Shadow Grail #2: Conspiracies (15 page)

“Oh, way to go, Burke.” Loch rolled his eyes. “Make sure Spirit feels real good about seeing the shrink in fifteen minutes.”

Burke looked startled, then sheepish. Clearly, he had forgotten this. “Oh heck Spirit, I—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Spirit said shortly. She got up and forced a smile. “Hey, I get out of conditioning class this way.”

Muirin looked at her sourly as she walked away.

Doctor MacKenzie’s office was in the same part of the main building as the Infirmary, down a long hall with stone floors. It was creepily quiet there, the lights were dim, and it was chilly. It looked like the hall of some grand hotel at the turn of the century, and she wouldn’t have been at all surprised if a ghost had walked through a wall to stare at her.

If Spirit hadn’t known better, she would have thought the place was deserted. Her footsteps were the only sound in the empty hall. It was funny; when you were in the populated parts of Oakhurst, you had no idea that there were whole sections like this, where there just wasn’t anyone.

The office door was solid wood, and closed, with Doctor MacKenzie’s name beside it on an ornate little brass plate. The plate looked as if it had been there since Oakhurst was built; it even had the same Deco script.

She knocked on the door, hoping he had somehow forgotten her session, or that he was busy with someone else, or that he wasn’t there—hoping, but really knowing that, of course, it wasn’t even remotely possible that any of these things could be true. Still, you never knew.…

“It’s open,” said a deep voice with a Brooklyn accent. Reluctantly, she turned the handle and stepped inside.

The room looked pretty typical for a shrink. The same cream walls and brown carpet as the rest of the school. Oakhurst brown chair and couch, in the same “lodge look” style. Usually there was a coffee table or something like one in a shrink’s office, but not here. Probably because the room was pretty small as it was. There was a wooden filing cabinet, a matching bookcase, and a tiny desk with a computer on it at the back of the room under the window, but Doctor MacKenzie was already sitting in the chair, looking at a file.

She stared at him. He looked up. She stared some more. He waited patiently for her to say something.

“You look like Lenin!” she blurted, finally. “The Russian!”

He chuckled. Somehow that made him look even more like the Russian, with his balding head and neat little beard. “I see homeschooling pays off,” he replied. “Usually the kids that actually recognize this face don’t say anything. They just give me that strange, puzzled look—like a dog that hears something funny. They know I look like
someone,
but they don’t know who.” He waved at the couch. “Come into my parlor.”

She took a seat on the couch, gingerly. It was brown suede, softer and more comfortable than it looked.

“I’m Doctor Cooper MacKenzie, you can call me Doc or Doc Mac if you like. I’m also a mage: Fire Mage, Gift of Cleansing.” He tilted his head a little to one side. “And you are Spirit White, and no one knows what your ability is yet. It’s there, though. The power is in you, curled up like a sleeping dragon.”

“You—can see it?” she replied, startled.

“There are a few of us who can. Not many. A few more who can sense it, but not actually see it. Ambrosius for one.” He raised an eyebrow. “You weren’t told that.”

It was a statement, not a question. She nodded.

“They like to keep people off balance here. They call it ‘challenged.’” Another statement. She decided not to react to it.

“If you’re a mage, why are you a therapist?” she demanded.

“Most people who become headshrinkers do so because they think there is something wrong with themselves and want to figure out how to fix it. I was no exception, though what was ‘wrong’ with me was magic, not neurosis.” He grinned as he managed to coax a wary smile out of her. “I’ve gone over your file, Spirit, and I want to start out by telling you that your previous shrinks are a prime example of the truism that half the people practicing psychotherapy graduated in the bottom half of their class.”

“Uh—what?” she asked, completely taken aback. It looked as if Doctor MacKenzie also liked to keep people off balance.

“What’s in this file, and what they told you, was complete bullshit,” he said bluntly, tapping the manila folder. “I don’t know what they’re turning out of college these days, but they all sound like the latest bestseller self-help book. They seemed to think you were supposed to somehow magically get over having your entire world ripped out from under you in less than a year. That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard.
Of course
you’re still not over any of it. You shouldn’t be. If you were, I’d be looking for some pretty intractable problems with you and flinging around fancy terms like
severe attachment disorder
. You don’t just get over that sort of loss in a few months, or even a few years.” He snorted. “Sometimes I think the Victorians had the right idea. When you lost a family member back then you were
supposed
to be in full mourning, dress in nothing but black, for a whole year.
Then
you went into something they called ‘half mourning’ for another full year, and during those two years, you were pretty much
expected
to have emotional breakdowns, you could do it whenever you felt you needed to, and everybody would support you. Now? A month after a tragedy, maybe two, and you’re expected to be all better—or down pills so you can pretend you are.” He just shook his head. “Unfair doesn’t even come close.”

Spirit was torn between shock and wanting to hug and kiss him. Not only was this the first time anyone had acted halfway normal around her, it was the first time any shrink had more or less given her permission to keep feeling bad. And the relief she felt was impossible to describe.

The thought fleetingly occurred to her that Doc Mac
could
be saying all this to try and trick her into trusting him.…

Well, if so, it was working, and right now, she didn’t care. She wanted to trust him; all of her instincts were reacting as positively to him as they reacted negatively to people like Ms. Smith. She
liked
him. She had the feeling that if he had been her shrink in the hospital, she wouldn’t be nearly so messed up now.

And for the first time, she felt like
talking
about it to someone, because she just knew he wasn’t going to cut her off because “her hour was up.” She was going to be able to vent about how bad she felt, how much she missed everyone, everything, and would give up everything to have them back again. How much she envied Muirin and Loch, because they hadn’t had parents they’d miss, and Burke, because he still had his foster folks. How sometimes she wanted to punch the next person who told her it was time for her to get over it. He was going to listen for as long as it took.

So she did. She went through a lot of tissues. Doc Mac was just solid, right through it all. He didn’t get all creepy and ooze sympathy and pretend empathy like Ms. Smith did; he was just there, listening, not saying much, but what he did say made her feel, not better exactly, but as if he understood.

He was a hundred times better than any of the shrinks she’d seen in the hospital.

When she finally wound down, he gave her the rest of the box of tissues and made a couple of brief notes. He talked to her a little about New Year’s Eve. She told him what she’d really seen and felt. He made some more notes, then looked up. “All right, Spirit, you’re good to go. I think you weathered the New Year’s incident pretty well. If you have trouble concentrating, sleeping, if you’re having nightmares, make an appointment. If it’s urgent, come right to me, and I’ll clear my schedule. We’ll try a little talk therapy, maybe a week or two of meds to take the edge off and get you over the hump. Otherwise, having crying fits and being depressed is part of the grieving process, and don’t let anyone try to tell you differently.”

She blew her nose as he added, almost to himself: “And I wish I could get Dylan to believe that.”

She hesitated a moment. Then she made up her mind. “That night … the night of the wreck … I saw something,” she said. “And the crash wasn’t an accident. There was something like—okay, it must have been an explosion of some kind of magic, like a flash of light, except it was dark.”

“Dark, like absence of light, or dark, as if all the light was being sucked into something?” he asked, his eyes suddenly going sharp and bright.

She blinked. She’d never thought of it that way. “The light being sucked into something,” she replied slowly. “So that’s some kind of magic?”

He nodded, and his brows creased. “All the Schools of magic have opposites, like matter and antimatter. You probably haven’t gotten that far yet. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing inherently evil about the opposite, any more than antimatter is evil. But if the usual forms of our magic are hard to control, the dark forms are even harder, because they’re rooted in chaos.” Doc Mac ran his hand over his balding head. “So you saw a manifestation from a magician who was either extremely powerful or just bug-out crazy. Or both. Go on.”

“Something—was just there, in the middle of the road.” She shuddered. “I think Dad saw it, too. It was—I’m not sure what it was. It was—I thought it was a man. A big man, but it was like the light was sucking into him, and—I don’t remember exactly, just that it was evil. And I knew, I
knew
that it was after me.…” She started to cry again, and stifled it. “It was, wasn’t it? It was after me, and it was hunting me. If it hadn’t been after me, they’d still be alive. Wouldn’t they?”

She couldn’t help it, a sob escaped on the last word, and that set her off again, wailing softly, the guilt filling her chest and throat and choking her. She cried and cried until her eyes were all gritty and her nose was sore. Once again, Doc Mac let her cry herself out. When she got herself back under control, he sighed.

“I’m not going to blow smoke at you,” he said. “Yes, I think you did see something evil. And it was there to kill you. And yes, the rest of your family died because of it. But Spirit”—he leaned over and fixed her with an intense gaze—“Spirit, that does not mean that
you
are to blame, any more than you would be to blame if you were the only survivor of a mass murderer. Whoever sent that thing, whoever did this in the first place—
that
is who is to blame. Not you.” He sat back in his chair. “This is one of those ‘bad things happen to good people’ situations. This magician, or group of magicians—they made the choice to hurt people. You didn’t hunt them down to taunt them, you didn’t do anything to them; in fact, you didn’t even know they existed until you came here.
They
are the bad guys.
They
are the ones who hurt people. You are innocent; the only thing you did ‘wrong’ was to be born, and you weren’t exactly the one responsible for that. And I want you to keep repeating that to yourself until you believe it, all right?”

Spirit nodded, hesitantly. This was crazy. Here she was pouring out her secrets to someone she didn’t even know—and yet Doc Mac was the first person here besides her friends she had ever felt was a real human being, and trustworthy.

And she wanted to keep right on trusting him.

He smiled a little at her nod. “Good. Now, you hop along to class. If you need me, you know where I am.”

*   *   *

“… I didn’t tell him about the Hunt or anything,” Spirit concluded, as she and Loch continued to page slowly through the scrapbooks, “but I wanted to. What do you think?”

“I think he doesn’t sound anything like the shrinks my dad’s girlfriends all saw,” Loch replied. “Which is a plus. I have an appointment with him day after tomorrow. I’ll let you know what I think. Burke’s sold on him. Dylan hates him, says he’s a wuss.”

Spirit rolled her eyes. “Anybody Dylan hates has to be all right.”

Loch chuckled. “I kind of agree with you. What did Murr-cat say?”

“She was kind of pissy, but didn’t actually say anything.”

Loch laughed again. “Which means not only couldn’t she game him, he probably read her like a book.”

“Well, she wasn’t rude about him.…” Spirit ventured.

“Which means he might have either impressed or scared her. Maybe both.” Loch peered down at an old clipping. “Once I see him, and Addie does, I think we should all decide together on what we tell him.”

“If anything,” Spirit reminded him.

“If anything,” he repeated. “Though if he’s in Doctor Ambrosius’s inner circle, he’ll already know about the Hunt, or at least as much as we told Doctor Ambrosius.”

“So? If he does, great. He wouldn’t have told
me
he knows, he’d have been waiting for me to bring it up. That’s how shrinks work.” She frowned at her hands; they were filthy. Looking at the books together in the study carrels at the back of the stacks in the Library was a good idea, marred only by the fact that she was going to have to wait to get to her room to wash her hands.

“You’re not so bad at gaming the system yourself.” Loch lifted a corner of a yellowing bit of newsprint, carefully. This stuff crumbled easily.

“Practice. I wonder who made all these books, anyway?”

“Tyniger, or an assistant,” Loch replied. “Could have been either. Rich guys back then did things like that.” He put a marker in the pages and closed his book. “Okay, that’s it. My eyes are going to cross if I have to do any more of this today.”

“Mine, too,” Spirit admitted. “Let’s get going.”

“Why do you want to tell Doc Mac about everything we’ve found out so badly?” Loch asked, as they headed back toward their rooms. It seemed safe enough to use one of the study carrels; no one was ever back there. Most people did all their school research electronically.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “It just seems as if we ought to have one adult we can trust.”

“Besides Doctor A.,” Loch prompted.

“Uh, yeah.” But she hesitated to say that …

And for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out why.

NINE

Spirit woke feeling bleary and exhausted; she’d been reading in one of the scrapbooks long after she should have been asleep. Technically she
had
been in bed, and it seemed that if you weren’t on the computer or had every light in your room blazing, no one figured out you were still awake. It was pretty easy to get away with reading in bed after “lights out.” She thought she might have hit something interesting, but by the time she’d gotten an inkling of it, she’d been nodding off and had to put the book away.

She was tempted to skip reading the usual school e-mail announcements once she was cleaned up and dressed. They rarely had anything interesting in them, just the usual club meetings and sports practices.

But if I don’t there’ll probably be something vitally important,
she decided with resignation.
Or at least something that will make me look stupid for not knowing it.
She went to the desk and bumped her mouse to wake up her computer. Brushing her hair with one hand, she opened up her e-mail program with the other.

Field Trip to Billings
was the subject of the first unread e-mail.

She blinked. A field trip? When did the school start having field trips?

Now, apparently.

She opened it.

A field trip to Billings will take place two weeks from today,
she read.
This will be to visit the Yellowstone Art Museum, and a short shopping visit for select students, a chance to socialize outside the school. Three teachers will accompany the students: Mr. Martin Bowman, Magic and Mathematics; Ms. Lindsay Holland, Art and Magic; and Mr. David Krandal, English Literature and Lore. The names of the students to go on the trip will be announced in a few days.

If there ever was an announcement of something that was obviously a reward for the perfect Oakhurst student, this was surely it.
Pigs will sing opera before my name is on that list,
she thought, deleting all the messages. She was a little angry and a little depressed at the same time—and the stupid thing was, she didn’t even know why she’d
want
to go on the trip. She didn’t have any money to shop with, and she didn’t like art museums. Her parents had tried to get her interested in art all her life, and it hadn’t worked; that had been her kid sister’s thing. Spirit liked science and history museums.

Maybe it was just the idea of getting away from this place even for a day. Maybe it was the whole Tom Sawyer trick of knowing she wasn’t going to get something that made her want to have it. Just another divide-and-conquer Oakhurst trick. Probably they’d make a point of dividing up kids who were friends, so one got to go and the other didn’t.

Good old Oakhurst.

She deleted the e-mail. No point in having it sit there, mocking her.

Besides, this evening they were all going to get together to see what they’d found in the scrapbooks. That should keep her mind off stupid field trips.

*   *   *

“I guess I’ll start,” Spirit said, as they all pulled up chairs to the Monopoly board. “Most of what was in the books I’ve looked through so far is newspaper stories about Arthur Tyniger.”

“Bleah,” Muirin said, making a face. “He was probably hanging out with my robber-baron great-grandfather, figuring out how to evict widows and orphans.”

“This was all stuff from the social columns,” Spirit corrected her. “Lots from New York City and San Francisco newspapers. He was kind of like William Randolph Hearst, not as wealthy, but rich enough to do what he wanted, and he was considered a real catch. Most of the stories are about how he was buying up all kinds of antiquities and art for all of his mansions. English mostly. And what they called ‘curiosities.’ One of them was the oak, and he thought it was so important that he built the whole house around it! And guess what it was sold to him as?”

“Robin Hood’s oak tree in Sherwood Forest,” said Burke, with a laugh.

“The oak Bonnie Prince Charlie hid in,” Addie put in.

Spirit shook her head. “He bought it as the same oak that Merlin was imprisoned in by Nimue,” she told them. “
The
Merlin. Merlin the Magician. King Arthur’s Merlin. He believed it, too. It was on some farm in Cornwall near Tintagel and was struck and brought down by lightning in a huge storm; that was how he was able to buy it. He had the whole thing transported by steamship to New York, then put on its own flatcar and brought here via rail.”

They stared at her. “Uh … he was a sucker?” Burke said, finally.

“Oh I don’t believe it, either,” she assured them. “I mean, King Arthur’s a myth. And ‘The Merlin’ was supposed to just be a title for a major Druid priest, so there would have been hundreds of Merlins. But I do believe there is a lot of magic in that tree, and we’ve seen the evidence of it.”

The rest nodded. “There’s probably a hundred Merlin’s Oaks, too,” Addie added. “It’s like pieces of the True Cross, you go around collecting those from all the churches in the world and you’ll have enough wood to build the Italian navy.”

Muirin’s eyes had lit up, and she had a strange, eager expression on her face. “Well, the runes on the trunk really
are
runes, only not the Norse kind,” she said, her voice getting that lilt that meant she was excited. “They’re Celtic ogham. I haven’t been able to translate them yet, but they match perfectly to the ogham symbols I’ve found. It might not have been
the
Merlin’s Oak, but it was
a
Merlin’s Oak, I bet!” Spirit looked at her askance. She sounded as if she’d uncovered a cache of double chocolate chocolate-dunked brownies. “I bet it was used for human sacrifices! The Druids would do that with their sacred oaks, tie a victim to it and—”

“More likely some farmer found the tree down, didn’t want to go to the work of cutting it up for firewood, knew Tyniger was in the neighborhood, and decided to make a lot of money,” Loch said cynically. “Probably found a picture of an ogham inscription in some book, then burned the runes into the tree himself and got all the villagers to agree to some story that it really was Merlin’s Oak if he bought them all a round at the pub.”

Burke grinned and Addie chuckled. “That’s a very likely story,” she said. “At the turn of the century people manufactured hundreds of those sorts of things. Petrified giants, baby mermaids…”

“I don’t know why it couldn’t be a real Druid oak,” Muirin replied, sullenly. “It’s just as likely a story. And how do you explain the magic in it? We all felt it, the way we can’t look at the oak without working really hard.”

“Oh, it’s almost certainly a
spell
carved into it,” Loch replied. “That’s how Druidic spells were cast in the first place. Written language was so sacred you weren’t supposed to use it for anything but magic and prayers. For that matter, spoken language was sacred, too, and bards were also magicians. That’s where the word ‘enchantment’ came from—you chanted at something and that worked magic. Just because some farmer carved something he found in a book into that tree, that doesn’t make the inscription itself phony. If he copied something faithfully enough, it would be real magic all right. For all we know, it really
is
the sort of spell you’d find carved into a sacrificial oak.”

Muirin didn’t look mollified, but finally she shrugged. “There’s definitely magic going on there,” she repeated.

“Definitely,” Loch agreed, and the rest of them nodded.

“It might have been even more powerful when it was fresh,” Addie pointed out. “Probably protective. Tyniger lived to be awfully old, and his fortune managed to pass through the Great Depression pretty much intact. That’s what’s been in my scrapbooks. He made his fortune in the 1880s, and built mansions with it in San Francisco, Denver, New Orleans, and New York City. But instead of building a vacation home in the Catskills or the Hamptons like everyone else did, he built Oakhurst out here. He started construction around 1900 and it took ten years to finish. It was a real showplace; for the first couple of years he was bringing people here all the time by his private rail line to show it off. Then, about the time World War I started, he gradually stopped spending any time in any of his other mansions, and stopped bringing people out here. People didn’t notice so much because everyone was wrapped up in the War. But the Great Influenza Epidemic in 1918 pretty much seems to have made him decide he wasn’t going to bring anyone here anymore and he wasn’t going to leave; he sold all the other places and lived here as a recluse. The funny thing is that one of the books has a big section of notes to him from the staff, thanking him for saving them from the Influenza; not one of them got sick. And it looks like that year is when he started making the scrapbooks. I’m no expert, but it looks as if all of the earliest ones were made in the same year, like he finally took stacks of clippings and things and made them into books.”

“Huh,” Burke said. “And all of them say ‘Oakhurst’ on the front. Not his name. It’s like the house was his kid.”

“The house might have been his child,” Addie replied. “He never married, he never had any children at all, and he died without an heir and without a will. But he doubled his fortune in the war, and when he died in 1939 he was over eighty, and that was really old for those times.”

“Then I got the oldest of the scrapbooks,” said Burke. “The house was in really good shape when he died, too; the last of the scrapbooks is full of photos he took and developed himself, and it was just amazing. So if there’s some spell on the tree, it explains why Tyniger devoted himself to the house and the tree took care of him,” Burke said slowly. “But then what?”

“All I found in my scrapbooks were more of those photos,” Loch said. “So I did some research. You had a huge estate here, from a really wealthy man, with no heir and no will. When there’s that much money, the State has to be really careful how they handle everything to make sure there’s no heir, because having one crop up can be really messy. It took Montana over thirty years to settle the estate, and by the time the State determined that they were getting the house, they didn’t want it. It was out in the middle of nowhere, there wasn’t really a concept of remote luxury spas back then, and no one wanted to buy it for a personal home, either, considering how much they’d have to spend just modernizing the wiring alone, never mind the plumbing and the heat and air. So it sat for another ten years, and then in 1979, Doctor Ambrosius came along and bought it.”

“And with that oak right in the middle of it, I can see why he’d want it,” Muirin said, getting back her enthusiasm. “And
maybe
the reason there isn’t a
lot
of magic in the oak now is because Doctor Ambrosius drained it all to build the protections around the school!”

“Oh yeah, I bet you’re right, Murr-cat!” Burke exclaimed. “That makes perfect sense!”

“That doesn’t sound right,” Spirit objected. “How can you drain magic out of a spell?”

“Oh, that’s easy enough,” Addie replied dismissively. “Any Energy Mage can do it. It’s an advanced thing, but they can all do it.”

Spirit stared down at the Monopoly board, reminded forcibly again that
she
didn’t have any magic.…

Except Doc Mac said she did. It was just sleeping.

Well I wish someone would set off the alarm clock,
she thought angrily. Then she bit her lip and fought the anger down. This was just one more way that Oakhurst was trying to separate her from her new friends. And she wasn’t going to let it.

*   *   *

They talked until a proctor came to shoo them out of the lounge for lights out. Two things seemed really obvious when they got done going over everything any of them had found in those scrapbooks.

First, the runes. They
had
to be pretty important. If they were protective—and they probably were—according to Loch and Addie, they would have been what Doctor Ambrosius used to “anchor” his own protections.

“The thing is,” Addie said, frowning a little, “you’ll have to take my word for it, but runes can actually change a little if they’re used that way—if they’re incorporated into something other than their original purpose. Physically change, I mean; the runes themselves will kind of get slightly rewritten to reflect the altered purpose.”

Spirit didn’t ask, “They can do that?” even though she wanted to, because Addie would never have said it if it wasn’t true. So she asked, “How?” instead.

“Magic is a living force,” Loch pointed out. “It changes. How we use it changes. So the tools we use to manipulate it have to be able to change, too. Things like runes. You can’t rewrite them drastically, but you could take a protective spell that read, say, ‘all that shelter under my boughs,’ and by doing what we think Doctor Ambrosius did, the runes would change to read ‘all that shelter within my bounds.’ If he got specific about
what
he was protecting against—which would be smart—the runes would change to name those things.”

“So if we translate them, we can figure out who or what Ambrosius is defending us against, and if we know that, we can figure out how we can help—” That felt better. That felt proactive. Spirit realized in that moment that she was getting very tired of always waiting for something to happen before she could act.

Burke had been very quiet all this time. When they all finally stopped talking, he spoke into the momentary silence.

“We’ve gotten distracted by all this,” he said slowly, and waved his hand vaguely. “The runes, the history … even New Year’s … it’s distracted us from what’s really urgent.” Before any of them could ask him what he meant, he continued. “We still haven’t figured out who the inside man is. Who the one trying to kill us from inside the school is.” His jaw firmed. “The more I think about it, the more certain I am. There
is
someone in here, and it won’t matter squat how much we figure out and how we help Doctor A. guard against what’s outside, when we have someone right inside with us—”

He might have said more, but just then one of the proctors poked his head into the lounge and spotted them.