Shadow grail 1

by Mercedes Lackey; Rosemary Edghill

  Loch shut down the leaf blower. “Gotcha,” he whispered into the sudden silence.

  Spirit stared at the tableau before her, her mind utterly blank, knowing that Loch was waiting for her to do her part. The lines of the spell-trap were already dimmer than they had been a moment before. When they went dark, the demon would be free. She closed her eyes, knowing she’d failed them all.

  I—Can’t—

  “Spirit?” Loch said, and she heard the confused fear in his voice. “Spirit, why? . . .”

  “‘Can’t’ isn’t in our vocabulary, Spirit.” The words in her mother’s voice cut through the cold, through her paralysis.

  Suddenly she felt an uprush of heat through her entire body, as intense as if she, not the spell-trap, was aflame. She took a deep breath and began to speak, her mind automatically translating the Latin into English as she went.

  “Hear me, ancient Abomination, firstborn of Creation, you who have rejected your birthright to reign over the charnel-houses of the Uncreated: I cast you forth from this place! I revoke your license to trespass here, in the name of those who have kept faith: in the name of those who have kept faith, I take from you the name you have been given in this place and name you outcast! I cast you out, to reign in the place of skulls! I cast you out, to reign on the field of blood! I cast you out, to reign over the Uncreated! You have no dominion here!

  I charge you to go from this place! By the power of this seal and this covenant: I charge you to go forth from this place! By the power of this ancient spell and working: I charge you to go forth from this place! By the power of your true name, to be spoken upon the day of reckoning: I charge you to go forth from this place! Come here no longer—stay here no longer—return here no more! I take your name—I take your form—I send you forth! Begone! Begone! Begone!”

  By the time she’d reached the end of the Spell of Dismissal, Spirit was shouting as loud as she could. And as she reached the last syllable of the dismissal, suddenly the spell-trap flared up even more brightly than before.

  It was as if the carved design on the ground and the demon huntsman were both just water in a bathtub and somebody had suddenly opened the drain. The edges of the spell-trap started to draw inward—sliding across the ground just as if the entire design were a puddle of water being sucked down a drain—and the demon trapped inside began to sink down beneath the earth, its body stretching and narrowing as if it were being sucked down a straw. In moments both it and the spell-trap were gone completely, and there was nothing left behind but bare earth.

  At the instant the demon vanished, the air went completely still. Spirit staggered out from her hiding place on unsteady legs, feeling as if the air were not only warmer, but cleaner than it had been a moment before. Loch stared at her, the expression on his face slowly moving through baffled confusion to realization toward joy. He raised a hand and took a step toward her—

  And suddenly Spirit was seized and lifted off her feet and spun around in a rib-cracking hug as Burke reached her.

  “You did it! Spirit! You did it!” he cried. He set her down a moment later, but only so he could reach out an arm to hug Loch, too.

  “We all did it,” Muirin complained, coming back into the woods. But her voice still shook, and Spirit could tell that her heart wasn’t in her usual griping.

  “That we did, Murr-kitty,” Burke said, his own voice giddy with relief. Spirit hugged him very hard. She’d almost lost him—lost all of them—tonight. And she didn’t think she could bear losing anyone else. Not now. Not ever again.

  “Oh my God,” Loch said, laughing. “We won. We did it. I don’t believe it.”

  “Well, you better believe it,” Burke said. “With Spirit here on our side, how can we lose?” As if realizing he’d been holding her too close for too long, Burke let go and both he and Loch reluctantly stepped away from her.

  “Oh but I—” I don’t have any magic. Spirit had been about to make her habitual protest, when suddenly she stopped. Loch said there were no “false positives” in magic, and . . . if she didn’t have her magic yet, then just what had she felt when she’d spoken the spell that sent the Lord of the Wild Hunt back to Hell? She knew she’d felt something. Something new. Something strange. She just wasn’t sure what yet.

  “—are a good person to have on our side, no matter what,” Loch finished for her. “I’m sorry I doubted you, even for a moment.”

  “I never did,” Addie said firmly, walking up to Spirit and hugging her very hard. “I’m so glad we’re all still alive!” she added.

  “So am I,” Spirit said. “Oh, Addie—Muirin—Loch—all of you—”

  “Hey,” Muirin said shakily. “Don’t get all emo. We’ve still got to sneak back into the dorms. And we’d better hurry. I’m freezing!”

  “Not to mention putting back what we borrowed,” Burke said.

  Addie snorted. “If anyone thinks I’m going after that Super Soaker, they can think again.”

  “Come on,” Muirin said impatiently.

  But the shocks and impossibilities of the night weren’t over yet. When they walked from the little grove of trees—Loch carrying the leaf blower and Burke carrying the shotgun—they saw . . .

  “Uh . . . Guys, isn’t that the sun coming up over there?” Muirin asked, sounding baffled. “You know? In the east?”

  “That’s where it usually comes up—okay, more to the south this time of year, but—” Loch broke off as he glanced at his watch. “It’s stopped. Burke?”

  “Mine, too,” Burke said, confused.

  Muirin wasn’t wearing a watch, and when she checked, Addie discovered she’d lost hers some time during the night. Spirit checked hers, and found it had stopped as well. When she and Burke and Loch compared notes, they found that their watches had all stopped at exactly the same time: 12:46 A.M. Or . . . probably just about the time she’d first heard the horns of the Wild Hunt. Despite herself, Spirit shuddered. As if she needed something else to have nightmares about!

  “But I know we haven’t been out here this long,” Burke said in bewilderment. “We left at eleven p.m., and okay, it’s been maybe—what? Three hours?” He looked at them. Spirit nodded—that felt about right to her.

  “Maybe four at the outside,” Loch said. Addie and Muirin just shrugged.

  “Okay,” Burke said. “But that is definitely dawn over there. And sunrise is at 7:48 on December twenty-second. And this is December twenty-second . . .” His voice trailed off as if he wasn’t quite sure.

  “We’re busted,” Muirin said gloomily.

  “It was the elves!” Addie said abruptly. “Spend a few minutes—or an hour—with the Fair Folk, and when you get home, months or . . . years . . . have passed.”

  “It can’t have been that long!” Loch said in horror. “It’s still winter! It is!”

  “It might be winter again, Loch,” Burke said with a frightening gentleness. “We’d better get back—take our lumps—and find out how long we’ve really been gone.”

  It isn’t fair! Spirit thought angrily. A moment before, they’d all been so happy. They’d won. The Wild Hunt was gone. Nobody else was going to have to die. And now . . . who knew what they’d find when they got back?

  But what they found—as they neared Oakhurst—was their fellow students. The sun had just been rising as they left the forest, so by now it was about eight-thirty in the morning. Breakfast had been over for half an hour, and cold as it was, a lot of kids were already outdoors.

  Kristi and Cadence were the first ones to spot them. They came running over and then simply stopped and stared.

  “Oh my God, Burke, is that a gun?” Kristi said, her blue eyes very wide. “Addie, I was trying to IM you all last night and all this morning! The dance is tonight! You can’t just go running off like that the night before the Winter Dance! Oh my God!”

  “I’m really sorry,” Addie said, and Spirit resisted the urge to break down in hysterical giggles, because this was just so ridiculous. I’m so sorry I c
ouldn’t stick around to deal with your emo pain! I was busy saving the world. . . .

  “Oh, Addie, you are in so much trouble,” Cadence added. “All of you are. Where have you been? You are in so much trouble,” she repeated. “You just—they didn’t make an announcement or anything, but everybody knows.”

  “Well isn’t that special?” Muirin snarled.

  “Hey, uh, Claire. Is she back yet?” Burke asked hopefully.

  “Sure.” Cadence stared at him as if he’d grown an extra head. “They kept her overnight down in Radial because they had to do surgery to fix her ankle, she said, but she’s back now. And she’s excused from all of her sports for the next three months,” she added, a little enviously.

  Burke glanced at Spirit and smiled, and she smiled back. This is why we did it, she thought. The rest really doesn’t matter.

  By now the five of them had attracted everyone’s attention. Their fellow students were standing around them, staring at them as if they’d just come back from the dead—although of course none of them could possibly realize how right they were. Everyone was talking at once, asking the same questions over and over. Some of the questions were utterly inane (yes, Burke really did realize he was carrying a shotgun) and some of them were questions none of the five of them intended to answer—like where they’d been and what they’d been doing—because answering those questions would just get everyone, including them, into a lot more trouble. It was almost a relief when Angelina Swanson and Gareth Stevenson showed up from the house.

  “Okay you guys, break it up, nothing to see here,” Gareth said with kindly ruthlessness. “You guys don’t want to get points, you know. The dance is tonight.” Amid groans of disappointment, the students began moving away. Standing beside Gareth, Angelina simply regarded the five of them coldly. “All of you. Inside. Now,” she said, when the last of the other kids had moved away.

  At least we know it hasn’t been seven months or seven years or, or, or something like that, Spirit told herself reassuringly. The Hunt is gone, Claire wasn’t Tithed to it, and we’re back more or less the same day.

  Gareth took charge of Burke’s (long since empty) shotgun, and the two proctors brought the five of them inside to the Entry Hall. Angelina told them to wait right there at the foot of the staircase as she went off to inform someone in authority that they were back, but Gareth didn’t protest when they all walked over to the enormous fireplace and stood in front of its roaring heat.

  “I will never be warm again,” Loch said solemnly, setting the leaf blower down at a careful distance from the heat and walking right up to the edge of the hearth.

  “Thought you liked winter sports,” Burke said teasingly.

  “From now on, the only winter sports I like are the ones you can do indoors,” Loch answered with feeling.

  “I think you were very brave out there, Loch,” Addie said softly.

  “No,” Loch said, after a moment’s startled hesitation. “Burke was brave. He stood and fought back. All I did was run. I’m good at that.”

  “That’s not what you did!” Spirit said fiercely. “You let that . . . thing . . . walk right up to you so you could trap it. You were brave. As brave as Burke was. Or Addie. Or Muirin—oh, Muirin, I couldn’t believe it when I heard you call them ‘losers.’ ”

  “Yeah, well, they were, weren’t they?” Muirin said, staring at the ground. “They lost, anyway.”

  “We were all brave,” Burke said firmly. “I’d just rather not have to be that brave again,” he added softly.

  Spirit bit her lip. They were already in trouble. She wasn’t going to make it worse by mentioning that their troubles were far from over, no matter what else happened today.

  They’d just gotten warm enough to unbutton their coats and take off their hats and gloves and scarves when the tik-tik-tik of high heels on the tiled floor alerted them to someone’s approach. To nobody’s particular surprise, it was Ms. Corby. Despite her festive scarlet business suit and the glittering enamel holly-wreath brooch pinned at its collar, she was nobody’s idea of a jolly Christmas elf. Instead, Doctor Ambrosius’s personal assistant seemed a lot more like the elves they’d spent most of last night dealing with. She looked more than angry. She looked enraged.

  “Doctor Ambrosius is taking time out of his very busy schedule to deal with all of you,” she said, her words clipped and precise. “He expects a full explanation of your behavior. And so do I.”

  Asking isn’t getting . . . Now, instead of Mom’s voice or even Dad’s, it was Phoenix’s voice Spirit heard in her mind, in the bratty sing-song Fee used to put on when she wanted to drive Spirit absolutely crazy. Ask-ing is-n’t get-ing, ask-ing is-n’t get-ing . . .

  Ms. Corby followed them into Doctor Ambrosius’s office, instead of just ushering them in and shutting the door this time, as she had the day Spirit and Loch had come to Oakhurst. Spirit glanced quickly at the others, but Loch was the only one who looked unsettled by her presence.

  There was no question of them being permitted to sit, even if there’d been enough chairs here for the five of them. In fact, today there were no guest chairs in the study at all. The five of them stood in front of the desk like errant children as Ms. Corby walked around behind the desk and stood beside Doctor Ambrosius.

  “I’ve brought the five missing students, Doctor,” Ms. Corby said. “They walked right back in at dawn, after being gone all night.”

  Doctor Ambrosius was sitting at his desk, looking over a folder of paperwork. It was nearly a minute before he looked up from the folder. His blue eyes were as piercing as they’d been that first day, and Spirit shivered as he locked eyes with her, but despite herself, she couldn’t look away.

  “You have all disappointed me greatly,” he said at last. “Mr. Hallows, I had hoped for great things from you. Miss Lake, you were doing so very well in your studies. And you, Miss Shae. You had shown such great improvement. As for you, Mr. Spears, Miss White, certainly one’s transition to the larger reality represented by Oakhurst is a great shock, following as it necessarily does the loss of one’s family. But I had not yet been dissatisfied in either of you.”

  There was another long silence as he continued to study them.

  “I suppose you have an explanation for your behavior?” he said at last. “Miss White, you may begin.”

  “I, um, I—” Spirit was utterly flustered at the thinly veiled demand that she explain her—explain their—actions. She saw Doctor Ambrosius frown at her panicked stammering, and a combination of anger and determination made her take a deep steadying breath. I faced down ghosts and killer elves and a demon tonight. I can face down one headmaster.

  Who also happened to be a magician.

  “It began when we realized that whatever had happened to Seth Morris, Camilla Patterson, and Nick Bilderback was related, and was magical in nature,” she said carefully.

  It took the five of them over an hour to tell the story of the Wild Hunt. Of coming to realize that the Wild Hunt was riding through the hills around Oakhurst during the eight ancient Festivals, of researching its probable elements, of seeking out suitable weapons, of going out to stop it. Doctor Ambrosius let them tell the story in their own words and their own ways, only speaking when one of them hadn’t made something clear enough, or when he wanted to hear a portion of the story from someone else.

  The one thing they all avoided, just as if they’d rehearsed what they were going to say ahead of time, was any mention of an “insider” at Oakhurst working with the Hunt. Ms. Corby was standing right there, and while she didn’t have any magic of her own, that was no proof she wasn’t working with someone who did.

  Their story was plausible enough without bringing up the trip to the subbasement and their discovery of Camilla Patterson’s file. Loch told of sneaking in to visit Nick in the Infirmary, and Muirin confessed to manipulating Eddie Abbott into Scrying for her because she suspected Seth had been a victim of the same attacker. And as for Camilla’s disappearance . . .
well, they only had Nick’s word to go on that she’d been on the grounds when she vanished.

  “So you see, sir, we weren’t really sure whether the Hunt would come at all,” Loch said earnestly. “If it didn’t, well, we’d just hope to get back to our rooms with nobody being the wiser. And if it did, well, we just didn’t want anybody else to die.”

  “I . . . see,” Doctor Ambrosius said. There was a long tense moment, then he smiled. “Miss Corby, I have to say that these five young persons have acted in the finest tradition of Oakhurst. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Ms. Corby looked as if her face was about to crack, but she smiled anyway. “Yes, Doctor Ambrosius. The finest tradition.”

  “And certainly there will be no demerits for any of you,” Doctor Ambrosius continued, still smiling and nodding benignly. “Quite the contrary. Commendations all around, I should say. Yes indeed. Commendations. Splendid work. Excellent work. Now run along and enjoy your day. Oh, and I’m sure you’ll be wanting nice hot breakfasts after that long cold night outdoors. Miss Corby, do see to it that the young people are provided with everything they need.”

  “Of course, Doctor Ambrosius,” Ms. Corby said. She gestured toward the doors of the study and they began to move toward it.

  “Oh, and just one last thing,” Doctor Ambrosius said.

  Everyone froze.

  “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you not to gossip about this,” Doctor Ambrosius said. “It would only upset your classmates. We wish them to think of Oakhurst as a place of safety. Of refuge. If you five have been forced to discover far too soon how fragile a refuge that is . . . I can only hope that strengthens your resolve to defend it on behalf of your friends. The day is coming, my young warriors, when you will be called to a greater battlefield.”

  His voice had become deeper and more sonorous as he spoke, and even though they were exhausted, all of them stood straighter upon hearing it.