Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,96
to nothing. Her horse, exhausted, stopped bucking and stood there trembling. She looked up.
The circle of gray-clad riders was still there, watching them under a cloud-laden sky that looked like a blizzard was about to cut loose any second. Then, as one, they turned away, rode down into the gully again—
And disappeared.
Spirit looked wildly around her. All the snowmobiles were stopped, turned over, one was wrecked with its driver still in it, and from the way he was lying …
Oh my God—he’s dead.…
People were lying all around, bleeding, with arms and legs going in directions that they shouldn’t, screaming, moaning. The kid who Spirit had seen thrown into the air wasn’t moving, either. She spotted Addie, still miraculously ahorse, with a black eye. She looked frantically for Loch, and saw him on the ground, curled in a ball with both his hands over the back of his neck. She jumped down out of the saddle and ran to him.
“Loch? Loch!” As she went down on her knees next to him, she was suddenly afraid to touch him. “How are you hurt? Where? How badly!”
He moaned, and rolled over onto his back. His eyes were unfocused, and one of his pupils was bigger than the other. “Head,” he said. “Hurts. Dizzy.”
“I’m going for help!” Addie called, and dug her heels abruptly into her horse’s flanks, sending him in a gallop toward the blur on the horizon that was the school.
“Don’t pass out,” Spirit urged Loch. “I’ll be back.” She began methodically checking on the others.
She might not have magic, but at least she had first aid.
* * *
“My God,” Muirin said, her eyes wide and her face blank with disbelief. “One townie dead, three of us…” For once she had nothing snide, catty, or amusing to say. “I—I’ve got nothing.”
“Stitches, concussions, broken bones…” Burke shook his head. “I should have been there.”
Loch blinked at them all groggily; he’d been concussed and had a cracked collarbone. Spirit had eleven stitches in the cut across her forehead and another fifteen in one across her scalp that she hadn’t even felt till they got back to Oakhurst, and they’d gotten off lucky. Addie was in a sling: a torsion fracture of her left arm. As for the rest, aside from the four dead, there were broken arms and legs, concussions, and lacerations enough to fill the tiny Radial emergency room twice over. But, of course, only the townies had gone there, in a fleet of vans supplied by Mark Rider and the town’s two ambulances. All the Oakhurst kids had come straight to the Oakhurst Infirmary. It wouldn’t do to have the townies see Earth Mages healing people by magic.
Besides their own Mages, Mark also seemed to have his own group of three people that could just do that—plus Madison, who made four.
Now most of the injured were resting and recovering in their own rooms. Spirit’s cuts were half healed already. She had no idea what story Mark had told the townies about what had happened—but she had seen Ms. Singleton going from one stretcher to another, briefly putting her hand on the occupant’s head, muttering something. She had no doubt that Mark’s story had replaced whatever the kids themselves had seen. She had a guess that animals weren’t the only things Ms. Singleton could control.
“If that’s what a mage-battle is like,” Loch said thickly, “we are seriously outclassed. I couldn’t even get myself organized before the horse threw me, and all I could do was try and protect myself.”
“Well, I was about as much use as a beach ball,” Spirit replied, wincing a little as the cut on her head pulled and hurt. It would be fully healed by morning, but with so many injured, the Healing Mages had been forced to ration their power. “How do you fight stuff like that?”
“I should have been there,” Burke muttered again, looking guilty and worried.
Muirin fiddled with her ring and with the snake-bracelet on her wrist. “All right, there’s an elephant in the room, and I’m going to talk about it,” she said. “The Gatekeepers. Mark Rider’s group. Would joining them be so bad? I mean, I know Dylan’s being scouted for it and you guys don’t like him, but if the alternative is what just happened? Come on! At least they know what they’re doing!”
“We can’t choose a side until we know what’s going on,” Burke insisted stubbornly. “Muirin, I know you don’t want to hear it, but so far … well, we don’t