She hurried back to the Refectory. Everyone in their group was already there, and Muirin was almost in tears, she was so angry. “. . . and of course they don’t give a damn! We’re just the freak-kids! It’s not like we’re real human beings or anything!” she was saying.
She had her arms wrapped around herself, and Spirit immediately put an arm around her. “Muirin, what happened?” she asked, feeling Muirin’s tense muscles trembling.
“What happened? Nothing! I talked to the cops, but they didn’t take notes, they didn’t even listen to half of what I said! They aren’t even sending out people to search for him! I asked! And he didn’t run away! Ask Brendan!”
But when Spirit glanced toward Brendan, he wouldn’t look at her or Muirin. “He didn’t take a coat,” Brendan muttered awkwardly, staring at the floor.
He thinks Seth did run away, Spirit realized in surprise.
“And why would he?” Muirin continued obliviously. “Where would he go? He hasn’t got anyone either! If any of us had any place that wanted us we wouldn’t have gotten dumped here! OK, he didn’t really like it here, but he didn’t hate it enough to make a run!”
Together, Addie and Spirit managed to coax her to sit down and eat something, though not even a PBJ with bacon tempted her much, which just showed how upset she was, since a PBJ was as close as Oakhurst got to allowing junk food most of the time.
On the way out of the Refectory, Spirit cornered Brendan. “You think he did run away,” she said without preamble.
Brendan looked as if he didn’t want to answer her. “You know I won’t tell anything you tell me to Muirin,” she coaxed.
Brendan sighed. “Well, you know, I don’t know for sure, Spirit. But one or two kids always do every semester. They just take off. I figure, we’ve all got magic, right? And I guess they think with a Mage Gift like oh, Healing or Transmutation or Weather, they can make it on the outside. All I know is the deputies come around and go off again and nothing ever happens.” He shrugged. “I’m gonna be late to class.”
Spirit stepped back, and Brendan hurried away. She didn’t think he really believed the e-mail, and she knew Muirin didn’t. But it really didn’t matter what the e-mail said, or how badly it said it. Seth was gone, and there wasn’t anything any of them could do about it.
I said block—you aren’t paying attention!” Mr. Wallis snapped.
Spirit heard the clonk of the bokuto—the wooden kendo practice sword—against the shinai. Bokuto were solid wood and were only supposed to be used to practice kata—not to hit anything—but Mr. Wallis didn’t seem to care. She winced, flinching back, and smiled apologetically at her partner. Kylee smiled back a little nervously.
“I’m sorry, sir. I’ll do better next time,” Burke answered softly.
It wasn’t fair, Spirit thought. Burke had blocked. If he weren’t a Combat Mage, Mr. Wallis could have broken his arm—or worse. This was supposed to be a sport, not war. But no matter how well Burke did—and he was better than all the rest of them put together—Mr. Wallis never let up on him once. And Burke just took it all without complaint, the way he put up with Mr. Gail and even Ms. Groves.
And if Mr. Wallis seemed to be trying to raise bruises on them, well, Mr. Gail seemed to be trying to get his football teams killed outright. More than once, during the games, Spirit had seen players carried off the field on stretchers. Of course, Oakhurst had an advantage that most schools didn’t: When the stretcher got to the sidelines, there was a Healing Mage waiting there to put the player back together again so Mr. Gail could put him back into the game. But all the Healing Mages were students—healing the players was part of their spell-practice—and sometimes if the game was particularly rough they’d get too tired to keep casting spells, so the players with minor injuries wouldn’t ask for help—they’d just play injured.
There’d been a game yesterday, and Spirit knew that Burke had really taken a beating. Mr. Wallis knew it, too. He ought to lighten up.
“Pay attention,” Kylee hissed, and Spirit nodded, raising her bamboo sword and circling the other girl. They were paired off today to practice forms. Burke, of course, was paired up with Mr. Wallis.
She’d thought several times about dropping her martial arts class and switching to something else. But Mr. Gail coached all the other sports, not just the football—except for fencing—and Spirit honestly couldn’t imagine how Muirin could stand Ms. Groves. And—much to her surprise—Spirit had discovered that she liked both karate and kendo. When she could tune Mr. Wallis out and just concentrate on her practicing, it was actually fun. And she was good at it, too. She’d only been in the class for three weeks, and while she hadn’t caught up to the kids who’d been taking it for three or four semesters, she wasn’t the worst student in the class.
And it wasn’t like she was sluffing off taking only one sport, because Ms. Wood, who gave the riding lessons, said the Riding School (she called it an ecolé, which was French for “school”) would be giving an exhibition in the spring, which would include jumping and precision riding. On the afternoons Spirit wasn’t in the dojo area of the gym (because the kendoka and the karate students were both going to be competing at the end of November, not just exhibiting), she was down at the stables. Only Sundays were free.
But only in a way.
Mr. Wallis called for a five-minute break before they changed partners. Spirit gratefully lowered her sword, stepped back, and bowed to Kylee before going over to the mat to rest. Karate was done on mats, kendo on the bare wood floor. She pulled off her mask and ran her hands through her hair, scraping it back into her ponytail again, and thought about Sunday.
Every Sunday at Oakhurst began the same way, with a pancake breakfast that was just as good as Muirin had said it was. And after breakfast, they all had half an hour to go back to their rooms and get their coats for the walk across the campus to the Chapel.
The Chapel was a freestanding stone building that looked as old as the main house. It even had a bell tower with an actual bell, not a recording of a bell, that Mr. Gail rang for Sunday service. It was one of those “neutral” kinds of places that didn’t really look as if it belonged to any denomination—or any religion—at all. There were pews, and a pipe organ, and a pulpit, but the stained glass windows all showed odd pictures of knights in armor.
Spirit thought it was kind of odd for somebody to build themselves their own church; Loch said he didn’t think that Arthur Tyniger had built it when he built Oakhurst, but that Doctor Ambrosius built it later when he turned the place into a school, maybe even putting it together out of bits and pieces of other buildings that were as old as the main house, because it certainly looked as if it matched.
Just as Muirin had said, Sunday service wasn’t exactly church, although there were songbooks and a choir—that Addie sang in—and all the students sang along with the choir. But in the last six weeks, Doctor Ambrosius had read to them out of the Diamond Sutra, the Yasna, the Rig Veda, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Tanakh as well as out of what he said were several different translations of the Bible. Spirit couldn’t make up her mind whether Doctor Ambrosius was trying to convince them that all religions shared an underlying spiritual truth—or that they were all equally false. But at least after the service, the rest of Sunday was free.
Only last Sunday when the service was over, Spirit had been stopped on her way out the door by Ms. Smith, who told her she’d be having afternoon tea with Doctor Ambrosius. When she’d caught up to Muirin and the others and asked about it, Burke said that Doctor Ambrosius took afternoon tea every Sunday with four boys and four girls chosen at random from the student body. Once you’d been to an Afternoon Tea, you couldn’t be picked again until everyone else at the school had been picked. (“Kind of like jury duty,” Muirin said.) Spirit knew that one of the things Oakhurst was supposed to be teaching them was what that section of the Oakhurst intraweb that talked about their curriculum called “genteel deportment” and Camilla called “fancy manners,�
�� and Spirit guessed that the Afternoon Tea thing meant that Doctor Ambrosius got to spend Quality Time with all of the students at least once a year.
When he wasn’t turning them into mice, that was.
At least she didn’t have to worry about what to wear.
The Afternoon Tea was held in the Senior Teachers’ Parlor, a place Spirit hadn’t been until now. It was one of the rooms on the second floor of the original house, and Spirit couldn’t imagine what it had been originally. Bedroom? Library? Roller-skating rink? Whatever it had been, it was an enormous room. The walls were paneled in golden oak, except for the outside wall, which was all windows (with window seats, or at least padded benches, although nobody sat on them). There were a bunch of oil paintings on the walls: some of them landscapes, but one of them—a huge one—was a portrait of an annoyed-looking man in old-fashioned clothes, who Spirit guessed must be Arthur Tyniger.
The other kids looked just as nervous about being here as she felt, and it didn’t make Spirit feel any better about this Tea that there were half a dozen teachers here, including Ms. Smith and Dr. Mackenzie, the Oakhurst psychological counselor.
Back when she’d still gone to regular school, Spirit had liked some of her teachers a lot and suffered through others, and the ones she hadn’t liked, she and her friends had all complained about together. But here at Oakhurst, nobody would complain outright about any of the teachers—even Muirin—and in Spirit’s opinion, there was plenty to complain about. The teachers like Ms. Groves actually weren’t the worst ones—Ms. Groves made no secret of the fact that she didn’t ever expect you to ever do anything that satisfied her. And nobody really expected a school shrink to be anything but a loser.
But then there were teachers like Ms. Smith.
Ms. Smith was always smiling and friendly and so interested in you and everything you were doing, and all the time she was asking a lot of prying questions about your life that none of the other teachers asked, like what were you thinking and how were you feeling and how were you doing, and Spirit had even fallen for all this friendly “concern” for a week or so—right up until Ms. Smith started asking her about just how depressed was she not to be a magician like everybody else here at Oakhurst. And over the last six months Spirit had too many people trying to climb inside her head trying to figure out where her switches were so they could flip them. She recognized the signs. If Ms. Smith wanted to flip somebody’s switches, she could look elsewhere. So Spirit had started keeping her mouth shut, and just saying she was fine, everything was fine, no matter what Ms. Smith asked her, and finally Ms. Smith had started to leave her alone.
At first the tea party had gone okay. There weren’t too many ways to screw up holding a glass of cider and a plate of cookies, after all, and Spirit knew better than to take more than one or two cookies. If she wanted to pig out later, she could go see Muirin, because Muirin always had some chocolate she could be talked into sharing. And there was always popcorn. Or apples. It wasn’t like they starved you here.
Thanks to Loch’s obsession with Oakhurst history, she’d been able to make mindless small talk with the teachers (she tried not to think of Phoenix, who’d always called it Spirit’s Stepford-Robot-Barbie act) while assuring them that she loved Oakhurst, loved her riding lessons, loved her karate lessons, loved her classes, loved the school, loved, loved, loved . . .
All the while she’d been constantly aware of Doctor Ambrosius, who was moving around the room making sure he talked to everyone, teachers and students alike. She’d never seen him wearing the flashy power suit he’d worn for her first interview again; he always wore a black suit in church, but now he was wearing a tweed suit with a vest that made him look like he probably ought to be talking with an English accent and riding around in a carriage. On television.
Since Doctor Ambrosius hadn’t turned anybody into anything this afternoon, Spirit was pretty much unruffled when he wandered over and sat down next to her on the couch. She’d picked it as a nice safe location because she could stare out the window at the (non-lethal) touch football game going on, or into the fireplace (where of course a fire was burning—and it was a real one, she could feel the heat) and not look as if she was as paralyzed with mind-numbing boredom as she actually was.
“And how are you finding Oakhurst, my dear? Spirit White, isn’t it?” Doctor Ambrosius asked.
“Yes sir,” Spirit answered obediently. Don’t you remember turning me into a mouse last month? she thought. “I’m very happy to be here,” she said, for what seemed like the ten thousandth time this afternoon. She knew Muirin said Afternoon Tea only ran ninety minutes tops, but that was starting to seem like a very long time. And just what would somebody here do if she said she was miserable? Give her some happy pills? Or worse—cast a spell on her to make her happy?
“Good, good. Very good,” Doctor Ambrosius said. Spirit thought for a horrified moment that he might pat her knee, but he didn’t. “And how are you coming with your magical studies? Your spellwork?”
Spirit stared at him, mouth open in surprise, caught in the middle of starting to say she was doing just fine, because she’d been sure that the next question was about her schoolwork, not her spellwork. “Um . . . I flunked my magician test,” she finally said. “You remember?” You practically had an entire cow right there and I woke up in the Infirmary? Hello?
He stared at her for a long moment in silence, and Spirit had the crazy feeling that he was about to tell her that she was mistaken, and even the thought that he might struck her as so unreasonably funny that she had to take a deep breath to keep from laughing.
“Well, don’t worry about it, my dear. I’m sure it will all sort itself out eventually,” Doctor Ambrosius said with grave politeness. “You just . . . continue to apply yourself to your studies like a good child.”
This time he did pat her, but on the arm, and he might have meant it to be consoling, but it just raised goose bumps. How could he have forgotten? He’d known her name, after all.
Maybe he was twins.
Maybe he was several fries short of a Happy Meal.
Maybe being a magician drives you crazy eventually. Oh hey. Something for everyone here to look forward to. Insanity. Once again she fought back the demented urge to laugh out loud.
Maybe that explained why all the teachers were so weird.
All right you slackers, playtime’s over.” Mr. Wallis’s voice jerked Spirit out of her reverie. His tone was contemptuous. He almost seemed to be taunting them.
She rose to her feet again and walked out onto the practice floor, pulling on her mask as she went. This time Mr. Wallis paired her with a boy named Dylan Williams. Spirit winced inwardly. Dylan was a year older than she was and had been taking kendo for three semesters. He was good and he was fast. And he liked to hurt people.
Normally she’d just complain about him to the instructor. But normally the instructor would see what Dylan was doing and stop it. She knew that wouldn’t happen here.
Maybe Mr. Wallis expects me to stop him myself?
It was a new idea, and one she didn’t like very much. It made it seem as if Oakhurst was some kind of cage-match, and only the strongest would survive to graduate. But it made sense—in a warped kind of way—if what Doctor Ambrosius had told her and Loch when they arrived about being at risk from evil magicians was true. If she could believe anything he’d said that day. If he wasn’t crazy.
Mr. Wallis gave them the order to begin, and Dylan raised his sword and began to circle her, his teeth bared in a predatory smile.
She couldn’t stop him—not today. She wasn’t good enough yet. But she was learning fast. And for now she’d count it a victory just to stay out of his way.
To stay out of everybody’s way.
SIX
This was her third year at Oakhurst, and like her Dad always used to call Wednesday “Hump Day”—because you were halfway through the week and over the hump and it was all downhill from there and the weekend was on its way—Cami
lla thought of the Halloween Dance as the “Hump Dance,” because it meant they were almost all the way through the year. Halloween meant there’d be the cold weather that she loved after growing up in Florida, and it would start snowing soon so they couldn’t do most of the outdoor sports, and there’d be a whole week of no classes at Christmas, and for Christmas they all got something from their Wish Lists in addition to some candy.
Yeah, okay, maybe it was lame. But it was also better than home. The one time she’d called the Halloween Dance the “Hump Dance” out loud, though, she’d gotten laughed at, so she’d never done it again. Sometimes she just wasn’t as good at making the words come out right as everyone else was—Camilla knew what she meant, but between her brain and her mouth, it just ended up sounding stupid. Sometimes she thought that when she got her powers working all the way right and could take on her animal shape, she’d just turn into something—a wolf, maybe, or an eagle—and just never turn back.
Having Transformation was a really cool Mage Gift, and she’d been excited when Mr. Bowman explained to her that someday she’d be able to turn into any animal she wanted to. But it was also dangerous, because if you got stuck halfway you could die, so she still had a lot of practicing to do before she did it for the first time. Right now she had what he called “the perks”—sharper senses, faster reflexes, being just a little stronger than somebody else her age.
And one of the advantages of that was it made it easier to sneak around.
The gym had started to fill up right around eight. The dance was going to run from eight to midnight, and the Dance Committee had been fighting in their chatroom for weeks over the playlist (which they did every dance), but they’d finally locked it down, and now the songs they’d picked were blasting out through the monster speakers in the corners of the ceiling.
There were tables along the walls with soda, and candy apples, and cupcakes, and enough sweets and junk food—chips and pretzels and soda and candy—to send everybody in the entire school into a white-sugar-coma. Everybody always rushed the snack tables during the first hour of a dance, but Camilla didn’t bother; she knew better. When Oakhurst relaxed the junk food ban, it didn’t do it by halves. The only rule was that you couldn’t take anything back to your room for later, but the tables would be full all evening.
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