“Are you teachers?” Spirit asked, as Mr. Devon held open one door for them.
Ms. Corby looked faintly amused. “Certainly not. Mr. Devon and I assist Doctor Ambrosius directly. He has more to deal with than just this school.”
“Are you—” Loch hesitated over the word.
“Magicians?” Ms. Corby asked, sounding more than amused now. “Mr. Devon is, I am not. But everyone here knows what Doctor Ambrosius is, and what you youngsters are.” She turned her head slightly, arching her eyebrow at him. “It would be rather silly to try and hide it from the ones who work here.”
Spirit felt a little rattled at that. Either everyone here was in on some kind of massive deception, or—
Or it was real. And she couldn’t help thinking, with a feeling of icy fear, about what she had seen just before the accident.
They were at an intersection. Ahead were glass doors leading into what could not by any stretch of the imagination be called a “cafeteria.” Not when it was full of long wooden tables covered with snowy linen tablecloths, lined by plain, if elegant, chairs. To the right and left were more double doors like the ones they’d just come through.
“As I said,” Ms. Corby interrupted her thoughts, “Young Ladies to the right, Young Gentlemen to the left.” She walked off—again, without beckoning to Spirit or looking to see if she’d followed—and Spirit hurried after her.
The hallway was decorated like the Entry Hall. It was the rich man’s version of “rustic,” lit with deco-Egyptian cast bronze lanterns. It looked like the hallway of an expensive hotel, except that each of the doors had a little engraved plaque with someone’s name on it.
“We assumed you would prefer to be on the ground floor,” Ms. Corby said, as if she didn’t care one way or the other what Spirit preferred. “If not, just e-mail me. There are empty rooms on the second and third floors and we should be able to move you in a day or two.” She paused beside one of the last two doors before a staircase.
“Ground is fine,” Spirit said vaguely. How many kids were there in this school? There must have been twenty doors on this hallway alone.
Nodding, Ms. Corby opened the door.
Spirit wasn’t really expecting a room just like the one in the brochure. And she was right.
This was better.
The color scheme was pretty neutral, and even though the dorm-wings had obviously been built after the house itself, it had still been decorated in the “rich man’s rustic” style (and the school colors), with the addition of some pink. Just standing in the doorway she could see a dresser, a desk, a bed (so she’d have a room all to herself!), a huge closet . . .
“Your school uniforms are in the closet,” said Ms. Corby, as if she was reading Spirit’s mind. “There’s a copy of the Oakhurst Code of Conduct in the desk; we expect you to become familiar with it quickly. The uniform for Young Ladies is blazer and skirt during classroom hours; trousers may be worn by special arrangement with your instructor. The computer here is for your personal and academic use. The music library is networked on the school server and other media is available in the library. Attempting to download material from the Internet is in violation of the Code of Conduct. I’ll leave you to make yourself comfortable. Dinner is in two hours; you will need to be in uniform. Welcome to Oakhurst.”
“Thanks,” Spirit said. I think.
Ms. Corby turned away and walked briskly off down the hall. Spirit walked carefully into the room, trying not to hold her breath, although she felt as if she should.
Everything since she’d left the hospital this morning seemed utterly unreal, and this might be the most unreal thing of all. This was a huge room, more like an efficiency apartment than a room. It contained a mini-fridge and microwave, a gleaming laptop, and a mini entertainment center with a flat-screen TV.
There was a set of wireless speakers—so she wouldn’t be stuck with the tiny tinny ones laptops had if she wanted to listen to the school music library—and a set of high-quality in-ear earphones if she didn’t want to use the speakers. And through a door to the right, next to the desk, she could see her bathroom. She’d never had her own bathroom; there’d only been one for the whole family.
She turned away quickly and opened the closet. It was only half full, and it still contained more clothes than she’d ever had in her whole life. And not all of them were in Oakhurst brown and gold—she saw some of the things that she remembered had come to the rehab facility. It looked like someone had brought her stuff to her room and unpacked it while she’d been . . .
. . . being turned into a mouse and told she was a magician whose life was in constant danger.
Spirit walked over to her bed and noted in sheer disbelief that the gold chenille bedspread had the school’s coat of arms as its central design. She sat down and looked out her window. From here she could see a vast sweeping expanse of . . . nothing.
Oh it was pretty, and green, but it was like having suddenly been dropped into the middle of Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth. Or Narnia. Or some other green weird empty place where the whole world had been turned upside down. This was nothing like Indiana, and the sheer difference suddenly made Spirit realize all over again how much of her life was just gone. And now she was in a place so strange that she felt completely lost in it. Even the hospital room had been more familiar.
She choked back a sob.
“Don’t tell me they set you up with a playlist preloaded with Polka Dance Party. I’d cry over that, too.”
She turned, startled. There were two girls about her age in the open doorway, both of them in the school uniform. At least, more or less, because one of them was wearing a lacy black blouse under the brown blazer, black tights, and black boots, while the other looked like she’d stepped out of an English boarding school, with a starched white shirt, chocolate tie, white tights, gold blazer, plaid pleated skirt, and brown Mary Janes.
The Goth-y one had flaming red hair—cut very short and spiked up—and vivid green eyes, and was wearing more makeup than Spirit was willing to bet was allowed in the Oakhurst Code of Conduct. The green-eyed Goth was so skinny she was on the edge of being too skinny. She had a sardonic little smile on her face, and something about that face reminded Spirit of a cat.
The other girl was her opposite in every way. Her hair was black—a true black, the kind with blue highlights—and it was completely straight, with straight bangs, and looked really long. Her eyes were a warm brown. If she’d been blonde-haired and blue-eyed, she would have looked just like every picture Spirit had ever seen of Alice In Wonderland, down to that faint little knot of stubbornness at the side of her mouth. She was several inches taller than the redheaded Goth, and sleek to the point of being plump.
“I’m Muirin Shae,” said the Goth-girl. “You do not get to call me ‘Murray’ or ‘Rin-Tin-Tin’ or any other cute names you can think of, because you will really regret it. This is Adelaide Lake. You can call her Addie, because everyone does. We’re supposed to get you oriented, show you around, keep you from slitting your wrists, all that stuff. You aren’t going to slit your wrists, are you?”
“Um. No.” Spirit eyed Muirin dubiously, unable to tell if the other girl was joking or not.
Muirin let out an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Well good. It makes an awful mess and Addie and me’d get our butts kicked. That’s one out of three.” She walked into the room, pulled out the chair from behind the desk, and flopped into it. “So what’s your sad story? We all have sad stories here. I have a Wicked Stepmother.”
Spirit blinked. “You do?”
“She does.” Addie rolled her eyes, following Muirin into the room and closing the door behind her. “I just have a trust fund.” Addie did have a faint accent, too faint for Spirit to tell if it was English or not. “Do you mind if I—?” She gestured at the couch.
There was a couch—a love seat, really—and two chairs, forming a little seating group around a coffee table. “Yes, please,” she said, getting up off the bed to join
Addie.
Muirin promptly got out of the desk chair to sprawl on the bed, rolling onto her stomach and kicking her feet in the air. “But don’t be shy! I know you want to hear all about my fascinating life—and that way I can ask you all about yours. Once upon a time I was a normal, happy child—”
Addie snorted rudely and Spirit was startled into a stifled giggle.
“Quiet!” Muirin said imperiously. “Then Mummy Dearest shuffled off this mortal coil—propelled by booze of course. Daddy Darling promptly married the Trophy Wife, then wrapped himself around the nearest tree in his little red sports car, leaving me at the mercy of my Wicked Stepmother.”
“It gets better,” Addie murmured, as Muirin paused dramatically.
“A little sympathy,” Muirin said. “I was only a baby.”
“Fourteen,” Addie explained.
“And had led a very sheltered life—”
“In and out of every progressive warehousing school Mummy and Daddy Dearest could find,” Addie footnoted.
“Who’s telling this?” Muirin demanded.
“Oh, you are,” Addie said. “Go on.”
Muirin heaved a theatrical sigh. “All right then! My Wicked Stepmother planned to lock me up in yet another boarding school while she took off for Europe to spend Daddy Darling’s fortune. Too bad—how sad—that Daddy Darling wasn’t as well-fixed as he’d looked.” Muirin smiled sweetly, but there was a wicked glint in her eye.
“First Wicked Stepmother tried to hand me off to a relative. Only neither Mummy Dearest or Daddy Darling had any. Then she figured she’d save money and keep me in public school instead of sending me off to another facility for troubled teens. Except that meant I was around, and by then I’d been . . . learning things, so whenever she tried to pretend she was in charge, I’d just show her who was really the boss.” Muirin sighed dreamily. “So of course when Oakhurst offered to take me off her hands, no charge, she couldn’t sign the papers fast enough.”
Muirin rolled over on her back and stretched herself like a cat, then held out her hand, palm-up. In rapid succession, a glowing ball of blue light, then a flame, then a tiny human figure appeared on it, before she closed it again. “I do illusions. Adelaide’s a Water Witch. What do you do?”
“Nothing,” Spirit said, still staring at Muirin in shock. “I mean, I don’t know, I—”
“Don’t let her tease you. Most of us aren’t as precocious as Murr-cat,” Adelaide said kindly. “You should get into a uniform though. They don’t like us to be out of uniform until after supper—no matter how many demerits some people want to collect.”
“Oh Addie! What are they going to do—send me home?” Muirin said mockingly.
“You know they won’t. But you wouldn’t like to be locked out of the music subdirectory, or lose your library privileges, or be restricted to your room when you aren’t in class,” Addie said reasonably. “So I’d consider being a little more careful in the future. And I think Spirit should be here at least a week before she starts collecting points. Where are you from?” she asked.
“Indiana,” Spirit said.
Addie nodded. “So you’re probably freezing.” Without waiting for either Spirit or Muirin to reply, she walked into Spirit’s closet and began rummaging through it. When she came out, she was holding a brown wool blazer with the school crest on the pocket, and a pair of matching wool pants. She handed them to Spirit and went over to her dresser, coming up with an ivory-colored turtleneck and a gold-colored pullover sweater.
“There,” she said, holding them out. “You should be warm enough in these. It’s after class so it doesn’t have to be a skirt.”
Feeling as if things were getting away from her, Spirit took the clothes and went into the bathroom. She was about to put them on when she glanced at the long, deep, bloody scratch on her arm again. Why hadn’t Addie or Muirin mentioned it? She didn’t want to think it was because injuries like this were too familiar to them.
She ran water in the sink and dabbed at it gingerly with the washcloth from the rack. It mopped up the blood, but it stung a lot, and she didn’t want to get blood on the ivory turtleneck. Without thinking, she opened the medicine cabinet over the sink. In addition to toothbrush, toothpaste, and all that sort of thing—all new, not the half-used items from the hospital—there were Band-Aids, gauze squares, a roll of gauze, adhesive tape, antibiotic cream, spray antiseptic, and bandage scissors. It only took Spirit a minute or two to squeeze salve along the scratch, cover it with squares, wrap that in gauze, and tape the gauze into place. It looked much worse than it actually was when she was done, but she was confident the bandages would hold.
Then she put on her new clothes, and she had to admit that she finally felt warm for the first time today. And she had to admit, even the blazer didn’t look nearly as dorky on as it did on the hanger. It was actually kind of cute, if you went in for that sort of thing. She brushed out her hair with the hairbrush and put it back in the drawer of the vanity, and when (on a hunch) she opened the top drawer on the other side, she saw a selection of barrettes, headbands, and hair-ties. Stupid place thinks of everything, Spirit grumbled to herself, before selecting a hair-tie and whipping her hair back into a quick ponytail. When she came out, Addie was getting a pair of brown loafers out of a box.
“Here,” she said, handing Spirit the shoes. “Socks are in your top drawer, but the ones you have on will do fine. As uniforms go, these aren’t bad—as long as you like brown, gold, and white.”
“Makes me feel like a box of caramels,” Muirin said with a snort.
Spirit stepped into the shoes. Everything fit perfectly, but that was hardly a surprise, since Oakhurst had bought all of the clothing she’d worn in the hospital and rehab. They ought to know her sizes by now.
While Spirit had been in the bathroom getting dressed, Muirin had gone to Spirit’s laptop and turned it on. The Oakhurst crest was on the screen, surrounded by icons. Spirit walked over and looked over her shoulder.
“You’re always connected to the intraweb, but assume the nannies are watching, because they always are. You can put on anything you want as wallpaper”—Muirin moused over the icons, talking as she went—“anything you can download, anyway. This goes to the school e-mail. Your default password’s your birthday—six numbers, so if your birth month’s before October it’s zero-something, and ditto if you’re born before the tenth of whatever. If it’s blinking you better check it, because it might be from a teacher or the admin. This is our school intraweb portal.”
She clicked on the small copy of the Oakhurst coat of arms, and another page of icons sprang open. “IMs, music library, electronic library, class stuff, yadda. You can reserve physical stuff at the bricks-and-mortar library from here if it’s not on the server. Some Oakhurst weirdness. This is the gateway to the real Internet, but don’t get your hopes up: we’re not allowed to have Facebook or LiveJournal or a Hotmail account or anything like that. If they find out about it—and they will—it’ll get nuked and your ass will be grass.”
Spirit blinked at that. “But—why?”
“Because they’re fascist pigs,” Muirin said.
“It’s a school rule,” Addie said, shrugging. “Murr-cat knows perfectly well there are a lot worse rules Oakhurst could have.”
“They made me cut my hair,” Muirin said darkly.
“It was blue,” Addie explained to Spirit. “And it looked really awful. They did their best with it, but it was cooked—you know darn well it was, darling Murr, don’t glare at me—and the Code says you can’t have dyed hair or extensions. So all they could do was cut it really short and keep cutting it until they got all the dyed bits out. I don’t see why you ever dyed it, really. It’s such a gorgeous color.”
“Easy for you to say,” Muirin said sulkily. “Anyway, Addie’s going to say we should give you the tour now, so let’s go.” She bounced to her feet and strode toward the door. “Well, come on! What are you waiting for?”
Spirit shrugged. A
ddie had already gotten to her feet, so Spirit followed the two of them out into the hall, and found herself whisked around a tour of the grounds and school buildings.
Behind the original mansion—she’d thought it was part of it until Addie said it was an addition—was the classroom building. While on the outside it was the same architecture, on the inside it was completely modern. Clearly no expense had been spared. Spirit wondered why they’d gone inside at all—Muirin and even Addie didn’t strike her as being the type to go into raptures over homework. Then they reached the end of the hall, and instead of going up, they went down.
“All the good stuff is down,” Muirin said, and laughed.
One side of the basement had doors just like on the floor above (except that these didn’t have panes of glass in them so you could see what was inside); but the other had doors spaced much closer together, as if the rooms were much smaller. Each of those doors had little lights above them, and about half of those lights were glowing red.
“These are the magic practice rooms,” Addie explained. “People aren’t always good at control.” A muffled thud from inside one of the rooms emphasized what she had just said. Spirit felt her eyes widening.
The rest of the tour included what she had seen from the train—the gym, the theater, the indoor pool, the stables, the tennis courts, the athletics field. It also included something she hadn’t seen from the train—an indoor and outdoor shooting range. That also made her eyes widen a little. She thought of Loch’s opinion of guns and hoped that shooting wasn’t mandatory.
“Why all the sports stuff?” she asked, as they headed back to the main building.
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