Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,17

to her. “I don’t know. You know this place. She’s going to have to toughen up fast or—”

Spirit sighed. “Yeah. Or she might as well be surrounded by wolves and vampires for real.” She made a face. “Well, I’m cold. Mind if I go inside?” She was kind of hoping Burke would go with her, but it looked like the mood was broken, because he shook his head.

“You go ahead. I need to hit the gym for my workout, and since I’m halfway there I might as well do it now.” With a cheerful wave, he trudged off in the direction of the stand-alone Gymnasium complex.

Spirit’s mood soured even more. She shoved her hands in her coat pockets and turned toward the terrace door that Elizabeth had vanished through. She had some vague idea of tracking Elizabeth down and—

And what? Trying to make her feel better? Like that would happen! She hugged herself tightly, trying to warm up. With Burke gone, it seemed even colder out here. She might as well go in and tell the others there was a new inmate in the asylum.

Once she stepped off the AstroTurf carpet, her feet crunched through a heavy crust of snow. It came all the way up to mid-calf, and the drifts were even higher—even in her snow boots she was freezing. She couldn’t wait to get inside, and the two of them had walked so far that the terrace entrance was closer than the Entry Hall entry she and Burke had come out through.

But as she started along the side lawn, she saw a sudden flurry of snowballs appear in the distance. “Appear” was exactly the right word: One moment there’d been nothing, the next, the air was full of snowballs. Hovering. It was hard to decide what Gifts were involved in the snowball fight, though it was pretty clear most of the “combatants” were School of Air: Jaunting, Telekinesis, and just plain Weather Witchery combined to turn what might otherwise be an ordinary snowball fight into something more like a snowball apocalypse.

No way was she walking into something like that, even if it did mean spending a lot longer out here in the cold. Grumbling under her breath, Spirit turned around and trudged back to the main entrance.

When she got there, she struggled up the steps—everything she wore was caked with snow by now—and pulled open the enormous (pretentious) heavy oak door with a certain amount of struggle. Burke made it look easy. Of course, Burke made everything look easy, even living here.

For a moment she indulged herself in the wistful fantasy of not being here, but still having met the other four. Would they still have been friends if they hadn’t been stuck here in High School Hell? She thought she and Burke might have been more than friends—Loch was dazzling, and she liked him a lot (maybe loved him, maybe just crushed on him), but Loch came from an entirely different world. She and Burke were a lot alike, really. She thought about having a boyfriend. A real boyfriend. Her first.

And suddenly she realized she didn’t dare.

It didn’t matter if it was Loch, or Burke, or even someone she hadn’t met yet (hard as that was to imagine)—Oakhurst didn’t even like you to have friends, let alone a boyfriend. The fact that she and Addie and Muirin were friends had been a secret they’d needed to hide as carefully as they’d hidden the knowledge that their fellow students were dying, not “leaving to pursue other opportunities.” If Oakhurst realized you had friends, they did everything they could to destroy the friendship.

Suddenly she realized she’d been thinking “Oakhurst” and not “the teachers” or “the Administration.” It was as if Oakhurst itself was some kind of malevolent entity.

It’s like that hotel in that horror novel. The haunted one that everybody who stayed at went insane.

She shuddered faintly, and distracted herself by stomping her feet to get the last of the snow off her boots. The Entry Hall was completely empty—it wasn’t a place people lingered—and even the fire roaring in the fireplace couldn’t make it look cheerful and inviting. The huge cheerless Christmas tree only made things worse, somehow. She wished they’d take it down now, but Burke said it would be up until after New Year’s. She didn’t see why. It wasn’t as if any of the students spent their time admiring it. And a thirty-foot tree? Quelle overkill. She wasn’t even sure how they’d gotten it in