Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,60

other mansions, and stopped bringing people out here. People didn’t notice so much because everyone was wrapped up in the War. But the Great Influenza Epidemic in 1918 pretty much seems to have made him decide he wasn’t going to bring anyone here anymore and he wasn’t going to leave; he sold all the other places and lived here as a recluse. The funny thing is that one of the books has a big section of notes to him from the staff, thanking him for saving them from the Influenza; not one of them got sick. And it looks like that year is when he started making the scrapbooks. I’m no expert, but it looks as if all of the earliest ones were made in the same year, like he finally took stacks of clippings and things and made them into books.”

“Huh,” Burke said. “And all of them say ‘Oakhurst’ on the front. Not his name. It’s like the house was his kid.”

“The house might have been his child,” Addie replied. “He never married, he never had any children at all, and he died without an heir and without a will. But he doubled his fortune in the war, and when he died in 1939 he was over eighty, and that was really old for those times.”

“Then I got the oldest of the scrapbooks,” said Burke. “The house was in really good shape when he died, too; the last of the scrapbooks is full of photos he took and developed himself, and it was just amazing. So if there’s some spell on the tree, it explains why Tyniger devoted himself to the house and the tree took care of him,” Burke said slowly. “But then what?”

“All I found in my scrapbooks were more of those photos,” Loch said. “So I did some research. You had a huge estate here, from a really wealthy man, with no heir and no will. When there’s that much money, the State has to be really careful how they handle everything to make sure there’s no heir, because having one crop up can be really messy. It took Montana over thirty years to settle the estate, and by the time the State determined that they were getting the house, they didn’t want it. It was out in the middle of nowhere, there wasn’t really a concept of remote luxury spas back then, and no one wanted to buy it for a personal home, either, considering how much they’d have to spend just modernizing the wiring alone, never mind the plumbing and the heat and air. So it sat for another ten years, and then in 1979, Doctor Ambrosius came along and bought it.”

“And with that oak right in the middle of it, I can see why he’d want it,” Muirin said, getting back her enthusiasm. “And maybe the reason there isn’t a lot of magic in the oak now is because Doctor Ambrosius drained it all to build the protections around the school!”

“Oh yeah, I bet you’re right, Murr-cat!” Burke exclaimed. “That makes perfect sense!”

“That doesn’t sound right,” Spirit objected. “How can you drain magic out of a spell?”

“Oh, that’s easy enough,” Addie replied dismissively. “Any Energy Mage can do it. It’s an advanced thing, but they can all do it.”

Spirit stared down at the Monopoly board, reminded forcibly again that she didn’t have any magic.…

Except Doc Mac said she did. It was just sleeping.

Well I wish someone would set off the alarm clock, she thought angrily. Then she bit her lip and fought the anger down. This was just one more way that Oakhurst was trying to separate her from her new friends. And she wasn’t going to let it.

* * *

They talked until a proctor came to shoo them out of the lounge for lights out. Two things seemed really obvious when they got done going over everything any of them had found in those scrapbooks.

First, the runes. They had to be pretty important. If they were protective—and they probably were—according to Loch and Addie, they would have been what Doctor Ambrosius used to “anchor” his own protections.

“The thing is,” Addie said, frowning a little, “you’ll have to take my word for it, but runes can actually change a little if they’re used that way—if they’re incorporated into something other than their original purpose. Physically change, I mean; the runes themselves will kind of get slightly rewritten to reflect the altered purpose.”

Spirit didn’t ask, “They can do that?” even though she wanted to,