“Anyway!” Muirin continued. “Having wheels of my own will make it a lot more fun to sneak out after curfew, right?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Loch drawled mockingly. “You’ll still be in Montana, sweetie.”
“If you’re going to be doing all that ‘sneaking,’ maybe you could help us out by doing some research down in Radial, Muirin,” Addie said quickly.
That’s right, Spirit thought. I was supposed to track down any surviving members of those bikers once I got off campus. Not that easy with the Dance Committee meeting at The Fortress.…
Muirin made a rude noise. “Research!” she scoffed. “Since I’m not gonna live to graduate, I’ve got to get in a lifetime’s worth of fun right now.”
I guess that’s a “no,” Spirit thought.
“So hey—who wants to go for a ride?” Muirin added.
Loch shook his head silently, turning away, and Addie was still outraged at Muirin’s latest gift—obviously from Breakthrough. Neither one was going to take Muirin up on it, and Spirit saw the flash of hurt in Muirin’s eyes—and the dangerous line of temper in the set of her mouth.
“Oh hey, Murr,” Spirit said, forcing a laugh. “I didn’t think eau de wet horse was your signature fragrance! I don’t know about Loch or Addie, but I know I stink. And you probably don’t want that smell all over your new car until the end of time!”
“Ha,” Muirin said, smirking, the ugly flash of temper averted. “You have a point. Rain check?”
“Sure,” Spirit said, forcing herself to sound as if she was looking forward to it. She wondered how long all of them could dance on this knife edge. Muirin had always had a sharp tongue and a quick temper, but she’d used to reserve her cruelty for other people. Not her closest friends.
She wondered if they were still Muirin’s friends.
* * *
When she walked into the Main Building, Spirit saw Burke in the first-floor lounge. She was about to detour over to him until she realized he was deep in conversation with one of the teachers.
He was talking to Beckett Green.
It felt like rejection, and it hurt. In a normal world, she and Burke could have gone on dates, spent time with each other. At Oakhurst, they had to pretend they didn’t know each other, and every tiny scrap of time they’d managed to steal to be together (just the two of them) was precious.
But it also made her feel as if what she and Burke had could vanish at any moment—or be taken away.
They’ve given Murr a car. Now Burke has Beckett. What will they offer Addie? Or Loch? She had a good idea what they could offer Loch—the one thing he’d never really had. Safety. What would Loch give to know that no one would be coming after him, that his physical safety would be guaranteed? Just sign right here, and no one will ever bother you again.
Would he? And if he did, could she blame him?
As for Burke—
I just don’t know what to think right now. She turned away and headed blindly back to her room. It was all falling apart, and there was nothing, nothing she could do about it. She closed the door behind herself and dropped down on the bed, pulling all the covers around herself in a kind of cocoon of misery.
At least she was warm.
* * *
Hunger woke Spirit at last; she’d crashed hard once she’d gotten back to her room, and at the time she hadn’t cared about missing dinner. She turned on the light and glanced at her watch. Two a.m. She might as well get up now. At least today was Saturday. That meant no Systema and no Endurance Riding. Just a lot of homework.
She pulled on her robe and opened her dorm fridge. Gatorade was better than nothing, she supposed. She chugged a bottle and brought a second one back to her desk. She opened the drawer of her desk, and her fingers slid under the litter of pens and loose papers to touch the Ironkey drive. Her link to QUERCUS, whoever he was. She plucked it out without hesitation and plugged it into her computer. The familiar book-shaped icon appeared once her computer recognized the device. She clicked on it, and the chatroom window opened.
Hello, Spirit, QUERCUS typed.
Hello, she typed back. She wondered how he’d known it was her—or if he was guessing. He always seemed to be right there whenever she opened their private chatroom. Maybe the Ironkey sent an alarm to his computer when it was plugged in. Or maybe he was more than one person, and they took shifts.
My riding class was attacked by a saber-toothed tiger today, she typed.
The sentence looked insane on the screen. What would he think? She wasn’t sure whether she was trying to shock him or asking for help.
Tell me what happened, QUERCUS answered. No emoticons. No hesitation. Did he—she—it—even believe what Spirit was saying?
Right now she didn’t care. She was so desperate to talk to someone—anyone—without watching every single word that she found herself telling QUERCUS everything. Not just about today, but about the last several weeks—things she’d held back before, still uncertain of whether he was the friend he seemed to be or a trap set by Oakhurst and Breakthrough. Sometime in the last week she’d stopped caring, she realized. If he wasn’t a friend … then at least this would be over. She was so tired, tired of it all, exhausted by what Oakhurst was putting them all through, tired of living a lie, of weighing every word out of her mouth, of thinking everyone around her was a potential enemy. She just wanted to be able to talk to someone without having to imagine the possible consequences!
At last she worked her way back around to Muirin and her new car. —and Addie was horrified about it, but that didn’t stop her from asking Murr to do some research for her. You know, when I got the Dance Committee gig, we figured I could poke around in Radial a little bit, but now I wonder if Teddy didn’t have an even better reason for bringing all of us to The Fortress that day than I thought.
There was a pause, then QUERCUS replied, the letters coming up on the screen as if he was typing very slowly. You don’t need to go to Radial to do research, QUERCUS typed. You can use the Internet.
Spirit began to scoff, but he was right: when this chatroom window was open, she could get out onto the “real” Internet. She hadn’t even thought of it—partly because what she wanted to know about was right in Radial, and partly because the first time she’d taken advantage of the freedom the Ironkey drive gave her, she’d slipped up and accidentally let Muirin know she’d had Internet access, and she’d been afraid of repeating that mistake.
And Oakhurst is really good at teaching you not to think about things, she thought sourly.
Thank you. I will, she typed.
Her hands shook as she opened her browser window. She typed an address at random—ain’t it cool news—and today’s page came up. She let out a deep breath. It still worked. She chewed her lip, wondering where to start. Typing biker gang survivors of magical gang war at the old Tyniger mansion probably wouldn’t get her very far.
She was right about that. It took her an hour of Googling before she hit pay dirt. To her surprise (she ended up stumbling over it by pure accident), the Radial Echo—Radial’s dinky little hometown newspaper—hadn’t just been microfilmed, it had been digitized. And the digital copy was available in a public online archive. The town had been incorporated in 1885, and all 125-plus years of the paper were archived. Searchably.
Muirin should be doing this, Spirit thought wearily, rubbing her tired eyes. Muirin was surprisingly awesome at research, as she’d proved time and again. But Muirin had already refused to help—and besides, Spirit would have to have let her in on the secret of the Ironkey if she was to do any online research. And she didn’t dare. She heaved a sigh and got back to work.
Oakhurst had been founded in 1973, Spirit remembered, so what she was looking for was earlier than that. She remembered Juliette Weber saying the place had been a gang hideout in the seventies, but just to make sure she didn’t miss anything she started with January 1960. By the time the sky outside her window began to lighten with dawn, she’d found what she want
ed to know.
The gang everyone kept mentioning had been called The Hellriders. The first item—about them taking over Oakhurst—was from 1968. The last was from three years later—1971—and that was a big enough story that the Echo ran coverage for an entire month, and the story was picked up by several out-of-town papers.
It started the night of July 31, when a member of the Hellriders—Stephen “Wolfman” Wolferman—tore through Radial on his motorcycle doing over a hundred miles an hour. His joyride triggered a three-county chase that went on until he ran out of gas. The Echo just said he was “taken into custody,” but the Billings Gazette included the information that Wolferman, a Vietnam vet, had been raving and disoriented when he was apprehended. The Touchstone—a monthly magazine published in Billings—gave even more information: apparently Wolferman had been raving about the sun turning black, the moon turning to blood, and the dead rising up out of their graves. The local authorities assumed drugs, and went up to what was then still called “the Tyniger estate” to investigate. According to the Billings Gazette, they found several dead Hellriders, and evidence of “intergang warfare.”
I doubt it somehow, Spirit thought. If a second bunch of bikers had showed up, they would’ve had to go through Radial to get here. And even Radial would notice that.
She frowned, staring at the page. August of 1971 to September of 1973 was barely two years. Not enough time to turn a derelict mansion that had been sitting vacant since 1939—when Arthur Tyniger died—into Dr. Ambrosius’s showplace.
Then she shook herself. She was still thinking like a normal person. Nothing about this place had ever been, or was, normal.
Oh, don’t be silly, Spirit told herself scornfully. Of course it is. All you need is magic.
Unfortunately, after that point, the regular papers lost interest in the story, but a Google Search using her new keywords turned up a page dedicated to the “Hellriders Massacre” on a site called Weird Montana.
And “massacre” was apparently the word for it. When the authorities reached the mansion on the morning of August 1st, 1971, they discovered “several” members of the Hellriders dead and the rest missing. There were some grainy black-and-white pictures on the Web page, but they were so blurry Spirit couldn’t even make out where they’d been taken, though it had to be at Oakhurst. According to Weird Montana, the missing Hellriders never turned up. The only survivor was “Wolfman” Wolferman, who never changed his story (such as it was).
Bingo. You were right, Loch. The authorities hadn’t been able to charge Wolferman with anything more illegal than speeding, and he ended up going to the County Hospital. Weird Montana said he was released in the early 1990s and returned home to Radial to live. She went back to the Radial Echo and found a mention of his return in the “Local News And Views” column. He’d apparently moved in with his parents. The story gave the address.
She pulled out a pen and a piece of paper and jotted it down—dangerous, she knew, but she was afraid of forgetting it. She skimmed the next few years of the paper to make sure he hadn’t moved or died. The only thing she found was the announcement of the opening of Oakhurst Academy in September 1973. Doctor Ambrosius—the paper gave his first name as “Vortigern”—was described as “a progressive European educator and philanthropist.” Out of a vague curiosity, Spirit searched the rest of the Echo for mentions of either Doctor Ambrosius or Oakhurst Academy, but she didn’t find a single one.
As far as Radial was concerned, Oakhurst Academy had simply ceased to exist.
* * *
“I am not cut out for this,” Burke said, sitting up with a groan. The Nissan hit a pothole and bounced; Burke winced as he finished unwedging himself from the footwell in the car’s cramped backseat, then reached down to lift Spirit up from the other side. She breathed a sigh of relief as she unfolded herself, and turned to glance out the back window. They were already off the school grounds; the school looked almost pretty in the dusk. If you don’t know what’s going on there, Spirit thought.
“Sweet, isn’t it?” Muirin said, ignoring Burke. “Relax—we’re outside the wards, and I’m the mistress of illusion, remember? Nobody’s going to see anything I don’t want them to see.”
“‘Feel’ is a different matter,” Burke said.
“Which is why I snuck you guys out on the floor,” Muirin said reasonably. “With the town in-bounds, you just know they’re going to start searching cars.” Muirin sounded cheerful. And why not? No matter what bizarre new rules Oakhurst—and Breakthrough—come up with, it isn’t as if she was going to be affected, Spirit thought.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Spirit said, trying to keep from sounding (too much) as if she was whining. “First they declare Radial in-bounds. Then they set a campus curfew for dusk.” The newest rule had been announced Saturday morning: after curfew, all students had to be either in the Main Building, or have a security escort to wherever they were going. And that meant pretty much from four o’clock on. “I wish they’d make up their minds.”
Muirin just laughed. “Why should they, when they can drive you guys crazy by changing the rules every other day?”
“Mr. Green said the curfew’s only until they can hunt down that whatever-it-was that attacked you guys on your ride Friday,” Burke said.
“Whatever it is,” Spirit muttered under her breath. You’d have to be an idiot (or not going to Oakhurst) to think it was anything that belonged on this planet.
“Hope they catch it soon—this is cattle country, and something like that could do a lot of damage,” Burke added.
“Burke the Selfless!” Muirin said mockingly. “Honestly—if you want to break the rules like this, why aren’t you at least doing something fun? There’s still time, you know—I could drop you guys at a No Tell Motel for a couple of hours.…”
“No thanks,” Burke said. He looked wildly embarrassed. “This is a research trip. Spirit found someone who was actually there when Mordred got let out of the tree. If we’re lucky, he can give us a lead on where Mordred is now.”
“Yeah,” Muirin said, detouring around another pothole. “You guys did a pretty good job of finding him. You didn’t even have to leave the campus.” Her tone was suspicious, and Spirit winced.
“I got lucky,” Spirit said, hoping she sounded more convincing than she felt. She knew Burke thought it was suspicious, too—she wished she could tell him at least that she had a way through the school firewall, but right now none of her friends seemed any more reliable than Muirin. Burke was acting like Beckett Green was his new BFF, Addie was well and truly pissed off and might do anything out of spite, and Loch … well, Loch was convinced he was about to die and might want to use the information to make a grand fatal gesture.
Or make a deal for a get-out-of-jail-free card, and it wouldn’t matter if he was including all of them in the deal. It would still be a disaster.
“You remember the other time, right?” she asked, hoping she could turn her previous mistake to her advantage. “Well, I was poking around to see if there was anything on the school intraweb, and the firewall was down again. You know Breakthrough’s been putting in a lot of new security. It was a lucky glitch.”
“‘Lucky,’” Muirin said dubiously.
“What else could it be?” Spirit said, mentally holding her breath. She had to get Muirin off the subject somehow. “But without you to help, it wouldn’t matter what I found.”
“Yeah, I am pretty fabulous,” Muirin said mockingly. “But I still think you could’ve shared the love.”
“Oh, like you have to worry about being stuck behind a firewall these days,” Spirit said.
“True,” Murin agreed smugly. “Hey, you sure you don’t want me to drop you any closer than this?”
Spirit blinked. They were here already. She looked around as Muirin stopped in the town library parking lot—by unspoken agreement, she and Burke had been rather vague about Wolferman’s address. It was Sunday evening, so the library was closed, and there weren
’t a lot of lights around.
“This is Radial, Murr-cat—how far away can anything be?” Burke said, making a joke of it. He pushed the passenger seat forward and clambered out of the backseat, reaching back a hand to pull Spirit after him. “We won’t be long. Meet you at the pizza place?”
“I’ll even buy,” Muirin said. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” She reached out and pulled the door shut, then gunned the engine and pulled out in a scatter of gravel.
“What is that, exactly?” Burke said softly, looking after her.
“I wish I knew.” Spirit sighed.
Burke smiled and took her arm. “C’mon,” he said.
“I still think I should’ve come by myself,” she said. This far off Main Street there weren’t any sidewalks; the two of them walked down the center of the narrow road. The sky was brilliant with stars. Back the way they’d come, the security lighting around The Fortress made a bright column of light shining up into the sky, but the only other lights she could see were the distant floodlights of the DOT equipment shed. In the distance, Spirit could see the lights of a few other houses, but if Radial were big enough to have a bad part of town, this would be it. Burke took out a flashlight and played the beam over the ground ahead of them. There was a full moon, but the light was deceptive—you were sure you could see better than you could, until you fell over something.
“And do me out of a chance to take you for a walk in the country?” Burke asked, smiling down at her. He put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her close, and for just an instant Spirit wanted this to be the reason they were here. A date. An ordinary thing two people did who weren’t being stalked by evil wizards.
“Besides,” Burke went on, “the guy’s an ex-outlaw-biker. I think you’re better off bringing a big scary jock with you. Because what if he’s crazy? Or evil?”
“Or both,” Spirit said helpfully.
“Right,” Burke agreed. “I mean … I know he was in a mental hospital, but that doesn’t prove anything. Not if he’d seen, well … magic.”
Spirit didn’t quite wince. On her first day at Oakhurst, Dr. Ambrosius had turned her into a mouse and himself into an owl. Whether that had actually happened or not, she’d experienced it. If she’d been trying to explain what had happened to the local Sheriff’s Department, they’d have said she was crazy too.
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