Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,28

Corby moved as quietly as Loch, and she only used her flashlight intermittently, which was how Spirit spotted her. She was still about fifty feet away, so Spirit was able to backtrack to the kitchen and duck inside. She hid by squeezing into the utility closet with the smelly mops and brooms, and waited breathlessly while Ms. Corby played the light around the kitchen. Looking for late-night snackers, no doubt. Maybe.

Or maybe she was actually on the alert for real trouble. Maybe Doctor A. was taking the Hunt seriously.

Maybe she’s just prowling around trying to get people in trouble. It seemed the most likely.

When Ms. Corby was gone from the kitchen, Spirit counted twice to sixty, then slipped out of the closet, padded quietly to the door, listened, then cracked the door open. Ms. Corby’s flashlight stabbed through the darkness back down the opposite way Spirit wanted to go, and with a sigh of relief, Spirit scooted out the door and headed for the rendezvous with Loch.

He was waiting outside the Furnace Room door; without speaking, they both went inside and headed for the furnace itself. The thing was going full-bore to keep up with the arctic temperatures outside, but it was so well insulated it was barely warm to the touch at the back where they knew the round cast-metal door to the secret rooms lay. By the light of Spirit’s flashlight, Loch picked out the right skeleton key, which Muirin had marked with a speck of blood-red nail polish. Like Muirin, Loch pocketed the padlock before he opened the door. Hopefully Ms. Corby wouldn’t prowl all the way down here.

Once the door was closed—and it had quite the seal on it, almost airtight—Loch flicked on the light switch; there were no windows this far belowground to betray them. The bare bulbs lighting up the cement stairs down and the room beyond were painful after the darkness of the basement proper.

“Right,” Loch said out loud, his voice making her jump. “We might be living in the digital future, but when Oakhurst was founded, it was all paper. We know there are paper records on former students here as well as the Tithed ones. At some point, probably early, they had to start sending the students that didn’t have magic to the—well, call it the ‘Shadow Oakhurst.’ So we should start finding records of students transferred if such a thing exists.”

“And if it does?” Spirit asked. “What then?”

“Well, then we’ll know that every Legacy kid ends up somewhere. So if you had a brother or sister that didn’t have magic, they’d go there.”

“And?” Spirit prompted. “I mean, what then?”

This was where Loch fumbled to a halt. “I don’t know. Except that it means Doctor A. isn’t telling us everything.”

We already know that, Loch, she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud.

“If there is such a thing, I suppose we ought to find out just what they’re telling those kids.” She stepped carefully down the wooden stairs and headed for the storage rooms, averting her eyes nervously from those other rooms.

She headed straight for a stack of dusty boxes that didn’t look as if they had been touched in decades, while Loch dove into the filing cabinets where they had found the records of the “Tithed.”

She leafed through cartons of what looked like old tourist brochures and real estate magazines for a while, then glanced over at Loch, who was studying something in a folder.

He’s really sweet, she thought, out of nowhere. And cute. Really cute. She remembered how nice he’d been to her in the limousine, and then in the plane on the way here. Of all of them, he was the one that seemed closest to her in a lot of ways. Addie was always distant, Muirin had a slightly sadistic side, and Burke—Burke was nice, but she couldn’t tell what it was he really wanted from her, and he never, ever seemed vulnerable, not even when they were all in deadly danger. Burke was fearless; confessing her fears to him made her feel awkward and useless. Loch, on the other hand, was someone she could probably talk to about anything. He never seemed to have a problem with admitting he didn’t know something, or asking for help. She couldn’t even begin to imagine Burke doing that.

And like her, he didn’t have anyone out there, either. Burke still had his foster family. The existence of that family was almost like a wall between them, because she envied him