Shadow grail 1

by Mercedes Lackey; Rosemary Edghill

  How come you weren’t answering your IM?” Muirin demanded, practically the moment Spirit settled into her seat in the Refectory. “I was paging you right up until dinner.”

  Spirit felt a flare of irritation—and an unreasonable wish that she’d sat somewhere else tonight. Couldn’t Muirin give her a rest for one afternoon? “I was busy,” she said shortly.

  She glanced around. The others were all looking at her as if she’d done something wrong—or something particularly stupid—and for just an instant Spirit was tempted to leap to her feet and start shouting: “Hey! Everyone! Camilla didn’t run away! She was kidnapped by the Monster Of The Week! And so was Nicholas! And so was Seth! And so was everybody that you think has left Oakhurst for any reason for the last ten years!”

  “What?” she said instead, knowing she sounded sulky and out of sorts.

  “Um, just, I could use some help on this thing I’ve got to work on, if you’ve got time after dinner,” Loch said, after an awkward pause.

  Spirit was about to point out that not only were they not in any of the same classes, Loch was probably a better student than she was. He might have been bounced around among half a dozen private schools (or more), but the ones that weren’t just babysitters for the rich and bored were academic pit bulls. And Lachlan Spears, Senior, had probably been the type of father to go for the pit-bull school over the babysitter school. But she didn’t. She opened her mouth to say something when she felt a foot settle over hers and press down. Hard.

  She glanced up in surprise. Addie was reaching for a roll and looking completely innocent, but Spirit had no doubt as to whose foot it was. “Um, sure. Glad to,” Spirit said unconvincingly.

  She was grateful when dinner was over. She didn’t have a lot of appetite between wondering what the others wanted to talk about and trying to keep up a stream of inane chatter about stupid things. They hadn’t seemed quite as stupid when she’d just thought Oakhurst was a perfectly normal orphanage where all the kids happened to have magic powers. (“Will you listen to yourself, Spirit White!” her inner voice said. “ ‘A perfectly normal orphanage where all the kids happen to have magic powers’? Is it any wonder you’re a few fries short of a Happy Meal these days?”) But now that she knew it was an orphanage where all the kids had magic powers and some of them were inexplicably disappearing, she’d lost any patience with trivialities that she’d had left after her family’s deaths. Life wasn’t just serious business, it was downright grim. Why didn’t everyone else see that?

  She was just as glad that Loch’s “cover story” of needing her help with a school project meant they could all head over to the Library after dinner instead of going to the gym for the basketball game. It was one more example of how Oakhurst was trying to turn them all against each other.

  She really wasn’t in the mood.

  The School Library occupied the second floor of the East Wing of the original house, and it had more books in it than the piddly little Association Library in Spirit’s hometown. Her former hometown. The Library was one long room, about twice the size of the Faculty Lounge where Doctor Ambrosius held his Afternoon Teas. The ceiling was painted dark blue, with a pattern of constellations on it in gold. Above each of the windows there was a half-moon-shaped panel (Loch—of course he’d know—said it was called a “lunette”) on which the celestial motif was repeated: there were twelve lunette panels in the library, and each had a painting of one of the signs of the Zodiac on it.

  There were oak bookshelves all along all four walls, and if that weren’t enough storage space for the Oakhurst Library (and apparently it wasn’t) there were also bookshelves jutting out into the room to form “study bays.” There were large oak tables in each of the “study bays,” at which the students could congregate to work.

  Ms. Anderson was behind the checkout desk this evening. You could check out as many books as you liked from the Library, but you could only keep them for seven days, and if you didn’t return them on time, you got demerit points, and they were assessed per book, not per you-had-overdue-library-books. And of course they had to be returned in good shape. But aside from that, they didn’t care what you read, and it was one of the nicest libraries Spirit had ever been in.

  Ms. Anderson looked up as they walked in, nodding briefly before returning to the book she was reading. On a Saturday after dinner, the Library wasn’t too crowded, though there were about half a dozen students sitting up near the front, typing away on their laptops, a stack of reference books beside them.

  The five of them went back into the stacks, to what had become Spirit and Muirin’s usual study table. There wasn’t as much light back here as in the rest of the Library: during the day, the freestanding shelves cut off most of the light from the windows, and at night, they blocked a lot of the light from the chandeliers. Also—by some fluke of the building’s construction—laptops in this corner couldn’t get a signal to connect to the school intranet.

  So it was perfect.

  Spirit settled into a seat and waited with ill-concealed impatience while the others collected chairs and settled around the table.

  “Okay,” Burke said. “So I get back from the game today, and Brendan comes over, because he was going through all his stuff to find all the books he needed to take back to the Library, and he had this.”

  He reached into his blazer pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. He set it on the table and unfolded it carefully. Inside was a tiny zip-up carrying case with the initials “NB” hand-painted on one side in flaming letters.

  “What is it?” Spirit asked. She was curious in spite of herself.

  “It’s an earbud case,” Burke said. “Brendan said Nick was studying in his room a few days before the dance. Nick brought his earbuds with him so he could listen to music without bugging Brendan. He was looking all over for it later—and Brendan forgot he’d left it there. So now Brendan doesn’t just want to throw it out, and Nick’s room’s already been emptied. I said I’d take care of it.”

  Spirit couldn’t figure out why the others looked as if this was a really big deal. So Burke had found Nick’s earbud case. So?

  “It’s something Nick handled a lot, and something he cared about,” Burke said. “Loch should be able to use his Kenning Gift to trace it back to where anything that has an affinity with it is.”

  “We know where Nick is—or where he’s supposed to be. Billings,” Loch pointed out.

  “Sure. But his stuff isn’t in Billings,” Addie said. “And they probably didn’t just toss it out—because somebody might notice, and wonder why. And if they didn’t . . . then maybe it’s with other stuff they’ve got stored.”

  “And if it is, and I can find where that is, who knows what else I might find?” Loch said, looking excited.

  “Well, you’re going to have to be careful,” Muirin said warningly. “And you’re going to need help.”

  When Muirin said that Loch would need “help,” it’d never occurred to Spirit that the help Muirin meant was her. But as Muirin explained, if Spirit hadn’t come into her magic yet, that also meant a magician couldn’t sense her by following her magic. So in the event Muirin and Loch were caught, Spirit could get away to warn the others.

  Probably.

  It’d seemed like a crazy idea after dinner, and it seemed like an even crazier one three hours after Lights Out, when she, Loch, and Muirin—all dressed in their darkest clothes—went sneaking down the back stairs of the main building.

  Loch was the one who had to do the actual Kenning spell, and Muirin was coming along at least partly—Spirit thought—because Muirin could never bear to be left out of any “adventure,” no matter how dangerous, and partly because her ability to cast illusions might give them some protection.

  Spirit had never been gladder about Loch’s obsession with local history. The Kenning spell pulled him in a straight line—as if there were an invisible string stretching between the object he held and the objects for which it had an “affinity”—but he w
asn’t forced to follow it slavishly. He could tell that it led down, so he led them around the main rooms of the house, into the classroom wing, down into the basement level there—and then back toward the house.

  “When they added on the new wings, they covered at least one of the exterior entrances to the cellar,” Loch whispered, shining his penlight over the walls. “This is the main one. Oakhurst used to be heated by coal.”

  Spirit wished he’d stop talking. If Oakhurst was a little creepy during the day sometimes, it was full-on spooky in the middle of the night. And she wouldn’t quite put it past one of the teachers—or one of the proctors—to follow them and then jump out shrieking just to give them the fright of their lives.

  The door Loch was indicating looked just like any other door down here, except for the sign that said NO EXIT: KEEP OUT. It was gray metal and looked grimly institutional. But when Loch tried it, much to Spirit’s surprise, it opened.

  “What if there are burglar alarms?” she whispered.

  “Oh don’t be silly, Spirit,” Muirin hissed. “Who’s going to break in down here?”

  “Well . . . us,” Loch said inarguably. “Come on.”

  The basement—cellar, really—was the only part of Oakhurst that Spirit had seen that didn’t look shiny new and rolling in money. It was freezing cold and faintly damp, and while Loch’s little penlight didn’t do much to illuminate it, what she could see was dusty, dirty, and generally unused. The walls were made up of wide-spaced wooden planks, and she could even see cobwebs.

  “Hey,” Muirin whispered. “Shine that on the floor again.” When Loch did, she made a small sound of surprise. “Somebody put down a new cement floor here. Newer than the house, anyway.”

  “How would you know?” Spirit asked, despite herself.

  “Daddy Dearest was a contractor,” Muirin said simply. “I spent a lot of time on construction sites when I was a kid.”

  “Do people ever put basements under basements?” Loch asked, sounding confused.

  It took them a while to find what Loch was looking for. The part of the cellar they’d come in through had contained the old coal bins. From there, they found the (modern) Furnace Room, where Muirin—over Spirit’s protests—grabbed a flashlight to replace Loch’s failing penlight.

  “We’re already going to be in trouble if we’re caught down here, what’s one little flashlight going to matter?” she said blithely.

  Spirit wasn’t sure what Loch was expecting to find down here. The basement was cut up into a number of rooms (Loch said that was to provide support for the ground floor above) and it was easily as large as the main house. A lot of it seemed to be devoted to storage: there were shelves of ancient computer equipment, a whole room full of broken wooden furniture and tattered carpet ends, things that had obviously been sent here to die—and other rooms filled with shelves that obviously held quantities of things in current use, everything from fifty-pound sacks of flour to industrial-size boxes of trash bags.

  Loch kept circling around as if he were lost, clutching Nick’s leather case in one hand. Finally he returned—for the third time—to the Furnace Room.

  “It’s here,” he said, sounding disgusted. He pointed at the floor. “Right there.”

  “Huh.” Muirin looked around the room, shining the flashlight around the walls and the ceiling. Suddenly she darted off and disappeared behind the furnace. “Maybe through this door, geniuses?”

  “What?” Loch spoke loudly and Spirit hissed in dismay. “Sorry,” he whispered.

  The two of them groped through the darkness to where Muirin stood. There was about three feet of space between the back of the furnace and the wall, and in the middle of that space was a door—or, rather, a hatch. It looked like a hatch on a ship, with rounded corners and a raised bottom edge, and it was painted the same color as the wall. Between that and the fact that it was a little smaller than an ordinary door, they hadn’t found it before.

  “This way through the rabbit hole,” Muirin said.

  It was also locked with a padlock.

  “How are we? . . .” Loch said.

  Muirin handed her flashlight to Spirit and dug around in her pocket. While Spirit and Loch were both wearing their school clothes—the dark brown was the perfect shade for sneaking around in, actually—Muirin was wearing black jeans and a black turtleneck sweater. She looked like an elegant cat burglar.

  “Trust me when I say I know everything there is to know about smuggling contraband into fancy private schools specializing in ‘attitude readjustment,’ ” Muirin said. She came up with a ring of keys and shook them at the other two. “And about keeping it hidden once you get there. These are skeleton keys. They’ll fit most locks. They were Daddy Dearest’s. And now—for reasons that don’t need explaining at this juncture—they’re mine.”

  Muirin had to try several different keys, but finally one of them turned, and the padlock sprang open. Muirin removed the lock and pushed open the door. It moved silently, but with a ponderousness that made Spirit think it must be heavy. Loch shone the flashlight in through the open door. There was a flight of metal steps leading down into the dark. He flicked the beam around as much as he could. Support beams. Blank walls.

  Muirin carefully tucked both the ring of skeleton keys and the open padlock into her pockets. “I’d rather be caught than locked in down there,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Loch said shakily.

  The three of them walked carefully down the stairs. Muirin came last, pulling the hatchway door closed behind her. When the beam of the flashlight revealed a light switch on one of the nearer pillars, she skipped over to it and switched it on.

  “Hey!” Loch protested.

  Strings of bare bulbs strung from an overhanging wire illuminated the room. Series of rooms, actually: this one was large, but Spirit could see doorways leading off of it. The walls, the floor, and the ceiling were all poured concrete.

  “We’re in the secret sub-subbasement, which—you may have noticed—doesn’t have any windows, and if they find us here, we’re toast anyway,” Muirin said. She looked around, her expression thoughtful. “Somebody’s Earth Gift got a workout, I’d say.”

  “Or something,” Loch said, conceding her point. “This way.”

  The fact that there was a secret sub-subbasement at all was bad enough. Some of the other things they found down here were worse. For instance: There were several small rooms set up as cells. In each, there was a bed, a table and chair, a toilet—and a door with a barred window that locked from the outside.

  There was a room that looked as if it must be an operating room, or an infirmary of some kind. There were shelves along the wall to hold some kind of supplies, and a sink, and a bed in the middle with a big lamp over it. The bed had heavy leather straps.

  “I guess now we know what happens if you collect too many demerit points,” Muirin said, looking at it, and Spirit could hear the fear beneath the mockery.

  “Here we are,” Loch said in relief. “Finally.”

  The room was about as large as the Library upstairs. Spirit had gotten completely turned around while they’d been following the trail, but she thought it might even be directly under it. There was a big oak table in the middle of the room—like the ones upstairs but considerably more battered—and along one wall there was rack after rack of rough wooden shelving containing rows of cardboard boxes. Beyond them were rows of file cabinets.

  Loch walked unerringly over to one of the boxes and opened it, dropping the little leather case inside. “Nick’s stuff,” he said, making a face. “It’s labeled. They all are.” He walked along the row of boxes, his lips moving silently as he read the labels. “Here’s Camilla’s stuff. And Seth’s. It looks like they’re arranged in chronological order.” He looked at the wall of boxes. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

  “Why are they keeping all this stuff?” Spirit asked.

  “They’re probably planning to ditch it when it’s convenient,” Muirin said
. She walked quickly along the row, obviously looking for something. “Maybe they take it all to a big city dump or an incinerator. Someplace where no one will know any of these kids or care about asking questions. Tabitha Johnson and Ryan Miller,” she said in disgust. “Early graduation last June. Not.”

  Spirit looked at the wall of boxes and swallowed hard. There were more than twenty names between Ryan and Tabitha—and Seth, Camilla, and Nick. She walked over to stand beside Loch. “How can they do this?” she asked plaintively. “How can they just keep doing this?”

  “I don’t know,” Loch said miserably. “It could just be . . . we could just be blowing things up out of proportion. We know why Seth and Camilla and Nick’s stuff is here. Maybe there’s a good reason for everything else. Maybe it’s stuff they didn’t want anymore.” He walked down to where the boxes marked TABITHA JOHNSON were and lifted one down, bringing it over to the table. He lifted off the lid.

  The first thing Spirit saw was a raggedy sweater in Oakhurst gold. Loch lifted it out carefully and set it aside. Beneath it was a two-sided silver frame. In one side was a picture of a smiling dark-haired girl with her arms around the neck of a panting golden retriever. Behind her stood a man and a woman, obviously her parents. In the photo on the other side, a handsome boy teased the same dog with a Frisbee. Brother? Boyfriend? It didn’t matter. No matter what, Tabitha Johnson wouldn’t have left that behind when she left Oakhurst.

  Not if she’d had a choice.

  “Hey, kids, look at this,” Muirin said. She walked over to the table with a file folder in her hand. “Those file cabinets are all full of files. There must be hundreds of them. I looked at some of the dates. They go all the way back to the seventies.”

  “That’s when Oakhurst opened,” Loch said. “It’s probably just their dead files. You know, former students? They’d have to keep them forever.”