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. “Crazier.”
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…”
Thanks to all the research they had done, Spirit knew what he was talking about, and—hadn’t those marks on the oak tree looked a bit like ogham? “I noticed something I hadn’t before. Two things, actually. You know the big oak tree the Entry Hall is built around?”
“You mean the Christmas—” Burke began, then blinked, looking puzzled. “Now why would I think that? Especially when you said ‘oak tree’…”
“That’s my point exactly!” Spirit said, excitedly. “What I noticed was that there’s something about the oak tree—it’s hard to remember it’s there even though it takes up tons of space!”
Both Addie and Muirin shook their heads, not as if they were saying “no,” but as if they were trying to shake something loose. “Okay. That is weird,” Muirin admitted grudgingly. “Really, really weird.”
“And wrong,” Addie said firmly. “Why would anyone here want us to not look at the tree? Why not just wall it up or plaster it over or something in that case?”
“I don’t know, but I decided that if something or someone didn’t want me looking at the tree closely, then I was going to.” At least now she had their attention. “There wasn’t anyone around, so I went up to it and stared at it for a while. There’s marks on it, and they didn’t look natural to me. But it was hard to make them out, and there was more weirdness, because right after I left the room I couldn’t remember them well enough to try and sketch them.”
Burke mulled that over for a moment. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to go and stare at it,” he said, eying her as if he expected her to object. “I mean, if by some crazy chance you’re right, and there still is someone here after the kids—us—you never know how they could be watching.”
Spirit tried not to bristle at the if by some crazy chance part. “Well, how can we get a good look at it then?”
“Actually, I think I can,” Addie piped up unexpectedly. “My Art Class is supposed to be doing sketches around Oakhurst all vacation. I can sketch the tree. I bet no one else is.”
Spirit felt a chill of alarm at the idea of Addie sitting alone in that room, sketching something that had deliberately been protected in some way. What if someone saw her?
Addie must have read what Spirit was thinking from her expression. “Relax,” she said, with a little chuckle. “I’ll keep our sketch hidden by using an onionskin overlay. I’ll sketch the tree without the marks, and then draw the marks on a piece of onionskin that I can hide easily. And I won’t just draw the oak, I’ll draw the Christmas tree, the fireplace, and the Grand Staircase, too.”
Well, that seemed safe enough. “Thanks, Addie,” she said with relief. “I should know by now you’re too smart to get into trouble.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Addie demurred, but Spirit could tell she was pleased at being called “smart.” “You can all make it up to me by actually playing this game instead of faking it.”
* * *
For the last three years, Elizabeth Walker had wavered between thinking she had a really vivid imagination, and thinking she was going crazy. But it wasn’t the kind of crazy she could actually talk to anyone about. She wasn’t anorexic, she didn’t want to cut herself … no, the problem was, since the morning of her thirteenth birthday … she’d been remembering.
It had all started with a bang; she’d woken up from a dream so vivid she’d expected to find herself in a stone-walled room, looking out of a narrow little window that had no glass in it toward a harbor and the sea beyond. But the ships in the harbor—in her dream—bore no resemblance to anything she knew; they were all boats with sails. Not sleek racing yachts, but rough and wooden things like something from a movie about Vikings. The harbor itself was little more than a rocky cove with a single wooden pier.
Her head was weighed down by the two thick braids that hung as far as her knees. She could feel the stones of the floor through her thin leather slippers. And the dress she’d been wearing had been impossibly heavy, made of thick wool—she somehow knew—and trailing down to the ground.
She’d felt … older. In her dream, her body felt foreign to her in ways she didn’t have the words to describe, but that were very confusing. She’d ached for things she couldn’t put a name to, which was why she was looking out the window. Waiting for someone. Longing for someone.
Behind her, there’d been someone moving. She didn’t want to turn to look. Her body—the person she’d been in her dream—didn’t like the person behind her, the person in the bed she’d risen from at the first rays of dawn.
The person behind her said something. It was as if he spoke a foreign language: Elizabeth recognized only one word. Yseult. Her dream-body turned, knowing this was her name.
That was when she woke up.
She’d been almost as confused on waking as she’d been in the dream. Her pink canopy bed, her pink and cream bedroom, the dolls and bears she knew she was outgrowing but couldn’t quite bear to be rid of—these all seemed strange, alien, wrong.
She’d shaken her head, and then everything settled back into place. The room was hers, of course, and whatever she had dreamed about was, of course, nothing but a dream. She thought about telling someone, because her parents would praise her imagination and her friends would all get a big laugh out of it, but something held her back.
It was the first dream. The first memory. But it was by no means the last.
After that, the dreams came more and more frequently. Soon they filled all night, every night—all of her sleeping hours. They were as consistent as if they weren’t dreams, but a biography, and eventually, fearfully, Elizabeth Walker came to realize that this was what they actually were. A biography. The life of someone she had once been.
Except, of course, that was impossible. There was no way she could’ve been a sorceress named Yseult. She could not possibly have helped to create magic armor and weapons for her uncle, a giant of a man named Morholt. She couldn’t have spent her days learning magic and healing from the Queen. Magic didn’t exist. This was some amazing—terrifying—fantasy created from far too many viewings of Lord of the Rings … though the castle Yseult—her dream-self—lived in didn’t look much like the Elven castles of the Rings movies, and only a little like the ones the Riders of Rohan lived in. It was wood and stone and shockingly—to Elizabeth’s eyes—small, though Yseult thought of it with pride and satisfaction, because all the floors were stone instead of being dirt on the ground floor, and because she and her parents had rooms of their own and didn’t have to sleep in the big main room—the hall—with everyone else.
That she was actually dreaming about a time she knew nothing about—and had lived before, lived then—was impossible, but that magic was real was even more impossible. Or so she’d thought as she lived a double life, growing up as Elizabeth by day, living as Yseult by night. Although Yseult knew and did things that Elizabeth had not even in her wildest waking thoughts imagined—
—things that involved a man named Tristan, and Elizabeth grew to love him as much as Yseult did. So many mornings she woke up and started to cry, because Tristan wasn’t real any more than Yseult was, but Tristan was everything she could ever want in a boyfriend: he was handsome, and kind, and smart, and he loved …
Yseult. Tristan loves Yseult, not me. And he isn’t even real!
The things they did made her blush when she thought of them, even though she knew about them from movies and television she wasn’t supposed to watch. And the last time she’d slept over at Marcie’s house, Marcie’d had an actual DVD with real sex in it, and they’d all watched it, muffling their giggles and squeaks behind their hands. But Elizabeth had thought (privately) that the DVD had been kind of, well, gross. Not at all like what Tristan and Yseult did—when they could get some privacy, because Yseult’s castle didn’t have a lot of that.
She kept having to remind herself they weren’t real. Sure, sometimes she thought she was going crazy. But it wasn’t as if she was seeing things when she was awake. And it wasn’t as if she believed in all the magic she—Yseult—was doing in those dreams. She had a good imagination, that was all. She began to think about writing her dream-life down as a story, and maybe it would be good enough to get published, like the boy with the dragon books had been.
And that was the way her life went while she turned fourteen, and fifteen, and sixteen. She never told anybody that she didn’t dream about anything but Yseult’s life, but she didn’t think of herself as keeping bad secrets. Who did her dreams hurt, anyway? Nothing in them was really real, any more than magic was really real.
That was what she’d believed right up until three months ago.
September, and she was a junior, and head of the Cheer Squad for the Junior Varsity football team. They’d all been at the game when Terry Bishop, who looked a little like Tristan in the right light, jumped for the ball and got clotheslined, and there was an awful snapping sound, and he screamed.
She got there first, even before the coach, and she still didn’t know how because she didn’t remember moving. Terry’s leg and knee were lying all wrong, and before anyone got there to stop her, Elizabeth put her hands on them, and did what Yseult had been doing in Elizabeth’s dreams for months.
With a weird snap, the bones went back the way they belonged, and she felt a rush of something pouring out of her and into Terry. So much something poured out of her that she nearly passed out, and she hardly noticed when the coach and everybody else shoved her aside and told her to get back to the sidelines with the rest of Cheer Squad. She stumbled back to the sidelines, and she must have looked really wrecked, because Marcie told her she probably shouldn’t do any of the stunts, and Elizabeth knew better than to try when she felt so awful. She sat through the rest of the game in a daze, then went straight home instead of going to the after-game party, and when she woke up the next morning she discovered she hadn’t even taken her shoes off before collapsing on top of her bedspread and pretty much passing out. Mom had a few careful words to say to her at breakfast about drugs, and how she wasn’t going to preach but she hoped Elizabeth would tell her if she’d decided to experiment because a lot of them were a lot more dangerous than alcohol, and Elizabeth had stumbled through an explanation about the game and seeing Terry get hurt. At least that explained her behavior.
The game was Friday, and normally she’d have had to wait until Monday to find out anything, but Marcie’s older sister was dating Terry’s best friend, so it only took Elizabeth one phone call to find out that Terry’d wrenched his knee and he’d be out for a couple games but not the season. That certainly didn’t match Elizabeth’s memory of a leg broken in at least three pieces, with the ends of the bone pushing against the skin and threatening to break through. She spent the rest of the day trying to convince herself that Daphne and Marcie were right—just a sprain—and she hadn’t seen—or felt—what she knew she had. And when she tried, it seemed as if she could hear Yseult’s laughter in her mind, affectionately mocking her attempts to blind herself to the truth.
So if the magic was real … were the dreams?
She wasn’t ready to admit that. Not yet.
She began to experiment, using ideas taken from books she’d read, fantasies where magic was real.
Lighting a candle: easy. Seeing through the eyes of a bird: piece of cake. Putting magic into an object …
There was this girl at school who Elizabeth felt kind of exasperated with and sorry for at the same time. Janine was nice enough, but she’d gotten mixed up with this guy who controlled practically every moment of her life. She stayed with Tommy because he said he loved her—and she said she loved him even after she ended up in the hospital and had to stay for three days. She told everybody she’d “fallen down the stairs”—but everyone who knew Tommy knew what had really happened to put Janine into the hospital.
So Elizabeth decided she was going to do something about it. The magic that made people change their minds about things was pretty much always the same—according to the books—you just varied what you wanted them to do. Elizabeth swiped Janine’s sunglasses; they were expensive designer ones, but besides that, the girl had to wear them sometimes to hide her dark circles and even an occasional black eye. She returned them the next day—enchanted. “See him the way we see him,” was the enchantment she’d put on them—appropriate for a pair of glasses!
It worked better than she had ever dreamed it would. The next day Tommy was in jail on assault charges, and Janine was wondering aloud what she’d ever seen in him.
But Elizabeth’s triumph was short-lived. Because after that, she started seeing things—while she was awake.
At first it was just out of the corner of her eye. Something moving impossibly fast, something that wasn’t there when she turned her head to look at it. Eyes in shadows.
But then she started seeing them clearly, in daylight.
They never showed up except when she was alone—when she was walking back from school was the first time she saw one by daylight. She had turned a corner, and realized the street was deserted, and too, too quiet. And there he was, standing in a challenging pose in the middle of the sidewalk, as if daring her to pass. A black blot that seemed to absorb all the sunlight, staring at her—he didn’t wear the black-washed armor and helm of her dreams, but she knew him, knew what he was, as he stared at her from beneath the brim of a black hat, black trench coat down to his ankles, open to the breeze, and showing black jeans and a tight black tee.
She froze like a scared baby bunny.
Then a little mob of grade school kids came around the corner, laughing and shrieking, and she turned involuntarily. And when she looked back, he was gone.
He—they—were something she remembered from her dreams, the menacing Knights of the Shadow.
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.”