Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,55

plate. The plate looked as if it had been there since Oakhurst was built; it even had the same Deco script.

She knocked on the door, hoping he had somehow forgotten her session, or that he was busy with someone else, or that he wasn’t there—hoping, but really knowing that, of course, it wasn’t even remotely possible that any of these things could be true. Still, you never knew.…

“It’s open,” said a deep voice with a Brooklyn accent. Reluctantly, she turned the handle and stepped inside.

The room looked pretty typical for a shrink. The same cream walls and brown carpet as the rest of the school. Oakhurst brown chair and couch, in the same “lodge look” style. Usually there was a coffee table or something like one in a shrink’s office, but not here. Probably because the room was pretty small as it was. There was a wooden filing cabinet, a matching bookcase, and a tiny desk with a computer on it at the back of the room under the window, but Doctor MacKenzie was already sitting in the chair, looking at a file.

She stared at him. He looked up. She stared some more. He waited patiently for her to say something.

“You look like Lenin!” she blurted, finally. “The Russian!”

He chuckled. Somehow that made him look even more like the Russian, with his balding head and neat little beard. “I see homeschooling pays off,” he replied. “Usually the kids that actually recognize this face don’t say anything. They just give me that strange, puzzled look—like a dog that hears something funny. They know I look like someone, but they don’t know who.” He waved at the couch. “Come into my parlor.”

She took a seat on the couch, gingerly. It was brown suede, softer and more comfortable than it looked.

“I’m Doctor Cooper MacKenzie, you can call me Doc or Doc Mac if you like. I’m also a mage: Fire Mage, Gift of Cleansing.” He tilted his head a little to one side. “And you are Spirit White, and no one knows what your ability is yet. It’s there, though. The power is in you, curled up like a sleeping dragon.”

“You—can see it?” she replied, startled.

“There are a few of us who can. Not many. A few more who can sense it, but not actually see it. Ambrosius for one.” He raised an eyebrow. “You weren’t told that.”

It was a statement, not a question. She nodded.

“They like to keep people off balance here. They call it ‘challenged.’” Another statement. She decided not to react to it.

“If you’re a mage, why are you a therapist?” she demanded.

“Most people who become headshrinkers do so because they think there is something wrong with themselves and want to figure out how to fix it. I was no exception, though what was ‘wrong’ with me was magic, not neurosis.” He grinned as he managed to coax a wary smile out of her. “I’ve gone over your file, Spirit, and I want to start out by telling you that your previous shrinks are a prime example of the truism that half the people practicing psychotherapy graduated in the bottom half of their class.”

“Uh—what?” she asked, completely taken aback. It looked as if Doctor MacKenzie also liked to keep people off balance.

“What’s in this file, and what they told you, was complete bullshit,” he said bluntly, tapping the manila folder. “I don’t know what they’re turning out of college these days, but they all sound like the latest bestseller self-help book. They seemed to think you were supposed to somehow magically get over having your entire world ripped out from under you in less than a year. That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard. Of course you’re still not over any of it. You shouldn’t be. If you were, I’d be looking for some pretty intractable problems with you and flinging around fancy terms like severe attachment disorder. You don’t just get over that sort of loss in a few months, or even a few years.” He snorted. “Sometimes I think the Victorians had the right idea. When you lost a family member back then you were supposed to be in full mourning, dress in nothing but black, for a whole year. Then you went into something they called ‘half mourning’ for another full year, and during those two years, you were pretty much expected to have emotional breakdowns, you could do it whenever you felt you needed to, and everybody would support you. Now? A month after