EIGHT
Spirit was normally pretty indifferent about math; she didn’t like it, but she didn’t hate it, either. Right now, though, she would have been a whole lot happier if there’d been more equations on the worksheet on the desk in front of her, because she knew what was going to happen, as soon as Ms. Smith finished going over the last of them—
“Very good. Does anyone have any questions?” she asked. Spirit glanced at her watch covertly and wanted to groan. There was a bit more than half an hour to go in the class. Ms. Smith smiled brightly when no one raised a hand. “All right then. How are you all holding up? You know, as a fellow magician, I am here to help you with much more than just math. Mariana?”
Oh, she would pick Mariana …
“I … uh…” Mariana’s thin face started to crumple, and her voice got choked up. “I can’t sleep,” she whispered, hiding behind her fall of dark hair. “Even when I keep a light on…”
Ms. Smith got a handful of tissues from a box on her desk, as if she’d prepared for this. Which she probably had. It was incongruous; Ms. Smith looked like a super-efficient secretary, with her tightly tied-back hair and her Oakhurst uniform blazer. She didn’t look like a magician, and she didn’t look particularly … empathetic. She handed the tissues to Mariana. “That’s all right, I’m not at all surprised,” she said soothingly. “Why don’t you tell me about it? Maybe it will help.”
Strangely, Spirit seemed to be the only person in the class that found this scene acutely uncomfortable, disturbing, invasive. Ms. Smith leaned over Mariana slightly, not touching her, but really getting into the girl’s personal space. “Every time I start to fall asleep, I get so s-s-scared,” Mariana gulped, rubbing at her eyes with the tissues and smearing her eye makeup. “It’s like I can feel it starting all over again. And when I do fall asleep, the nightmares…” She faltered, and took a shuddering breath.
“Is anyone else having nightmares?” Ms. Smith asked. She looked like she was enjoying this.
“The nightmares are the worst. I keep fighting something I can’t see,” said Taylor Parker, in a low voice, as if he was ashamed to admit he had nightmares, but couldn’t help talking. “It’s—it’s dark, and there’s something that keeps grabbing at me and hitting me, like in blind randori. Only it’s not practice and I’m not blindfolded and every time it hits me it slices into me so fast I don’t even feel it until I look down and I’m bleeding from all these slices—”
“I’m running, I’m back at home and I’m running,” sobbed Mariana. “I’m trying to get to my house, but the street keeps changing and there’s something behind me, and I know if I turn around to look at it, I’m going to die!”
“I’m here at school in my dreams, but my brother’s here, too.” That was Andrew Hayes, and although his voice was steady, his face was so bleak Spirit didn’t even want to look at him. Of course, just like the rest of them, Andrew’s family was dead.… “There’s this thing after him, this huge, shadowy thing, and I’m trying to get to him to save him, only I can’t!”
One by one, Ms. Smith got them to tell her their nightmares. Even Spirit—though Spirit lied. She just buried her face in her hands and mumbled something about dark and evil eyes. She didn’t think it would be a good idea to stand out by not talking.
This had been going on for days now. Only about half of the class was spent on math. The other half was Ms. Smith and her not-exactly-interrogations. This was the first time she’d grilled them about their nightmares, though, and actually, this was the first time Spirit had heard that practically everyone was having them. If it hadn’t been that Spirit’s mom had taught her lucid dreaming back when she was a little kid and having night terrors, she’d probably be having them, too. But she wondered if Burke and the others were having the same problem. I could ask Loch. He’ll tell me, even if the others don’t.
Most of the time, Ms. Smith had been asking about the night of the dance, getting not only what everyone had experienced, but what they’d been doing and thinking before the lights went out. Definitely creepy … extracting details from the kids that Spirit was pretty sure they’d had no intention of telling any teacher. The sort of stuff you might put on your blog, for your friends, but not for anyone else. Certainly not for anyone old.
Spirit couldn’t figure out how Ms. Smith was doing it. Was it magic? Or was it just that she was really, really good at getting things out of people? At least there was only five minutes more of this before class change.
Is she like this with all her classes? Spirit wondered. Or is it just this one? She had thought about asking Addie or Loch, but … no, better wait. If she started acting suspicious of Ms. Smith without any reason except that—well, on the surface, it looked as if the teacher was actually trying to help everyone, and they might think she was being paranoid again.
Just a few more minutes …
Ms. Smith handed Mariana another wad of tissues and went back to her desk. “I don’t want any of you to think that we’re making light of this,” she said, raking her eyes over the whole class. “You’ve all had a nasty shock, and Dr. MacKenzie is of the opinion that this has brought up a great many things that were buried. I’m sure you’re all familiar with post-traumatic stress, right?” She looked them over again, and wasn’t satisfied until she’d seen each of them nod. “Dr. MacKenzie wants each of you to have at least one session with him. He wants to evaluate whether you’re going to get through this on your own, or need some extra help.”
Spirit repressed a groan, and she was pretty sure she heard muffled sighs and moans from some of the others, too. Another shrink … she’d had her fill of shrinks at the hospital. If she had her way, she’d never see another shrink again. She didn’t even know what this “Dr. MacKenzie” looked like; in the months she’d been here, she’d never seen him, not even at meals or the dances. Or at least, if she had, she hadn’t known who he was.
“I’ve got your assigned times right here,” Ms. Smith said, in that tone of voice that pretty much made it clear there was no point in arguing with her. She began handing out little envelopes, and Spirit took hers with a sinking heart. From the looks on the faces of some of the others, they felt the same.
* * *
From the buzz at supper, it looked like, sure enough, everyone had gotten the appointments. Some people were actually happy about it; Mariana for one. She really was in bad shape, her voice had a shrill edge that carried right across the Refectory. “Maybe he can give me something so I can sleep,” she was saying, and it was true that she did look pretty awful, big dark circles under her eyes, and her eyes red from crying, lack of sleep, or both. Austin Phillips, who was at her table, smirked. “If we’re going to get drugs out of this, it might not be all bad,” he said, loud enough that other kids smirked or frowned or looked embarrassed, as if that was something they’d thought but hadn’t said out loud.
Muirin was one of the ones who smirked. “Let’s see,” she said in a quiet, mocking tone. “What drug would I like to get? Something fun, not a downer like Prozac.”
“Don’t joke about that,” Addie said crossly, cutting her meat with a lot more energy than the ham warranted. “It’s not funny.”
“Why not? What put a burr up your butt?” Muirin asked.
Addie put her silverware down on the table with a clatter. “It’s not funny because the Trust decided I needed to see a shrink before I came here—and he put me on so much Prozac I was a zombie, that’s why!” she hissed angrily. “I didn’t have two clear thoughts in a row until I got here and they took me off it.”
Spirit started to say something sympathetic, but Muirin just shrugged. “So you should have done what I did, and either flush the pills or throw them up if it was something I didn’t want to take. Seriously, Addie, lighten up. If you don’t want to game the system, fine. But don’t get all self-righteous about it.”
Addie’s jaw clenched, but she didn’t retort. The rest of the meal was passed in unusual silence, and as soon as Austin got up from his table, Muirin gulped down the last of her dessert and went to join him.
Burke patted Addie’s hand. “Don’t worry,” he said soothingly. “Doc Mac doesn’t like to prescribe drugs. He’s a magician, too, and he won’t give out anything that interferes with magic—which is most stuff.”
Addie relaxed a little. “I just worry about her, you know?” she said, looking into Burke’s eyes in a way that made Spirit feel a little uncomfortable twinge of jealousy. “She doesn’t think things through. What if we’re all drugged up and whatever it was that hit us does it again? A lot of stuff doesn’t just interfere with magic, it opens you wide up for anything—” She broke off. “I just don’t want to see Murr-cat hurt.”
“Well I saw Doc Mac for a while when I first got here, and he’s okay,” Burke said with confidence. “Muirin might think she can game him, but he’s pretty sharp. Serve her right if he decided what she needed was more time in the exercise room as therapy.”
Addie almost choked, and even Spirit and Loch found themselves grinning a little. Still, Spirit was not looking forward to her session. No matter what Burke said … Burke was far too inclined to think that everyone was okay until it was proven otherwise. When it came to shrinks, Spirit was going to assume that this “Doc Mac” was going to be just like all the rest. And the sooner she could get out of his office, the better she’d like it.
* * *
The morning of Spirit’s session with Doctor MacKenzie, she walked into the Refectory to the sound of conversational buzzing with the sort of edge to it that meant something had happened. She got cereal, yogurt, and fruit and hurried over to the usual table. Addie had been watching her, and gave her a little nod when she got close. As soon as she was sitting down, Addie leaned over and said in a low voice, “Mariana Thornton is gone.”
“Gone?” Spirit paused and put her spoon back down in her bowl. “What do you mean by gone?”
Addie looked over at Loch. “She wasn’t in her room this morning, her bed didn’t look like it had been slept in, which meant she went some time between dinner and lights out.” Loch shrugged. “So sayeth the word of Chat.”
Muirin plopped down in her usual chair with a stack of buttered toast that she proceeded to load up with preserves—even though they were the “no sugar added” kind. “And so sayeth the e-mail I got before I came down, Mariana was in such bad shape after supper that she was deemed in need of getting out of here and was sent away for a nice ‘rest.’ Presumably in a loony bin, and presumably so decided by good old Doc MacKenzie, since she saw him yesterday.” Muirin looked pensively at her toast. “Maybe I should have hysterics in front of him. Mother Dearest would have me put up in a really plush loony bin. You know, the kind with private rooms and ‘beauty therapy’ and massages. And satellite TV and chefs. No more conditioning classes, and real jelly on my toast, not mashed fruit pretending to be jelly.” She bit into the slice anyway. “And I hear if you’re cooperative, they reward you with chocolates.”
For a moment, Spirit herself was tempted. It would mean getting out of here … but then she remembered; it wouldn’t be a plush, resort-rest-home for her. She’d get dumped in one of those horrible places where they warehoused people, drugged them up like zombies, shoved them into tiny rooms with bunk beds, and locked them in at night. She swallowed hard, and drank a little milk to try and get the lump of fear out of her throat. No, there were places worse than Oakhurst.
And besides, at least here they believed in things like the Hunt. Out there—she’d have no protection from it. And if she tried to tell anyone about it, they’d think she was even crazier.
“What, now you want to flip out, and play right into your stepmother’s hands?” Loch asked, with a sarcastic edge to his voice. “I bet your Step would just love that. She could keep you in there forever, you know. All she has to do is pay the right shrinks to diagnose you as bipolar and a danger to yourself. You’d be locked in there and out of the old trust fund pretty darn quick.”
Muirin made a sour face. “That would be funnier if it were less true,” she admitted. “I have to stay alive and sane until twenty-one so I can wrestle her to the floor and take my inheritance. Stupid Trust.” She sighed dramatically. “Darn it, Loch, you’re right, she was looking for ways to cut me out when the Trust sent me here.”
“Hey, I know these things.” He shrugged. “The crap that went on with some of the guys I went to school with makes the Borgias look like the Family Channel.”
“Too true. Besides, I have to stab her in the back—metaphorically of course—and take back my castle. If I don’t, my robber-baron ancestors will probably show up to haunt me as a weak and cowardly branch of the family tree.”
“Do you think she was taken away?” Spirit asked Loch. “Mariana, I mean.” He actually thought about the question before he answered it, which he did just as Burke sat down.
“On the one hand, she’s been pretty much falling apart since New Year’s Eve,” Loch pointed out. “And face it, if we end up with another attack, she’d not only be no help, she’d be a liability. So yes, I can see her getting sent away. But on the other hand, unless she’s been sent to a facility that actually knows how to deal with psychologically disturbed magicians, sending her away from here is about the worst thing that Doctor Ambrosius could have done to her. And so far, no one has mentioned seeing the train go out, or the car going out to the airstrip. So…” He shrugged. “It’s possible that this is another cover-up. It’s not as if covering up disappearances is new around here.”
“I think the official story is the most likely,” Burke put in. “She was in pretty bad shape at dinner. She couldn’t even eat. I don’t know what the Doc said to her, but she looked like if you accidentally startled her, she’d fall to pieces right there.”
“Oh, way to go, Burke.” Loch rolled his eyes. “Make sure Spirit feels real good about seeing the shrink in fifteen minutes.”
Burke looked startled, then sheepish. Clearly, he had forgotten this. “Oh heck Spirit, I—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Spirit said shortly. She got up and forced a smile. “Hey, I get out of conditioning class this way.”
Muirin looked at her sourly as she walked away.
Doctor MacKenzie’s office was in the same part of the main building as the Infirmary, down a long hall with stone floors. It was creepily quiet there, the lights were dim, and it was chilly. It looked like the hall of some grand hotel at the turn of the century, and she wouldn’t have been at all surprised if a ghost had walked through a wall to stare at her.
If Spirit hadn’t known better, she would have thought the place was deserted. Her footsteps were the only sound in the empty hall. It was funny; when you were in the populated parts of Oakhurst, you had no idea that there were whole sections like this, where there just wasn’t anyone.
The office door was solid wood, and closed, with Doctor MacKenzie’s name beside it on an ornate little brass plate. The plate looked as if it had been there since Oakhurst was built; it even had the same Deco script.
She knocked on the door, hoping he had somehow forgotten her session, or that he was busy with someone else, or that he wasn’t there—hoping, but really knowing that, of course, it wasn’t even remotely possible that any of these things could be true. Still, you never knew.…
“It’s open,” said a deep voice with a Brooklyn accent. Reluctantly, she turned the handle and stepped inside.
The room looked pretty typical for a shrink. The same cream walls and brown carpet as the rest of the school. Oakhurst brown chair and couch, in the same “lodge look” style. Usually there was a coffee table or something like one in a shrink’s office, but not here. Probably because the room was pretty small as it was. There was a wooden filing cabinet, a matching bookcase, and a tiny desk with a computer on it at the back of the room under the window, but Doctor MacKenzie was already sitting in the chair, looking at a file.
She stared at him. He looked up. She stared some more. He waited patiently for her to say something.
“You look like Lenin!” she blurted, finally. “The Russian!”
He chuckled. Somehow that made him look even more like the Russian, with his balding head and neat little beard. “I see homeschooling pays off,” he replied. “Usually the kids that actually recognize this face don’t say anything. They just give me that strange, puzzled look—like a dog that hears something funny. They know I look like someone, but they don’t know who.” He waved at the couch. “Come into my parlor.”
She took a seat on the couch, gingerly. It was brown suede, softer and more comfortable than it looked.
“I’m Doctor Cooper MacKenzie, you can call me Doc or Doc Mac if you like. I’m also a mage: Fire Mage, Gift of Cleansing.” He tilted his head a little to one side. “And you are Spirit White, and no one knows what your ability is yet. It’s there, though. The power is in you, curled up like a sleeping dragon.”
“You—can see it?” she replied, startled.
“There are a few of us who can. Not many. A few more who can sense it, but not actually see it. Ambrosius for one.” He raised an eyebrow. “You weren’t told that.”
It was a statement, not a question. She nodded.
“They like to keep people off balance here. They call it ‘challenged.’” Another statement. She decided not to react to it.
“If you’re a mage, why are you a therapist?” she demanded.
“Most people who become headshrinkers do so because they think there is something wrong with themselves and want to figure out how to fix it. I was no exception, though what was ‘wrong’ with me was magic, not neurosis.” He grinned as he managed to coax a wary smile out of her. “I’ve gone over your file, Spirit, and I want to start out by telling you that your previous shrinks are a prime example of the truism that half the people practicing psychotherapy graduated in the bottom half of their class.”
“Uh—what?” she asked, completely taken aback. It looked as if Doctor MacKenzie also liked to keep people off balance.
“What’s in this file, and what they told you, was complete bullshit,” he said bluntly, tapping the manila folder. “I don’t know what they’re turning out of college these days, but they all sound like the latest bestseller self-help book. They seemed to think you were supposed to somehow magically get over having your entire world ripped out from under you in less than a year. That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard. Of course you’re still not over any of it. You shouldn’t be. If you were, I’d be looking for some pretty intractable problems with you and flinging around fancy terms like severe attachment disorder. You don’t just get over that sort of loss in a few months, or even a few years.” He snorted. “Sometimes I think the Victorians had the right idea. When you lost a family member back then you were supposed to be in full mourning, dress in nothing but black, for a whole year. Then you went into something they called ‘half mourning’ for another full year, and during those two years, you were pretty much expected to have emotional breakdowns, you could do it whenever you felt you needed to, and everybody would support you. Now? A month after a tragedy, maybe two, and you’re expected to be all better—or down pills so you can pretend you are.” He just shook his head. “Unfair doesn’t even come close.”
Spirit was torn between shock and wanting to hug and kiss him. Not only was this the first time anyone had acted halfway normal around her, it was the first time any shrink had more or less given her permission to keep feeling bad. And the relief she felt was impossible to describe.
The thought fleetingly occurred to her that Doc Mac could be saying all this to try and trick her into trusting him.…
Well, if so, it was working, and right now, she didn’t care. She wanted to trust him; all of her instincts were reacting as positively to him as they reacted negatively to people like Ms. Smith. She liked him. She had the feeling that if he had been her shrink in the hospital, she wouldn’t be nearly so messed up now.
And for the first time, she felt like talking about it to someone, because she just knew he wasn’t going to cut her off because “her hour was up.” She was going to be able to vent about how bad she felt, how much she missed everyone, everything, and would give up everything to have them back again. How much she envied Muirin and Loch, because they hadn’t had parents they’d miss, and Burke, because he still had his foster folks. How sometimes she wanted to punch the next person who told her it was time for her to get over it. He was going to listen for as long as it took.
So she did. She went through a lot of tissues. Doc Mac was just solid, right through it all. He didn’t get all creepy and ooze sympathy and pretend empathy like Ms. Smith did; he was just there, listening, not saying much, but what he did say made her feel, not better exactly, but as if he understood.
He was a hundred times better than any of the shrinks she’d seen in the hospital.
When she finally wound down, he gave her the rest of the box of tissues and made a couple of brief notes. He talked to her a little about New Year’s Eve. She told him what she’d really seen and felt. He made some more notes, then looked up. “All right, Spirit, you’re good to go. I think you weathered the New Year’s incident pretty well. If you have trouble concentrating, sleeping, if you’re having nightmares, make an appointment. If it’s urgent, come right to me, and I’ll clear my schedule. We’ll try a little talk therapy, maybe a week or two of meds to take the edge off and get you over the hump. Otherwise, having crying fits and being depressed is part of the grieving process, and don’t let anyone try to tell you differently.”
She blew her nose as he added, almost to himself: “And I wish I could get Dylan to believe that.”
She hesitated a moment. Then she made up her mind. “That night … the night of the wreck … I saw something,” she said. “And the crash wasn’t an accident. There was something like—okay, it must have been an explosion of some kind of magic, like a flash of light, except it was dark.”
“Dark, like absence of light, or dark, as if all the light was being sucked into something?” he asked, his eyes suddenly going sharp and bright.
She blinked. She’d never thought of it that way. “The light being sucked into something,” she replied slowly. “So that’s some kind of magic?”
He nodded, and his brows creased. “All the Schools of magic have opposites, like matter and antimatter. You probably haven’t gotten that far yet. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing inherently evil about the opposite, any more than antimatter is evil. But if the usual forms of our magic are hard to control, the dark forms are even harder, because they’re rooted in chaos.” Doc Mac ran his hand over his balding head. “So you saw a manifestation from a magician who was either extremely powerful or just bug-out crazy. Or both. Go on.”
“Something—was just there, in the middle of the road.” She shuddered. “I think Dad saw it, too. It was—I’m not sure what it was. It was—I thought it was a man. A big man, but it was like the light was sucking into him, and—I don’t remember exactly, just that it was evil. And I knew, I knew that it was after me.…” She started to cry again, and stifled it. “It was, wasn’t it? It was after me, and it was hunting me. If it hadn’t been after me, they’d still be alive. Wouldn’t they?”
She couldn’t help it, a sob escaped on the last word, and that set her off again, wailing softly, the guilt filling her chest and throat and choking her. She cried and cried until her eyes were all gritty and her nose was sore. Once again, Doc Mac let her cry herself out. When she got herself back under control, he sighed.
“I’m not going to blow smoke at you,” he said. “Yes, I think you did see something evil. And it was there to kill you. And yes, the rest of your family died because of it. But Spirit”—he leaned over and fixed her with an intense gaze—“Spirit, that does not mean that you are to blame, any more than you would be to blame if you were the only survivor of a mass murderer. Whoever sent that thing, whoever did this in the first place—that is who is to blame. Not you.” He sat back in his chair. “This is one of those ‘bad things happen to good people’ situations. This magician, or group of magicians—they made the choice to hurt people. You didn’t hunt them down to taunt them, you didn’t do anything to them; in fact, you didn’t even know they existed until you came here. They are the bad guys. They are the ones who hurt people. You are innocent; the only thing you did ‘wrong’ was to be born, and you weren’t exactly the one responsible for that. And I want you to keep repeating that to yourself until you believe it, all right?”
Spirit nodded, hesitantly. This was crazy. Here she was pouring out her secrets to someone she didn’t even know—and yet Doc Mac was the first person here besides her friends she had ever felt was a real human being, and trustworthy.
And she wanted to keep right on trusting him.
He smiled a little at her nod. “Good. Now, you hop along to class. If you need me, you know where I am.”
* * *
“… I didn’t tell him about the Hunt or anything,” Spirit concluded, as she and Loch continued to page slowly through the scrapbooks, “but I wanted to. What do you think?”
“I think he doesn’t sound anything like the shrinks my dad’s girlfriends all saw,” Loch replied. “Which is a plus. I have an appointment with him day after tomorrow. I’ll let you know what I think. Burke’s sold on him. Dylan hates him, says he’s a wuss.”
Spirit rolled her eyes. “Anybody Dylan hates has to be all right.”
Loch chuckled. “I kind of agree with you. What did Murr-cat say?”
“She was kind of pissy, but didn’t actually say anything.”
Loch laughed again. “Which means not only couldn’t she game him, he probably read her like a book.”
“Well, she wasn’t rude about him.…” Spirit ventured.
“Which means he might have either impressed or scared her. Maybe both.” Loch peered down at an old clipping. “Once I see him, and Addie does, I think we should all decide together on what we tell him.”
“If anything,” Spirit reminded him.
“If anything,” he repeated. “Though if he’s in Doctor Ambrosius’s inner circle, he’ll already know about the Hunt, or at least as much as we told Doctor Ambrosius.”
“So? If he does, great. He wouldn’t have told me he knows, he’d have been waiting for me to bring it up. That’s how shrinks work.” She frowned at her hands; they were filthy. Looking at the books together in the study carrels at the back of the stacks in the Library was a good idea, marred only by the fact that she was going to have to wait to get to her room to wash her hands.
“You’re not so bad at gaming the system yourself.” Loch lifted a corner of a yellowing bit of newsprint, carefully. This stuff crumbled easily.
“Practice. I wonder who made all these books, anyway?”
“Tyniger, or an assistant,” Loch replied. “Could have been either. Rich guys back then did things like that.” He put a marker in the pages and closed his book. “Okay, that’s it. My eyes are going to cross if I have to do any more of this today.”
“Mine, too,” Spirit admitted. “Let’s get going.”
“Why do you want to tell Doc Mac about everything we’ve found out so badly?” Loch asked, as they headed back toward their rooms. It seemed safe enough to use one of the study carrels; no one was ever back there. Most people did all their school research electronically.
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “It just seems as if we ought to have one adult we can trust.”
“Besides Doctor A.,” Loch prompted.
“Uh, yeah.” But she hesitated to say that …
And for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out why.