Shadow Grail #2: Conspiracies

by Mercedes Lackey; Rosemary Edghill

  The four of them, by mutual consent, took one of the empty tables at the opposite end of the room from the buffet table. Muirin saw them, waved, and came over, carrying two plates heaped high with goodies, including a stack of brownies topped with scoops of ice cream, hot fudge, and whipped cream.

  “I don’t see how you can eat all that,” Addie said with a sigh as Muirin plopped down at the table opposite her.

  “Practice,” Muirin answered. She pushed the second plate toward them. It was stacked with plain brownies of various kinds.

  Spirit picked up the top one—marbled and studded with M&Ms—and bit into it. She didn’t have much of an appetite, but hey: chocolate. Bread and circuses, her mother’s voice whispered in her mind.

  “So, come on, open your other one!” Muirin urged around a mouthful of fudge and ice cream.

  Spirit had almost forgotten about the second box. Why had she and Loch both gotten two when no one else had? She tore the paper off quickly. Inside it was a pasteboard box, and inside that was a tiny wooden jewelry box—a ring box—with the Oakhurst crest (what a shock) laser-cut into the top.

  She opened it.

  Inside, on a bed of black velvet, was what looked like … a class ring. Well, a really nice class ring, not the cheesy ones the high school kids back in Indiana had, the kind with fake stones, set into rings made out of some cheesy-yet-fancy-sounding made-up metal like “Valadium” or “Endurium.” She lifted it out of its box and inspected it curiously. It was gold—when she looked inside the band, she saw it was stamped 24K—and felt heavy, very heavy. On the sides of the band were the broken sword and the inverted cup from the Oakhurst coat of arms. The bezel of the ring said: ABSOLUTUM DOMINIUM.

  “Absolute dominion,” Loch translated. He’d opened his own box and was looking at his ring curiously.

  With everything else about the ring being so lavish, Spirit would have expected the stone to be something she recognized, something real. But to her surprise, it looked like something “lab created.” It was opaque like an opal, a strange glittery sort of opalescent blue, the kind of thing that made you think there were other colors in it, only no matter how hard you looked, you couldn’t see them.…

  Spirit tore her eyes away with an effort and stuffed the ring back into the box and closed it. It made her uneasy for reasons she couldn’t quite understand. She saw Loch slip his on—of course it fit perfectly—and bit back the impulse to cry out a warning. Against what?

  “Oh, they gave you your rings,” Muirin said offhandedly.

  “Our rings?” Loch repeated, staring at his hand as if he was fascinated.

  “Hey, open your stuff first!” Muirin demanded. “Look what I got!”

  “You’d think they wouldn’t want to encourage you,” Addie murmured, as Muirin brandished the kit of makeup brushes and manicure tools. But she ripped the paper off her box gleefully, revealing a Monopoly set. It was the fanciest one Spirit had ever seen, with a wooden box and gold-colored counters.

  “I get really tired of using the ones in the Games Library,” Addie said, grinning. “There are always a couple of pieces missing, and not enough Monopoly Money to get through a full game.”

  She looked at Burke expectantly. He opened his gift methodically, prying the tape loose from the ends and folding the paper carefully.

  “You got a football?” Muirin asked in disbelief. “This place has footballs coming out of its … ears.”

  “Yeah, but not like this,” Burke said. “This is the old style, the one they stopped using around 1930. The modern one is more lightweight and streamlined.” He hefted it appreciatively.

  “Okay,” Loch said, in tones that made it clear he didn’t really get it. “But about the rings…?”

  “Okay. Class rings. We all get them at some point in our first year at Oakhurst,” Burke said.

  “Why don’t you wear them, then?” Loch wanted to know.

  “Because they’re dorky,” Muirin said with contempt. “I mean, come on. Class rings? That’s so Fifties!”

  “But—”

  “Come on, Murr-cat,” Addie said decisively. “You guys guard Muir’s sugar-hoard. We’ll be right back.”

  Muirin rolled her eyes, but followed Addie out of the room, while Burke continued. “You don’t have to wear them, except for a couple of times a year—like Alumni Days, when we’re doing the full School Uniform thing, with the blazer and scarf and everything, like we were—”

  “—on the playing fields of Eton,” Loch finished for him, in a broad fake English accent. Burke grinned at him.

  “Some people wear them all the time, some don’t,” Burke continued. “The point about them is that they’re … kind of magic. The stone changes color until it matches your School of Magic.”

  Great. A wizardly mood ring, Spirit thought.

  “It does?” Loch stared at his hand again. “Try yours, Spirit,” he urged.

  Reluctantly, she reopened the box and slipped it on. It felt cold and heavy against her hand—much colder and heavier than she thought it should.

  A few minutes later, Muirin and Addie returned; Muirin thrust her hand under Spirit’s nose and wiggled her fingers. Her ring was identical to Spirit’s, except for the fact that the stone was a pale lemon yellow. It seemed to have faint sparkles caught down in the stone. “School of Air,” she announced.

  “Mine’s green,” Burke said. “Earth, you know? Addie’s is blue, but a deeper blue than—”

  Suddenly, Addie squeaked. She smothered the sound immediately, but thrust her hand at them. “Look!” she whispered, half in excitement, half in alarm.

  Just as Burke had said, the stone in Addie’s ring was a deep translucent sapphire blue instead of the pale opal blue of the stone in Spirit and Loch’s rings. But as Spirit stared down into it, she could see there was an image in it, too. It looked as if it had been engraved on the underside of the stone.

  It was the image of a goblet, just like the one on the Oakhurst coat of arms.

  “Holy Toledo, Addie!” Burke breathed. Spirit had never heard him sound so shocked.

  “I know…” Addie gulped, staring at her hand. “I have a Destiny.”

  “A what?” Spirit was puzzled. Addie’d said it as if the word “destiny” was capitalized. Did that mean you were especially powerful? She could sure believe that of Addie.…

  “Oh hey,” Muirin said, trying not to sound impressed and failing. Out of the corner of her eye, Spirit saw Muirin slip her own ring off and stuff it into her pocket.

  “Is this like a ‘it is your Destiny, Luke,’ thing?” Loch asked.

  “Kind of,” Addie said hesitantly, staring at her hand.

  “I heard a couple of the seniors talking about it a while back,” Burke said. “It’s something Ms. Groves teaches you about in your last year here. You can ask her about it if you like.”

  “No thanks,” Spirit said. “I’ve already had enough extra assignments dumped on me.” Ms. Groves taught the “History of Magic” courses, as well as teaching magic itself. Any time she thought you weren’t interested enough, you got hit with an extra assignment on top of the stunning amount of homework the Oakhurst faculty already assigned.

  Burke grinned a little at her comment. “So anyway, what I know is, if a Destiny appears in your ring, it means your future is pretty much set. Fixed. Unchangeable.”

  “It’s not always good,” Muirin said, her face unreadable. “Trailer Trash had a Destiny.”

  “Trailer Trash” was Muirin’s cruel name for Camilla Patton—one of the victims of the Wild Hunt. “She showed me once. She thought it meant she was going to turn into a wolf. Stupid b—”

  “Hey, look,” Loch said, interrupting Muirin—probably on purpose. “My ring’s already starting to turn!”

  Sure enough, the pale blue was starting to change. Right now it was a pale greenish color: Loch’s main Gifts came from the School of Air, so his stone would probably turn as yellow as Muirin’s was.

  Spirit looked down
at her own ring. The stone remained a cool, serene blue.

  TWO

  It took Muirin about half an hour to wolf down three heaping plates of gooey sugary treats. On her last trip back to their table she brought two more plates heaped so high with brownies and chocolates that Spirit was amazed they didn’t spill. It was obvious Muirin was settling in for the long haul, and with good reason: You couldn’t take anything out of the Refectory—though you could eat as much as you wanted while you were here—so most of the other kids were hanging around, too. Spirit didn’t have any appetite for the desserts, but the chance to mainline as much Diet Pepsi as she wanted was too good to pass up.

  When Addie said she wanted to try out her new Monopoly game, it didn’t take much coaxing for her to get all of them to agree to play, because really, it was a game with them Addie wanted for Christmas, not the set itself. Addie chose the Moneybag token (with a faint smirk), and Loch chose the Top Hat (with an ironic bow). Burke chose the Race Car (he was from Indianapolis, home of the Indianapolis 500), and Muirin (surprisingly) chose the Scottie Dog. Spirit didn’t care what piece she picked, so just reached in and grabbed one at random. It turned out to be the Cannon. I wish I did have a cannon, she thought with irritation. I’d blow up Oakhurst. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t really solve anything. She tried to concentrate on the game, but her mind kept wandering—and not to good places. She was just as glad she’d taken her new ring off again—Loch hadn’t, and he kept looking at it with an expression of pleased wonder that was kind of sick-making. She wondered if Loch would find a “Destiny” in his stone when it finished changing color. Hearing about them had absolutely creeped her out.

  And at least part of what creeped her out was that no one else seemed creeped out. She wouldn’t have known if the other kids were—from what Burke had said, you weren’t even supposed to know what a “Destiny” was until your Senior Year here—but even her friends just seemed to shrug the whole idea off.

  That wasn’t all they were shrugging off, either. They’d defeated the Wild Hunt three days ago. They should still have been trying to deal with their very-near-death experience at the cadaverous claws of a collection of ghosts, demons, and—oh yeah—evil elves. She certainly was! She’d had nightmares about the battle in the snow every single night. But from the way the other four acted—and everything they said—it was as if that fight had happened three years ago, not three days ago. And that was just crazy.

  She wanted a break. Needed a break. They’d taken on one of the nastier things in Celtic mythology—and won—and an all-expenses-paid month in Disney World—anywhere but here!—was the least of the things she would have liked as a follow-up. But she had the horrid feeling that things were only going to get worse from here on in. And fast.

  So … get a break? Shoot, she hadn’t even gotten enough time to sit down and think. Too much wasn’t adding up, and that was terrifying. If the Wild Hunt showing up the way it had was the start of the wizard war, why wasn’t Doctor Ambrosius stocking up on magical nukes and having everyone build barricades? (Or, hey, just warning people, because that’d be nice.) And if the people here were the good wizards, where were all the bad wizards coming from? Didn’t anybody care?

  She frowned, tuning out the sound of Loch and Muirin arguing—just as if it mattered—about whose turn it was, and whether or not Loch owed Muirin rent. There was another thing that had been bothering her for a while. If the only kids allowed here were magicians, but all the children of former Oakhurst students were eligible to come to Oakhurst, where did the kids who weren’t magicians go? Was there another school—a kind of Shadow Oakhurst—where the non-magical kids were sent?

  “—so I got permission to have Admin ask the Trust peeps to send my formals, and—quelle surprise—she actually did, and I only fit the black one anymore,” Muirin was saying, as Spirit tuned back in to the conversation. “But that’s okay, since the others are like so last century and you gotta know if I fit one of them, that’d be the one Ms. Corby’d say I had to wear.” Muirin shuddered. “Seafoam! Come on! Maybe if I was thirteen and still into Magical Girl animé!”

  Spirit frowned harder. Formals? What was Muirin going on about?

  “The Trust sent me another new one,” Addie said, sighing faintly. “Just like the old one, only blue this time.”

  Spirit glanced around the table. The guys were exchanging “I hope they’re not going to talk about dresses all night” looks. Formals? We escaped death three days ago and they’re talking about—

  “You guys seriously aren’t talking about the New Year’s Dance are you?” she asked incredulously.

  Muirin gave her a slanty look. “Why not? We get graded on it, you know. Ballroom dancing, deportment, blah blah blah.”

  “Don’t worry. You won’t get graded on the dancing, Spirit,” Addie said in a kindly tone of voice. “You weren’t here for the Summer Term, so you didn’t get Ballroom Dance. They only give it in the Summer Term.”

  Spirit was so shocked all she could do was stare at the two of them with her mouth slightly open. “But we—But you—” She gathered her scattered thoughts. “But— We can’t just go on as if nothing happened! It isn’t over! You know it isn’t over!”

  She would have said even more, but suddenly a sharp pain in her ankle interrupted her—Loch had kicked her!—and his equally sharp elbow hit her in the ribs for the second time that day.

  “Let’s get something to drink,” he said. “That diet stuff might be okay for some people, but Real Men want real high fructose corn syrup.” He grabbed her wrist and practically hauled her out of her seat and off toward the Viennese Table. By now there wasn’t a mob of kids surrounding it, but about half the Refectory tables were full. They weren’t the only ones here playing a board game, and she glimpsed some kids playing card games, or just reading books and listening to music, either on Oakhurst iPods (easy to spot, since they were in custom colors) or on ones of their own.

  Loch dragged her past the table, over by the kitchen doors. It was about as private as they could get without leaving. And the others would notice that—their table was right by the door.

  “What do you think you’re—” she began, as soon as he stopped.

  “Leave them alone, Spirit,” he hissed in an undertone. “You deal with stuff your way, let them deal with it their way.”

  She blinked at him. This was the last thing she would have expected to hear, from the last person she’d have expected to hear it from. “But, Loch—”

  “Don’t you ‘but’ me, Spirit White! Yeah, the New Year’s Dance is stupid, but if that’s what they want to focus on, you let them. Get it? If they want denial, whose job is it to tell them they can’t have it? Yours? Are you some kind of super-shrink now? Are you going to tell me you can help them deal when you can’t even stop moping around over your family and that’s half a year ago? Okay, we saw awful things, we almost died, but we won, game over, now let it go.”

  The injustice of Loch’s accusation made her want to erupt with anger—just because he didn’t care whether or not he’d been orphaned didn’t mean she hadn’t loved her family and didn’t still miss them—and it took all her willpower to answer him instead of slapping his face and storming off. “But it’s not over! Loch, you know it’s not over! We still have to—”

  “I don’t know any such thing.” Loch pulled himself up to his full height and folded his arms over his chest. “I know none of us—including you!—knows what Doctor Ambrosius and the teachers did after we told him what happened. I know they’re a million times better magicians than we are. And I know all this time he’s been telling us there’s danger out there. So what do you know? Did you follow all of them around for the last three days and see they aren’t taking what we told them seriously and beefing up the security? Have you got some kind of super Magic 8-Ball you can listen in on the meetings with?”

  “But— But—” But why do you think they’ll take it seriously now when kids were vanishing for the last forty
years and nobody cared? Why do you want to trust them when we know one of them was in league with the Wild Hunt? How can you think they’re going to take us seriously after you saw the basement, with all the dead kids’ stuff stored down there and their school records stamped “Tithed”? How could she explain any of this if he was so determined to deny what he’d seen with his own eyes? How could she make him see she wasn’t being crazy or paranoid, that all of her instincts were shouting at her that this wasn’t the end, it was only the beginning. What am I going to do if I have to do this all alone?

  At the expression on her face, Loch’s softened a little. “Look, Spirit, I understand why you’re doing this. Your magic hasn’t developed yet and you feel like you’re the only normal kid in Super-Hero High. And you did get us all together and get us to see there was something wrong, and I know that had to feel pretty damn good. And it must have felt even better to face down those things without magic—and I’m not lying when I say if you hadn’t been there, we’d all be dead now. Nobody wants to take that away from you. But you have to accept that, well, you did win. It’s over. And trying to relive it and make it happen again so you don’t have to think about not having your magic yet is … it’s unworthy of you, Spirit. Just be patient. Your magic will show up soon enough. Meanwhile, it’s time to let go and stop trying to get attention and make yourself feel special by coming up with crazy conspiracy theories.” He smiled faintly. “We like you whether you have magic or not.”

  He thinks this is all about me? That I’m just thinking of myself, and about not having magic? That this is all some sick way for me to try to get attention by crying wolf and making up imaginary enemies? She was so outraged by his accusation that for a moment her voice wouldn’t work.