EIGHT
Loch dropped the folder. The papers scattered everywhere. He stepped back quickly, as if the folder contained something dangerous.
“Tithed,” Muirin whispered harshly.
In that split second, the world seemed to lurch dangerously, and Spirit remembered the nightmare moment when she’d felt her parents’ car spin out of control—of thinking it would be bad, then worse-than-bad, then the blind mindless terror that swallowed up all thought. She’d relived that terror for weeks afterward, its echo enough to drag her up out of even heavy sedation.
It was like a flash, only negative, and before any of them could react with more than a flinch, there was something in the road—right in the middle of the road. It was—
Oh God! It couldn’t be—It couldn’t be—
And it looked at them and Mom screamed and Dad yanked the wheel sideways—
She’d told herself for months that what she’d seen wasn’t real. And now she was at Oakhurst, and she knew it could be, that it was, that whatever it was, it had come for Camilla Patterson and it had come for Nick Bilderback and it had come for Seth Morris and it would come for her. She had somehow eluded it once. She’d never be able to escape it a second time. Terror turned her insides to liquid.
“We have to—We have to—” Loch stammered in a stunned disbelieving voice.
“Burn this whole place down,” Muirin said viciously. “All of it—just burn it!”
“No. Wait.” Spirit dragged in a deep gasping breath, clutching her hands into fists to stop them from shaking. She was so terrified that all she wanted to do was burst into tears and hide. And if she did, all that would happen was other kids would end up just like her. And Loch. Burke, Muirin, Addie—and all the kids who’d died here.
She took another deep breath, closing her eyes tightly. Play hard and think harder. Mom always said that. “We need to put everything back the way it was. We need to get out of here without anyone noticing. We need to find out what t-t-tithing means,” she said, stumbling over the horrible word. “Tithed to who? What? And by who? Who put that note in there? Why? Was it supposed to be a warning in case someone came looking into these records?”
“It can’t be everybody doing this,” Loch said. He sounded better now. Calmer. As if Spirit managing to hold onto things was making it possible for him to do the same. “Not all the teachers. Not for almost forty years.”
“Why not?” Muirin demanded. She sounded angry, and almost about to cry. “Look at that!” She pointed an accusing finger at the page, which had landed at her feet. “It was in the file! They have to know!”
“You said once that Burke and Spirit aren’t anybody, Murr, and even you and I aren’t anybody. And you were right. But Addie is heir to Prester-Lake BioCo. She’s worth millions. At the very least. She can’t be the first super-rich kid to end up here. Doctor Ambrosius probably sold her trustees on what a great safe secure place it would be for her, because if he hadn’t, it would be the easiest thing in the world to tie up Conrad Lake’s will in court until she was of age.”
“ ‘Safe and secure,’ ” Muirin said bitterly.
“That’s the whole point,” Loch said eagerly. “Anybody who had proof that it wasn’t—that this whole place was something out of Wes Craven land—could just take her out of here and get a lot of money from her trustees for bringing her to safety. They wouldn’t even have to break any Magician’s Code of Silence. They could leave that part out.”
“And nobody’s ever done something like that,” Spirit said.
“Well, Oakhurst is still here,” Loch said. He bent over and began scooping up the scattered papers. “And believe me, my dad worked with people like Conrad Lake. When the really rich want something to go away, it does.”
Spirit didn’t stop twitching at every sound until she was back in her own room with her door shut. Of course the door didn’t lock. None of the doors in the dormitory wings locked: the demerit points you got for stealing were astronomical; almost as high as the ones for being found in the dorm wing of the opposite sex. Ever.
But even when she was lying in bed, lights out, right where she was supposed to be and doing (almost) what she was supposed to be doing, Spirit couldn’t relax. For the first time in months, cruel recollections of the life and the family she’d lost pushed into the forefront of her mind, and nothing Spirit could do could stop the torture of those memories. She remembered when the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out: She’d been nine, and wild to see it, and she’d been afraid she wouldn’t get to, because the house rule was that any theater movies had to be something both she and Phoenix could go to, and Phoenix was three years younger than she was, and at nine she was barely old enough to see some PG-13 movies.
But Dad was crazy about pirates (Mom preferred cowboys), and Spirit’s parents had struck a deal, so she and Dad drove an hour to the only theater in the area showing Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl—just them—and all the way home Dad had talked in a pirate voice while Spirit had yelled and stuffed her fingers in her ears. “Yarrrr!” he’d said. “Yarrrr, me heartie! T’will be our secret, arrh arrh! Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead—arrrrrh!”
She missed them so much.
And Oakhurst held a horrible secret—and it wasn’t the one she’d thought for the last two months that it was. It was bad enough to be drafted into a secret wizard war. It was worse—much worse—to find out that war might have started early, in the place that had been supposed to be safe.
And if it wasn’t safe, who was the enemy? Spirit stared unseeing at the ceiling.
She thought Loch had to be right: it couldn’t be Doctor Ambrosius and all the teachers and staff doing this. Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. Addie couldn’t be the first student at Oakhurst who’d be going back to claim a family fortune when she turned twenty-one. As Loch said, somebody—in all the years Oakhurst had been open—would have taken the quick path to easy money. Even if the rich kids weren’t the ones slated to be “Tithed,” it wouldn’t matter—not if there was evidence that anyone was being . . . taken away. No matter what you saw in summer blockbusters or in books, trustees didn’t want heirs disappearing. Things could get tied up in court for decades, the way they always seemed to with money. Just look what had happened when that rich guy Anna Nicole Smith married died!
For the first time since the accident that had killed her parents and her sister, Spirit made herself think about that night on purpose. What had she seen? What had been there in the middle of the road? As hard as she tried, all there was in her mind was too much darkness—and eyes, and teeth, and cold.
She lay in her bed unable to sleep until the sound of music from her laptop told her it was time for her day to begin.
Another happy day at Oakhurst Academy.
The next day was Sunday. Spirit held her breath all through the morning service, but none of them was picked to attend Afternoon Tea. Aside from studying—and magic practice—Sunday really was a day of rest at Oakhurst, without any games or competitions or demos scheduled. It made it easier for them to get away to talk. Burke was the one who suggested—at lunch—that they all go for a nice walk.
November was freezing cold in Montana—it was twenty degrees out—and there were already snow flurries. They’d agreed to leave separately and meet down at the train station again, to avoid attracting attention by leaving as a group. Spirit bundled up in her warmest clothes—with an extra sweater for good measure—but the wind still cut like a knife. She walked quickly, hoping the exercise would warm her.
She was the last to arrive. “This is warm,” Burke said, grinning at her and Loch as they stamped and shivered. “Too bad neither of you has a Fire Gift.” Addie shook her head, and Muirin just groaned hollowly. “Come on,” Burke said.
“Where?” Loch asked, frowning slightly. “We can’t leave the grounds.”
“There isn’t any out there to go to,” Muirin pointed out.
“Yeah, but you know the grounds go a lot further than this,” Burke said, pointing. “Come on.”
Once they’d crossed over the railroad tracks, it seemed to Spirit as if they couldn’t be on the school grounds any longer, but Burke swore they were. There was nothing much around them but green-brown rolling earth, and mountains in the distance—and there was a lot of distance.
“See that stand of trees over there?” Burke said, pointing to a small clump of evergreen trees about a mile away that seemed to have been dropped down out of nowhere. “That marks the northern boundary of the school property. You’ll see when we get there.”
“Because a two-mile walk in the freezing cold is just how I want to spend my Sunday,” Muirin grumbled. But now they had all the privacy they could possibly want, so the three who’d been there—Spirit, Loch, and Muirin—told the two who hadn’t been—Addie and Burke—what they’d found in Oakhurst’s hidden subbasement.
Addie shook her head, looking troubled. The wind pulled strands of her long black hair out from under the collar of her coat and whipped it around her face. “I don’t think—How could they—?” She ducked her chin into her scarf and fell silent.
“We know Doctor Ambrosius said there’s some bad people out there,” Burke said soothingly. “That’s why he brought us here. Not all the Oakhurst Legacies come here, you know. Just the ones with magic. Like us.”
Like you, Spirit thought. Not like me. She knew that Doctor Ambrosius and Ms. Smith had both said she had magic. But what if they were wrong? Burke said sometimes it showed up late—but how long was she supposed to wait to find out she was a magician? Or to find out she wasn’t?
She wondered if she would’ve liked the place where the nonmagical Oakhurst orphans got sent better. But . . . what if they got Tithed, too? They’d have no idea what was happening and never see it coming.
Burke was chewing on his lower lip and looking thoughtful. “You said Camilla’s folder was stamped ‘Tithed,’ right?”
“Yeah,” Loch said unhappily. “It’s an old word that means a payment. It used to be a tenth part of whatever you had—like in the Middle Ages, when people tithed a tenth of their harvest to the Church. Who’s being paid—or what they’re being paid for, though . . .” Loch shrugged.
“Yeah,” Burke said. “And whatever—whoever—it is, they’re probably being Tithed eight times a year, on the dates of the old-time Festivals. It doesn’t matter what—or who—you worship: There’ve been celebrations on those eight days in most places about as far back as anybody can trace things.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Muirin said. “Astronomical calculations, tides of Power rising and falling, yadda. So?”
“So,” Burke said, “the problem I see right now is that Camilla disappeared right outside the gym. And she was Tithed. But Oakhurst and the grounds are supposed to be completely warded against anything bad getting in. And that means—”
“That someone here at Oakhurst is giving permission for the Whatever to pass the defensive wards,” Addie finished grimly.
Imagining someone at Oakhurst might be out to kill them was one thing. Having logical proof that they really were—and had outside allies—was another thing entirely. Spirit actually saw the moment that Addie was really, truly convinced: first, a kind of shock, and then a kind of glazed chill. The five of them walked on in silence for a few minutes until they got to the stand of trees.
It was like being in a miniature forest. The pines filled an area about thirty feet by sixty—a long irregular rectangle—and at the outer edge of the long side were a couple of staggered rows of young trees. The oldest trees were easily thirty feet high, and someone had trimmed them while they were growing, because there were no branches growing out of their trunks lower than seven feet above the ground. Spirit wondered why anyone would do that. Ease of bringing a brush-hog in? The ground in the middle of the tiny forest was soft with fallen pine needles, and in here, sheltered from the wind, it seemed warmer.
At the far edge of the forest was a white marble cylinder, about four feet tall. Burke walked over to it and brushed the fallen pine needles off the top. Carved into the flat disk of its surface was the Oakhurst crest, and carved into one side was a large letter “N.”
“This marks the northern boundary of the school grounds,” Burke said, tapping the top of the cylinder. “The southern boundary marker is set into the stone pillar on the left side of the foot of the driveway up to the school. The eastern one is about three-quarters of a mile past the centerline of the tennis courts—it’s a plaque set into a big boulder. The western one is out past the stadium about a mile, dead level with the fifty-yard line.”
Loch turned and looked back the other way. While the ground was fairly level, there were too many things in the way to be able to see even the main gates—let alone the drive and the markers at the foot of it. But: “They all line up,” he said.
Burke nodded. “A perfect cross—if you could see them from the air. Or a perfect square, if you connected them around the edges. And everything inside that square is warded.”
“Or it’s supposed to be,” Addie said quietly, returning to the earlier conversation.
“Wouldn’t Doctor Ambrosius know if the wards failed?” Loch asked curiously.
“He can’t be the one responsible for this,” Spirit said doubtfully. “I know he was really horrible to us those first couple of days, but then I saw him at the Afternoon Tea, and—Did he seem, well, different to you, too, Loch?”
“A little confused,” Loch agreed, nodding. “At my tea party, he didn’t seem quite sure who I was. He had that dragon with him—you know, his assistant, Ms. Corby—and she had to tell him my name was Lachlan, not Lawrence. If there’s a bad guy at Oakhurst, I vote for her.”
“Can’t be,” Muirin said promptly. “Doctor A. would know if the wards went down, but people get permission to cross them all the time—like those cops the other night, or the ambulance that brought Nick up from Radial. All the school staff with magic can manipulate the wards—but La Corbyissima doesn’t have magic.”
“They put them back the way they are afterward,” Addie said softly. “It’s called Revoking. You’d never be able to tell that someone’s been through the wards once their permission’s Revoked. But that means somebody inside is cooperating with someone on the outside so they can come through the wards. And that means one of the staff with magic. Which—I don’t know how that ties in with someone being ‘Tithed’ . . .”
“And why ‘Tithe’ anyone?” Muirin said. “Because—”
“It doesn’t matter why,” Spirit said harshly.
All of them looked at her in surprise.
“It doesn’t,” she insisted. “All that matters is stopping it. Don’t you see? Don’t any of you see? It’s going to happen again. It’s going to happen on the Winter Solstice—that’s less than two months from now. Two more kids are going to die—disappear—go crazy. Doesn’t matter. Unless we find out what’s doing it and how to make it stop, it’s going to keep happening.”
If her double life had left Spirit feeling worn out and shaky and constantly on the edge of a crying jag during the previous week, it was nothing to what she felt during the days that followed. Now they not only had a deadline—December twenty-first—but they knew that someone here in the school was in league with . . . whoever the enemy was.
Student? Faculty? Staff? It was Loch who pointed out that whichever member of the Oakhurst staff was turning the school from a safe haven into a hunting ground, they weren’t their only problem. There were good reasons to suspect everyone. Knowing what they now did, it seemed more likely that the “secret society” that might-or-might-not exist among the Oakhurst students was more likely to be allied with Doctor Ambrosius’s enemies and the Whatever than it was to be on the side of the Good Guys. (“Just because they’re keeping it a secret?” Addie had demanded indignantly, and Loch had replied: “Yeah. Think about it. We’ve got a Chess Club, a Tennis Club, a swim team, a Kendo Club, and every other kind of club and team I can think of here at Oakhurst. If there were an Honors Society for wizards—a legitimate one—don’t you think they’d tell us about that, too? If only so we could fight over who got in?”)
So they didn’t just have to find the enemy—they had to do it while they were surrounded by potential spies. And then there was another problem: the Alumni, and the secret society that might (or might not) exist. Were they (and it) Good Guys? Bad Guys? Some of each? Not even Burke remembered who’d visited the Alumni during Alumni Days, so they didn’t know who they definitely had to avoid. And anyone at all who saw one of them in the wrong place at the wrong time—or saw something they shouldn’t, like their research notes on the Whatever—could betray them innocently and by accident, just by mentioning it to the wrong person.
Was Angelina Swanson one of the bad guys? She was one of the proctors, and most of the younger girls didn’t really like her: Angie was an Air Mage, and not above using her Gift to raise a wind that would scatter your schoolwork all over your room—or out a window—or make a door slam on your hand. Was Dylan Williams? He had a nasty streak a mile wide, and used his Mage Gift—Dylan was School of Earth; a Jaunting Mage—to make life unpleasant when he could: He’d grab your pencil or your calculator out of your hands in class, and you’d be the one who had to make a disturbance in order to get them back.
Or was it just too simpleminded to think that because someone was a creep they were actually evil? Maybe they should be worrying about the nice people at Oakhurst, like Kelly Langley and Ms. Smith. Only Ms. Smith was just too nice to be real.
Wasn’t she?
This was all enough to make Spirit want to crawl into a hole and never come out again.
We aren’t getting anywhere,” Spirit said tiredly.
It was a Tuesday evening. Thanksgiving was in just a few days. And more to the point, the last football game of the Oakhurst season was this Saturday, and Saturday evening—instead of a basketball game—the martial arts club was giving an exhibition.
“No, no,” Burke said. “You’re getting a lot better, Spirit. Honest.”
The two of them were down in the gym, wearing their gis. Lately the only time Spirit felt as if she could relax was when she was practicing with Burke, because at least then she was doing something “normal for Oakhurst,” and Burke’s gentle style of teaching was a relief after the constant high pressure from everyone else at Oakhurst.
“I don’t mean this,” she said, smiling wanly. “This is great. I mean everything else.”
She tilted her head back, trying to work some of the tired stiffness out of her neck muscles. It had been two weeks since she, Loch, and Muirin had made their midnight trip to the subbasement, and they were all regularly blowing off the “lights out” part of curfew in order to get their schoolwork done, because they were all spending hours in the Library trying to figure out what Nick’s last cryptic warning—if it was a warning—had meant.
“Oh,” Burke said, as if she’d reminded him of something he really wanted to forget. “We’re all doing our best, but . . . Muirin wants to go back down there and look for more clues. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“God, no.” As much as she wanted to find answers, the thought of going back there made Spirit shudder with fear.
“But unless we come up with something soon, I’m scared she will,” Burke added. “And I’m scared something will happen to her.”
“You like her, don’t you?” Spirit said impulsively.
“Uh.” Burke looked as startled as Spirit had ever seen him. He turned away, fiddling with the hem of his gi. “Not that way. I mean,” he added, obviously thinking he sounded rude, “she’s too smart for me, I guess. Always making jokes and, um, they’re not really the kind I like,” he finished awkwardly.
“She doesn’t mean anything by it,” Spirit said. “It’s just . . . I don’t think she knows any other way to be funny.” Muirin’s humor was cruel, and her jokes were always at someone else’s expense. She rarely had anything nice to say about someone—just as Burke never had anything bad to say about anyone.
“That kind of makes it worse,” Burke pointed out quietly. “I think she needs friends. I’m glad that you and Addie and Loch are willing to be her friends. And I don’t mind if she insults me. But I know she thinks I’m big and stupid.” He shrugged.
“You aren’t stupid,” Spirit said, because there was no point in denying that Burke was big. He was the kind of guy that, if his life were normal, the spotters would be knocking on his parents’ door right now and offering him a full scholarship if he’d come and be a linebacker on their college football team. “It isn’t stupid to not want to say mean—”
“Clever—” Burke corrected, grinning at her.
“Whatever,” Spirit said, waving her hand. “—things all the time,” she finished. “Especially around here.” But saying that only brought her thoughts back around to where they’d started. “We’ve got less than a month,” she said. “And we’re no further along at finding answers than we were two weeks ago.”
“Trouble is, Loch’s Gift isn’t strong enough to get us the answers we need, and Addie doesn’t have the right Water Gift,” Burke said.
Spirit bit her lip. She knew what Burke was getting at. Kenning could tell you a lot more than just where something was—it could tell you something’s whole history, and even a lot about the people who’d handled it. And one of the Gifts in the School of Water was Scrying—a Scrying Mage could see past, future, and other places in the here-and-now. Some Scrying Mages did it in dreams, some in waking visions, and some even used “focus objects” like the traditional crystal ball.
“We can’t bring someone else into this,” Spirit said, alarmed. “What would we tell them?”
“That’s something to think about after we decide if we’re going to risk it,” Burke said seriously. “I don’t know if I can see any other way, though. It’s that or give up—not forever, but before the Winter Solstice for sure. But right now what we have to do is make sure you get through that demo in one piece. C’mon now. No more slacking.”
Spirit groaned theatrically, shaking her head, and stepped toward him on the practice mat again.
Without Burke and Loch, she didn’t think she could have borne Oakhurst at all.
Thanksgiving was horrible.
There weren’t any classes that day, but in the morning there was a concert and in the afternoon (oh joy) there was going to be a play. Naturally Oakhurst had a Choral Society, an Orchestra, and a Drama Society, but you weren’t allowed to try out for any of them until you’d been at Oakhurst for at least six months.
So an hour after breakfast, when Spirit would really rather have been watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (she knew it was silly and childish, but she still loved it), she was herded into the Theater along with everybody else.
Spirit hadn’t been in the Theater before. It was in a part of the main house she hadn’t been in yet, and it looked like an actual theater, with velvet seats and a stage with curtains and everything. It was hard to imagine that Arthur Tyniger had actually built it as part of the original house, because there were seats for everyone, and who’d build a theater this large if they never used it?
The decoration was the same kind of “King Tut and Back-To-The-Land vibe in a blender with Titanic” design that she’d seen in most of the house: There was a big Egyptian design over the top of the stage, and Deco ornaments down the sides, and then—just to top it all off—there were cartouches all up the walls of the Theater on both sides, and painted inside them were scenes of elks and snow-covered mountains and railroad trains.
“My brain hurts,” Loch said very softly, as they walked in.
“You get used to it,” Muirin said. “Just keep your eyes closed. Like the guys who painted it did.”
Loch made a rude noise of appreciation at the joke and Spirit just rolled her eyes, much as Addie would have if she’d been there. But Addie was in the choral society, so she was performing this morning.
To Spirit’s mild surprise, they were separated in the theater—boys on one side of the center aisle, girls on the other. That was a little odd, considering that the administration didn’t make any attempt to keep them apart the rest of the time. She shrugged and took her seat. She wasn’t going to worry about it. There were too many things about this day she was trying not to think about already.
But: “First Thanksgiving is rough,” Muirin whispered to her when they were seated. “First Thanksgiving, first Christmas, first birthday—they all suck. A lot.”
“Yeah,” Spirit said. She blinked hard, refusing to give in to the prickle of tears that had welled up in her eyes. I wish I was home. Even for Tofurky.
Maybe it was just as well she wasn’t watching the parade. She remembered how she and Phoenix made fun of the floats and the has-been stars, and her parents would get indignant and make comments about “rampant commercialism.” And everyone would always bitch that after coming all that way, the band kids wouldn’t even get thirty seconds on-camera. And Mom or Dad would say, “Well in my day, we got to see the whole band routine instead of two minutes of commercials.” And—
She started to choke up just thinking about it, and riveted her attention on the curtain and stage. After a few more minutes of shuffling, everybody was seated. Then Mr. Henderson—Spirit knew he was the Music Teacher, even if she didn’t have any classes with him—came out from behind the curtain and announced the morning’s program. It sounded horribly boring.
It was.
Something could be done very well and still not be something you wanted to have anything to do with, and “an exciting exploration of nineteenth-century American composers” was really high on Spirit’s list. Of course the two-hour concert began and ended with the School Song. Unfortunately, the end version was the orchestra and chorus together, so Spirit had to listen to the words. All seven verses of them.
“Okay, now let’s go do something mind-rotting that actually belongs to this century,” Muirin said, bouncing to her feet as the green velvet curtain closed.
“I—I think I just want to be by myself for a while, okay?” Spirit said.
“Yeah, sure,” Muirin said. “Don’t do anything emo or anything, right?”
“I won’t,” Spirit said, forcing a smile.
She went back to her room for her coat—and to change from a skirt into slacks—and then went for a walk. Dinner would be served early today, at five instead of six, and because the kitchens would be running flat-out all day, lunch would be a make-your-own sandwich bar. She wouldn’t be missed.
She knew she should be seizing this opportunity to plan with the others, because Burke had been right: one way or another, they either had to take a risk to get more information, or admit they wouldn’t be able to do anything when the December “Tithing” came.
Let Muirin go back down into the subbasement to look for information? There were a lot of file cabinets down there, but what they probably held was more files like Camilla’s. Whoever was doing this wasn’t going to write down all the details of their Secret Plot and then leave them lying around loose.
Recruit another student who could find out what they needed by magic? Suppose they picked the wrong one? Suppose it was somebody who was already a member of the secret society?
Yes, that was what she should be doing today. And she was too miserable to even think of it.
Come on inside, Spirit,” Burke said. “You’ll freeze, and you know Mr. Wallis won’t accept a head cold as an excuse for staying out of the demo Saturday.” He shrugged out of his jacket and draped it around her. It was nice and warm, warm like Burke. It even smelled like him, clean, with a hint of nice soap.
“How’d you know where to find me?” she asked. “Magic?” She heard the anger in her voice and winced.
“Nah,” he said. “Useless old Combat Mage, remember? Muirin said you wanted to be alone, and, well, this is where I always came to be alone when I first got here.”
She blinked up at him. He was holding out his hand to her. She took it. It was warm even through her gloves. He pulled her easily to her feet. “Your coat—” she said.
“Keep it,” he said. “I’m tough. Besides, it isn’t that far back to the house.”
They walked out from under the bleachers. “Yeah,” Burke said, glancing back, “it’s a good place—you can’t be seen, you aren’t really that far from the house, you’ve got shelter from the wind . . .”
“Don’t make fun of me!” Spirit said sharply, pulling away.
Burke’s face reflected his honest confusion. “I wasn’t,” he said. “That’s why I chose it. I figured that might be why you chose it. Maybe you’re a Combat Mage, too. It’d be nice if there was another one here,” he said, a little wistfully.
“You’re the only one?” Spirit asked in surprise.
“Well, not the only one ever,” Burke said. “But the only one here in all the time I’ve been here.”
“Maybe I am,” Spirit said. “I’d like to be something.”
“You’d like to be home with your family,” Burke said. “So would everyone here. Even people like Muirin and Loch who didn’t really have families. And I’d like to be back with my foster family—right now, right this minute—and it’s still awful, even if I know I’ll get to see them again in a few years, when I can protect myself and them. And I know that makes me luckier than everybody else here. I have a family to go back to.”
“I think it would be worse,” Spirit said. To have something and not to have it would be the worst thing she could imagine. “But at least you write to them, don’t you?”
“No,” Burke said in a low voice. “No, I don’t. It wouldn’t be fair. Doctor Ambrosius told me that when I got here. He was right. If I wrote them, the people who—well, they might figure out—” He shrugged. “Hostages.”
Spirit slipped her hand back into his. She thought it was a horrible kind of fairness—and what was worse was that Burke had accepted it so completely. “We won’t let anything turn us against each other?” she said a little desperately. “Us five? No matter what happens—or what other people tell us? We won’t believe them? Promise?”
“I promise, Spirit,” Burke said in a low voice. “I’ll always believe in you.”
Every meal at Oakhurst was formal, and Spirit had actually gotten used to it. But Thanksgiving introduced a new element into Oakhurst’s “elegant dining” obstacle course. Place cards.
She’d gone back to her room to try to get warm, having only realized how cold she’d gotten once she got inside. She took a hot shower and stayed under the water until she was on the verge of being late, but she still had to dry her long blonde hair. When she got to the Refectory, half the kids were already seated, and as Spirit headed for her usual table, Angelina grabbed her by the arm.
“Not today, White. You’re over there. Don’t you read your e-mail?”
“Oh, give her a break, Angie, she’s new.” Kelly Langley walked over to them. “Seating’s semi-alphabetical on Thanksgiving and a few other days: It’s in your Orientation Manual. Boy-girl-boy-girl. You’re over there: T through Z.”
Spirit nodded and walked over to her assigned table. She realized, with faint despair, that she was seated between Dylan Williams and Brendan Wilson. She liked Brendan—but she’d rather have skipped the meal completely than sit beside Dylan.
Blake Watson smiled at her as she passed him on her way to her seat. He was nicknamed “Henry” because he was a Healing Mage, and Henry Blake had been a doctor on an old TV show. At least if I stab Dylan with a fork there’ll be help nearby, she thought. Although I ought to be worrying about Dylan stabbing me!
“T through Z” meant Zoey Young was on the other side of Brendan, and also that Loch and Muirin were a couple of tables away, sitting at the “S” table. Most of the kids at her table were “W”s, except for Alexis Zimmerman and Nadia Vaughn, though there were a handful of “T”s, too: Andrew Tate, Kiara Tyler, Christopher Terry, Mariana Thornton, Noah Turner, and Serenity Thompson (why did parents always give their kids such horrible names?). Spirit didn’t need the place cards except to find her own seat; she knew everybody at her table by at least their first name, because she’d been here almost three months now. Some of her fellow students she liked, and some of them she didn’t know more than to just say “hi” to in the hallways, and some of them (like Dylan) she actively disliked. But the ones you have to worry about are the ones who are out to kill you, Spirit reminded herself. And which ones are those?
She’d never had a flat-out bad meal at Oakhurst, though some of them had been pretty weird. Spirit tried not to think about what Mom had always called “Apology Turkey”—the real-turkey dinner she made sometimes the week after Thanksgiving, though it wasn’t an actual Thanksgiving dinner, just turkey. When the servers started going around, Spirit realized this was going to be like Thanksgiving dinner in a movie, with everything clichéd and perfect, from the stuffing and gravy to the cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes to the servers asking everyone if they wanted dark meat or white.
It all tasted like sawdust to her, and after a bite of her turkey, she set her fork down. Fortunately, the one thing they didn’t do here was nag you about eating if you didn’t feel like it. Maybe that was because they knew there wasn’t any junk food to eat.
“Hey, if you don’t want it, just pass it over here,” Dylan said, elbowing her. Under the table, he was pushing his leg against hers, too, but Spirit couldn’t work up the energy to care.
“Hey, Dyl.” The girl speaking was Kylee Williamson. She was in the martial arts class, but Spirit didn’t know much about her beyond that. “Know what an Energy Mage can do?”
“What?” Dylan asked suspiciously.
Kylee favored him with a bright hard smile. “Anything she wants. So if you want to keep enough Gift to be able to Jaunt your toothbrush tonight, lay the hell off. Know how Dylan ended up here, Spirit?” she added.
“Shut up,” Dylan said. There was as much desperation as anger in his voice.
“I don’t really want to—” Spirit said. Whether she wanted to know or not, she knew Dylan would hate her for knowing—rather than just enjoying tormenting her, the way he did now.
“I think you ought to know. Everybody ought to know about Mister Dylan I’m-So-Hot Williams. See, our last names are so close that our files keep getting mixed up, so one day I got ahold of his. Family vacation right? Mom, dad, three kids—”
“Kylee, shut up,” Dylan hissed.
“You bring the proctors over here and I’m not going to be the one in trouble,” Kylee said. She took a big bite of cranberry sauce. “So they ditched him at an amusement park in Florida. Took the police three days to track them down. Found ’em all dead. They’d run off to commit suicide rather than have him around anymore.”
“That’s a lie! They were murdered!” Dylan cried. He was halfway up out of his seat, and all of the silverware on the table was starting to shake.
“Dylan, don’t.” Spirit grabbed his arm and squeezed. “Don’t do it. Don’t.” If Burke were here, he’d help her. Loch would. Even Addie might. But they were all scattered around the room. And in another few seconds the proctors—or one of the teachers—would notice there was something wrong.
Dylan stared at her, his green eyes wide and unseeing.
“Yeah, stupid, chill,” Zoey said from Dylan’s other side. “You’re a jerk, but you don’t have to act like one. And I’m hungry.”
After a long tense moment Dylan settled slowly back into his seat and reached for his glass, but his hands were shaking so badly that he would have just tipped it over if Spirit hadn’t rescued it. She looked across the table at Kylee. How could you do something like that? How could you say something so cruel?
“You try sticking up for somebody else, you’ll just both go down when the time comes,” Kylee said softly. She picked up her knife and began to butter her roll as if nothing had happened.
The karate and kendo exhibition two days later wasn’t a disaster, but about all Spirit really remembered afterward about her own performance was that Mr. Wallis didn’t stop things in the middle to scream at her. She wasn’t just nervous, she was terrified—and knowing that most (and probably all) of her martial arts club teammates were crazy didn’t help at all. She already knew that Jenny O’Connell was happy to sabotage her partners’ equipment for fun. Now she knew that Kylee was . . . Spirit wasn’t sure what. And Dylan didn’t seem grateful for the way she’d stuck up for him at Thanksgiving. Aside from Burke, that left ten other students, and the odds were that every one of them was . . .
Normal for Oakhurst.
But the hours of practice with Burke had helped a lot. She got through her two sections of the demo—sparring hand-to-hand against Nadia, and a sword-kata with Kylee—without screwing anything up. Of course, neither Nadia nor Kylee wanted to look bad in the exhibition. In between those parts, she got to kneel on the mat with the other beginners and watch the advanced students’ routines. And the showpiece of the whole thing was Mr. Wallis versus Burke, both in karate and kendo.
It was beautiful—like a dance—but it scared her to watch it, because by now Spirit had done enough training to know no punches were being pulled—at least by Mr. Wallis. And Burke had already played a football game—both halves—only a couple of hours before. Blake Watson could Heal him, but Healing didn’t take the place of rest.
Watching Burke’s part of the exhibition, she remembered what he’d said the first night she’d been at Oakhurst: how it would be unfair for him to compete against non-magicians at something in which he had a Mage Gift. She remembered how Muirin had jeered at the thought. But today, Spirit understood it bone-deep, where before it was only something she’d believed to be right.
Mr. Wallis was a master kendoka and karateka. He’d trained for years to gain his level of skill. Burke said himself he’d only been doing this for a year or so. But he was better at it than Mr. Wallis—better, faster, superior.
Burke says it doesn’t matter what Gift you have—even if it’s something little like sensing weather patterns, you’re generally stronger and healthier and everything than non-magicians. And . . . nobody here wears contact lenses, or glasses, and . . . I haven’t even seen a single zit.
She wondered for the first time if the “enemies” Doctor Ambrosius talked about really were other magicians—or if maybe they were non-magical people who just hated the fact that there was another kind of person around that was better than they were?
If it was really true that they were better.
The five of them had only had scraps of time to get together as a group since what Muirin had started calling The Adventure of the Haunted Basement, and none at all to get together since Spirit had conceded they weren’t going to solve this. Everything would have been so much easier if they could just have gotten onto IM for ten minutes—or could risk sending an e-mail. But they didn’t dare. So there’d only been enough time to state the problem, not to discuss the solution. Not until this Sunday. As it was, they had to put that off until late in the afternoon, because Addie had to go to the Afternoon Tea, and she didn’t want to do it before that.
At least there were two full hours before dinner. Plenty of time to find the most deserted corner of Oakhurst they could that was indoors, because the weather had now graduated to being really freezing, and there were patches of snow on the ground.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together,” Muirin said in portentous tones.
“Oh, hush, Murr-cat,” Addie said.
The Greenhouse wasn’t off-limits, but it wasn’t a place most of the kids thought of hanging out in, aside from some of the Green Witches whose magic had a direct involvement with plants and growing things. Even most of them associated it with studying and not free time, though, so on a Sunday afternoon the Greenhouse was deserted.
“We all know what the problem is,” Loch said. “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
“I bet there’s more information down in the Haunted Basement,” Muirin said darkly.
“Why should there be?” Spirit demanded. “Or—what if there is, and there’s a booby trap, too? Then they lock you up in one of those cute little cells we saw and tell everybody you ran away to be with Seth.”
Muirin’s face sharpened with anger. Spirit knew it was a low blow, but she was scared. And if Muirin got into one of those crazy states where she’d do anything—she might go down there alone, without telling the rest of them.
“I suppose you want to go just telling everybody else about this and seeing if they have any good ideas? Sure! Then we can all be down there! Except Ads, of course—she’s got her trust-fund lawyers looking out for her!” Muirin said viciously.
“Spirit didn’t say that, and you know it,” Burke said. “She’s just worried because she’s your friend. But look: does it really make sense that the Whatever and whoever’s serving it would be stupid?”
“Huh,” Loch said, sounding surprised. “We’ve kind of been assuming that the Whatever is working for whoever’s on the inside here. But what if you’re right, and it’s the other way around? Because if kids have been disappearing for forty years, the only one who’s been at Oakhurst that long is Doctor Ambrosius.”
“We don’t know that they have, Loch. That’s one of the problems,” Addie said. “If—”
“Will you all stop getting sidetracked by unimportant things?” Spirit demanded, trying to keep a leash on her temper. “It doesn’t matter. Find out what the Whatever is and how we stop it. That’s what matters!”
“Huh,” Muirin said speculatively, losing some of that angry spark. “So . . . how do we do that?”
Burke looked at Spirit. She shrugged helplessly.
“We can’t follow up Nick’s clue; we tried,” he said, ticking the points off on his fingers. “Whoever’s letting the Whatever onto the School Grounds and cleaning up after it probably hasn’t left a Monster Manual around with the page conveniently marked for us. We have twenty-four days until the Winter Solstice, and we have to figure out how to stop the Whatever once we identify it, or one and probably two more kids will die. We can’t ask anyone for help, or we might be asking the wrong people—or they’ll tell the wrong people what we asked. So we decide—now—whether to approach somebody else here for help in identifying the Whatever— or we have to decide we’re okay with a couple more people dying and hope we can figure it out by February.”
“Isn’t approaching somebody for help in identifying the Whatever the same as asking them for help?” Addie asked, after a long moment when nobody said anything.
“Oh. No. No,” Loch said, sounding as if he’d found the solution. “We can ask someone for help—but we don’t have to tell them why they’re really helping. Right?”
“I think,” Addie said slowly. “I think that could work. We get someone with the Scrying Gift, and we ask them to See something for us. Everybody does that all the time. We make it something that seems reasonable—”
“But something that will tell us what we need to know!” Muirin said. Her eyes gleamed avidly.
“They won’t be hurt, will they?” Spirit asked doubtfully. She’d studied Scrying, the way she’d studied all the Mage Gifts of all the Elemental Schools, but it still seemed so unlikely. See something somewhere else than where you were, okay—a television camera could do that. But view the past and the future? That was pure science fiction.
“A Scrying Mage just Sees what they’re looking for,” Addie said. “They don’t experience it. It’s real, but it’s not like it’s right there.” She thought for a moment, chewing on her lower lip. “It’s going to be hard to find somebody who’s got a strong Gift and stays awake while they use it.”
Muirin snorted. “Yeah, because it isn’t going to be a lot of use to us if we have to hang around waiting for them to wake up and tell us about it.”
Especially, Spirit thought, if just seeing it had the same effect on them as it’d had on Nick Bilderback. But right now, this wasn’t just the best idea they had.
It was the only idea they had.