Muirin snickered cruelly. “ ‘Dead Files’ is right. This is Camilla’s. Let’s see what the Powers That Be had to say about the trailer trash.”
“That’s not very nice,” Spirit snapped.
“She’s gone, what’s the harm?” Muirin said. She flipped through the manila folder. “Transcripts, notes from the teachers—huh, she was getting better grades in Art than I am—evaluations from her magic coach—Kissyface Bowman always was too easy on anybody with a flashy Water Gift—Demerits . . .” She stopped suddenly, as she got to the last page, and stared down at the folder in silence.
“What?” Loch said. Muirin simply held the folder out to him mutely.
He took it, and looked down at the last page. Spirit looked over his shoulder. There was just a single page there at the end, something it would be easy to take out and dispose of if for some reason you were going to hand it over to someone. At the top of the page there were several lines of illegible handwriting. The rest of the page was blank.
Except for a large red stamp that said: “Tithed.”
And the date.
Halloween.
EIGHT
Loch dropped the folder. The papers scattered everywhere. He stepped back quickly, as if the folder contained something dangerous.
“Tithed,” Muirin whispered harshly.
In that split second, the world seemed to lurch dangerously, and Spirit remembered the nightmare moment when she’d felt her parents’ car spin out of control—of thinking it would be bad, then worse-than-bad, then the blind mindless terror that swallowed up all thought. She’d relived that terror for weeks afterward, its echo enough to drag her up out of even heavy sedation.
It was like a flash, only negative, and before any of them could react with more than a flinch, there was something in the road—right in the middle of the road. It was—
Oh God! It couldn’t be—It couldn’t be—
And it looked at them and Mom screamed and Dad yanked the wheel sideways—
She’d told herself for months that what she’d seen wasn’t real. And now she was at Oakhurst, and she knew it could be, that it was, that whatever it was, it had come for Camilla Patterson and it had come for Nick Bilderback and it had come for Seth Morris and it would come for her. She had somehow eluded it once. She’d never be able to escape it a second time. Terror turned her insides to liquid.
“We have to—We have to—” Loch stammered in a stunned disbelieving voice.
“Burn this whole place down,” Muirin said viciously. “All of it—just burn it!”
“No. Wait.” Spirit dragged in a deep gasping breath, clutching her hands into fists to stop them from shaking. She was so terrified that all she wanted to do was burst into tears and hide. And if she did, all that would happen was other kids would end up just like her. And Loch. Burke, Muirin, Addie—and all the kids who’d died here.
She took another deep breath, closing her eyes tightly. Play hard and think harder. Mom always said that. “We need to put everything back the way it was. We need to get out of here without anyone noticing. We need to find out what t-t-tithing means,” she said, stumbling over the horrible word. “Tithed to who? What? And by who? Who put that note in there? Why? Was it supposed to be a warning in case someone came looking into these records?”
“It can’t be everybody doing this,” Loch said. He sounded better now. Calmer. As if Spirit managing to hold onto things was making it possible for him to do the same. “Not all the teachers. Not for almost forty years.”
“Why not?” Muirin demanded. She sounded angry, and almost about to cry. “Look at that!” She pointed an accusing finger at the page, which had landed at her feet. “It was in the file! They have to know!”
“You said once that Burke and Spirit aren’t anybody, Murr, and even you and I aren’t anybody. And you were right. But Addie is heir to Prester-Lake BioCo. She’s worth millions. At the very least. She can’t be the first super-rich kid to end up here. Doctor Ambrosius probably sold her trustees on what a great safe secure place it would be for her, because if he hadn’t, it would be the easiest thing in the world to tie up Conrad Lake’s will in court until she was of age.”
“ ‘Safe and secure,’ ” Muirin said bitterly.
“That’s the whole point,” Loch said eagerly. “Anybody who had proof that it wasn’t—that this whole place was something out of Wes Craven land—could just take her out of here and get a lot of money from her trustees for bringing her to safety. They wouldn’t even have to break any Magician’s Code of Silence. They could leave that part out.”
“And nobody’s ever done something like that,” Spirit said.
“Well, Oakhurst is still here,” Loch said. He bent over and began scooping up the scattered papers. “And believe me, my dad worked with people like Conrad Lake. When the really rich want something to go away, it does.”
Spirit didn’t stop twitching at every sound until she was back in her own room with her door shut. Of course the door didn’t lock. None of the doors in the dormitory wings locked: the demerit points you got for stealing were astronomical; almost as high as the ones for being found in the dorm wing of the opposite sex. Ever.
But even when she was lying in bed, lights out, right where she was supposed to be and doing (almost) what she was supposed to be doing, Spirit couldn’t relax. For the first time in months, cruel recollections of the life and the family she’d lost pushed into the forefront of her mind, and nothing Spirit could do could stop the torture of those memories. She remembered when the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out: She’d been nine, and wild to see it, and she’d been afraid she wouldn’t get to, because the house rule was that any theater movies had to be something both she and Phoenix could go to, and Phoenix was three years younger than she was, and at nine she was barely old enough to see some PG-13 movies.
But Dad was crazy about pirates (Mom preferred cowboys), and Spirit’s parents had struck a deal, so she and Dad drove an hour to the only theater in the area showing Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl—just them—and all the way home Dad had talked in a pirate voice while Spirit had yelled and stuffed her fingers in her ears. “Yarrrr!” he’d said. “Yarrrr, me heartie! T’will be our secret, arrh arrh! Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead—arrrrrh!”
She missed them so much.
And Oakhurst held a horrible secret—and it wasn’t the one she’d thought for the last two months that it was. It was bad enough to be drafted into a secret wizard war. It was worse—much worse—to find out that war might have started early, in the place that had been supposed to be safe.
And if it wasn’t safe, who was the enemy? Spirit stared unseeing at the ceiling.
She thought Loch had to be right: it couldn’t be Doctor Ambrosius and all the teachers and staff doing this. Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. Addie couldn’t be the first student at Oakhurst who’d be going back to claim a family fortune when she turned twenty-one. As Loch said, somebody—in all the years Oakhurst had been open—would have taken the quick path to easy money. Even if the rich kids weren’t the ones slated to be “Tithed,” it wouldn’t matter—not if there was evidence that anyone was being . . . taken away. No matter what you saw in summer blockbusters or in books, trustees didn’t want heirs disappearing. Things could get tied up in court for decades, the way they always seemed to with money. Just look what had happened when that rich guy Anna Nicole Smith married died!
For the first time since the accident that had killed her parents and her sister, Spirit made herself think about that night on purpose. What had she seen? What had been there in the middle of the road? As hard as she tried, all there was in her mind was too much darkness—and eyes, and teeth, and cold.
She lay in her bed unable to sleep until the sound of music from her laptop told her it was time for her day to begin.
Another happy day at Oakhurst Academy.
The next day was Sunday. Spirit held her bre
ath all through the morning service, but none of them was picked to attend Afternoon Tea. Aside from studying—and magic practice—Sunday really was a day of rest at Oakhurst, without any games or competitions or demos scheduled. It made it easier for them to get away to talk. Burke was the one who suggested—at lunch—that they all go for a nice walk.
November was freezing cold in Montana—it was twenty degrees out—and there were already snow flurries. They’d agreed to leave separately and meet down at the train station again, to avoid attracting attention by leaving as a group. Spirit bundled up in her warmest clothes—with an extra sweater for good measure—but the wind still cut like a knife. She walked quickly, hoping the exercise would warm her.
She was the last to arrive. “This is warm,” Burke said, grinning at her and Loch as they stamped and shivered. “Too bad neither of you has a Fire Gift.” Addie shook her head, and Muirin just groaned hollowly. “Come on,” Burke said.
“Where?” Loch asked, frowning slightly. “We can’t leave the grounds.”
“There isn’t any out there to go to,” Muirin pointed out.
“Yeah, but you know the grounds go a lot further than this,” Burke said, pointing. “Come on.”
Once they’d crossed over the railroad tracks, it seemed to Spirit as if they couldn’t be on the school grounds any longer, but Burke swore they were. There was nothing much around them but green-brown rolling earth, and mountains in the distance—and there was a lot of distance.
“See that stand of trees over there?” Burke said, pointing to a small clump of evergreen trees about a mile away that seemed to have been dropped down out of nowhere. “That marks the northern boundary of the school property. You’ll see when we get there.”
“Because a two-mile walk in the freezing cold is just how I want to spend my Sunday,” Muirin grumbled. But now they had all the privacy they could possibly want, so the three who’d been there—Spirit, Loch, and Muirin—told the two who hadn’t been—Addie and Burke—what they’d found in Oakhurst’s hidden subbasement.
Addie shook her head, looking troubled. The wind pulled strands of her long black hair out from under the collar of her coat and whipped it around her face. “I don’t think—How could they—?” She ducked her chin into her scarf and fell silent.
“We know Doctor Ambrosius said there’s some bad people out there,” Burke said soothingly. “That’s why he brought us here. Not all the Oakhurst Legacies come here, you know. Just the ones with magic. Like us.”
Like you, Spirit thought. Not like me. She knew that Doctor Ambrosius and Ms. Smith had both said she had magic. But what if they were wrong? Burke said sometimes it showed up late—but how long was she supposed to wait to find out she was a magician? Or to find out she wasn’t?
She wondered if she would’ve liked the place where the nonmagical Oakhurst orphans got sent better. But . . . what if they got Tithed, too? They’d have no idea what was happening and never see it coming.
Burke was chewing on his lower lip and looking thoughtful. “You said Camilla’s folder was stamped ‘Tithed,’ right?”
“Yeah,” Loch said unhappily. “It’s an old word that means a payment. It used to be a tenth part of whatever you had—like in the Middle Ages, when people tithed a tenth of their harvest to the Church. Who’s being paid—or what they’re being paid for, though . . .” Loch shrugged.
“Yeah,” Burke said. “And whatever—whoever—it is, they’re probably being Tithed eight times a year, on the dates of the old-time Festivals. It doesn’t matter what—or who—you worship: There’ve been celebrations on those eight days in most places about as far back as anybody can trace things.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Muirin said. “Astronomical calculations, tides of Power rising and falling, yadda. So?”
“So,” Burke said, “the problem I see right now is that Camilla disappeared right outside the gym. And she was Tithed. But Oakhurst and the grounds are supposed to be completely warded against anything bad getting in. And that means—”
“That someone here at Oakhurst is giving permission for the Whatever to pass the defensive wards,” Addie finished grimly.
Imagining someone at Oakhurst might be out to kill them was one thing. Having logical proof that they really were—and had outside allies—was another thing entirely. Spirit actually saw the moment that Addie was really, truly convinced: first, a kind of shock, and then a kind of glazed chill. The five of them walked on in silence for a few minutes until they got to the stand of trees.
It was like being in a miniature forest. The pines filled an area about thirty feet by sixty—a long irregular rectangle—and at the outer edge of the long side were a couple of staggered rows of young trees. The oldest trees were easily thirty feet high, and someone had trimmed them while they were growing, because there were no branches growing out of their trunks lower than seven feet above the ground. Spirit wondered why anyone would do that. Ease of bringing a brush-hog in? The ground in the middle of the tiny forest was soft with fallen pine needles, and in here, sheltered from the wind, it seemed warmer.
At the far edge of the forest was a white marble cylinder, about four feet tall. Burke walked over to it and brushed the fallen pine needles off the top. Carved into the flat disk of its surface was the Oakhurst crest, and carved into one side was a large letter “N.”
“This marks the northern boundary of the school grounds,” Burke said, tapping the top of the cylinder. “The southern boundary marker is set into the stone pillar on the left side of the foot of the driveway up to the school. The eastern one is about three-quarters of a mile past the centerline of the tennis courts—it’s a plaque set into a big boulder. The western one is out past the stadium about a mile, dead level with the fifty-yard line.”
Loch turned and looked back the other way. While the ground was fairly level, there were too many things in the way to be able to see even the main gates—let alone the drive and the markers at the foot of it. But: “They all line up,” he said.
Burke nodded. “A perfect cross—if you could see them from the air. Or a perfect square, if you connected them around the edges. And everything inside that square is warded.”
“Or it’s supposed to be,” Addie said quietly, returning to the earlier conversation.
“Wouldn’t Doctor Ambrosius know if the wards failed?” Loch asked curiously.
“He can’t be the one responsible for this,” Spirit said doubtfully. “I know he was really horrible to us those first couple of days, but then I saw him at the Afternoon Tea, and—Did he seem, well, different to you, too, Loch?”
“A little confused,” Loch agreed, nodding. “At my tea party, he didn’t seem quite sure who I was. He had that dragon with him—you know, his assistant, Ms. Corby—and she had to tell him my name was Lachlan, not Lawrence. If there’s a bad guy at Oakhurst, I vote for her.”
“Can’t be,” Muirin said promptly. “Doctor A. would know if the wards went down, but people get permission to cross them all the time—like those cops the other night, or the ambulance that brought Nick up from Radial. All the school staff with magic can manipulate the wards—but La Corbyissima doesn’t have magic.”
“They put them back the way they are afterward,” Addie said softly. “It’s called Revoking. You’d never be able to tell that someone’s been through the wards once their permission’s Revoked. But that means somebody inside is cooperating with someone on the outside so they can come through the wards. And that means one of the staff with magic. Which—I don’t know how that ties in with someone being ‘Tithed’ . . .”
“And why ‘Tithe’ anyone?” Muirin said. “Because—”
“It doesn’t matter why,” Spirit said harshly.
All of them looked at her in surprise.
“It doesn’t,” she insisted. “All that matters is stopping it. Don’t you see? Don’t any of you see? It’s going to happen again. It’s going to happen on the Winter Solstice—that’s less than two months from now
. Two more kids are going to die—disappear—go crazy. Doesn’t matter. Unless we find out what’s doing it and how to make it stop, it’s going to keep happening.”
If her double life had left Spirit feeling worn out and shaky and constantly on the edge of a crying jag during the previous week, it was nothing to what she felt during the days that followed. Now they not only had a deadline—December twenty-first—but they knew that someone here in the school was in league with . . . whoever the enemy was.
Student? Faculty? Staff? It was Loch who pointed out that whichever member of the Oakhurst staff was turning the school from a safe haven into a hunting ground, they weren’t their only problem. There were good reasons to suspect everyone. Knowing what they now did, it seemed more likely that the “secret society” that might-or-might-not exist among the Oakhurst students was more likely to be allied with Doctor Ambrosius’s enemies and the Whatever than it was to be on the side of the Good Guys. (“Just because they’re keeping it a secret?” Addie had demanded indignantly, and Loch had replied: “Yeah. Think about it. We’ve got a Chess Club, a Tennis Club, a swim team, a Kendo Club, and every other kind of club and team I can think of here at Oakhurst. If there were an Honors Society for wizards—a legitimate one—don’t you think they’d tell us about that, too? If only so we could fight over who got in?”)
So they didn’t just have to find the enemy—they had to do it while they were surrounded by potential spies. And then there was another problem: the Alumni, and the secret society that might (or might not) exist. Were they (and it) Good Guys? Bad Guys? Some of each? Not even Burke remembered who’d visited the Alumni during Alumni Days, so they didn’t know who they definitely had to avoid. And anyone at all who saw one of them in the wrong place at the wrong time—or saw something they shouldn’t, like their research notes on the Whatever—could betray them innocently and by accident, just by mentioning it to the wrong person.
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