everybody knew—that it was because Zoey was “more advanced.” Spirit knew that Jillian was the better magician. Jillian knew it, too. She stopped sitting with Zoey at meals.
When Spirit mentioned that to the others, Addie didn’t seem to see anything odd in it, and Spirit wondered if she was being overly paranoid. The truth was that Oakhurst rarely needed to meddle that much to keep all of them at each other’s throats. With all the competition going, it was hard to stay friends with someone. On Wednesday in kendo, she’d been sparring against Jenny O’Connell, and when she’d blocked with her shinai, it exploded into splinters and ash in her hands. Somebody had carefully burned the bamboo-slat sword to cinders from the inside out. Jenny backed off and let Spirit get another shinai.
Spirit had thought Jenny was being nice until she saw her laughing with Andy Hayes about it after class. Andy wasn’t taking kendo—but he was a Fire Witch. So much for being nice; Jenny had sabotaged her sparring session.
When Spirit wasn’t dealing with her classmates, or trying to be “normal for Oakhurst,” she was helping the others try to figure out what was going on. What she was actually figuring out was that this kind of double life left her feeling as drained as those first weeks of rehab had—when she was struggling to reclaim her own body. There were never enough hours in the day, and they weren’t much closer to figuring out what the “Whatever” was (Muirin’s name for it had stuck), either. They were guessing it was something that had to vanish with the dawn, but there were a lot of magical things that did that.
On the other hand, they were starting to develop a scarily long list of missing students.
Oakhurst Academy had opened almost forty years ago, according to Loch. They couldn’t exactly ask any of the proctors or the teachers about kids who’d disappeared from Oakhurst before they turned twenty-one, but Burke was well-liked and knew everyone—and he had a good memory. When he sat down and thought about it, he came up with something that startled all of them, even Muirin. At least two kids had left Oakhurst in the weeks around the Fire Festivals and Cross-Quarter Days for as far back as Burke could remember. And if it had been going on for the last four years, well, there was no reason to think it hadn’t been going on for the last forty years. They were all orphans. Who’d know—or care—if one of them vanished, so long as everything looked right on the surface? Like Loch said, if the paperwork was all in order . . .
Oh, there were dozens of explanations. Illness, injury, ran away, long-lost relative turned up, transferred to a different boarding school . . . kidnapped by space aliens, for all Spirit knew! The point was, Oakhurst was like a Roach Motel in reverse: kids checked out—and they never checked back in again.
The double life was exhausting and nerve-wracking, and the expected attendance at the football game was pretty much the last straw. As the victorious players trotted from the playing field, Spirit decided her plans for the rest of the afternoon would be curling up with a good book, and . . . curling up with a good book. The football game had just been a reminder that Oakhurst encouraged confrontation and conflict—five players had been carried from the field into the hands of the Healing Mages—as well as a reminder that there was nobody any of them could turn to for protection. And if that wasn’t bad enough, it was cold out there in the stands.
When she got back to her room, her IM was flashing and chiming with a request for chat. So not in the mood, Spirit thought, muting the sound and turning her computer around so she wouldn’t have to look at the nagging image on the screen.
How come you weren’t answering your IM?” Muirin demanded, practically the moment Spirit settled into her seat in the Refectory. “I was paging you right up until dinner.”
Spirit felt a flare of irritation—and an unreasonable wish that she’d sat somewhere else tonight. Couldn’t Muirin give her a rest for one afternoon? “I was busy,” she said shortly.
She glanced around. The others were all looking at her as if she’d done something wrong—or something particularly stupid—and for just an instant Spirit was tempted to leap to her feet and start shouting: “Hey! Everyone! Camilla didn’t run away! She was kidnapped by the Monster Of The Week! And so was Nicholas! And so was Seth! And so was everybody that you think has left Oakhurst for any reason for the last ten years!”
“What?” she said instead, knowing she sounded sulky and out of sorts.
“Um, just, I could use some help on this thing I’ve got to work on, if you’ve got time after dinner,” Loch said, after an awkward pause.
Spirit was about to point out that not only were they not in any of the same classes, Loch was probably a better student than she was. He might have been bounced around among half a dozen private schools (or more), but the ones that weren’t just babysitters for the rich and bored were academic pit bulls. And Lachlan Spears, Senior, had probably been the type of father to go for the pit-bull school over the babysitter school. But she didn’t. She opened her mouth to say something when she felt a foot settle over hers and press down. Hard.
She glanced up in surprise. Addie was reaching for a roll and looking completely innocent, but Spirit had no doubt as to whose foot it was. “Um, sure. Glad to,” Spirit said unconvincingly.
She was grateful when dinner was over. She didn’t have a lot of appetite between wondering what the others wanted to talk about and trying to keep up a stream of inane chatter about stupid things. They hadn’t seemed quite as stupid when she’d just thought Oakhurst was a perfectly normal orphanage where all the kids happened to have magic powers. (“Will you listen to yourself, Spirit White!” her inner voice said. “ ‘A perfectly normal orphanage where all the kids happen to have magic powers’? Is it any wonder you’re a few fries short of a Happy Meal these days?”) But now that she knew it was an orphanage where all the kids had magic powers and some of them were inexplicably disappearing, she’d lost any patience with trivialities that she’d had left after her family’s deaths. Life wasn’t just serious business, it was downright grim. Why didn’t everyone else see that?
She was just as glad that Loch’s “cover story” of needing her help with a school project meant they could all head over to the Library after dinner instead of going to the gym for the basketball game. It was one more example of how Oakhurst was trying to turn them all against each other.
She really wasn’t in the mood.
The School Library occupied the second floor of the East Wing of the original house, and it had more books in it than the piddly little Association Library in Spirit’s hometown. Her former hometown. The Library was one long room, about twice the size of the Faculty Lounge where Doctor Ambrosius held his Afternoon Teas. The ceiling was painted dark blue, with a pattern of constellations on it in gold. Above each of the windows there was a half-moon-shaped panel (Loch—of course he’d know—said it was called a “lunette”) on which the celestial motif was repeated: there were twelve lunette panels in the library, and each had a painting of one of the signs of the Zodiac on it.
There were oak bookshelves all along all four walls, and if that weren’t enough storage space for the Oakhurst Library (and apparently it wasn’t) there were also bookshelves jutting out into the room to form “study bays.” There were large oak tables in each of the “study bays,” at which the students could congregate to work.
Ms. Anderson was behind the checkout desk this evening. You could check out as many books as you liked from the Library, but you could only keep them for seven days, and if you didn’t return them on time, you got demerit points, and they were assessed per book, not per you-had-overdue-library-books. And of course they had to be returned in good shape. But aside from that, they didn’t care what you read, and it was one of the nicest libraries Spirit had ever been in.
Ms. Anderson looked up as they walked in, nodding briefly before returning to the book she was reading. On a Saturday after dinner, the Library wasn’t too crowded, though there were about half a dozen students sitting up near the front, typing away on their laptops, a stack of reference books beside them.
The five of them went back into the stacks, to what had become Spirit and Muirin’s usual study table. There wasn’t as much light back here as in the rest of the Library: during the day, the freestanding shelves cut off most of the light from the windows, and at night, they blocked a lot of the light from the chandeliers. Also—by some fluke of the building’s construction—laptops in this corner couldn’t get a signal to connect to the school intranet.
So it was perfect.
Spirit settled into a seat and waited with ill-concealed impatience while the others collected chairs and settled around the table.
“Okay,” Burke said. “So I get back from the game today, and Brendan comes over, because he was going through all his stuff to find all the books he needed to take back to the Library, and he had this.”
He reached into his blazer pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. He set it on the table and unfolded it carefully. Inside was a tiny zip-up carrying case with the initials “NB” hand-painted on one side in flaming letters.
“What is it?” Spirit asked. She was curious in spite of herself.
“It’s an earbud case,” Burke said. “Brendan said Nick was studying in his room a few days before the dance. Nick brought his earbuds with him so he could listen to music without bugging Brendan. He was looking all over for it later—and Brendan forgot he’d left it there. So now Brendan doesn’t just want to throw it out, and Nick’s room’s already been emptied. I said I’d take care of it.”
Spirit couldn’t figure out why the others looked as if this was a really big deal. So Burke had found Nick’s earbud case. So?
“It’s something Nick handled a lot, and something he cared about,” Burke said. “Loch should be able to use his Kenning Gift to trace it back to where anything that has an affinity with it is.”
“We know where Nick is—or where he’s supposed to be. Billings,” Loch pointed out.
“Sure. But his stuff isn’t in Billings,” Addie said. “And they probably didn’t just toss it out—because somebody might notice, and wonder why. And if they didn’t . . . then maybe it’s with other stuff they’ve got stored.”
“And if it is, and I can find where that is, who knows what else I might find?” Loch said, looking excited.
“Well, you’re going to have to be careful,” Muirin said warningly. “And you’re going to need help.”
When Muirin said that Loch would need “help,” it’d never occurred to Spirit that the help Muirin meant was her. But as Muirin explained, if Spirit hadn’t come into her magic yet, that also meant a magician couldn’t sense her by following her magic. So in the event Muirin and Loch were caught, Spirit could get away to warn the others.
Probably.
It’d seemed like a crazy idea after dinner, and it seemed like an even crazier one three hours after Lights Out, when she, Loch, and Muirin—all dressed in their darkest clothes—went sneaking down the back stairs of the main building.
Loch was the one who had to do the actual Kenning spell, and Muirin was coming along at least partly—Spirit thought—because Muirin could never bear to be left out of any “adventure,” no matter how dangerous, and partly because her ability to cast illusions might give them some protection.
Spirit had never been gladder about Loch’s obsession with local history. The Kenning spell pulled him in a straight line—as if there were an invisible string stretching between the object he held and the objects for which it had an “affinity”—but he wasn’t forced to follow it slavishly. He could tell that it led down, so he led them around the main rooms of the house, into the classroom wing, down into the basement level there—and then back toward the house.
“When they added on the new wings, they covered at least one of the exterior entrances to the cellar,” Loch whispered, shining his penlight over the walls. “This is the main one. Oakhurst used to be heated by coal.”
Spirit wished he’d stop talking. If Oakhurst was a little creepy during the day sometimes, it was full-on spooky in the middle of the night. And she wouldn’t quite put it past one of the teachers—or one of the proctors—to follow them and then jump out shrieking just to give them the fright of their lives.
The door Loch was indicating looked just like any other door down here, except for the sign that said NO EXIT: KEEP OUT. It was gray metal and looked grimly institutional. But when Loch tried it, much to Spirit’s surprise, it opened.
“What if there are burglar alarms?” she whispered.
“Oh don’t be silly, Spirit,” Muirin hissed. “Who’s going to break in down here?”
“Well . . . us,” Loch said inarguably. “Come on.”
The basement—cellar, really—was the only part of Oakhurst that Spirit had seen that didn’t look shiny new and rolling in money. It was freezing cold and faintly damp, and while Loch’s little penlight didn’t do much to illuminate it, what she could see was dusty, dirty, and generally unused. The walls were made up of wide-spaced wooden planks, and she could even see cobwebs.
“Hey,” Muirin whispered. “Shine that on the floor again.” When Loch did, she made a small sound of surprise. “Somebody put down a new cement floor here. Newer than the house, anyway.”
“How would you know?” Spirit asked, despite herself.
“Daddy Dearest was a contractor,” Muirin said simply. “I spent a lot of time on construction sites when I was a kid.”
“Do people ever put basements under basements?” Loch asked, sounding confused.
It took them a while to find what Loch was looking for. The part of the cellar they’d come in through had contained the old coal bins. From there, they found the (modern) Furnace Room, where Muirin—over Spirit’s protests—grabbed a flashlight to replace Loch’s failing penlight.
“We’re already going to be in trouble if we’re caught down here, what’s one little flashlight going to matter?” she said blithely.
Spirit wasn’t sure what Loch was expecting to find down here. The basement was cut up into a number of rooms (Loch said that was to provide support for the ground floor above) and it was easily as large as the main house. A lot of it seemed to be devoted to storage: there were shelves of ancient computer equipment, a whole room full of broken wooden furniture and tattered carpet ends, things that had obviously been sent here to die—and other rooms filled with shelves that obviously held quantities of things in current use, everything from fifty-pound sacks of flour to industrial-size boxes of trash bags.
Loch kept circling around as if he were lost, clutching Nick’s leather case in one hand. Finally he returned—for the third time—to the Furnace Room.
“It’s here,” he said, sounding disgusted. He pointed at the floor. “Right there.”
“Huh.” Muirin looked around the room, shining the flashlight around the walls and the ceiling. Suddenly she darted off and disappeared behind the furnace. “Maybe through this door, geniuses?”
“What?” Loch spoke loudly and Spirit hissed in dismay. “Sorry,” he whispered.
The two of them groped through the darkness to where Muirin stood. There was about three feet of space between the back of the furnace and the wall, and in the middle of that space was a door—or, rather, a hatch. It looked like a hatch on a ship, with rounded corners and a raised bottom edge, and it was painted the same color as the wall. Between that and the fact that it was a little smaller than an ordinary door, they hadn’t found it before.
“This way through the rabbit hole,” Muirin said.
It was also locked with a padlock.
“How are we? . . .” Loch said.
Muirin handed her flashlight to Spirit and dug around in her pocket. While Spirit and Loch were both wearing their school clothes—the dark brown was the perfect shade for sneaking around in, actually—Muirin was wearing black jeans and a black turtleneck sweater. She looked like an elegant cat burglar.
“Trust me when I say I know everything there is to know about smuggling contraband into fancy private schools specializing in ‘attitude readjustment,’ ” Muirin said. She came up with a ring of keys and shook them at the other two. “And about keeping it hidden once you get there. These are skeleton keys. They’ll fit most locks. They were Daddy Dearest’s. And now—for reasons that don’t need explaining at this juncture—they’re mine.”
Muirin had to try several different keys, but finally one of them turned, and the padlock sprang open. Muirin removed the lock and pushed open the door. It moved silently, but with a ponderousness that made Spirit think it must be heavy. Loch shone the flashlight in through the open door. There was a flight of metal steps leading down into the dark. He flicked the beam around as much as he could. Support beams. Blank walls.
Muirin carefully tucked both the ring of skeleton keys and the open padlock into her pockets. “I’d rather be caught than locked in down there,” she said.
“Yeah,” Loch said shakily.
The three of them walked carefully down the stairs. Muirin came last, pulling the hatchway door closed behind her. When the beam of the flashlight revealed a light switch on one of the nearer pillars, she skipped over to it and switched it on.
“Hey!” Loch protested.
Strings of bare bulbs strung from an overhanging wire illuminated the room. Series of rooms, actually: this one was large, but Spirit could see doorways leading off of it. The walls, the floor, and the ceiling were all poured concrete.
“We’re in the secret sub-subbasement, which—you may have noticed—doesn’t have any windows, and if they find us here, we’re toast anyway,” Muirin said. She looked around, her expression thoughtful. “Somebody’s Earth Gift got a workout, I’d say.”
“Or something,” Loch said, conceding her point. “This way.”
The fact that there was a secret sub-subbasement at all was bad enough. Some of the other things they found down here were worse. For instance: There were several small rooms set up as cells. In each, there was a bed, a table and chair, a toilet—and a door with a barred window that locked from the outside.
There was a room that looked as if it must be an operating room, or an infirmary of some kind. There were shelves along the wall to hold some kind of supplies, and a sink, and a bed in the middle with a big lamp over it. The bed had heavy leather straps.
“I guess now we know what happens if you collect too many demerit points,” Muirin said, looking at it, and Spirit could hear the fear beneath the mockery.
“Here we are,” Loch said in relief. “Finally.”
The room was about as large as the Library upstairs. Spirit had gotten completely turned around while they’d been following the trail, but she thought it might even be directly under it. There was a big oak table in the middle of the room—like the ones upstairs but considerably more battered—and along one wall there was rack after rack of rough wooden shelving containing rows of cardboard boxes. Beyond them were rows of file cabinets.
Loch walked unerringly over to one of the boxes and opened it, dropping the little leather case inside. “Nick’s stuff,” he said, making a face. “It’s labeled. They all are.” He walked along the row of boxes, his lips moving silently as he read the labels. “Here’s Camilla’s stuff. And Seth’s. It looks like they’re arranged in chronological order.” He looked at the wall of boxes. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
“Why are they keeping all this stuff?” Spirit asked.
“They’re probably planning to ditch it when it’s convenient,” Muirin said. She walked quickly along the row, obviously looking for something. “Maybe they take it all to a big city dump or an incinerator. Someplace where no one will know any of these kids or care about asking questions. Tabitha Johnson and Ryan Miller,” she said in disgust. “Early graduation last June. Not.”
Spirit looked at the wall of boxes and swallowed hard. There were more than twenty names between Ryan and Tabitha—and Seth, Camilla, and Nick. She walked over to stand beside Loch. “How can they do this?” she asked plaintively. “How can they just keep doing this?”
“I don’t know,” Loch said miserably. “It could just be . . . we could just be blowing things up out of proportion. We know why Seth and Camilla and Nick’s stuff is here. Maybe there’s a good reason for everything else. Maybe it’s stuff they didn’t want anymore.” He walked down to where the boxes marked TABITHA JOHNSON were and lifted one down, bringing it over to the table. He lifted off the lid.
The first thing Spirit saw was a raggedy sweater in Oakhurst gold. Loch lifted it out carefully and set it aside. Beneath it was a two-sided silver frame. In one side was a picture of a smiling dark-haired girl with her arms around the neck of a panting golden retriever. Behind her stood a man and a woman, obviously her parents. In the photo on the other side, a handsome boy teased the same dog with a Frisbee. Brother? Boyfriend? It didn’t matter. No matter what, Tabitha Johnson wouldn’t have left that behind when she left Oakhurst.
Not if she’d had a choice.
“Hey, kids, look at this,” Muirin said. She walked over to the table with a file folder in her hand. “Those file cabinets are all full of files. There must be hundreds of them. I looked at some of the dates. They go all the way back to the seventies.”
“That’s when Oakhurst opened,” Loch said. “It’s probably just their dead files. You know, former students? They’d have to keep them forever.”
Muirin snickered cruelly. “ ‘Dead Files’ is right. This is Camilla’s. Let’s see what the Powers That Be had to say about the trailer trash.”
“That’s not very nice,” Spirit snapped.
“She’s gone, what’s the harm?” Muirin said. She flipped through the manila folder. “Transcripts, notes from the teachers—huh, she was getting better grades in Art than I am—evaluations from her magic coach—Kissyface Bowman always was too easy on anybody with a flashy Water Gift—Demerits . . .” She stopped suddenly, as she got to the last page, and stared down at the folder in silence.
“What?” Loch said. Muirin simply held the folder out to him mutely.
He took it, and looked down at the last page. Spirit looked over his shoulder. There was just a single page there at the end, something it would be easy to take out and dispose of if for some reason you were going to hand it over to someone. At the top of the page there were several lines of illegible handwriting. The rest of the page was blank.
Except for a large red stamp that said: “Tithed.”
And the date.
Halloween.