Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,110

mocking tone to his voice Spirit had never heard before. “Oh wait—you’re a code-monkey, and that sort of etiquette goes straight over your head, right? Well, here’s your fast education. You don’t haul someone else’s girl off for a dance, and you don’t ever mess with a jock’s steady. Got it? Great. Buh-bye.” He made a little finger-wiggle at Clark, who slunk away, muttering. Then he put his arms around Spirit and they started slow-dancing away from the Breakthrough geek corner. Before the crowd hid them, Spirit saw Clark arguing with Mandy.

“Um. Thanks,” Spirit said, feeling awkward. “The only thing is, that wasn’t true.”

“I know,” Burke replied, and flushed as he looked down at her. “But would you like it to be?”

All she could do was look up into his eyes and say, “Um—”

Which was precisely when the lights went out, the temperature dropped down to freezing, and the terror descended.

The terror wiped away her astonishment at Burke’s question. Before the terror could take hold, she took a deep breath and yelled into the silence: “Rave! RAVE!”

Burke bellowed the same word as he seized her hand. He hauled her across the dance floor by memory to one of the preset spots where the decorating committee had stashed a cache of flashlights and chem-lights. They stumbled into a few people on the way, and the silence had been replaced by deafening noise, but this time the noise was less screaming in fear and more shouting rave. Loch was already passing out chem-lights and flashlights from his station. And Addie, with chem-necklaces aglow around her neck and fistfuls of more chem-lights, was opening the fire exit door to the outside.

Addie was supposed to jam it open with a cinder block that had been left outside; Spirit couldn’t see if she had, because she was too busy handing out lights. Once she and Burke got that box started, they moved to one of the others—and by the time they got that one started, there was a huge whoosh outside, and the fire exit doorway lit up with a bright yellow light. The pranksters had been building an enormous bonfire in the sunken garden’s drained fountain all week, and someone had just lit it. Muirin’s illusion had fooled everyone not in on the scheme into thinking there was nothing in the sunken garden. She’d held that illusion 24/7 for days, and Spirit couldn’t wait to really congratulate her for it.

Everyone who had lights streamed out into the now brightly lit night. The rest scrambled through the boxes frantically to get something. Within minutes of the power going out, everyone was heading for the fire—and that was when they set off Part Three of the Great Rave Prank.

A wall of sound erupted from the vicinity of the fire.

A sound system, powered by batteries stolen from idle Breakthrough construction equipment, bellowed out the most cheerful, high-energy songs that any of the pranksters could think of. There were six hours’ worth of songs on the iPod that was running the show, and if the terror went on for more than six hours, well—it would be more than anyone could fight.

Everyone started dancing around the fire, which was easily fifteen, maybe twenty feet across, huge, and burning too high and hot for anyone to have a hope of putting it out, thanks to a five gallon jug of vegetable oil and a lot of candle-ends. Addie wasn’t the only one who liked to have scented candles in her room, and the Christmas decorations had included hundreds of candles. As the terror closed in on them they translated their hysterical energy into equally hysterical dancing, and—

—and that was where things got weird. Spirit knew what the plan was—Loch and Addie were somehow supposed to be feeding Muirin and Burke with the emotions and energy they were getting, and Muirin and Burke were supposed to be turning that into a shield against the fear. But as Spirit hung on to Burke’s hand as hard as she could, she could feel … something.

It was like there was this river flowing through her; not something she could stop, or do anything with, but—somehow, she needed to let this happen. Because somehow, what was flowing into her was much more powerful than what was flowing out of her. Which made no sense. So she hung on to Burke’s hand and tried to focus on the bonfire, and the music, and the kids all dancing around like a bunch of barbarians in a Viking