Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,26
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.”
FOUR
The Oakhurst storage rooms were beginning to feel as familiar as one of the classrooms.
At this point, Spirit felt that she and Loch had all this sneaking around stuff down to a fine art. They managed to meet up without scaring the pants off each other, and without either of them running afoul of anyone else. Of course, since Loch was a Shadewalker, that was relatively easy for him, and Spirit felt more than a little jealous, but being without magic did make her invisible to people looking for wandering magicians, so maybe it all evened out. And once down in the subbasement, Spirit felt a little more relaxed, maybe because there was only one entrance, so they should have plenty of time to hide if someone turned up.
This time they both had better flashlights than Loch’s little penlight, and Loch had an LED work light as well. Spirit didn’t ask him where he had gotten it, or how, but it was probably through Muirin.
They didn’t need Muirin’s skeleton keys this trip, because they weren’t going to the hidden storage room yet, but to the regular storage rooms. Which was just as well because those hidden rooms gave her the serious creeps. Dungeonlike cells, an operating room, and boxes of the records and belongings of the students who had vanished … it was too much like something out of a horror movie.
Now if you were looking at things in the best possible light for Oakhurst, it kind of made sense to have prisonlike cells down there given what Doctor Ambrosius said about the wizard war. If you caught one of the bad guys you would want a place to hold and interrogate him, right? Doctor A. might be one of the good guys, but it was pretty obvious that he was no kind of angel; the way Oakhurst was run alone showed that the people at the top were pretty cold and businesslike when it came to doing “what needed to be done” to win this war. There was a Darwinian ruthlessness about the way that competition was encouraged here.
And on the good side, none of those rooms, at least during Spirit’s cursory look around, had shown any signs of actual use.
But still … the fact that they were there at all was seriously creepy. And it began to strain things more than a bit to have all the personal belongings of all of the kids who had disappeared stored down there. But what really put the frosting on the cake were the records, all marked “Tithed.” Who had marked them that way? Had it just been a frustrated guess on the part of one of the administrators? Or had it happened after the records were put down there, as a kind of smug “gotcha” by the person who had called the Hunt? And if that was the case, then why do something like that to alert Doctor A. that whoever-it-was walked among them?