Spirit arrived after Loch and Muirin; Burke got there soon afterward. It was nearly another half hour before Addie arrived with Edgar Abbott.
It was only when she saw him that Spirit realized that everybody else at Oakhurst Academy really did look kind of perfect. It didn’t matter whether they were tall or short—or even fat or skinny—all the students at Oakhurst looked vibrantly alive.
Spirit wasn’t sure how to describe it. It wasn’t that everyone at Oakhurst was happy, because, just, no. Or even energetic (again, no), or cover-model gorgeous. And it really wasn’t their clothes, because the dress code made everybody look like robot zombie escapees from a weird religious cult. But whatever it was, Edgar didn’t have it.
His hair was light brown, and he had a good haircut, because there was an in-school salon where you could go get your hair cut if you wanted—and where you had to go get your hair cut if you were a guy, because boys’ hair length was part of the dress code, just like not dying it blue (whether you were a boy or a girl) was. But Edgar’s was messy and uncombed and sticking up all over the place. His clothes were a mess, too—not dirty, but rumpled, as if he’d just pulled them on and then never bothered to make sure his sweater lay flat or his shirt was tucked in. Worst of all, his hands flapped while he walked, and he twitched and stumbled along—not like he was a spaz, but as if he was constantly being distracted by sights and sounds that nobody else noticed but him.
“Oh boy,” Muirin said. “Here comes Freakazoid.”
“Do I even need to tell you how rotten saying something like that is?” Loch asked her in a perfectly pleasant voice.
“Why, no,” Muirin said, smiling a big false smile. “I can get there on my own.” She took a step forward as Addie and Edgar approached, since this was supposed to be her idea.
“Hi, Eddie,” she said unenthusiastically.
It seemed to take Edgar a moment to notice her. “You’re really pretty for a dead girl,” he told her. His voice was high pitched, like a child’s, though Spirit would have guessed he was about Addie’s age.
Muirin grimaced. “Yeah. I like you, too.”
“You didn’t say there were going to be a lot of, a lot of people here, Addie,” Edgar said. He had his book bag slung precariously over one shoulder, and he clutched at the strap as if it were a kind of security blanket.
“Remember, I said Muirin’s friends wanted to know, too?” Addie said. “This is everybody, Edgar. You know Burke. And this is Spirit White and Lachlan Spears. They came here in September.”
“Hi, Edgar,” Loch said.
“Hi,” Edgar said. He looked at Spirit. “You don’t have a crown,” he said, sounding disappointed.
Spirit blinked. She had no idea how to answer, since “I’m sorry” seemed kind of tacky. She was trying to remember if she’d ever had a dress-up princess outfit as a child—since it didn’t seem likely she was going to be crowned Queen of England any time in the future—when Addie took charge of matters.
“Come on over here, Edgar,” Addie said. “Then we can get started.”
Edgar smiled at her, and Spirit thought suddenly that Edgar wanted to reassure Addie as much as Addie was trying to reassure him. “It’s okay. We’re near the water,” he said.
Spirit heard Muirin growl faintly under her breath.
Edgar reached into his book bag and pulled out a battered metal bowl. It looked as if it was handmade—although Spirit couldn’t tell what the metal was, because it had been painted over thickly with black enamel.
“I use the, uh, the same bowl every time,” Edgar said shyly, glancing up from beneath his lashes. “I don’t have to. I just do. Ms. Smith, she says the fewer things you have to think about, the easier it is, and, and, and so your focus should be something familiar.”
“That makes sense,” Loch said, as if this were the most reasonable thing in the world to be discussing. “I wish my Gift worked that way, but it doesn’t. Mine’s Kenning.”
“Oh, oh, oh then you, you won’t want to touch my bowl, no. I’ve had it since before I came here, and, no. You wouldn’t want to touch it. No,” Edgar said, shaking his head and clutching the battered bowl to his chest. But not as if he was protecting it from Loch. As if he was protecting Loch from it. “No.”
“Okay,” Loch said, still sounding just as agreeable.
There were folded canvas drop cloths in the tool shed at the back end of the Greenhouse, and they’d brought one out to sit on. Burke seemed to know just about everything about the day-to-day running of Oakhurst. He said they used them when they wanted to move a plant from one of the raised beds to a flowerpot. Some plants “wintered” in the Greenhouse and were replanted in the flower beds every spring. The five of them arranged themselves in a semicircle on the drop cloth facing Edgar, and Edgar set the empty bowl down in front of himself. Addie picked up a nearby watering can, preparing to fill it—though she could just as easily have Called the water out of the can into the bowl with her Gift.
“First I should—Muirin wanted to ask me to See something, right Addie?” Edgar said.
“That’s right,” Addie said. “She—”
“I want you to See Seth, okay, Eddie?” Muirin said brusquely. “You know him—he has red hair and Pathfinder Gift.”
“He ran away,” Edgar said slowly. “In September. I don’t know why he’d do that.”
“I don’t know, either,” Muirin said, her voice deadly even. “And I don’t know where he is now. And he said he’d send me a message.”
“You mean, by, by, by someone like me? Because they wouldn’t let you have his letters, you know,” Edgar said seriously.
“He’d send it somehow,” Muirin said. “So could you look for him? I just want to know where he is and if he’s okay, okay?”
“Sure, Muirin,” Edgar said. “I like doing things for my friends.”
He looked toward Addie and nodded, and she lifted the watering can and poured the water into the bowl. She kept the spout purposefully low, but Spirit could see how Edgar’s gaze followed the flowing water, and as the bowl between his knees filled, he became more and more intent upon it.
“Hi, Seth,” he said, as conversationally as if Seth were in the Greenhouse with them. “Oh, no. Don’t go out there. It’s dark, and you don’t have a jacket. You’ll be cold. Go back to Oakhurst. Nobody will know you ran away if you go back now.”
Spirit looked at Loch in confusion. The other three might be familiar with Scrying and seeing magic done, but neither of them were. Spirit couldn’t tell if what Edgar was doing was normal, and from Loch’s expression, neither could he.
“It’s cold. It’s dark. He’s walking. He’s been this way before, many times.” Edgar’s normal speaking voice was high and stammering, but his voice while in trance was deep and resonant. Spirit saw Muirin nod to herself at Edgar’s words. It was obvious to all of them that Edgar was Seeing the past.
“He hears howling in the distance. It sounds like wolves. A whole bunch of them.”
Spirit saw Loch frown and hesitate, on the verge of saying something, then shake his head and change his mind.
“He looks around. He starts to run.” Edgar stopped, staring down into his bowl. “Now he’s stopped. Listening. What does he hear? Engines? Maybe. They don’t sound right. They shouldn’t be out here. He starts to run again. I’m getting scared.”
Despite that last statement, Edgar’s voice didn’t change its calm even timbre. Addie shifted forward on her knees, obviously intending to interrupt Edgar’s Seeing, but Muirin shook her head violently and reached out her arm to block Addie.
“He’s running as fast as he can now. There are a lot of engines, but it’s dark. He sees a boxcar ahead. He can hide there and, and—no! Too late! Cold! So . . . cold! The riders have found him! They’re here! The dark! The hunters of the night! The hunt! The horns! The horns! THE HORNS! Nooooo—!”
It happened so fast that not even Addie—already primed to stop Edgar from Seeing more—could interrupt in time. O
ne moment he was narrating a confusing description of Seth running from engine noises, and the next he was talking faster and faster, his voice getting higher and higher until he was kneeling upright and screaming out the same words that Nick Bilderback had said in the infirmary.
Burke grabbed for him, but it was too late. Edgar’s final words blended into a wordless wail as his body arched backward. He kicked over his Scrying Bowl as his body arched, jerking as if electrical current were running through it. A few seconds later he went limp.
“Is he dead?” Muirin asked after a moment.
“No,” Burke said after another moment, kneeling beside Edgar and feeling for the pulse at his neck. “Just had a seizure.” He bent down and picked Edgar up in his arms, getting to his feet as easily as if the other boy weighed nothing. “I’m going to take him to the Infirmary.”
“Hey, no, wait, you can’t do that,” Muirin said, sounding rattled. “What are you going to tell Ms. Bradford?”
“Half the truth,” Burke said grimly. “That’s why we came up with the story, right? You asked him to See where Seth is now. He had a seizure. He didn’t say anything.”
He turned away before Muirin could protest further, and Loch scrambled to his feet and ran ahead in order to open the Greenhouse door for Burke.
“I don’t want to be involved,” Muirin said. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with this.”
“Too late now,” Addie said callously. “You agreed. You’re in.” She reached over to pick up Edgar’s bowl, then pointed. At first Spirit thought she meant the two of them to look at something, but then she saw all the spilled water literally crawling across the surface of the drop cloth and back into the watering can.
“Yeah, but—” Muirin said.
“We should put this thing away and get out of here,” Loch said, coming back. He looked at Muirin. “I’m sorry, Muirin. You were right. Seth would have written to you from outside. Now let’s get what killed him.”
Muirin Shae was a green-eyed redhead, with the skim-milk pale skin to match. As Spirit watched, rage made Muirin turn even paler, until her eyes seemed as brilliantly green as a cat’s. She nodded sharply. “I was right. And we will.”
Spirit felt a twinge of unease. No one could say that Muirin’s buttons weren’t both highly visible and easy to push—but she wasn’t sure that pushing them this way was the best idea that Loch had ever had. Even if it did get Muirin back on board, it also focused Muirin on revenge—maybe even to the exclusion of her own safety.
They all felt too guilty to do what would have been the logical thing if they’d been innocent, which was to go to the Infirmary and see if Edgar was okay. At least Spirit did, and none of the others suggested it.
“But what does it mean?” Addie asked, sounding lost. “What did Edgar see? Nothing should have . . . Nothing could have . . .” She faltered to a stop and looked despairing.
“At least we know more than we did before,” Loch said quietly. “Even if we don’t know much.”
“Yeah,” Muirin said. “Riddle me this, campers: what hunts at night and drives you insane if you run into it?”
The other three looked at her, and none of them had an answer.
Muirin’s question was the clue that let them finally give the Whatever its true name, but before that happened, they all got another unwanted lesson in just how far someone—or something—at Oakhurst would go to protect its secrets.
Once they’d cleaned up the Greenhouse, they weren’t really sure what to do or where to go. By mutual agreement they split up, and Spirit spent the afternoon waiting for a summons—by whom and to where she wasn’t sure—that never came. When she saw the other four sitting at their table at dinner, it just showed Spirit how scared she’d been that one or more of them wouldn’t be there, and that just made her angry. She hated being scared all the time. She hated being afraid of her teachers, of her classmates, of the entire school. She hated the thought that there wasn’t anybody she could go to for help. She hated the thought of having to live this way for years.
And the fact that everyone else at the table was bubbling over with anticipation for the upcoming whole week of no classes with the Winter Dance right in the middle of it—on the twenty-second, a Wednesday—and talking about the big tree that would be brought in next Sunday to decorate the Main Entry just made everything worse. Spirit didn’t want to think about Christmas at all, let alone her first Christmas without her parents and her baby sister.
“What?” Spirit said, suddenly aware that one of the others had asked her something.
“I said, do you want to get in another hour or so of practice tonight?” Burke repeated. “I know we don’t have another demo until March, but it doesn’t hurt to keep in practice. Um, I mean—”
“Ooooh, can we watch?” Muirin purred.
“No, Muirin, you can’t watch,” Burke said, in long-suffering tones. “If you want to take karate, go see Mr. Wallis.”
“Sorry! Busy being a brilliant fencer!” Muirin chirped brightly.
Loch smiled at her. “You can come and be brilliant in the Library then. It’s dark back in the stacks,” he said.
Addie groaned appreciatively at the joke and Muirin made a face. Spirit just stared at her plate. Loch’s ability to, well, pretend still bothered her in a way she couldn’t quite explain.
Burke, do you wonder about Loch?” Spirit asked.
It was an hour later, and they’d both changed to their workout clothes and were down in the gym. While it wasn’t empty—there were two pick-up basketball games going on, one at each end of the court—nobody was paying any attention to them.
“Spirit, I have wondered about more things in the three months since the two of you got here than in the four years before,” Burke said. “Wonder what in particular?”
“I don’t know,” she said, frustrated. “It’s just . . . it doesn’t seem to matter how awful something is. He can just laugh and pretend it doesn’t matter to him at all. Do you think it really doesn’t?”
“Don’t know,” Burke said. “Get your feet wider. Bend your knees more. Yeah. Like you’re going to sit. Good. But if it helps any, Addie’s the same way, really. She just gets all quiet and polite. But maybe that’s just how rich folks are. Not supposed to let anybody know what they’re thinking.”
“That would be hor—Ow! You pushed me.” In the middle of her sentence, Burke had reached out and shoved at her shoulder. It had taken Spirit off guard.
“And if I could push you over, your stance still wasn’t good enough,” Burke said reasonably. “Come on, let’s try that again.”
“I wouldn’t have fallen over if you’d warned me,” Spirit grumbled, taking his hand and letting him pull her to her feet.
“Oh, yeah, the way Mr. Wallis always does?” Burke said, and Spirit had to laugh. It felt good.
They spent another half hour working on what Burke called “first principles”—he freely admitted he’d skipped all this stuff when he’d been working with her to get her ready for the demo because these were the things that could take months of work to get right (if you weren’t a Combat Mage). Standing. Balance.
“You don’t stand low enough,” Burke told her. “I know you’re short, and you think you want to be at eye-level with your opponent, but you don’t. You want to stand in your center, so all your movements come from your center and return to your center. If you do that, you’ll spend a lot less time looking up at your opponent from the floor.”
Spirit nodded. What Burke was saying made sense. And telling her why she should do it—and why she was constantly making the same mistake—was a lot more helpful that Mr. Wallis yelling at her. “So then I’ll be able to throw you over my shoulder?”
Burke shook his head, smiling. “Too much difference in height between us for you to do Ippon Seoinage—and that’s judo, anyway, not karate. But, oh, in a couple of years you could probably do a hip throw, sure. I mean, if we were doing judo.”
“And if you let me,
” she said.
“Yeah,” he agreed.
Spirit hadn’t wanted to ask about Edgar at all. She didn’t really want to hear the worst—if there was a worst. But she knew that was being cowardly, because whatever had happened to him today, she was partly responsible. So when Burke said they’d had enough lesson for the night, she took a deep mental breath and said:
“Burke, what happened today when you took Edgar to the infirmary? He’s okay, right?”
Burke shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “I hope so. I ran in there with him and Ms. Bradford asked me what happened, and I said he’d had a cat-fit, and she said to put him down on a bed and go out in the hall and wait. So I did. And about fifteen minutes later she came out and wanted the whole story. So I told her Muirin had been really down in the dumps since Seth ran away, and she wanted to know how he was, so we all came up with the idea of getting someone to See for her, and Edgar was the best choice because maybe Seth was somewhere that one of the deep-trance Scrying Mages wouldn’t want to tell Muirin about. And I said he looked into his bowl, and let out a scream, and went rigid and shook for about half a minute and passed out, and I brought him right to her. And she said I did the right thing and she hoped Muirin wasn’t too upset, and I said I didn’t know because I hadn’t stayed to find out. And she said Edgar would be fine and I should run along, and I thought that was a really good idea.”
“Me, too,” Spirit said quietly.
It had become habit for Spirit to check her e-mail first thing in the morning. In addition to several other pieces of the Oakhurst equivalent of spam (a request for students to review their “wish lists” and submit their first, second, and third choices to the Office no later than December fourteenth; a terse e-mail from the dance committee saying that it was almost New Years and the voting ballot for next year’s dance committee had to be final by January third; a long incoherent rant about a missing hairdryer from Madison Harris, who seemed incapable of figuring out how not to send her private e-mails to the entire school) there was a memo from “Staff” notifying “Oakhurst Students” that “Staff” was sure they would all regret to learn that Edgar Abbot had been taken ill Sunday afternoon and had been sent to Billings for treatment, and that “Staff” joined “Oakhurst Students” in wishing Mr. Abbott a speedy recovery and return to Oakhurst.
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