Shadow Grail #2: Conspiracies (23 page)

“But—do you think the people from Breakthrough might know about it?” she asked, feeling desperation clutching at her throat. “I mean, they’d have to, they’d have to protect both schools, right?”

“I’m not part of the Inner Circle, or whatever they call themselves, probably because I didn’t go to Oakhurst myself,” Doc Mac replied with a wry twist to his mouth. “But trust me, they’ve dropped everything to come here, and they aren’t dividing their time and attention three ways. Only two. Mark Rider has already effectively moved
his
part of the Breakthrough headquarters here; they’re only waiting on building construction. There is no second Oakhurst, I’m sorry. You and Burke are going to have to cope with the fact that you are here to stay—or at least, until you graduate.”

Spirit somehow managed to make coherent conversation until her hour was up. He let her out, and let another student in. She headed for the lounge, where Addie and Loch had been listening to her session.

“I recorded this,” Loch said. “I want Burke to hear it.”

Spirit nodded, and combed her fingers through her hair distractedly. “I’m not sure what this means.”

“If our parents went to Oakhurst, they had to be magicians. But if they
were
magicians, there is no damn reason why they should be dead,” Addie said angrily. “Yours—car wreck—
every
School teaches ways you could keep yourself and your family safe in a situation like that. Mine, plane crash. Same thing there. Loch—”

“My mother died in a riding accident when I was a kid. Maybe
she
was the Legacy and not Father. But if she wasn’t, I can’t think of any School that wouldn’t have some way to get out of a fire,” Loch said bluntly. “I mean,
I
got out, and I didn’t even know I
had
magic! Now I do, and I know it wasn’t just dumb luck and
parkour,
but
parkour
and magic that did it.”

“So we have three sets of supposed Legacy parents who could not possibly be dead if they really were magicians,” said Addie, and Spirit realized Addie—calm, quiet,
gentle
Addie—was more furious than Spirit had ever imagined she could be. “And there’s no mirror-Oakhurst for ordinary people to go to. Which means—”

“We were lied to. We aren’t Legacies at all.” Spirit bit her lip. “So … how did we end up here?”

“We’re here because Oakhurst is
looking
for kids with magic, and is somehow diddling with records to get themselves named our wards,” Loch said immediately. “In a lot of states that wouldn’t even be a problem. They’re an institution with no black marks against them, orphans are a drain on the state. Most states would be happy to turn us over, no questions asked.”

“Even those of us with
money,
” Addie said, her eyes flashing dangerously. “Because our Trusts have to put us somewhere. Why not here?”

“Please don’t call me a ‘conspiracy theory nut’ again,” Spirit begged. “But … is it possible that
because
we have magic, that’s why our families … died? Like … whatever sent the Hunt is trying to kill us off, and got our families, but not us?” That horrifying figure on the road loomed up again in her memory.

“Or maybe it’s our magic that saves us. I know it was in my case,” Loch said thoughtfully. “Given what we know now … that’s not all that crazy, Spirit.”

“My turn to sound like a nut bar,” Addie said, slowly. “We know there’s someone here trying to kill off the students. What if that same person is the one that found us in the first place, tried to kill us
then,
and got our families instead? Because our families didn’t have magic to protect them?”

Vindication should have been sweet. Spirit realized vindication meant having to tell her only friends their families had been murdered because of what they were. Vindication wasn’t sweet. It hurt.

“That’s not nutty, Addie,” Spirit replied, wrapping a twist of her hair around and around her finger nervously. “Take that a step further. What if that person already knew, because they’ve done it so many times already, that they couldn’t kill
us
at a distance, so they killed our families, knowing we’d be brought
here,
where it would be easy to get us?”

“Argh,” Addie replied, knuckling her temples. “I wish that didn’t sound so logical! It fits what we know too well!”

“And why didn’t Doctor Ambrosius tell us the truth about our families in the first place?” Loch frowned. “Because he
had
to know it. And I don’t think he’s the type to spare our feelings, either. Hell, if anything, he’d use the guilt. You know: ‘Your families died because Dark Powers were trying to get to you, now you have to train to become the Great and Powerful Oz and avenge them!’”

Both Addie and Spirit nodded. “That does sound more like his speed,” Addie agreed.

Then they all looked at each other. “He might not know…,” Spirit said, slowly.

It was Loch who addressed the elephant in the room. “Or he might be the one behind it.”

If that was true, Spirit thought they’d better be praying Doctor Ambrosius really had gone senile.

FOURTEEN

One of the mandatory new classes was horseback riding. But not just any old trail riding, the way the old class had been—this was endurance riding. It was something like a human marathon—assuming the humans were running, not on streets and roads, but on unimproved land, through any kind of weather, and over marked obstacles known as hazards that were parts of a course as extreme as the terrain allowed. In Montana, even this flatter part of it, that could be very extreme indeed. It even required a special lightweight saddle with a breastplate that kept the saddle from sliding backward when the horse was scrambling up steep inclines. In competition—because to Spirit’s astonishment, this was actually a
sport
—the races were fifty and one hundred miles long. They weren’t doing that—yet. They were doing shorter distances, the kind of riding called “competitive trail riding,” which sounded so … well, nice. “Oh, let’s get on the horse and ride a trail and see who gets there first!”

Wrong.

These were ten-mile rides. They all started together. Beforehand, they had to kit up the horse as if they were going to end up making camp at the other end, which meant
everything
for the camp and the horse had to be on the horse. The more stuff you thought you needed, the more the horse had to carry … and so on. And what the horse had to go over, under, and through meant that at any moment you might be trotting, off the horse and walking, or helping the horse to get over something. Or swimming—though this was winter, so the water they’d had to cross was all frozen right now. What the point of this was (aside from, to make you feel as if you had been beaten from head to toe at the end of the ride) Spirit didn’t know.

She, who had never ridden until she got here, had at least discovered that she had what the new riding instructor, Mia Singleton, said was “a natural seat.” That at least meant she could stay on the horse and manage to get in rhythm with it so she didn’t get pounded to death. It didn’t mean that she had any idea of how to handle this huge thing, and she always had the feeling that the horses she got took one look at her and started snickering about how they were going to make her miserable.

At least Addie was in her class, and Loch. Loch was good enough, but Addie had ridden all her life; she’d stick to Spirit like a burr and make sure the horse didn’t run off with her, or stop and not move at all.

“What’s the point of all this?” she asked Addie in despair, as she fumbled with all the gear that was supposed to go on the monster. “Do they really think we’re going to be charging at the Dark Lord on horses, and when we’re done, camp on the battlefield?”

“We might have to run for it, and there aren’t exactly a lot of cars at Oakhurst,” Addie pointed out somberly. “At least this way we’ve got a chance of getting away and surviving to get to a rally point.”

“Oh. Um,” Spirit replied, shivering with both cold and apprehension. Apprehension, because she had the feeling that if it ever did come to that—she’d die.

“Don’t worry, Spirit,” Addie told her. “If it comes to that, I’ll be right with you.”

They didn’t have any chance to say anything more, since Ms. Singleton showed up and started her inspections. When everyone had everything loaded to her satisfaction, she whistled shrilly as the sign to mount up, opened the stable doors, and waited for them to line up at the “start.”

Ms. Singleton didn’t talk much, and generally in as few words as possible. Skinny, tough, hair cut short—if she’d had tattoos, she would have looked like a girl gangbanger. But on the rare occasions she did open her mouth, out came perfect English with a cultured accent. Spirit had never seen her outside of the gym or the barn. She couldn’t help but wonder what it was that Ms. Singleton did for Breakthrough. It was obvious why she was here, though; like the others, she had an Oakhurst ring. Horses would do
anything
for her—though truth to tell it seemed more a matter of control than because they wanted to. From what Spirit knew at this point, this was one of the things Earth Mages did—Animal Control, rather than Animal Speech. Coercion rather than cooperation. That seemed to fit Ms. Singleton.

When the kids were lined up—eight of them, including Spirit and Addie—Ms. Singleton whistled again, circling her hand above her head three times and pointing down the trail. They all dug heels into their horses’ flanks and started. Most with more success than Spirit, whose horse snorted and stood there, until Addie came alongside, leaned over and gave him a sharp smack on his butt. Then he lunged forward.

This wasn’t a horse she’d had before, and he settled quickly into a very hard trot. Fortunately that “natural seat” thing came in to save her. When he figured out he wasn’t going to bounce her off, he snorted and eased into something a little less bone-jarring. By that time they were at least a mile from the school. The others were all several hundred feet ahead of her. Loch turned to see where she was, and pulled his horse to a complete stop, waiting for them.

“Smack him, Spirit!” Addie called over her shoulder. “Or—wait, this is Pendleton I’m on. I’ll fix your mount for you. Pendleton does hate laggards.”

Addie wheeled around and came in behind Spirit. Her brown horse (they were all brown, Addie called them by different color names—bay, chestnut, whatever—but they were all brown to Spirit) laid his ears back, and Spirit could have sworn he looked gleeful. He rolled his eyes, snaked out his head, and before Spirit could react, all she could see was a set of big yellow teeth heading straight for her horse’s butt.

They connected.

Her horse squealed and lurched forward into a gallop. Pendleton kept pace with him, and whenever he threatened to slow down, those teeth headed for him again. When they caught up to the rest, Addie somehow managed to steer her horse away far enough that he couldn’t bite Spirit’s, but kept him within “threat” distance. Loch joined them, so that he and Addie bracketed Spirit’s horse. Now the only direction he could go was forward. He put his ears back. He was not happy. Well, neither was Spirit; she was already sore, her nose was freezing off, and they weren’t even halfway done yet.

Now they were about two miles from Oakhurst, and outside the “safe” area. Oakhurst was just a dark smear on the horizon. And ahead of them was the first hazard, a big, deep gully with steep, crumbling sides and ice at the bottom. A broad swath of it was marked out with a pair of red flags; that was where they were
supposed
to cross and they got marked down if they didn’t. Given the competitive spirit at Oakhurst it was a bet that if anyone cheated, three others would tell on him.

But before they reached the gully, a distant whine of motors and plumes of snow to the right warned Spirit—and everyone else—that they weren’t alone out here.

Oh hell, it’s Saturday …

Which meant no school for the kids in Radial.

Sure enough, as the small horde of snowmobiles headed in their direction, it looked like all the drivers were teenagers. The horses were going to hate this.

Whooping and shrieking, the Radial kids buzzed the horses, circling them and forcing them to crowd together, bucking and shying. Spirit’s horse backed into Addie’s, who didn’t snap at him this time. Addie was holding him steady, but his eyes showed whites all around, and he was trampling the snow in tight little steps. Spirit’s horse bounced stiff-legged; she tried to hold him in and soothe him at the same time, and it wasn’t working—

And that was when the sky suddenly darkened. Out of nowhere, huge black clouds just boiled up and covered the entire sky. The kids on the snowmobiles started looking around, startled. The horses all went rigid.

A sound like thunder came out of the gully. Except it wasn’t thunder. It was the hooves of more horses, twenty or thirty, that came boiling up the steep slope out of the gully as easily as if it was level ground. There were riders on those horses, in gray hooded parkas with gray scarves over their faces.
They
circled the Oakhurst kids and the snowmobiles both, and as soon as the circle was complete, a wall of wailing wind and snow sprang up behind them, cutting them all off from the rest of the world.

And then they turned their powers loose inside that confined space.

Spirit was caught in a maelstrom of screaming horses, screaming kids, wind, ice, fire, and shadow. The earth under them shook and heaved. She saw things—when she could see at all!—that couldn’t possibly be there. Horses bucked, bit, kicked. Snowmobiles careened into the horses. One kid in Oakhurst colors got plucked off his horse before her eyes and thrown about twenty feet into the air; she didn’t see where he landed. She was battered, cut by flying shards of ice as sharp as razor blades, and all she could think of to do was to get as far down on her horse’s neck as she could and cling for dear life while he reared and bucked and screamed. If the others were getting their powers to work,
she
couldn’t tell. She was crying and screaming with terror herself; she felt blood running down her face from a cut over one eye, and something hit her in the back hard enough to knock all the breath out of her. She started to feel herself falling, hung on tighter. Something smacked her in the head and she saw stars.

This is it,
she thought, in a single moment of fear-sharpened clarity.
This is where I die—

Then … it stopped.

The wind dropped to nothing. Her horse, exhausted, stopped bucking and stood there trembling. She looked up.

The circle of gray-clad riders was still there, watching them under a cloud-laden sky that looked like a blizzard was about to cut loose any second. Then, as one, they turned away, rode down into the gully again—

And disappeared.

Spirit looked wildly around her. All the snowmobiles were stopped, turned over, one was wrecked with its driver still in it, and from the way he was lying …

Oh my God—he’s dead.…

People were lying all around, bleeding, with arms and legs going in directions that they shouldn’t, screaming, moaning. The kid who Spirit had seen thrown into the air wasn’t moving, either. She spotted Addie, still miraculously ahorse, with a black eye. She looked frantically for Loch, and saw him on the ground, curled in a ball with both his hands over the back of his neck. She jumped down out of the saddle and ran to him.

“Loch? Loch!” As she went down on her knees next to him, she was suddenly afraid to touch him. “How are you hurt? Where? How badly!”

He moaned, and rolled over onto his back. His eyes were unfocused, and one of his pupils was bigger than the other. “Head,” he said. “Hurts. Dizzy.”

“I’m going for help!” Addie called, and dug her heels abruptly into her horse’s flanks, sending him in a gallop toward the blur on the horizon that was the school.

“Don’t pass out,” Spirit urged Loch. “I’ll be back.” She began methodically checking on the others.

She might not have magic, but at least she had first aid.

*   *   *

“My God,” Muirin said, her eyes wide and her face blank with disbelief. “One townie dead, three of us…” For once she had nothing snide, catty, or amusing to say. “I—I’ve got nothing.”

“Stitches, concussions, broken bones…” Burke shook his head. “I should have been there.”

Loch blinked at them all groggily; he’d been concussed and had a cracked collarbone. Spirit had eleven stitches in the cut across her forehead and another fifteen in one across her scalp that she hadn’t even felt till they got back to Oakhurst, and
they’d
gotten off lucky. Addie was in a sling: a torsion fracture of her left arm. As for the rest, aside from the four dead, there were broken arms and legs, concussions, and lacerations enough to fill the tiny Radial emergency room twice over. But, of course, only the townies had gone there, in a fleet of vans supplied by Mark Rider and the town’s two ambulances. All the Oakhurst kids had come straight to the Oakhurst Infirmary. It wouldn’t do to have the townies see Earth Mages healing people by magic.

Besides their own Mages, Mark also seemed to have his own group of three people that could just do that—plus Madison, who made four.

Now most of the injured were resting and recovering in their own rooms. Spirit’s cuts were half healed already. She had no idea what story Mark had told the townies about what had happened—but she
had
seen Ms. Singleton going from one stretcher to another, briefly putting her hand on the occupant’s head, muttering something. She had no doubt that Mark’s story had replaced whatever the kids themselves had seen. She had a guess that animals weren’t the only things Ms. Singleton could control.

“If that’s what a mage-battle is like,” Loch said thickly, “we are seriously outclassed. I couldn’t even get myself organized before the horse threw me, and all I could do was try and protect myself.”

“Well, I was about as much use as a beach ball,” Spirit replied, wincing a little as the cut on her head pulled and hurt. It would be fully healed by morning, but with so many injured, the Healing Mages had been forced to ration their power. “How do you fight stuff like that?”

“I should have been there,” Burke muttered again, looking guilty and worried.

Muirin fiddled with her ring and with the snake-bracelet on her wrist. “All right, there’s an elephant in the room, and I’m going to talk about it,” she said. “The Gatekeepers. Mark Rider’s group. Would joining them be so bad? I mean, I know Dylan’s being scouted for it and you guys don’t like him, but if the alternative is what just happened? Come on! At least they know what they’re doing!”

“We can’t choose a side until we know what’s going on,” Burke insisted stubbornly. “Muirin, I know you don’t want to hear it, but so far … well, we don’t know anything about them, except that they’re rich and Oakhurst Alumns. But we
do
know that the people who attacked Spirit and Loch and Addie were Oakhurst Alumns, too.”

“So the Gatekeepers are also the Shadow Knights?” She rolled her eyes. “Oh come on!”

“The point is not that they are, or that
only some
of them might be, but that we don’t know!” Burke said earnestly. “Do you see the difference?”