Shadow Grail #2: Conspiracies (6 page)

Spirit made an abortive gesture toward her, wanting to show sympathy, but Elizabeth wrapped her arms around herself as if trying to protect herself and backed away. “I—I’m sorry. I—I’ll just go back now—” And she turned and scuttled away, head down, shoulders hunched.

Burke and Spirit looked at each other. Burke looked as if he wanted to say something, then just shrugged. “We can try talking to her later,” he suggested. “She sure seemed skittish though.”

Spirit sighed, watching Elizabeth pull open the door just enough to slip inside. “But not the pep talk Murr-cat and Addie gave me when I got here,” she said, a little acidly. “And do you blame her for being nervous? I wonder how Doctor Ambrosius tortured
her
? She probably expected us to turn into wolves and vampires.”

And it won’t do her any good to hear that the ice probably
wasn’t
thin, and her family’s death probably
wasn’t
an accident. It’s nothing I can prove, anyway—any more than I can prove what I know I saw the night
our car went off the road …

Burke had been staring after Elizabeth. Now he turned back to her. “I don’t know. You know this place. She’s going to have to toughen up fast or—”

Spirit sighed. “Yeah. Or she might as well be surrounded by wolves and vampires for real.” She made a face. “Well, I’m cold. Mind if I go inside?” She was kind of hoping Burke would go with her, but it looked like the mood was broken, because he shook his head.

“You go ahead. I need to hit the gym for my workout, and since I’m halfway there I might as well do it now.” With a cheerful wave, he trudged off in the direction of the stand-alone Gymnasium complex.

Spirit’s mood soured even more. She shoved her hands in her coat pockets and turned toward the terrace door that Elizabeth had vanished through. She had some vague idea of tracking Elizabeth down and—

And what? Trying to make her feel better? Like that would happen! She hugged herself tightly, trying to warm up. With Burke gone, it seemed even colder out here. She might as well go in and tell the others there was a new inmate in the asylum.

Once she stepped off the AstroTurf carpet, her feet crunched through a heavy crust of snow. It came all the way up to mid-calf, and the drifts were even higher—even in her snow boots she was freezing. She couldn’t wait to get inside, and the two of them had walked so far that the terrace entrance was closer than the Entry Hall entry she and Burke had come out through.

But as she started along the side lawn, she saw a sudden flurry of snowballs appear in the distance. “Appear” was exactly the right word: One moment there’d been nothing, the next, the air was full of snowballs. Hovering. It was hard to decide what Gifts were involved in the snowball fight, though it was pretty clear most of the “combatants” were School of Air: Jaunting, Telekinesis, and just plain Weather Witchery combined to turn what might otherwise be an ordinary snowball fight into something more like a snowball
apocalypse
.

No way was she walking into something like that, even if it did mean spending a lot longer out here in the cold. Grumbling under her breath, Spirit turned around and trudged back to the main entrance.

When she got there, she struggled up the steps—everything she wore was caked with snow by now—and pulled open the enormous (pretentious) heavy oak door with a certain amount of struggle. Burke made it look easy. Of course, Burke made
everything
look easy, even living here.

For a moment she indulged herself in the wistful fantasy of
not
being here, but still having met the other four. Would they still have been friends if they hadn’t been stuck here in High School Hell? She thought she and Burke might have been more than friends—Loch was dazzling, and she liked him a lot (maybe loved him, maybe just crushed on him), but Loch came from an entirely different world. She and Burke were a lot alike, really. She thought about having a boyfriend. A real boyfriend. Her first.

And suddenly she realized she didn’t dare.

It didn’t matter if it was Loch, or Burke, or even someone she hadn’t met yet (hard as that was to imagine)—Oakhurst didn’t even like you to have
friends,
let alone a
boy
friend. The fact that she and Addie and Muirin were friends had been a secret they’d needed to hide as carefully as they’d hidden the knowledge that their fellow students were dying, not “leaving to pursue other opportunities.” If Oakhurst realized you had friends, they did everything they could to destroy the friendship.

Suddenly she realized she’d been thinking “Oakhurst” and not “the teachers” or “the Administration.” It was as if Oakhurst itself was some kind of malevolent entity.

It’s like that hotel in that horror novel. The haunted one that everybody who stayed at went insane.

She shuddered faintly, and distracted herself by stomping her feet to get the last of the snow off her boots. The Entry Hall was completely empty—it wasn’t a place people lingered—and even the fire roaring in the fireplace couldn’t make it look cheerful and inviting. The huge cheerless Christmas tree only made things worse, somehow. She wished they’d take it down now, but Burke said it would be up until after New Year’s. She didn’t see why. It wasn’t as if any of the students spent their time admiring it. And a thirty-foot tree?
Quelle
overkill. She wasn’t even sure how they’d gotten it in here.
Maybe it’s always here, and they just make it invisible for the rest of the year. Maybe old Mr. Tyniger built the place around it.

As if anyone would want to build a room around a tree.…

Then she blinked and shook her head.
What the
—? Because, of course, this room
was
built around a tree. And for one moment, staring at the Christmas tree, she had utterly and completely forgotten that, even though the tree Oakhurst was built around was there, right in front of her—that huge oak trunk in the middle of the Entry Hall.

It should have been the focus of the entire room, actually. And it … wasn’t.

She tried to stare at it—really tried—and after a very little time she found her eyes sort of shifting away from it. For some reason, after glancing at it, she kind of found herself dismissing it. As if it was nothing more imposing than a lamp. Instead of being a tree trunk at least twelve feet in diameter and two stories high.

She would never have thought about that twice—she certainly didn’t when she first got here—except for the whole Hunt business.
The Wild Hunt was another thing people should have noticed immediately and didn’t …
Little alarms went off in her head. If something was making her “forget” about an oak tree that an entire building was built around, she wanted to know why.

Slowly, she walked across the inlaid stone floor toward it; warily, with a creepy feeling as if she was halfway expecting a door in the trunk to open and some horror-movie monster to pop out. When she got up close to it, she studied it, only to see that there were marks all over its smooth time-polished surface. They were faint—but they were there.

And they’d been
made
by someone. Or something. She would have dismissed them as natural—and a part of her really wanted to do that, because didn’t worms and beetles crawl under tree bark and leave marks on the wood?—but there was something about the marks that kept her from doing that. She couldn’t swear to it—not exactly—but she had the vague feeling the marks on the wood looked
familiar.

That was even creepier.

Well, one thing was certain. She didn’t want anyone to catch her looking so closely at that tree or those marks. She was pretty darn certain that if they had something to do with Oakhurst tradition that the kids were supposed to know, Doctor Ambrosius or the teachers would have been all over the story at every given opportunity.

So— They weren’t. And maybe she needed to find a way to look at those marks without being seen.

She moved along, as if she’d been on her way back to her room all along, and resolved to tell the others. With any luck, one of them would have an idea about the best way to get a really good look at the Oakhurst Oak—and its marks—without anyone noticing. With a little
more
luck, she might be able to get them to wake up to the fact that there was still a lot going on here at Good Old Oakhurst that was just not right.

THREE

At lunch, Elizabeth stood out by not standing out; she picked the table farthest from the desirable spots—which put her at the window, where it was freezing cold—she ate quickly and without really talking to anyone. Even by Oakhurst standards this was odd, and Spirit wondered if she was going to find herself sharing the back of the class with Elizabeth. At Oakhurst, there was competition, and fierce competition at that, for the seats at the front of the room. Everyone wanted to be noticed.

Because, hey, we are all winners, right?

She watched Elizabeth leaving the dining room and wondered where she was going. Her room? Probably. When your family had just been killed, it wasn’t as if you were really in the mood for a Winter Carnival.

She was still thinking about Elizabeth when she got back to her room and found Addie and Muirin waiting for her.

“What do you think of the new kid?” she asked, putting her books beside the computer in the order she was going to do the homework assignments (and why call it “homework” when they never left the campus?).

“Uh, Eleanor? Elsie?” Muirin said, without any interest. “Why?”

“Elizabeth,” Spirit corrected. “She’s in most of my classes. So what do you think of her?”

“I think she’s a wimp,” said Muirin dismissively. “Limper than a shoelace. She’s going to get run right over in this place. Or become invisible, like that song from
Chicago.
” She did a shuffle-step and sang a couple lines from “Mister Cellophane.”

“I didn’t know you liked musicals,” Addie said, surprised.

Muirin smirked and appropriated the computer chair. “It’s got gangsters and murder and prison numbers, what’s not to like?”

“Well, what do
you
think of her?” Spirit said to Addie, interrupting before they could get off on a tangent.

Addie shrugged. “I think she’s just really shy. Why are you so interested in her? You didn’t get assigned to her.”

By now Spirit knew that the proctors set up an informal “safety net” for the new arrivals; it irritated her, as if Addie and Muirin were her friends only because they’d been assigned to be—as if that were possible at Oakhurst. “I don’t know,” Spirit replied, a little fretfully. “It just seems like there is something important about her, but I don’t know what it is, and it’s making me crazy—”

“—er,” said Muirin. “Crazi
er.
”

Nettled, Spirit counted to ten before she snapped back. “If it’s crazy to think we’re all still in danger—”

Then she stopped as a new thought struck her. “You know, maybe that’s it. She acts like she’s scared. Like she already
knows
there’s something here out to get all of us, and she doesn’t know who to trust!” Crazy as the idea was, it just might explain Elizabeth’s behavior.

Muirin rolled her eyes, but Spirit wasn’t going to give up this time. “Look, the Hunt didn’t come out of nowhere. It didn’t migrate across half the world from Ireland by itself. Someone, and it was probably someone right here in this school, set kids up as sacrifices for it!”

“Right, but we chased the Hunt off.” Addie lay back on Spirit’s bed, staring at the ceiling.

“We might have chased the Hunt off, but we didn’t do squat about whoever is right on this campus. I went over this with Loch. Someone set it up, or at least kept it going by supplying sacrifices. Someone dropped the wards so it could get in. Even if Doctor Ambrosius decided to do something after we told him about it—I don’t know about you, but I didn’t see anybody missing from among the adults here—either he hasn’t done squat, or
he
couldn’t find the person, either!” She didn’t say
so there,
but she sure felt like doing it.

Muirin turned around in Spirit’s computer chair and gave her an odd look. “Huh,” she said.

Addie sat up. “Well even if that’s true—and I’m not saying it is!—since you talked to Loch about this, he had to tell you
cui bono.
”

Muirin made a face. “Yeah. Or for us normal people, ‘follow the money.’ Who here would benefit from killing us off? It’s not like Oakhurst is in our wills or like that—sure, Daddy Dearest left me a little trust fund, and Addie’s an heiress, and even you probably have an insurance settlement waiting for you back in the world—but the only way Oakhurst gets any of it is if we live to graduate, get our hands on it, and feel generous.”

For a second, Spirit’s attention was diverted. She’d spent all this time thinking she was a pauper, but Muirin might be right—about part of it, anyway. She knew Mom and Dad had insured everything—the house, the car, her and Phoenix’s lives—and Oakhurst had paid all her hospital bills from Day One.…

Then she shook her head and went back to the important subject. “I don’t think it’s about money, Muirin. We saw the records.
You
saw them. This … This
Tithing
went back maybe to the beginning of Oakhurst, and that would be more than thirty years. So what if the wizard war that Doctor Ambrosius told us about is already going on?”

“And he hasn’t mentioned anything?” Muirin asked dubiously.

“Well, wouldn’t you freak if he did? I know I would.” Spirit chewed a nail.

“Don’t do that, it’s disgusting,” Addie said automatically. “And you’re already freaking.”

“Well
someone
should!” Spirit hoped she sounded resolute instead of hysterical, but in her own ears she sounded shrill.

“Okay, let’s break this down.” Addie ticked off a
one
on her fingers. “Oakhurst has been graduating kids since the seventies. So some of them were our parents. And when we were born, we automatically became Oakhurst Legacies, so when we were orphaned, we ended up here. So, if this wizard war has already begun, everyone here is an orphan. And if it
hasn’t
”—she ticked off a
two
—“some of the kids here have
live
parents and were sent here for training in magic. Because Oakhurst is safe.”

“But didn’t Doctor Ambrosius just give us that speech about how Oakhurst is our real family?” Spirit replied, more confused by the minute.

Muirin snorted. “Every fancy school I’ve ever been to gives you that speech. It’s supposed to build togetherness.”

Addie nodded her agreement. “And who talks to each other here? I mean the way we talk. How much do you know about Jenny or Claire or Kristi or even Brendan? Cadence is one of my closest—well, I can’t even call her a ‘friend,’ really—here, and I don’t even know what city she grew up in, or if she had any brothers or sisters. When Burke told me about his family, I was
shocked
. Yes—shocked! Because nobody here tells anybody else anything real. Half the student body could have families, Spirit, and none of use would ever know.”

“Maybe everyone here with families just
wishes
they were orphans,” Muirin suggested mockingly.

“So either the wizard war has started and we’re all orphans—because of the Evil Wizards—or it hasn’t and we aren’t.” Addie looked pleased with herself. “Logic is your friend.”

“Thanks so much, Mister Spock,” Spirit replied. She frowned, thinking she was missing something. Whatever it was, she’d have to hope it would come back to her later. “So … how do we find out about people’s families? Set up an online poll?”

Muirin grinned gleefully. “We hack the school computer and get into the student and graduate databases, of course! I’ve been wanting a really good excuse to do that for ages!” Then she jumped to her feet and grabbed Spirit’s hands. “But meanwhile, there’s something vital we need to take care of right this minute, or it’s going to be too late.”

*   *   *

Spirit shivered in the cold of the storage room and eyed the double rack of dresses with dismay. She
liked
clothes. She did. That was why she’d wanted to learn to sew. But getting set up to make your own clothes was almost as expensive as buying them—she could mend, and embroider, and make alterations, but that was about all. But she liked clothes. So she should’ve been in heaven. Right?

These aren’t clothes. These are terrifying implements of torture.

Pastel pink warred with hot pink, eye-searing blue, turquoise, deer-hunter-orange, and a lot of sequins and metallics. The one thing there
didn’t
seem to be here on the Isle of Misfit Dresses was anything knee-length or shorter.
I guess Oakhurst doesn’t consider anything that’s not down to the ground to be formal enough.

“So as you see, this is where bridesmaid dresses go to die,” Muirin said scathingly. “The New Year’s Eve thing is a formal dinner and dance. That’s
full
formal, meaning floor-length. And if you don’t have your own formal you have to get one from here. You can see why Addie and I had ours sent. What size are you? Hopefully things haven’t been picked over too much yet.”

Addie snorted disbelievingly, which only made Spirit more depressed.

“Um … Four? Six?” She tried not to fidget. And here she’d thought the Christmas Dinner was bad. The New Year’s Dance was going to be hideous.

Muirin and Addie dove into the mass of tulle, glitter, and satin at the far end of the racks. “Seafoam: Eighties. Fuchsia: Eighties. Nineties’ Hippie revival, oh noes, not unless we want you to look like a flower child.” Muirin rejected one dress after another until Spirit wondered if staying in her room was an option.

“But hark! Is that a plain white something I spy?”

Addie finally hauled a candidate out where Spirit could see it. The dress was white, yes, but it had some sort of bizarre rainbow-colored tulle ribbon poof stuck to one hip, some sort of weird scarf-like thing in the same material wreathing the neckline, and matching poofs at the shoulders. And shoulder pads. Big ones.

“I think these are supposed to be flowers,” Muirin said critically. She started poking and prying at them. “The basic dress is all right…”

Spirit could not imagine how anyone could describe that horror as “all right.”

“It’s the only one with classic lines in her size,” Addie agreed.

Muirin and Addie exchanged an enigmatic look. “Three hours, tops,” said Muirin, in answer to an unspoken question.

“Have they told us anything about not cutting things up from here?” Addie asked.

Muirin shook her head smugly, then dived back into the racks to grab a black-and-silver thing that was even worse than the rainbow poof dress—and not even in her size. She couldn’t imagine anyone her age—anywhere,
ever
—wearing that horror.

“I’ll get this stuff deconstructed before they have a chance to tell us not to get creative, then it’ll be too late for them to do anything about it.” Muirin glanced down the row of dresses at Spirit, who was wearing a look of utter horror. “Trust me,” she said, knowingly, waving the silver-and-black dress like a flag of triumph. “I might have to cover up where I take Rainbow Brite’s corsages off. You’ll love it.”

For one moment Spirit contemplated telling her not to bother, that she’d pick something out by herself. Then she looked at the other choices. And realized there
were
no other choices. “Um … thanks,” she said, faintly. She only hoped she wasn’t going to end up wearing something held together with safety pins.

Then, as she followed the other two out, she could have hit herself. What was wrong with her? They were all still in deadly danger—and she was worrying about a
dress
? She’d started her conversation with Addie and Muirin wanting to talk about Elizabeth, who behaved as if she knew she was in danger. She’d wanted to talk to them about the danger she
knew
they were all still in. And she’d ended up down here picking out a prom dress as if she didn’t have anything to worry about besides who’d dance with her at the ball!

This was the last thing that should have been on her mind. Maybe it wasn’t just shock and denial. Something was going on here. Maybe they were all being manipulated into forgetting what had happened at Midwinter, and even she was falling into the trap.

She started to say something to Addie and Muirin—and then stopped herself just in time. Because telling them—again—wouldn’t help. She couldn’t prove there was some sort of Jedi mind-trick stuff going on, and saying there was would only make her look more paranoid.

No, somehow she had to get them to see it for themselves.

Maybe investigating the oak in the Entry Hall would help. She had to start somewhere.

*   *   *

Muirin showed up to dinner a little late—not so much that she got in trouble, but enough so that a couple of the proctors gave her a glare. There were bits of white and black thread on her skirt, so Spirit knew she had made good on her plan to cut the two gowns up, and the cat-in-the-cream look on her face told Spirit that she was happy with the results. They kept the conversation to perfectly ordinary stuff over the food, but once they were free for the evening, they all retired to their favorite nook and Addie brought her Monopoly board from her room.

“I’ve been thinking about the Hunt,” Loch said, reluctantly. “And, yeah, it doesn’t belong here. And, yeah, somebody had to summon it.”

Spirit managed to not say “I told you so.” She practically held her breath as she waited for Loch to continue.

“It’s mostly Celtic in origin, so we’re looking for someone who really knows Celtic tradition, the genuine old stuff, as opposed to—oh, Nordic, or Native American or Chinese. So that’s as good a place as any to start,” he continued.

But Addie sniffed. “Oakhurst isn’t exactly the Rainbow Coalition,” she pointed out. “Most of the students and
all
of the teachers are whiter-than-white WASPs. That doesn’t much narrow down who could be the summoner, since practically anyone could have known about the Hunt.”

Spirit blinked a bit in surprise. Addie was right, and somehow she hadn’t noticed. Why hadn’t she noticed? Was this something else they didn’t want you to think about? But why? What difference could it possibly make?

Loch grimaced. “You’ve got me there, but it’s the only thing I can think of. Maybe if we can find someone doodling in ogham or something…”