“They told Ms. Bradford that they found Nick wandering around the center of town right around dawn. They said he was barefoot and in shirtsleeves, so they took him over to the local hospital for a couple of hours to make sure he was going to be okay. Which he is—physically. The cops are calling it a drug overdose, and now they’re saying that Camilla was involved with drug dealers, and she disappeared because of a drug deal gone wrong.”
“No. No. Absolutely not.” Burke was shaking his head. “Nick’s mom was a junkie. He wouldn’t even touch aspirin. He thought Coca-Cola was the hard stuff.”
“Camilla smoked,” Spirit pointed out.
“Yeah, sure,” Burke said. “And cigarettes will kill you, but they aren’t exactly heroin. Murr, Seth wasn’t bringing anything like that in, was he?”
“Not even pot,” Muirin said, making a face. “He said even beer was too risky, because what if the proctors or the teachers caught someone ’faced? Junk food, mail, some clothes, magazines, software, cigs, condoms—that was it. I’d know.”
“And Seth was the ‘dealer,’ not Camilla, anyway,” Addie pointed out. “Camilla was supposed to meet Nick outside the gym last night. She disappeared off the school grounds. Nick went looking for her—and I don’t care what the police are saying, he would have worn a coat and shoes when he went,” she finished angrily.
“So . . . what are we saying?” Loch asked, looking around at the others.
“That there’s something going on here at Oakhurst,” Spirit said into the silence. “It’s something that makes kids disappear. And either the authorities in Radial are in on it—or they’re being bribed to look the other way—or they’re being . . .” She hesitated. “Bespelled. Bespelled to not notice what’s going on. No matter what it is.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Muirin said instantly.
“Ridiculous?” Spirit shot back in disbelief. “Spells are ridiculous?”
“Mind-control spells,” Addie said, frowning. “Telepathy, or . . .”
“Or glamourie?” Spirit asked. All those mind-numbing lessons with Ms. Groves were finally coming in useful. “How is controlling what somebody thinks and feels any different from controlling what they see? Muirin?”
“I don’t know,” Muirin said thoughtfully. “But it isn’t an Air Gift. Or Water or Earth or Fire. We get taught every Gift that every School can have—you know that, Spirit. It’s in case, you know, we show up with a secondary one later. Right?” she said, looking at the others.
Or any Gift at all, Spirit thought. “But everything we know about magic—real magic—we know because Oakhurst has taught it to us, and told us it’s the truth. If they aren’t telling us the truth about how our classmates are disappearing, what else aren’t they telling us?”
“If you’re right,” Loch said slowly, “then I think we may have a real problem.”
“Just the one?” Burke said, rolling his eyes. “That’s a relief. For a minute there, I was worried.”
“First things first,” Addie said. “We need to find out what happened to Nick. Somebody has to talk to him.”
“Loch, you’re up again,” Muirin said. “Time to work those magic ninja powers.”
“Yeah,” Loch said, glancing at his watch. “But now we have to get back to class. I don’t know what they’d do if they noticed us going off to talk like this, but I don’t want to find out, either. So lets just keep this here. No Cadence, no Brendan. Nobody else—and especially none of the proctors. Just us.”
The five of them exchanged glances, their faces serious as they nodded agreement. Spirit had known this was serious when Loch told all of them about Nick, but making this a secret only the five of them shared seemed to underscore that fact.
“Yeah, and I don’t think I have to remind any of you orphan geniuses to keep this off the intraweb, right?” Muirin said.
Nobody said anything. Even Burke didn’t protest.
SEVEN
If Spirit had found it difficult to concentrate that morning just knowing Nick was gone, it was a hundred times harder that afternoon, knowing he’d run into something last night that had fried his brain. And whatever it was, it seemed like the administration didn’t think a Healing spell would do any good. Were Healing spells no use on someone who’d been traumatized so badly that he’d completely flipped out?
Maybe they thought whatever had happened to Nick might be contagious. Was that even possible? Spirit didn’t know.
Or maybe there wasn’t anyone here who could Heal him? That didn’t seem right, either.
It couldn’t just be that they wanted to conceal what had happened from the students, because with so many magicians among the teachers, the odds were that one of them must be a Healer as well. Had to be. How could they not have a Healer? It had to be Doctor Ambrosius, if nobody else.
Or . . . maybe not Ambrosius. Transformation was a Water Gift, and Healing was a Fire Gift. Even if somebody had Gifts from two Schools, it was usually from Schools of compatible Elements, so maybe Doctor Ambrosius was out of the running for School Healer.
True, Loch had three Gifts, but Kenning and Shadewalking were both from the School of Air, and apparently Pathfinding—School of Earth—wasn’t that incompatible.
On the other hand, you were only supposed to be able to Transform yourself, not somebody else; and he’d certainly turned her and Loch into mice. So what School did that make Doctor Ambrosius?
Could you have Gifts from several Schools? Or was there a secret School that let you do things they didn’t talk about in class?
She chewed on the end of her pen. Why hadn’t anybody ever thought about these things before? (Maybe they had, a little voice inside her suggested. Maybe the kids who think about things like this are the ones who vanish.) The more Spirit thought about Oakhurst, the more she realized there were so many things none of them knew, and more things that just didn’t make sense.
She was so distracted that Ms. Groves caught her not paying attention in Magic Class, and as a result she got an extra assignment—write a ten-page paper on how the traditional folklore practices of Wiltshire were adapted when the English emigrated to the New World, due Monday. There went every scrap of free time over the weekend, not that there was much to begin with. And last Sunday Doctor Ambrosius had finished making his “first pass” through the student body for Sunday Afternoon Tea, which meant she could get chosen again for that honor at any time, since student’s names were chosen at random. It would be just her luck to make the list this Sunday, and how would she be able to sit there and smile nicely and pretend that there was nothing wrong, that Seth and Camilla weren’t missing, that Nick hadn’t had his mind destroyed?
To top off what was turning out to be a really awful day, Mr. Wallis was in a horrible mood during karate class. Not only did he pick Spirit to come up to the front of the class to demonstrate a new form with, when she screwed up—she had only been in the class for a month and a half!—he did a foot-sweep that knocked her sprawling and then spent five minutes shouting at her about what a clumsy useless loser she was. The dojo had an exhibition coming up at the end of the month (for “exhibition” read “competition,” even if they were only competing against the other students in the class), he announced—as if he let any of them forget it for an instant—and he was not going to have them all made to look ridiculous by a lazy, untalented, good-for-nothing, spoiled little princess like her. He made her do forms with the other students for the rest of the class—even when she should have been working on her kendo—and of course Dylan Williams took the opportunity to hit her—and hit hard.
By the time the lesson was over, Spirit was bruised, nearly crying from sheer rage, and just about ready to run away from Oakhurst herself. As the other students folded and packed away their kendo equipment in their gym bags, Spirit strode toward her unopened one. It was probably just as well that she didn’t have a real sword. She’d probably have beheaded somebody.
“If you’d like, I could do some extra practice wi
th you,” Burke said softly.
He’d come up behind her so quietly she hadn’t even heard him approach. If she had her magic, she’d have known he was there, Spirit thought, gritting her teeth. Over the last several weeks she’d noticed how all of the other students—even Loch, and that really hurt—seemed to notice whenever one of the others was there. How many times had she seen Muirin trying to sneak up on Addie, or Brendan, or even (she winced mentally) Nicholas, only to have her intended victim spin around just as she reached them? She was the only one who couldn’t tell. Spirit White. The loser. The cripple.
She was about to tell Burke that she didn’t need any more charity, and forced herself to bite back the words unsaid. Burke wasn’t offering charity. Burke was her friend. He wanted to keep her from collecting any more bruises from Mr. Wallis. And if she was honest, she’d have to admit she needed the help.
“I don’t know when you’d have the time,” she said grudgingly. The football team was playing under lights now, and they had practices every afternoon and a game every Saturday. Burke was heading off to football practice now.
“Evenings after dinner,” he said promptly. “We can get in an hour or so as often as we can. It’ll help.”
She straightened up and turned around, heaving the bag of armor and padding up onto her shoulder. If there had been the least scrap of pity or sympathy on Burke’s face, she would have refused: she refused to accept pity and she rejected the entire idea that she needed sympathy. But his face showed nothing but kindness, so she nodded. “Okay.”
The horrible session with Mr. Wallis had driven everything else out of Spirit’s mind. It was only when she was on her way into the Refectory for dinner that she remembered that Loch had been supposed to be sneaking back into the Infirmary while she’d been collecting a choice set of new bruises. When she saw him sitting at their table, she felt a sharp pang of relief. It would have been unbearable if Loch had vanished, too.
If any of the others had.
Camilla’s disappearance and Nick’s accident were the main topics of conversation at dinner—apparently everyone had heard that he’d been found and was going to be in the hospital for a long time. Listening to Brendan talking about it with Troy Lang and Eric Robinson, though, Spirit realized that nobody knew Nick was here at Oakhurst right now. Everyone thought that he’d been found in Radial—that much was true—and was still in the hospital there.
The rumor about his accident and Camilla’s disappearance having something to do with “drugs” was making the rounds, too. Sarah Ellis and Cadence Morgan were both sticking up for Camilla, but Spirit doubted it would matter much. If she didn’t go to Oakhurst and know how impossible it was to get even an unapproved aspirin here—if she hadn’t known everyone involved and known that Nick would rather die than touch anything harder than caffeine—it would probably seem like a plausible explanation.
Only Brendan, Troy, and Eric—and Jillian Marshall and Kristi Fuller—did go to Oakhurst, and they sounded as if they believed it. That just was such a WTF moment it almost made Spirit’s eyes cross.
And then she realized something else; never mind why the other kids believed the bogus story. That didn’t matter. The real question was, how did the rumor get started in the first place?
Loch didn’t say anything at all about Nicholas during dinner, even though Muirin kept giving him Meaningful Looks. Loch pretended not to notice, insisting on talking to Cadence about tonight’s basketball game, and Burke about tomorrow’s football game. Addie said that the football team played their last game the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and after that, a lot of the other Oakhurst sports took over Saturday afternoons—the swim team, and the fencing team, the gymnastics teams, and (of course) the martial arts club.
“You should take up tennis in the spring,” Addie said to Spirit. “And there’s a golf course, too.”
“Golf?” Loch asked, looking interested.
“Just nine holes,” Addie said. “But”—she dropped her voice conspiratorially—“at least we don’t have to compete at it.”
Loch smiled at her, understanding her perfectly. They want us to compete at everything here, Spirit thought—not for the first time. And against each other. It’s almost as if somebody’s trying to make sure that only a few of us survive to graduate, and that none of us make good friends.
“Hey, at least the skeet range is open for a few more weeks,” Burke said. “You might like that, Loch. You need to do something besides swimming and chess. And shooting’s fun.”
“I don’t like guns,” Loch said, his smile fading as he looked away. “I don’t think they’re fun at all.”
“I didn’t—” Burke began, looking hurt.
“Archery,” Spirit said quickly. “That’s outdoors, right? Or—I don’t know—just pick something that’s going to get snowed under six weeks from now. Then they’ll be happy, and you won’t have to think about it again until March.”
“April, actually,” Addie said drily. “There’s soccer. Or field hockey—we’d love to have you on our team, Loch.”
Loch snorted rudely. Field hockey was one of the few sports at Oakhurst—football was another—that didn’t have both a boys and a girls team.
“Croquet,” Muirin said instantly.
“Shuffleboard,” Spirit said. It was the most ridiculous thing she could think of.
“Hopscotch,” Loch said, capping both of them, and the somber mood was broken.
The five of them had gone to the Friday night basketball game as a group every week—at least since Spirit and Loch had arrived at Oakhurst—and by unspoken agreement, they went tonight as well. If you were forming a secret cabal (even if you didn’t know what your secret cabal was for just yet) the first thing you had to remember was to keep behaving exactly the way you had before you’d formed your secret cabal.
But at least they could all sit together at the top of the bleachers without doing anything unusual. And not everyone came to the Friday games—or to the basketball games at all (not like the football games that practically the whole school attended). So they could hide in plain sight—and talk.
Loch sat in the middle, with Spirit on one side of him and Muirin on the other. Addie and Burke sat on the ends. Most of the other kids either didn’t want to climb up that high, or wanted to sit at the ends near one or the other of the baskets. All the Oakhurst teams played full-court, and the court was regulation size—94 by 50—so that left plenty of room in the middle for them to have privacy.
“Well?” Muirin demanded, as soon as Mr. Gail had blown the whistle to start the game and the ball was in play. The sound system was blasting a techno mix version of “Oakhurst We Shall Not Forget Thee” (Spirit had nearly died laughing the first time she’d heard it, but she had to admit it kind of grew on you), and everybody was whistling and shouting.
“Okay,” Loch said, leaning forward. “I went down to the Infirmary after class, instead of going to the Chess Club—”
“Wow, I bet that took real courage,” Muirin said snidely.
“You’ve been here longer than I have, Muirin—you know they like us to be where we’re supposed to be all the time,” Loch snapped.
“He’s right, Murr,” Burke said. “That was a real risk you took,” he added, and Loch smiled at the praise.
“So I eavesdropped on Ms. Bradford. You know how everybody was talking at dinner about how Nick’s going to be in a hospital for a long time? Well he is, but not in Radial. Ms. Bradford was making the arrangements on the phone with somebody to have an ambulance meet her and him at the train station in Billings.”
“When?” Addie asked tensely.
“They’re going first thing in the morning,” Loch said. “If you’re thinking about—about breaking him out, or—or anything—there isn’t any point. I tried talking to him.”
He sighed, and looked really upset. But he was laughing and joking all the way through dinner, Spirit thought. She didn’t know whether to be proud of Loch for being able to lie
so well—or worried, because if he could lie that well to them about something like this—something they all knew about—what else might he lie about later?
“I had to wait almost an hour for her to leave. Ms. Holland says that when I’m a full-fledged Shadewalker, I’ll be able to fool security cameras into not seeing me, and walk right up to people and have them not see me even if they’re looking for me, but right now it’s more like they just happen to not look where I am. I didn’t dare try to walk past her desk and try to talk to Nick while she was there.”
“But she did leave,” Muirin said impatiently. “And then what happened?”
“They have him strapped into a bed, with an IV in his arm, and one of the bags was just saline, but the other one was really small, and I figured it was some kind of sedative. So I stopped the drip and tried to wake him up, and—stop hitting me, Muirin. I’m going to tell this my own way.”
“It’ll go faster if you don’t try to hurry him, Murr,” Burke pointed out.
“I was scared to death,” Loch said shakily. “If Ms. Bradford came back, she’d be sure to see me. And Nick wouldn’t wake up. He looked so awful—pale, and . . . I don’t know how to describe it. Kind of . . . starved.” Loch stared off into space for a long moment, and even Muirin didn’t try to hurry him this time. “Like he hadn’t just been gone for a few hours. Like he’d been gone a really long time. But I remembered something I read in a book once, how to wake somebody up if you really had to, so I pinched his earlobe as hard as I could. And he did wake up—at least a little—and I asked him what had happened to him.”
On the floor below, the game had reached the end of the first quarter. The break in the action meant a drop in the noise level, and Loch stopped talking until the ball was back in play again.
“I don’t know if he was really awake. I don’t know if he knew I was me,” Loch said. “All he’d say—over and over—was: ‘the horns—the horns.’ I couldn’t get him to say anything else—and he started getting louder and louder—and trying to get loose. So I started the IV again and got out of there. Maybe I should have brought Brendan with me to talk to him—his Gift is Animal Communication,” Loch added bitterly.
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