Shadow Grail #2: Conspiracies (8 page)

But he, or more like him, kept popping up, and soon they appeared whether she was alone or not. Staring at her out of a crowd of spectators at a game. Lurking outside the school, right where she would see him when she looked out the window. Cruising by in a black SUV. And nobody else seemed to see him—or them, if there was more than one.

At that point, she wanted to think she really was finally going crazy. Because being crazy would have been better than what her dreams were telling her, what her instinct and everything she’d experienced was telling her.

Her dreams weren’t fantasy. They were truth. She’d been Yseult of Ireland, wife of Mark, lover of Tristan. Sorceress, healer. She was back—and so, somewhere, were Mark and Tristan. And so were … others. How many others, she didn’t know for sure, but she knew of one, whose name she shuddered even to think about. The one the Shadow Knights served. The one who meant the Shadow Knights to claim her and make her kneel at his feet, surrendering her power to him.

Of course, her family stood between her and
him
and not even the Shadow Knights could do anything about that. This was the twenty-first century after all. Not even
he
could just waltz in and take her from her parents. So even if the dreams and all were true, she was safe—

Until he killed her family.

And now she was here.

Doctor Ambrosius was no protection; if he wasn’t senile—which she was half convinced he was—he still had no idea what he was
really
up against. She knew Oakhurst was part of
his
plots—or she wouldn’t be here—but was Doctor Ambrosius an unwitting dupe … or one of his henchmen? Without knowing, she couldn’t warn him outright. He hadn’t listened to her hints—and worse, she’d already heard some of the kids had already gone missing from this place, no matter what Doctor Ambrosius said. It wasn’t nearly as safe here at Oakhurst as he claimed it was. It wasn’t safe from
him
.

So here she was, in the middle of nowhere, no idea who to trust, and not a familiar face in sight. Except for Mark—who she did
not
want to meet again—and Tristan, she’d never known any of the other ones likely to come back. She wouldn’t recognize them, so how could she find someone it was safe to trust her warnings to?

And even if she did figure out who they were—would they even listen?

*   *   *

“Tell me I’m brilliant,” Addie begged with a grin.

“You’re brilliant,” Spirit replied, going along with it. “You got the sketch?”

Addie nodded, and pulled a couple of sketch pads out of the bag she had slung over one shoulder. The others gathered around their usual “study” table in the lounge as Addie flipped the pads open and started passing them around as cover for the one they really wanted to see.

They all made appreciative or critical noises as she cast a cautious look around to see if anyone was watching them. She must have been satisfied that no one was, because she pulled a piece of onionskin from the back pages of the pad and laid it over the sketch of the oak tree. Spirit and the rest bent over it.

“You were dead right, Spirit,” Addie told her, a little grimly, as they all studied the marks now made plain on the tree. “I could feel something kind of pushing my eyes away while I was working. There is some very powerful magic on that tree. What do you think, people?”

“These aren’t natural,” Burke agreed, his finger starting to trace one of the signs, then pulling away, reluctantly.

“They look familiar, but I can’t place from where,” Muirin observed, then shrugged. “Although for all
I
know, they might have come from the cover of a Death Metal album.”

“You don’t really think that, do you?” Spirit challenged.

“It’s possible. Rumor hath it that this place was used by a biker gang before Doctor Ambrosius turned it into a school.” As usual, Spirit couldn’t tell if Muirin was serious, or trying to yank her chain.

“I don’t think bike-gang signs would try to make me look away from them,” Addie said firmly. “We need to research this. I made copies for all of us—by hand of course.” She passed them all tiny paper cranes, which they all oo’d and ah’d over. “I’m going to check the photo archives in the Art Department and see if there are any pictures of the tree I can use to photo-enhance the marks. We need to find out what they mean.”

Burke nodded. “I can check Norse,” he said. “I’ve got a project I can twist around to cover Norse runes.”

Muirin made her little crane “fly,” bobbing her hand up and down. “I can check Celtic ogham because of the Hunt connection.” She looked pointedly at Loch and Spirit. “That leaves you two.”

Loch sighed. “Into the archives, again?”

“What else?” Muirin nose-dived her crane. “And who else? You two make the cutest little spies.”

Spirit thought she saw a strange look pass over Burke’s face. But in the next moment, it was gone, and she decided she had imagined it.

She sighed. “Archives it is. And hope we can continue keeping from getting caught.”

FOUR

The Oakhurst storage rooms were beginning to feel as familiar as one of the classrooms.

At this point, Spirit felt that she and Loch had all this sneaking around stuff down to a fine art. They managed to meet up without scaring the pants off each other, and without either of them running afoul of anyone else. Of course, since Loch was a Shadewalker, that was relatively easy for him, and Spirit felt more than a little jealous, but being without magic did make her invisible to people looking for wandering magicians, so maybe it all evened out. And once down in the subbasement, Spirit felt a little more relaxed, maybe because there was only one entrance, so they should have plenty of time to hide if someone turned up.

This time they both had better flashlights than Loch’s little penlight, and Loch had an LED work light as well. Spirit didn’t ask him where he had gotten it, or how, but it was probably through Muirin.

They didn’t need Muirin’s skeleton keys this trip, because they weren’t going to the hidden storage room yet, but to the regular storage rooms. Which was just as well because those hidden rooms gave her the serious creeps. Dungeonlike cells, an operating room, and boxes of the records and belongings of the students who had vanished … it was too much like something out of a horror movie.

Now if you were looking at things in the best possible light for Oakhurst, it kind of made sense to have prisonlike cells down there given what Doctor Ambrosius said about the wizard war. If you caught one of the bad guys you would want a place to hold and interrogate him, right? Doctor A. might be one of the good guys, but it was pretty obvious that he was no kind of angel; the way Oakhurst was run alone showed that the people at the top were pretty cold and businesslike when it came to doing “what needed to be done” to win this war. There was a Darwinian ruthlessness about the way that competition was encouraged here.

And on the good side, none of those rooms, at least during Spirit’s cursory look around, had shown any signs of actual use.

But still … the fact that they were there at all was seriously creepy. And it began to strain things more than a bit to have all the personal belongings of all of the kids who had disappeared stored down there. But what really put the frosting on the cake were the records, all marked “Tithed.” Who had marked them that way? Had it just been a frustrated guess on the part of one of the administrators? Or had it happened after the records were put down there, as a kind of smug “gotcha” by the person who had called the Hunt? And if that was the case, then why do something like that to alert Doctor A. that whoever-it-was walked among them?

It was way more complicated than Spirit could figure out.

This time they had something quite simple to dig up. Addie needed pictures, photos, of the tree. They all agreed that it was too risky to try photographing it unless one of them got a class assignment in art that involved photography with an open-ended “photograph what you want.” You couldn’t exactly line everyone up for a candid shot in front of the tree, because—well, why would you want to do that in the first place? As a memento of your friends? You were discouraged from having friends. To send to your family? Even if you had family, you couldn’t e-mail them to your family, because you couldn’t e-mail anyone. So until one of them got that sort of chance, it was better to look for existing photos.

In its ongoing attempt to make things look as normal as possible, Oakhurst had a yearbook—and, sporadically, a school paper. That, Spirit figured, and Loch agreed, would be where there were any free-roaming photos of the Tree.

It meant going through a lot of dusty boxes and leafing through a lot of books and six-page newspapers that pretty quickly started to look alike. But it did yield some pay dirt; occasionally some club or team actually
would
pose in front of the Tree. It was never quite the same shot, so the marks never looked quite the same, and it appeared that the marks had no particular aversion to being photographed. Interestingly, the best shots were by someone who was actually in the photo, meaning that he or she had set the camera on a timer, then run around to be in the picture—so the aversion communicated itself to the photographer, but not the camera. By the time she and Loch got to the end of the newspapers and yearbooks, they had been at it for two hours.

They looked at each other, then Loch divided up the stacks into two piles, and shoved one half of each over to her. When she looked at him, he just shrugged and didn’t comment. So neither did she. Instead she took her stack, got herself up off the floor, and headed back to her room as quickly and silently as possible.

She dropped her stuff off at Addie’s room on the way to breakfast, leaving earlier than she usually did to do so. While she and Addie nattered about the dance, Addie carefully stored the stuff with her art supplies.

“I think you’ll like your dress,” Addie said, as they closed the door to her room and headed for the dining room.

Spirit shrugged. “As long as it’s not as ugly as it was, that’s all I hope for,” she said. “I just wish I didn’t have to go in the first place.”

“Well the only way you can get out of it is to be sick,” Addie said warningly. “And I mean, really sick. And the way we’re isolated out here, it’s not likely you’re going to get exposed to anything between then and now.”

Spirit weighed the advantages and disadvantages of puking up her toenails versus going to the dance, and reluctantly concluded that the dance would be less miserable.

And caught herself again. Why was she even thinking about the dance? The dance was inconsequential—

But nothing has happened since we took on the Hunt,
came the insidious little voice in her head.

Yet,
came the reply.

*   *   *

The next night, she and Loch needed Muirin’s keys.

Muirin had a ring of skeleton keys—she said they had been her father’s because he was in the construction business, though she wouldn’t say how she had gotten hold of them. Knowing Murr-cat, Spirit would not have been at all surprised to learn that she’d gone through her dead father’s things the first chance she had gotten.

It was funny how you could still like someone even though the things they said and did sometimes seemed somewhat immoral, callous, and even cruel. Maybe because, in Muirin’s case at least, she would then turn around and do something unselfish—like volunteering to make the dress—or brave—or both, the way she’d been right there taking the Hunt down.

Once again, Spirit armed herself with a flashlight, an LED one that wouldn’t deplete batteries, and stuck Muirin’s keys in her pocket before turning off her room lights and slipping out into the hall. Spirit hadn’t expected any interference—but hey, paranoia. So when she went slinking down the hallway that led to the basement, she
didn’t
get caught by Ms. Corby prowling the hall.

It was a near thing though. La Corby moved as quietly as Loch, and she only used her flashlight intermittently, which was how Spirit spotted her. She was still about fifty feet away, so Spirit was able to backtrack to the kitchen and duck inside. She hid by squeezing into the utility closet with the smelly mops and brooms, and waited breathlessly while Ms. Corby played the light around the kitchen. Looking for late-night snackers, no doubt. Maybe.

Or maybe she was actually on the alert for real trouble. Maybe Doctor A.
was
taking the Hunt seriously.

Maybe she’s just prowling around trying to get people in trouble.
It seemed the most likely.

When Ms. Corby was gone from the kitchen, Spirit counted twice to sixty, then slipped out of the closet, padded quietly to the door, listened, then cracked the door open. Ms. Corby’s flashlight stabbed through the darkness back down the opposite way Spirit wanted to go, and with a sigh of relief, Spirit scooted out the door and headed for the rendezvous with Loch.

He was waiting outside the Furnace Room door; without speaking, they both went inside and headed for the furnace itself. The thing was going full-bore to keep up with the arctic temperatures outside, but it was so well insulated it was barely warm to the touch at the back where they knew the round cast-metal door to the secret rooms lay. By the light of Spirit’s flashlight, Loch picked out the right skeleton key, which Muirin had marked with a speck of blood-red nail polish. Like Muirin, Loch pocketed the padlock before he opened the door. Hopefully Ms. Corby wouldn’t prowl all the way down here.

Once the door was closed—and it had quite the seal on it, almost airtight—Loch flicked on the light switch; there were no windows this far belowground to betray them. The bare bulbs lighting up the cement stairs down and the room beyond were painful after the darkness of the basement proper.

“Right,” Loch said out loud, his voice making her jump. “We might be living in the digital future, but when Oakhurst was founded, it was all paper. We know there are paper records on former students here as well as the Tithed ones. At some point, probably early, they had to start sending the students that didn’t have magic to the—well, call it the ‘Shadow Oakhurst.’ So we should start finding records of students transferred if such a thing exists.”

“And if it does?” Spirit asked. “What then?”

“Well, then we’ll know that every Legacy kid ends up
somewhere.
So if you had a brother or sister that didn’t have magic, they’d go there.”

“And?” Spirit prompted. “I mean, what then?”

This was where Loch fumbled to a halt. “I don’t know. Except that it means Doctor A. isn’t telling us everything.”

We already know that, Loch,
she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud.

“If there is such a thing, I suppose we ought to find out just what they’re telling those kids.” She stepped carefully down the wooden stairs and headed for the storage rooms, averting her eyes nervously from those
other
rooms.

She headed straight for a stack of dusty boxes that didn’t look as if they had been touched in decades, while Loch dove into the filing cabinets where they had found the records of the “Tithed.”

She leafed through cartons of what looked like old tourist brochures and real estate magazines for a while, then glanced over at Loch, who was studying something in a folder.

He’s really sweet,
she thought, out of nowhere.
And cute. Really cute.
She remembered how nice he’d been to her in the limousine, and then in the plane on the way here. Of all of them, he was the one that seemed closest to her in a lot of ways. Addie was always distant, Muirin had a slightly sadistic side, and Burke—Burke was nice, but she couldn’t tell what it was he really wanted from her, and he never, ever seemed vulnerable, not even when they were all in deadly danger. Burke was fearless; confessing her fears to him made her feel awkward and useless. Loch, on the other hand, was someone she could probably talk to about anything. He never seemed to have a problem with admitting he didn’t know something, or asking for help. She couldn’t even begin to imagine Burke doing that.

And like her, he didn’t have anyone out there, either. Burke still had his foster family. The existence of that family was almost like a wall between them, because she envied him that more than she could ever admit.

“Ugh,” Loch said suddenly, in a voice full of distaste. “They used to have a hunting club here.”

“Like horses and chasing foxes?” she hazarded.

“Like guns and shooting down anything that moved,” he replied. “I’m glad
that
stopped anyway.”

“Why don’t you like guns?” she asked, hesitating a moment before she asked the question. “I thought it was a guy thing.”

“Not this guy.” Silence fell between them for a moment, and Spirit figured that was the end of the subject until he coughed. She looked back up again. He was staring bleakly down at the files.

“I was at Carnarvon Academy,” he said, as if he thought she would recognize the name. Then he added, “It’s a prep school in Massachusetts. This was before I learned
parkour
and how to get away from the bullies. There was another guy, David, he was kind of my friend, because we both got bullied about the same amount. It got to him more than it got to me, I guess. I wish I’d known at the time how much it was getting to him.”

He fell silent for a very long time. “One day … one day he dragged me into his room and said he was going to make it stop. For good. He’d got hold of a handgun somehow, I never found out how. I don’t know if he managed to get off-campus and buy it, or stole it from his parents over break, or found it somewhere.…” His voice trailed off for a moment. “Anyway, he showed it to me. Said he was going to wait until the ringleaders were all at lunch and come in and shoot them. I tried to talk him out of it.”

Spirit
knew
, right then, that this was not going to have any kind of a good ending.

“Everything I said just seemed to make things worse.” Loch shook his head heavily, as if there was a weight settling all over him. His voice grew hoarser, as if he was trying to hold back emotion. “I kept trying to tell him that, at best, he was just going to hurt someone and go to jail, and at worst, he’d kill someone and end up getting the death penalty or getting gunned down himself by the cops. He kept telling me he didn’t care, that anything was better than trying to live like we were, and finally he said”—Loch’s voice broke a little—“he said since I cared so much about
them
and so little about
him
there was no reason for him to go on anymore, and he put the gun in his mouth and—”

The silence pressed down on both of them like lead. She didn’t know how to break it. “I’m sorry,” just wasn’t adequate.

Loch slammed the cabinet drawer closed. “So that’s why I don’t like guns.”

He looked up, and she nodded a little, trying to look as sympathetic as she could. She didn’t feel as if she dared say anything.

*   *   *

They leafed through files and boxes until almost three in the morning, and the only thing that seemed worth looking into was something Spirit found in a box half full of what looked like old receipts. It was a pile of identical leather-bound scrapbooks, each with gold tooling, an elaborate monogram, and a picture of the house inset on the front cover. Just paging through the first couple, Spirit quickly realized that they were older than anything she had ever seen about Oakhurst—that they dated from the time the first stone had been laid here. In fact, as she deciphered a couple of handwritten notes, it looked as if these were scrapbooks put together by the original owner. As far as she could tell, he had documented every step of the construction, and then went on to collect every mention of it he could lay his hands on. In later volumes there were society columns from as far away as Chicago mentioning parties here, and the menus and guest lists from those parties, photographs of people posing stiffly on horseback or with guns or in clunky-looking masquerade costumes.