Shadow Grail #2: Conspiracies

by Mercedes Lackey; Rosemary Edghill

  But he moved closer to her, and she to him, and all over the room people were starting to get an edge of fear in their voices.

  “I’m sure Doctor Ambrosius and the teachers are getting the gennies going now,” Burke said, but his voice sounded … uncertain.

  But the power, and the lights, didn’t come back.

  The room was really getting colder.

  And the sick feeling in the bottom of Spirit’s stomach told her that the worst was yet to come.

  SIX

  Spirit clutched Burke’s hand and strained her eyes until they actually hurt, trying to see in the darkness. Still none of the teachers spoke. What was wrong with everybody?

  Suddenly, there was something—a spark of light. Then another, and another. For a moment she was afraid that she had strained her eyes until she’d torn something in there, but no—there were more and more of these little lights—

  “What’s that? What are those?” someone gasped, a girl with plenty of hysteria in her voice.

  More and more of the lights winked on, hundreds of them now, all colors. Just tiny little sparks, not enough to do anything but break the pitch-black darkness. Spirit couldn’t even tell for sure how close they were to her. Were they on the walls? Floating in the air? She glanced up; there were more overhead, anyway.

  They weren’t staying on steadily, either, they were flickering—you couldn’t say “flashing,” they were too dim and it was more like they were fading in and out. It was like a million multicolored lightning bugs were in here, but none of them seemed close enough to touch.

  Somehow, though, there was nothing very comforting about them. It was more like the lights were watching them. Like eyes. And not friendly eyes, either. Like the lights were waiting for something to happen, and it was going to be bad when it did.

  There was some nervous laughter. And just at that moment, it occurred to Spirit that she was in a gym full of magicians … and shouldn’t someone be able to generate light? Or fire? Or something?

  And why hadn’t those people whose powers included that little parlor trick thought of doing it yet?

  Does it matter? Maybe they’re all just waiting for the punch line of this joke, only it’s not a joke and they haven’t figured that out yet. Say something!

  She opened her mouth.

  It was as if the mere thought had summoned up a terrible retribution. A wave of incredible terror washed over her, out of nowhere.

  The words died in her throat, and the scream that tried to replace them choked off into a little squeak. She couldn’t feel Burke’s hand. The little sparks of light gleamed malevolently at her. Her heart was beating so fast it felt as if it was about to explode in her chest; she was burning hot and ice cold all at the same time. Her eyes burned, and she couldn’t move, and even if she could have moved, she couldn’t see where to move to. She felt her whole body shuddering with every panicked heartbeat, as if her body was rattling to bits.

  The vision of the night her whole family died rose up in front of her; she could see the baleful sparks at the bottom of the holes that thing had instead of eyes glaring at her. Sparks of light, like the ones here, in the gym. The thing was here, with her, the thing that had killed her family! It was here, and it was looking for her, it had come to finish the job and it had brought a whole mob of friends!

  Her throat ached, her chest ached, and it felt like her lungs were going to explode. She couldn’t get any air, and yet she was panting as if she had just finished a kendo bout with Dylan.

  Someone screamed, shrill, high, piercing the darkness.

  Now at last a scream burst out of her, joining the other screams all around her, triggered by the first person to cry out. And instantly, everyone else in the room was shrieking in the same terror.

  Her knees started to give. She couldn’t think, she could only feel. Fear, fear, nothing but fear! She felt the screams coming out of her, but she couldn’t hear them over the shrieks of everyone else. Her hands were clenched—on Burke?—but she couldn’t feel them. Her hands were numb, she needed to run, to hide, but there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

  Her heart was beating so fast—it was going to explode. Or she was going to go insane.

  Then—salvation. Light!

  It happened like an explosion, and so painful to her dark-accustomed eyes that an instant headache burst into life at the back of her head. But at last, at last, the room erupted in light, the perfectly ordinary lights of the gym, high above all the decorations, glaring down on everyone with white fluorescence.

  And the fear—vanished. It just disappeared, leaving her limp and exhausted and feeling like a used paper towel.

  Her brain started to work again; the first thing she realized was that she and Burke were clinging to each other like a—well, a terrified couple. Right now, she didn’t much feel like letting him go, and he didn’t seem to want to let go of her any time soon, either. He was alert, though, his gaze flitting all over the place. Looking for something? Or just looking?

  She tried to get hold of herself and do the same. Whatever had caused this, it was pretty clear as she looked around the gym that it had come as a complete surprise to everyone; everywhere she looked, students were clinging to each other, confused, as wrung out as she was, and a few still scared. Even that hulking brute, Blake Watson, was white and shaking, his eyes wild, fists clenched. Dylan Williams was passed out cold on the floor a few feet away, and he wasn’t the only one who had passed out, either. As people managed to shake off the last of the fear and start to react, a couple little knots of people were forming around others. Spirit got sight of a poof of frothy pink skirt, a long trail of gold-and-black slinky stuff, and someone’s legs in tux pants. From far across the gym floor came the sound of someone throwing up.

  The teachers had been caught off guard, too; the first teacher she spotted, Ms. Holland, was white, thin-lipped, and still shaking, groping for a chair to collapse into. Over near the “bar,” Mr. Krandal, Mr. Bowman, and Ms. Groves had just started to talk to one another, and at least Mr. Krandal was furious from the look on his face.

  So none of them knew this was going to happen.…

  Slowly, people were starting to throw off the lingering remains of the fear, and their reactions were as varied as the students and teachers were themselves. Spirit could hear, and see, people starting to cry; most of the adults were getting angry. Some people were very groggy, staggering or wobbling, acting as if they’d had a stroke or a concussion.

  Whispers broke the silence, and a few sobs. Then more and more people started talking. Voices rose, echoing across the gym, then more and more joined in, until the babble was as loud as a storm over the ocean. Mostly people were saying the same thing. “What was that?” “What happened?” “Who did that?”

  Then one voice cut across them all.

  “Have done.”

  It had the volume of a drill sergeant without sounding as if the person speaking was raising his voice at all, and it had, above all, Authority. It was recognizable immediately, of course.

  Doctor Ambrosius.

  “He used Command Voice,” murmured Burke, still making no move to pry her off his arm. “It’s a minor Air Spell.”

  The babble cut off to nothing—well, almost nothing. There were still some people sobbing, and a couple murmuring drunkenly.

  “Whatever caused this, no one has been seriously injured,” Ambrosius said, his expression unreadable. “It’s entirely possible it was a prank gone wrong, as I doubt any Oakhurst student intends to actually challenge the staff, and such an effect, if it were caused by a spell, would, of course, be properly taken as a formal challenge.”

  His eyes flitted over the crowd, as if he was looking for a guilty face, or someone who might at least know something. As he looked them over, he continued to talk, meaningless explanations, as if he was trying to hold their attention while he looked for something. Nothing of what he said made any sense, at least not to her. Ball lightning, Magnetic Resona
nce Waves, ancient Panic fear caused by the presence of a supernatural being … it seemed as if he was just babbling whatever came into his head while his eyes probed everywhere.

  That was when Spirit realized that her ring was glowing.

  So was Burke’s.

  “Your ring,” she hissed at him. He glanced down and his eyes went wide.

  She flashed a startled look across the gym and caught Addie’s eye and, under the cover of her skirt, waved her ring hand at her friend. Addie’s eyes narrowed, she looked down, and murmured something to Loch and Muirin.

  Their rings were glowing, too. And near as Spirit could tell, no one else’s was.

  Addie quickly turned the stone into her palm and closed her hand over it; the other two did the same. Spirit tugged on Burke’s arm, demonstrated, and he followed suit.

  All the while, Doctor Ambrosius kept talking, his eyes searching, searching, searching. But whatever he was looking for, he didn’t find it, so at last he gave up.

  “All things considered, this was unpleasant, and an exceedingly rude way to interrupt the festivities, but the damage, such as it was, is minimal. Since it is clear that we can hardly continue the New Year’s celebration, I am ordering all students back to their rooms, and all teachers into conference in my office. We will get to the bottom of this. And meanwhile, compose yourselves. Fortunately, tomorrow is not a class day; I will leave orders with the staff to keep a brunch buffet open until two in the afternoon so that you may sleep in and shake off the aftereffects of this. If anyone feels seriously ill, please report to the Infirmary.”

  He turned and left. Muirin, Addie, and Loch pushed their way through the crowd to Burke and Spirit, all three of them still visibly shaken. Muirin was so pale it looked as if she had done a full-out Gothic Vampire makeup job, and Addie’s lips were pressed tight and colorless.

  “Are you two all right?” Addie asked. Spirit nodded, and finally let go of Burke’s arm, but still kept hold of his hand.

  Addie shivered, and hugged herself, rubbing her arms. “I’ve never been through anything like that in my life. I wasn’t even that scared when we were fighting the Hunt.”

  “I don’t know what that was, but I’m kind of torn,” Muirin put in. “On the one hand, anything that ends this funeral early is all right with me. On the other hand, I didn’t get nearly enough soda.” Her words were light—but her voice was strained, and her eyes were still so wide with fear that she looked almost comical.

  “I can fix that.” With an apologetic smile, Burke patted Spirit’s hand until she let go of his hand. He shoved his way through the crowd to the bar, and when he came back, his arms were full of two-liter bottles of soda. He shoved the cola at Muirin, who took three bottles with a tremulous smile of thanks. He passed a ginger ale to Addie, a cola to Spirit, a bottle of something fluorescent-yellow to Loch, and kept a bottle of cola for himself. “Caffeine and sugar,” he said by way of explanation. “Good for shock. That’s what I told the bartenders anyway.”

  At this point, the teachers had completely shaken off the effects—or at least, enough so that they could follow Doctor Ambrosius’s orders—and had started to chase the students out of the gym, stopping only to help the ones still sitting shakily on the floor. “We’d better go,” said Addie. Spirit nodded.

  “So much for a festive New Year,” Loch said, dryly.

  She cradled her soda bottle in her arms and followed Addie to the girls’ section, Muirin beside her. It was a very surreal sight, all of these girls in their formal gowns, shuffling along like a bunch of shell-shocked disaster victims. Most of them still looked terminally confused.

  “Net” mouthed Muirin, as she ducked into her room to stash her loot—or drink it all, there was no telling with Murr-cat. Having the dining room open with a brunch until mid-afternoon was pretty much license for her to go on a caffeine and sugar jag and sleep it off. Addie and Spirit nodded.

  Whether or not caffeine and sugar were good for shock, Spirit’s mouth was dry and she felt parched, and she was awfully glad Burke had snagged all that soda. Water just wasn’t going to do it, and she did not want to go out into the empty halls to the communal fridge to replenish her depleted supply of bottled water and juice.

  She put the bottle down, stood there a moment, exhaustion making her indecisive, then finally squirmed around until she could reach her zipper. She carefully peeled herself out of the dress and hung it up in the closet. Night of terror or no night of terror, she still wanted it; weird, but she did. Under all the fuzziness of exhaustion and the ever-present paranoia and the reaction to what had just happened was this little voice reminding her urgently that it was easily the most gorgeous thing she had ever worn, and she needed to put it away safe. Since that ridiculous little voice was the only thing giving her a direction at the moment, she obeyed it.

  Net. Murr-cat said to get on the ’net. Right. She pulled on fuzzy Oakhurst-brown, polar-fleece jammies, poured herself a huge glass of Burke’s bounty, and logged on.

  The intranet, as she fully expected, was humming. As soon as she was on, she got an invite to a private chatroom—or at least as private as you could be with Big Brother probably keystroke-logging everything you typed. She sipped her soda, feeling the cold, acidic cola cutting through the layer of parched “desert” down her throat, and opened a second window to the school-wide chat.

  It was scrolling almost too fast to follow. Everyone had a theory, some of them pretty out-there, even for someone as paranoid as Spirit. She only caught a handful of them; someone thought it was aliens (of course), citing the “paralyzing fear” that was supposed to overcome you when you were about to be abducted. Dylan’s theory was that the government had finally figured out what Oakhurst really taught and was using some sort of top-secret mind ray on them as a prelude to rounding them all up and incarcerating them in a death camp. He was hysterically telling them all that they had to barricade their rooms, block up the windows, hide in the closet, and get ready for the commandos who were going to come over the horizon in black helicopters at any moment.

  Huh, that’s not as crazy as it sounds, except for the top-secret mind ray part. I bet if the government really did know what was going on here, they really would round us all up. Of course, it wouldn’t be to go to a death camp. We’d be too useful.

  Probably they’d all be recruited for stuff. Espionage, intelligence-gathering, assassination. Somewhere, she thought, the ghost of her hippie father nodded with approval at her reasoning.

  The flaw in Dylan’s reasoning was that this place had Money, and if she had learned anything from her folks, it was that the government never, ever bothered anyone with Money. Wacky cultists had “compounds” that could be raided. When people with Money built the same sort of places, and stockpiled an equal amount of weaponry, the places were called “estates” and the weapons were a “collection” or a “private security arsenal.”

  She checked the private chat window.

  Never seen or heard of any magic that would do that, Addie was typing. It took everyone I saw by surprise, unless there are people that are better actors than I think they are.

  What was the point? Loch asked. Whatever happened, the question is, why did it happen in the first place? I could see it if something had followed up on the fear, but nothing did.

  Loch was right. If an attack had taken place, whether it was the Wild Hunt or Dylan’s black-helicopter commandos, no one would have been able to do anything to protect themselves. But there had been no attack so—why?

  In answer, Muirin pasted some lines from Elizabeth Walker.

  EW: It only makes sense as a test. Otherwise something would have happened while we were all frozen. Maybe a test to see which of us could stand up to the terror.

  Spirit emptied her glass, poured another, and thought about that. It was a good idea, actually. The only problem was that the teachers had all been caught, too.

  Wait a minute …

  It got the CHAPERONES too, she typed, putting
the word in all caps so they remembered that not all of the teachers were there, chaperoning. Not more than half, so far as she could tell. So had the teachers who were not in the gym been affected, too? Or had they been the ones behind it?

  But surely Doctor Ambrosius would think of that, first thing. And surely the absent teachers would be the first ones he questioned.

  In brightest day in blackest night, Burke typed.

  She blinked again, looked down at the ring with the stone still turned into the palm of her hand, and clenched her teeth. Their rings had glowed. And no one else’s had. So what did that mean? She yanked it off, shoved it in the box, and shoved the box to the back of the desk drawer.

  And what was it that Doctor Ambrosius had been looking for, back there when he’d been babbling about Magnetic Waves? His eyes hadn’t been down, as they would have been if he had been looking for glowing rings, but he had definitely been looking for something.

  Maybe Elizabeth was right. Maybe it had been a test that Doctor Ambrosius himself had run, to find out who was able to withstand whatever it was.

  But then wouldn’t he have warned the teachers first?

  You’d think.

  Actually, he’d have had to, wouldn’t he? Because if he didn’t, they wouldn’t be braced in case one of the students really ran amok. Maybe had a psychotic break, or went postal. No, that would have been monumentally stupid.

  Did you guys all see the sparks that lit up first? she asked, hoping to remind them that—hello! The rings glowed!

  The chorus of “yes’s” at least told her she hadn’t been seeing things.

  Might have been some kind of spillover from the fear-thing, Loch typed. Might work as an early warning if it happens again.…

  If??? she typed, wishing there was a sarcasm emoticon. Because hadn’t she told them? Hadn’t she warned them?

  And the glowing rings … she mentally thanked Burke for coming up with a code-way to remind the others without saying “what’s with the rings?” But hey, Green Lantern effect? What was that? Did anyone else see that?