“That’s a lie! They were murdered!” Dylan cried. He was halfway up out of his seat, and all of the silverware on the table was starting to shake.
“Dylan, don’t.” Spirit grabbed his arm and squeezed. “Don’t do it. Don’t.” If Burke were here, he’d help her. Loch would. Even Addie might. But they were all scattered around the room. And in another few seconds the proctors—or one of the teachers—would notice there was something wrong.
Dylan stared at her, his green eyes wide and unseeing.
“Yeah, stupid, chill,” Zoey said from Dylan’s other side. “You’re a jerk, but you don’t have to act like one. And I’m hungry.”
After a long tense moment Dylan settled slowly back into his seat and reached for his glass, but his hands were shaking so badly that he would have just tipped it over if Spirit hadn’t rescued it. She looked across the table at Kylee. How could you do something like that? How could you say something so cruel?
“You try sticking up for somebody else, you’ll just both go down when the time comes,” Kylee said softly. She picked up her knife and began to butter her roll as if nothing had happened.
The karate and kendo exhibition two days later wasn’t a disaster, but about all Spirit really remembered afterward about her own performance was that Mr. Wallis didn’t stop things in the middle to scream at her. She wasn’t just nervous, she was terrified—and knowing that most (and probably all) of her martial arts club teammates were crazy didn’t help at all. She already knew that Jenny O’Connell was happy to sabotage her partners’ equipment for fun. Now she knew that Kylee was . . . Spirit wasn’t sure what. And Dylan didn’t seem grateful for the way she’d stuck up for him at Thanksgiving. Aside from Burke, that left ten other students, and the odds were that every one of them was . . .
Normal for Oakhurst.
But the hours of practice with Burke had helped a lot. She got through her two sections of the demo—sparring hand-to-hand against Nadia, and a sword-kata with Kylee—without screwing anything up. Of course, neither Nadia nor Kylee wanted to look bad in the exhibition. In between those parts, she got to kneel on the mat with the other beginners and watch the advanced students’ routines. And the showpiece of the whole thing was Mr. Wallis versus Burke, both in karate and kendo.
It was beautiful—like a dance—but it scared her to watch it, because by now Spirit had done enough training to know no punches were being pulled—at least by Mr. Wallis. And Burke had already played a football game—both halves—only a couple of hours before. Blake Watson could Heal him, but Healing didn’t take the place of rest.
Watching Burke’s part of the exhibition, she remembered what he’d said the first night she’d been at Oakhurst: how it would be unfair for him to compete against non-magicians at something in which he had a Mage Gift. She remembered how Muirin had jeered at the thought. But today, Spirit understood it bone-deep, where before it was only something she’d believed to be right.
Mr. Wallis was a master kendoka and karateka. He’d trained for years to gain his level of skill. Burke said himself he’d only been doing this for a year or so. But he was better at it than Mr. Wallis—better, faster, superior.
Burke says it doesn’t matter what Gift you have—even if it’s something little like sensing weather patterns, you’re generally stronger and healthier and everything than non-magicians. And . . . nobody here wears contact lenses, or glasses, and . . . I haven’t even seen a single zit.
She wondered for the first time if the “enemies” Doctor Ambrosius talked about really were other magicians—or if maybe they were non-magical people who just hated the fact that there was another kind of person around that was better than they were?
If it was really true that they were better.
The five of them had only had scraps of time to get together as a group since what Muirin had started calling The Adventure of the Haunted Basement, and none at all to get together since Spirit had conceded they weren’t going to solve this. Everything would have been so much easier if they could just have gotten onto IM for ten minutes—or could risk sending an e-mail. But they didn’t dare. So there’d only been enough time to state the problem, not to discuss the solution. Not until this Sunday. As it was, they had to put that off until late in the afternoon, because Addie had to go to the Afternoon Tea, and she didn’t want to do it before that.
At least there were two full hours before dinner. Plenty of time to find the most deserted corner of Oakhurst they could that was indoors, because the weather had now graduated to being really freezing, and there were patches of snow on the ground.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together,” Muirin said in portentous tones.
“Oh, hush, Murr-cat,” Addie said.
The Greenhouse wasn’t off-limits, but it wasn’t a place most of the kids thought of hanging out in, aside from some of the Green Witches whose magic had a direct involvement with plants and growing things. Even most of them associated it with studying and not free time, though, so on a Sunday afternoon the Greenhouse was deserted.
“We all know what the problem is,” Loch said. “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
“I bet there’s more information down in the Haunted Basement,” Muirin said darkly.
“Why should there be?” Spirit demanded. “Or—what if there is, and there’s a booby trap, too? Then they lock you up in one of those cute little cells we saw and tell everybody you ran away to be with Seth.”
Muirin’s face sharpened with anger. Spirit knew it was a low blow, but she was scared. And if Muirin got into one of those crazy states where she’d do anything—she might go down there alone, without telling the rest of them.
“I suppose you want to go just telling everybody else about this and seeing if they have any good ideas? Sure! Then we can all be down there! Except Ads, of course—she’s got her trust-fund lawyers looking out for her!” Muirin said viciously.
“Spirit didn’t say that, and you know it,” Burke said. “She’s just worried because she’s your friend. But look: does it really make sense that the Whatever and whoever’s serving it would be stupid?”
“Huh,” Loch said, sounding surprised. “We’ve kind of been assuming that the Whatever is working for whoever’s on the inside here. But what if you’re right, and it’s the other way around? Because if kids have been disappearing for forty years, the only one who’s been at Oakhurst that long is Doctor Ambrosius.”
“We don’t know that they have, Loch. That’s one of the problems,” Addie said. “If—”
“Will you all stop getting sidetracked by unimportant things?” Spirit demanded, trying to keep a leash on her temper. “It doesn’t matter. Find out what the Whatever is and how we stop it. That’s what matters!”
“Huh,” Muirin said speculatively, losing some of that angry spark. “So . . . how do we do that?”
Burke looked at Spirit. She shrugged helplessly.
“We can’t follow up Nick’s clue; we tried,” he said, ticking the points off on his fingers. “Whoever’s letting the Whatever onto the School Grounds and cleaning up after it probably hasn’t left a Monster Manual around with the page conveniently marked for us. We have twenty-four days until the Winter Solstice, and we have to figure out how to stop the Whatever once we identify it, or one and probably two more kids will die. We can’t ask anyone for help, or we might be asking the wrong people—or they’ll tell the wrong people what we asked. So we decide—now—whether to approach somebody else here for help in identifying the Whatever— or we have to decide we’re okay with a couple more people dying and hope we can figure it out by February.”
“Isn’t approaching somebody for help in identifying the Whatever the same as asking them for help?” Addie asked, after a long moment when nobody said anything.
“Oh. No. No,” Loch said, sounding as if he’d found the solution. “We can ask someone for help—but we don’t have to tell them why they’re really helping. Right?”
“I think,” Addie said slowly. “I think that could work. We get someone with the Scrying Gift, and we ask them to See something for us. Everybody does that all the time. We make it something that seems reasonable—”
“But something that will tell us what we need to know!” Muirin said. Her eyes gleamed avidly.
“They won’t be hurt, will they?” Spirit asked doubtfully. She’d studied Scrying, the way she’d studied all the Mage Gifts of all the Elemental Schools, but it still seemed so unlikely. See something somewhere else than where you were, okay—a television camera could do that. But view the past and the future? That was pure science fiction.
“A Scrying Mage just Sees what they’re looking for,” Addie said. “They don’t experience it. It’s real, but it’s not like it’s right there.” She thought for a moment, chewing on her lower lip. “It’s going to be hard to find somebody who’s got a strong Gift and stays awake while they use it.”
Muirin snorted. “Yeah, because it isn’t going to be a lot of use to us if we have to hang around waiting for them to wake up and tell us about it.”
Especially, Spirit thought, if just seeing it had the same effect on them as it’d had on Nick Bilderback. But right now, this wasn’t just the best idea they had.
It was the only idea they had.
NINE
Wednesday was December first. Three weeks from today, either somebody else would be dead, or they would have stopped the Whatever. No pressure, right? Spirit thought to herself.
The pop-up calendar app on her desktop told her that the twenty-first wasn’t just the Solstice, but a Full Moon. If this were a movie, she could hack into the school’s main database and run a search on every student who had ever been here. She could find out which ones had left before the age of twenty-one, and when, and then she could just hack her way out onto the Internet and cross-index that with the Naval Observatory’s ephemeris. And then she could find out what lunar phases those dates corresponded with and get all the other information she needed, too. Like complete bios on all the Alums. If she had the complete files on everybody who’d ever gone to Oakhurst, she’d have all their Social Security numbers, and there were any number of sites on the Internet where you could find out about people . . .
Great wish list. She was about as likely to get any of it as she was to find out that she was the last Jedi Knight. Her computer skills were probably good enough to get out of the sandbox to the system itself, but she doubted she could get past whatever security Oakhurst had set up around its data files. And even if she could (because who knows, its security might suck), she definitely couldn’t do it without getting caught.
Looks like technology’s a wash. Better hope magic comes through, she thought.
You have got to be kidding,” Muirin said, her whisper harsh with disbelief. “Crazy Eddie?”
“Don’t whisper, Murr. It makes it sound like you’re plotting something,” Burke said in a quiet voice.
“Well we are, aren’t we?” Muirin demanded reasonably. “But—oh come on, Ads.”
It should have been an idyllic scene, Spirit thought. The five of them were sitting in front of a crackling fire (a real fire, not an illusion) in one of the student lounges. Snow sifted down outside, as fine as powdered sugar. It was so cold that the snow blew around like dust instead of sticking, and Burke said it would probably be gone by morning.
There were six student lounges at Oakhurst: three on the first floor and three on the second. Five of them had sixty-inch flat-screen DVD players and microwaves. The sixth lounge was less than half the size of the others. It backed on the School Library and the staff didn’t want the sound of a movie disturbing the students who were studying. The only people who used it regularly were the Chess Club—who found the library too noisy—but right now the five of them had it to themselves.
“He’s a good choice,” Addie said stubbornly.
“He’s nuts,” Muirin retorted.
“Hey, uh, time out?” Loch said. “Who’s, uh, Eddie?”
“Edgar Abbott,” Addie began, looking sternly at Muirin, “is a Scrying Mage with an extremely strong Gift. Edgar uses a bowl of water to focus on.”
“And he’s cra-a-a-a-zy,” Muirin sang softly. “Addie, come on! He walks around talking to himself all the time! He’s on drugs! Last year he came to breakfast in his underwear—”
“He’s had his Full Gift since he was five years old,” Addie said forcefully. “Full—and completely uncontrolled. He’d have a Scrying episode whenever he saw water, or anything that glittered or sparkled. His visions were as real to him as what was actually around him and nobody understood that he wasn’t crazy. The ‘drugs’ he’s on is just Ativan, and he doesn’t take it all the time.”
There was something niggling at the back of Spirit’s mind. Finally she teased it loose. “But—if he’s here—he’s a Legacy, right? Wouldn’t his parents have . . .”
She stopped as something abruptly occurred to her. She remembered the day she’d found out about Oakhurst, traveling on the private jet with Loch, seeing the “Welcome to Oakhurst” video. And she remembered what Ms. Corby had said:
“Certainly you must be curious about the reasons your parents had for arranging for Oakhurst to become your guardian . . . the reason is simple . . . you are a Legacy . . . what this means is that your parents, one or both of them, was also raised at Oakhurst.”
I’m here because I’m a Legacy, Spirit thought. She’d been too stunned on the plane to think of this, and afterward there’d been too many new things to take in. So either Mom or Dad—or both—were here. But that would mean they were magicians. . . .
“He could be a Legacy without his parents having gone here,” Burke said. He smiled at her, as if he guessed her thoughts. “There’s that Other Oakhurst out there somewhere, the one where all the kids are normal.”
“You mean there’s two places that look like this in the world?” Muirin said. “Now that’s scary. But Eddie’s still crazy.”
Addie set her jaw and looked stubborn.
“Look,” Burke said. “There’s no point in fighting. Addie had a good reason for picking Eddie. Why don’t we listen to it?”
Loch smiled brilliantly at Burke. “Yeah. Because . . . I can’t even imagine what it would have been like just to get Kenning when I was a little kid, and Scrying’s got to be even rougher, right?”
“Yes.” Addie smiled at Loch gratefully. “Edgar’s got one of the strongest Scrying Gifts here. He’s the only strong one who works while he’s awake. We could ask Emily Davis or Cassandra Moore—they’re strong, too—but both of them work in trance.”
“Which, uh? . . .” Loch prompted.
“Which means they wouldn’t be able to tell us anything they Saw until they came out of trance—and then they might decide not to. Edgar can tell us what he’s Seeing as he Sees it,” Addie said. She shrugged. “And he’ll do it if I ask him.”
“Okay,” Loch said, blowing out a long breath. “I’m in. Let’s do it.”
“Me, too,” Burke said. “Spirit?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t like it much, but it was this or let someone die whose death they could prevent.
“And we know Addie’s in, Muirin, so that leaves you,” Burke said. “Because it has to be unanimous.”
Muirin was frowning, her mouth set in a thin angry line. She said nothing.
“Muirin—if Edgar had his Scrying Gift since he was five—and he wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t an orphan—what if he Saw what was going to happen to his parents, and couldn’t tell them?” Spirit said softly. “Or what if they didn’t believe him? I think—I think I might be a little crazy, too. But that doesn’t mean what he Sees can’t be trusted.”
“Oh, sure,” Muirin finally said offhandedly. “I think it’s stupid, but—what’s the fun of playing it safe?”
Spirit heaved a sigh of—not relief, exactly, but at least the decision had been made. “So what do we ask him to do?” she asked.
But just as she asked the question, six kids came in, two of them carrying chessboards, and the chance to speak privately was gone.
So much for Wednesday. For the rest of the week—in every private moment they could grab—the five of them argued over what to tell Edgar Abbott that would protect both him and them from the enemy inside Oakhurst who might be working with the Whatever. It was Muirin who finally came up with a story that all of them thought would work: asking Edgar where Seth was and if he was all right.
It made more sense than asking about Nick. None of them knew Nick that well, and either Edgar would just See him in a hospital in Billings, which would be pretty useless, or he’d look backward and See Nick being brain-fried, and while Addie said nothing someone Saw while Scrying really affected them, the others weren’t as sure.
But Muirin had a logical reason to ask about Seth, and if Seth had been taken by whatever was making Oakhurst kids vanish, Edgar would See what it was. And they’d probably have enough warning from listening to the things he said to interrupt his Scrying before he got to anything that might actually hurt him.
Addie had already talked to Edgar during the week, telling him as little as possible, but enough that she was able to tell the others that he’d agreed to See for Muirin. They decided that Sunday would be the best time—Sundays were the days when nobody expected them to be anywhere or do anything, unless one of them who hadn’t gone got picked to attend Afternoon Tea. They chose to do it in the Greenhouse, because if they tried to drag Edgar off somewhere really secluded, he’d probably pitch a fit (and besides, it was snowing), and agreed that they’d do it right after lunch whether they could all be there or not, because Sunday was already December fifth, and they were running out of time.
But they were lucky enough that none of them was picked for the “honor” of Afternoon Tea this Sunday, so once lunch was over, they went off one by one to the Greenhouse.
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