Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,44
we do,” Spirit told her, and since Muirin couldn’t pull loose without making a fuss and getting people to notice there was more going on at their table than eating, she gave in sullenly, and shoved her hand where they could see it.
And there was a Destiny in the depths of her ring, too; a bird in flight.
“A bird?” said Loch, puzzled.
Spirit peered closely at it. “A raven, I think.” One of her mother’s friends had been an avid bird-watcher. “It’s got the right beak, anyway.”
“Quoth the Raven, Nevermore,” said Muirin, in tones that made it clear she wasn’t even remotely happy about this. “Thanks a bunch, Blondie. Anyway, big deal, it doesn’t mean anything, I knew about it before…” She stopped, and looked even more stubborn. And guilty.
“What do you mean, you knew about it ‘before,’ Muirin?” Burke asked quietly. “Before what? Before when?”
All four of them glared at her, and finally she scowled and shook her hair back. “Okay, okay, I saw it Christmas Day when we all showed our rings. And it wasn’t there a couple months ago when I took it out to wear it to one of Doc A’s goofy tea parties, and that was the last time I looked at it.” She turned a glare of her own on Spirit. “So what about you? Does yours have an angel or something in it? I bet it’s an angel, or a fairy, or a rainbow, or a unicorn.”
Spirit took her ring out of her pocket and put it on the table.
Just as it had been when she had taken it out of the box this morning, the stone in it was blank and unchanged.
SEVEN
The kids who actually made it down for breakfast seemed to stuff themselves, as if they had been starved all last night. That didn’t make any sense to Spirit, since she hadn’t seen anyone avoiding the food at the New Year’s Dinner; it had been really good, actually, even if the atmosphere had been strained. Maybe there was something else going on. Could they have been—oh, drained or something, by that fear?
Or maybe some of them had been so frightened they’d gone back to their rooms and thrown up. Spirit wouldn’t have blamed them.
After a huge breakfast and what could not have been a very restful night, if she had been in their shoes, Spirit would have wanted a nap. Mind, she could see why Muirin didn’t—Murr-cat had gotten so much sugar and chocolate she must have been buzzing. But a lot of the kids had shoveled in heaps of hash browns, huge omelets, and mountains of bacon, ham, and sausage, and that kind of thing put Spirit to sleep. If she hadn’t been so determined to use this opportunity to convince the others to get serious about the threat, she probably would have been thinking about going for the protein herself and sacrificing this rare free day in favor of sleep.
As their group gathered for Monopoly in the lounge, she couldn’t help notice that the lounge was practically deserted—and so were the grounds. There were three or four die-hard winter-lovers outside—ones who’d made big inroads on the pastries and were probably on as much of a sugar-high as Muirin. They were mostly skating. There couldn’t be more than a dozen people in the lounge, including Spirit and her friends.
Or maybe the missing weren’t napping, just huddling in their rooms, alone or in twos or threes, still scared, maybe chattering away on the computer. Spirit didn’t blame them. None of them had faced the Wild Hunt. None of them had known that the students who had supposedly run away had, in fact, been murdered by the Hunt. Oh, they were told often enough that the reason they were here was because there were people out there who wanted to kill young magicians—and some of them might have the idea that those same people were the ones who had killed their own families and left them orphans. But there was no proof of any of that, and it was one thing to hear this story out of Doctor Ambrosius but it was quite another to show up at the school dance and have something try to scare you to death.
Spirit couldn’t keep her attention on the game, and for once, it seemed the others, even Addie, were having the same problem.
“I just don’t get it,” Loch whispered, finally. “There doesn’t seem to have been a point.”