Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,95
and came in behind Spirit. Her brown horse (they were all brown, Addie called them by different color names—bay, chestnut, whatever—but they were all brown to Spirit) laid his ears back, and Spirit could have sworn he looked gleeful. He rolled his eyes, snaked out his head, and before Spirit could react, all she could see was a set of big yellow teeth heading straight for her horse’s butt.
They connected.
Her horse squealed and lurched forward into a gallop. Pendleton kept pace with him, and whenever he threatened to slow down, those teeth headed for him again. When they caught up to the rest, Addie somehow managed to steer her horse away far enough that he couldn’t bite Spirit’s, but kept him within “threat” distance. Loch joined them, so that he and Addie bracketed Spirit’s horse. Now the only direction he could go was forward. He put his ears back. He was not happy. Well, neither was Spirit; she was already sore, her nose was freezing off, and they weren’t even halfway done yet.
Now they were about two miles from Oakhurst, and outside the “safe” area. Oakhurst was just a dark smear on the horizon. And ahead of them was the first hazard, a big, deep gully with steep, crumbling sides and ice at the bottom. A broad swath of it was marked out with a pair of red flags; that was where they were supposed to cross and they got marked down if they didn’t. Given the competitive spirit at Oakhurst it was a bet that if anyone cheated, three others would tell on him.
But before they reached the gully, a distant whine of motors and plumes of snow to the right warned Spirit—and everyone else—that they weren’t alone out here.
Oh hell, it’s Saturday …
Which meant no school for the kids in Radial.
Sure enough, as the small horde of snowmobiles headed in their direction, it looked like all the drivers were teenagers. The horses were going to hate this.
Whooping and shrieking, the Radial kids buzzed the horses, circling them and forcing them to crowd together, bucking and shying. Spirit’s horse backed into Addie’s, who didn’t snap at him this time. Addie was holding him steady, but his eyes showed whites all around, and he was trampling the snow in tight little steps. Spirit’s horse bounced stiff-legged; she tried to hold him in and soothe him at the same time, and it wasn’t working—
And that was when the sky suddenly darkened. Out of nowhere, huge black clouds just boiled up and covered the entire sky. The kids on the snowmobiles started looking around, startled. The horses all went rigid.
A sound like thunder came out of the gully. Except it wasn’t thunder. It was the hooves of more horses, twenty or thirty, that came boiling up the steep slope out of the gully as easily as if it was level ground. There were riders on those horses, in gray hooded parkas with gray scarves over their faces. They circled the Oakhurst kids and the snowmobiles both, and as soon as the circle was complete, a wall of wailing wind and snow sprang up behind them, cutting them all off from the rest of the world.
And then they turned their powers loose inside that confined space.
Spirit was caught in a maelstrom of screaming horses, screaming kids, wind, ice, fire, and shadow. The earth under them shook and heaved. She saw things—when she could see at all!—that couldn’t possibly be there. Horses bucked, bit, kicked. Snowmobiles careened into the horses. One kid in Oakhurst colors got plucked off his horse before her eyes and thrown about twenty feet into the air; she didn’t see where he landed. She was battered, cut by flying shards of ice as sharp as razor blades, and all she could think of to do was to get as far down on her horse’s neck as she could and cling for dear life while he reared and bucked and screamed. If the others were getting their powers to work, she couldn’t tell. She was crying and screaming with terror herself; she felt blood running down her face from a cut over one eye, and something hit her in the back hard enough to knock all the breath out of her. She started to feel herself falling, hung on tighter. Something smacked her in the head and she saw stars.
This is it, she thought, in a single moment of fear-sharpened clarity. This is where I die—