Shadow grail 1

by Mercedes Lackey; Rosemary Edghill

  She slipped out the side door of the gym, flicking a glance at her watch. Eight-thirty. Perfect. Nick would wait ten minutes and follow her out so nobody saw them sneak out together, and they could probably have at least twenty minutes out here together before somebody came looking. She knew the teachers practically patrolled the grounds during the dances.

  But this was too good a chance to pass up.

  She ducked around the corner of the gym, into the shadows, and dug into her vest pocket. The vest was patchwork velvet, the pieces stitched together in metallic thread, and it was the prettiest thing she owned. She’d added the inside pocket herself. She’d always been handy with a needle and thread.

  She pulled out the half-empty pack of cigarettes and the lighter, fumbled a cigarette into her mouth, and lit it. She took a cautious drag, and coughed slightly. She wasn’t used to smoking anymore. She wasn’t supposed to be smoking at all (Hello? Sixteen?) but she’d always used to back home. When she’d come here she’d had to go cold turkey until she’d hooked up with Seth Morris and started swapping her weekly soda ration for cigarettes. She didn’t really crave them by that point, but they were kind of a link with home. The good parts. Now that Seth was gone, it looked like she’d be giving up smoking again—for good this time. This was her last pack.

  She took another drag on her cigarette—and then nearly strangled as she heard a noise coming from the direction of the Sunken Garden. For a few seconds she was scrambling to figure out whether to throw the cigarette away, swallow it, or just try not to cough herself to death. Then she blew out a mouthful of smoke on a shaky silent laugh. She could hear them, but whoever was making the noise was too far away to even see her.

  Camilla frowned as the sounds continued. But what was it? It sounded like leaves rustling, and it couldn’t be—the only things that were still green this time of year were the pine trees, and they didn’t make sounds like that. Plus, it was a little early for any of the make-out artists to have snuck away from the gym—and if they did, they’d pick someplace warmer. Like the Greenhouse, or the swimming pool, or even the train station.

  And those noises didn’t sound . . . right. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. They just didn’t.

  She carefully ground her cigarette out and picked up the remains, tucking it into her pack and tucking her pack into her vest. Best not to leave any evidence. Then she trotted off to investigate. She had a good five minutes before Nick showed up. He’d wait for her.

  Every time Camilla stopped to listen, the noises stopped just a beat later. Scuffling. Giggling. It didn’t sound like any of the kids from here, and she wondered if some of the townies from Radial had decided to play a Halloween prank on the school. She passed the Sunken Garden. The noises weren’t coming from there. Maybe the train station?

  If they’d just keep making noise when she stopped to listen, she’d know where they were. And then they’d see who gave who the fright of their life!

  Camilla was standing on the railroad tracks, wondering how she’d come so far without realizing it, when she heard the sound of engines. Car motors, but bigger, like a truck or an SUV—a bunch of them—but the school only had two SUVs, and they were locked up in the garage. And the motor noises weren’t coming from the direction of the road, and she didn’t see any headlights.

  This is wrong. This is all wrong.

  She didn’t know what was going on out here, and she didn’t want to know. The only thing Camilla wanted was to be back in the gym, back where there was noise and light and people.

  The engines got louder.

  She turned around and began to run as fast as she could. She could see the lights of the gym in the distance.

  She didn’t get far.

  Spirit hadn’t been sure whether the dance was going to be fun or awful. It wasn’t the kind of thing she’d used to do in her old life. She couldn’t keep from thinking of it that way, because going and standing around some sweaty gym somewhere waiting for a guy you probably didn’t even really like that much to ask you to dance had never been her idea of a good time. But at Oakhurst, at least it was something different to do.

  The whole day had been a little strange. She wasn’t really used to seeing her friends and classmates out of their school uniforms. Everyone looked so different. Of course, Muirin had taken shameless advantage of the “No Dress Code” day to show up in all of her classes looking like a vampire version of Hello Kitty, but most of the students just wore band t-shirts, or sweatshirts, or jeans and some color that wasn’t gold or brown. Addie had come to class wearing a powder blue turtleneck, and she’d loaned Spirit a green sweater so at least Spirit had something nonregulation to wear with her jeans. For a change.

  She didn’t know if her friends would have paired off more if Seth were still here, but since he wasn’t, they’d all sort of decided without talking about it to go as a group. It meant Spirit didn’t know if Loch would have asked her to “go” with him—but on the other hand, it meant she didn’t have to find out that he wouldn’t have.

  The gym had been decorated for the dance, but they hadn’t tried to make it look as if it wasn’t the gym. The Theater Department and the Art Students had gotten together and designed some scenery flats that were painted up to look like old graveyards, and the inside of Dracula’s castle, and spooky forests, which was kind of babyish, but it was traditional, too. There were black and orange crepe streamers hung from the walls, and one set of bleachers had been opened out so everyone would have a place to sit, and there were tables full of food and drinks.

  Everything might have been awkward, except that Addie announced that she was going to dance with Burke and Spirit was going to dance with Nicholas and Loch was going to dance with Muirin and Camilla was going to dance with Brendan and then they’d all go get cupcakes and punch. Spirit was too busy keeping Brendan from dying of shyness to think about how she felt, and after that, everything didn’t seem as weird. Addie was on the Dance Committee—there was a dance roughly every other month—and they’d picked some good music. No matter what you liked to dance to or listen to, it wouldn’t be too long before something you liked came up. She was a little surprised, though, when Burke asked her to dance during one of the slow ones.

  “It’s like this,” he said, smiling at her and holding out his hand. “Addie won’t let me hear the end of it if I don’t dance with everybody we came with—I mean, all the girls—and I’m kind of the world’s worst dancer. I figure a slow dance gives you a better chance of getting out of my way.”

  “Doesn’t your—?” Spirit asked, trying to take his hand and gesture inarticulately at the same time.

  He shook his head, still smiling. “Combat Mage,” he said. “Dancing isn’t fighting. Unless, of course, you’re dancing with the Murr-cat.”

  Spirit laughed, because Muirin had been showing off, dancing the last fast dance with herself, an illusion that had mirrored her moves exactly. She’d been in a strange kind of mood ever since Seth had . . . done whatever he’d done, withdrawing more from the rest of them all the time and not hanging out in the lounge as much in the evening. Spirit knew that Addie felt hurt by it, because she and Muirin had been best friends, but there wasn’t a lot anyone could say to Muirin without setting her off, which no one, least of all Addie, wanted to do. Spirit just hoped that Muirin wouldn’t do something stupid. Really stupid, like running away.

  Meanwhile, even if it was a school dance, there were a lot of things about it that made it different from any other school dance ever. A lot of the kids were showing off: the Ice Mages freezing cups of soda into slushies, the Jaunting Mages apporting food across the room, the Air Mages conjuring up little wind-devils that picked up dust and twisted the streamers around themselves and whirled across the floor like the baby sisters of Dorothy’s tornado. And Muirin wasn’t the only Illusion Mage here.

  “You shouldn’t let it get to you,” Burke said, under cover of the music. “Everybody’s magic doesn’t show up at the same time. Muirin
got hers when she was twelve. Some kids come here and they’re older than either of us, and they don’t know they’re magicians yet.”

  Spirit looked up at him, startled. And relieved, too, because she didn’t think she actually wanted to be a magician, but everyone else was, and it was hard to be left out. “I don’t—” she began.

  “Don’t sweat it,” he said. Despite his claims of clumsiness, Burke wasn’t that bad a dancer. Just careful and a little nervous. “Give it a few months and you can—”

  He broke off in the middle of a sentence, taking a half-step away from Spirit and looking toward the back of the gym. The dance floor was pretty crowded, but Spirit could see that the door was open, and Nicholas was in the doorway talking to Kelly. He looked really upset.

  “C’mon,” Burke said.

  “—gone! I was supposed to meet her outside and I waited for ten minutes then I went looking for her,” Nicholas was saying. “She wouldn’t have just gone wandering off!”

  “It’s not that warm outside,” Kelly pointed out reasonably. “Maybe she came back in here and you missed her.”

  But Nicholas was shaking his head frantically, and Spirit was looking around and couldn’t see Camilla anywhere.

  Within ten minutes, everyone knew Camilla wasn’t in the gym and wasn’t in her room. The five of them knew something Nicholas hadn’t wanted to mention around the proctors or the teachers, too: the reason he was sure that Camilla was in trouble was that he’d found her cigarette lighter outside on the ground. It had belonged to her father—a brass Zippo with the Navy world-and-anchor and the initials “CMP” engraved on the lid—and it wasn’t something she’d just drop and not notice. It proved she’d been outside, and it proved—at least to Nicholas—that she was in trouble.

  “Let me have it,” Loch said quietly, holding out his hand. “One of my Gifts is Kenning,” he said, when Nicholas just stared at him. “I might be able to learn something.” Loch closed his hand around it, and for a second or two nothing happened. Then he winced, gasping, and forced his fingers open with an effort. He shook his head. “I’m not very good yet,” he said apologetically. “All I got from it was cold and darkness. You don’t need Kenning to know it’s cold and dark out there.”

  “I’m going to look for her,” Nicholas said determinedly.

  “Not by yourself,” Burke said firmly. “We’ll all go.”

  “Coats,” Addie said. “I’ll get ours. Brendan, you get the guys’. Come on.”

  “Before the teachers say we can’t,” Muirin muttered under her breath.

  But the teachers were out searching, too—at least some of them were. It was a storybook kind of Halloween night—clouds, a full moon, the wind whistling through whatever wind whistled through. There weren’t any fallen leaves to kick through—Burke said the Air Mages got together in the fall and swirled them all up into a cyclone and dumped them twenty or thirty miles away—but aside from that it could have been a Halloween in a movie.

  Right down to the missing coed.

  Don’t think like that! Spirit told herself fiercely. Camilla was here somewhere, she was fine, they’d find her and everything would be okay. She hadn’t run away. Camilla was one of the few kids Spirit had talked to who actually liked being at Oakhurst better than she’d liked being at home.

  But Spirit couldn’t help but think about what Brendan had told her. About how a couple kids went missing every year. And when you put that together with what Doctor Ambrosius said about them having enemies somewhere out here—

  Well, maybe the school isn’t that safe a place after all.

  And it wasn’t like the teachers or Doctor Ambrosius would actually tell you that kids were being grabbed by the Bad Guys right off the campus! That would just start a panic, which wasn’t what the faculty would want. She stopped where she was and looked around. She could see the beams of flashlights flickering off in the distance, and could hear people calling Camilla’s name.

  No, no, that was stupid. Really, that was stupid, Spirit insisted to herself. Camilla was just—maybe she heard something and fell in a hole and twisted an ankle. Maybe someone else was trying to play a prank on them all. She shook her head and kept walking. Maybe—

  Maybe it’s the townies. Spirit didn’t know much about Radial, but once in a while some of the kids that had been at Oakhurst for a while got to go there, and from what they said, there was a lot of resentment from the town about the kids here. The townies seemed to think that everyone here was living some kind of Rich and Famous lifestyle, where they all lounged around in mink bathrobes, didn’t actually ever do any work, and got handed top grades just for showing up for class. Which was stupid, of course, but even if Doctor Ambrosius let people from Radial on the campus, they’d probably still believe stupid stories like that, just because the place did look like a resort. And if Radial was anything like the rural towns where Spirit came from, the schools were getting by on shoestrings, and what Oakhurst spent in one year just on computers would probably equal the entire district budget.

  She was almost to the Chapel, and the five of them had agreed to meet there when they’d finished checking their search areas. Burke was already there, standing on the steps; she didn’t need to ask him if Camilla had been found, because she could still hear other people searching.

  “What if someone from Radial decided to play a prank on us?” she blurted out as soon as she reached him.

  Burke shook his head. “They might want to. But if you don’t belong here—or aren’t wanted here—you run into a bunch of big-time protection spells. The teachers call them ‘wards.’ Mr. Wallis told me they just lead anybody who doesn’t belong here straight to the front door, no matter where they think they’re going.”

  “Mr. Wallis?” Spirit said in surprise.

  “Well, yeah,” Burke said. “He’s my magic coach. Doesn’t make sense for a Combat Mage to have a magic coach who can’t do martial arts.”

  By now the other three had arrived—Addie and Muirin together, Loch by himself. “We checked the whole Sunken Garden,” Addie said. “Nothing.”

  The Oakhurst campus was what Loch called “extensively landscaped.” But at this time of year, what the campus mostly had was bare-limbed trees and bushes and flowerbeds already in their winter protection. The Sunken Garden was a couple of acres where the ground had been dug out to a couple of feet below ground level, then shored up along the edge with a brick wall. Ms. Holland, who taught the art classes, said it was partly for beauty and partly for warmth for the more delicate plants. There was a fountain in the middle (drained for the winter), and trees planted along the walls, and flower beds covered in burlap for the winter so that they looked like giant pincushions. Even so, it was one of the best places on the campus to hide—or to be hidden.

  “I took the main path all the way down to the train station. I even looked inside,” Loch said. He shrugged, not needing to say he hadn’t had any better luck than Addie and Muirin had. “Maybe she’s in the stables. Or the greenhouse.”

  “Maybe she’s just disappeared,” Muirin said angrily. “Like Seth. Like all the other kids who’ve just vanished.”

  “How many kids?” Spirit asked, looking at Burke, Addie, and Muirin. None of them said anything. “Which of you’ve been here the longest?” she asked.

  “Me,” Burke said quietly.

  “And?” Spirit demanded. “How many?” she repeated, when Burke didn’t answer.

  “Not many,” he said at last. “Three or four or . . . six . . . or so a year. But sometimes, uh, kids just leave early, like if Oakhurst sends them off to a regular college or something.”

  But that doesn’t make sense! Spirit thought. Not if we’re all here to be trained as magicians! And the prospectus said we were all going to stay here until we were twenty-one . . .

  But as she glanced at the others, none of them looked really suspicious. Even Loch only looked puzzled.

  “Whoops,” Muirin said bitterly. “Here come Mulder and Scully.” />
  Spirit glanced over her shoulder. A sheriff’s car was coming around the side of the Main Building. Its blue and red crash-bar was flashing, and the searchlight on its door was lit. Suddenly there was a click and a grating squeal as its bullhorn woke to life.

  “Attention Oakhurst students! Please return to the Gymnasium immediately! This is an order! Return to the Gymnasium at once! Attention Oakhurst students—”

  “Ow, my ears,” Addie said. “I guess we’d better go.”

  “Yeah,” Burke said. He forced a smile. “If Camilla’s out here anywhere, she’s sure to hear that.”

  None of them answered him. They didn’t think—any more than Burke did—that Camilla Patterson was anywhere on the Oakhurst campus.

  When they got back to the gym, somebody had already shut down the music and everybody was standing around talking at once. The sound was deafening. There were two McBride County sheriff’s deputies standing next to a man and a woman who weren’t part of the faculty by the other door to the gym, the one that led in through the classrooms. Two of the teachers—Ms. Holland and Mr. Bridges—were with them, and so was Ms. Corby. Spirit could see a couple of the other teachers and several of the proctors moving among the students, separating them out into groups.

  As the five of them walked in, Kelly Langley came over to them.

  “Doctor Ambrosius called the Sheriff’s Office as soon as Nick said Camilla was missing. They sent some detectives over to talk to us and a K-9 unit to search the grounds. They want to start with everyone who knew her best,” she said. Her expression was solemn. “That would be you.”