Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,26

embarrassed. “Then all there was to do was figure out exactly what my Gifts in those Schools were. I guess that must have been when you, uh, ran into trouble, because he left and Ms. Smith came in and finished up with me. I didn’t even know you’d had a problem until later.”

Spirit opened her mouth to tell him—all of them—that she hadn’t had a problem until after Doctor Ambrosius came in to see what was going wrong with her Testing, and stopped. Sure, he’d been pretty out of control. But Loch obviously didn’t have any complaints about him. And Mom had yelled at her plenty of times when Spirit did things that she later realized had been stupid dangerous. If what Doctor Ambrosius had said yesterday about the world being a dangerous place for untrained magicians was true, maybe he’d just been angry at her for refusing to protect herself. She was already pretty clear on the fact that he didn’t have the hottest people skills on the block.

It didn’t change the fact that, despite the fact that both Doctor Ambrosius and Ms. Smith had said she was a magician, she hadn’t been able to do what Loch had done so easily.

Maybe they were wrong. Maybe she didn’t have any magic at all.

“Hey, if you guys don’t mind clearing out of here, I could get dressed,” she said.

She had to admit that a lot of things about this place didn’t completely suck, Spirit decided. Of course, a lot of them did. Every time she thought of something she wanted to share with Mom and Dad—and especially Phoenix—she had to remember they were dead all over again. And then she’d feel uneasily guilty about having all this because they were dead.

But if a week’s time wasn’t long enough to make deep friendships, she’d certainly started to make friends. And Kelly had been right when she said that Spirit’s situation wasn’t unique. There was Camilla, who’d lost her whole family down to her youngest nieces and nephews. And Addie, who’d been at summer camp when her parents died in a light plane crash. Burke had managed to lose three families: He’d been left as a month-old foundling in a church with nothing but his birth certificate tucked into his blanket with him. Three months later they’d traced his parents—to the city morgue—and he’d been put up for adoption, since they’d never found any other relatives. When he was eight, his house caught on fire. He managed to get to the baby’s room and get out with her, but their parents died in the fire. She’d gone to relatives, but they hadn’t wanted a boy who was “no relation to them.” He’d been quickly taken in by a nice couple, the Martins—though as a foster child this time—and been happy enough for the next few years, until Oakhurst came forward and offered him a place.

“It only made sense to come,” he’d told Spirit quietly. “Ma—Mrs. Martin—wasn’t getting any younger, and her health wasn’t so good, and I already knew there wouldn’t be any money for college or anything. Couldn’t ask it of them. Oakhurst was offering me everything. And maybe—when I get out—I can look them up again and see about paying back some of their kindness.”

No, she didn’t have it as bad as she possibly could.

But Oakhurst was still . . . frustrating. Weird, in a way Spirit couldn’t quite put her finger on. As if she was always trying to put her foot on a step that wasn’t there, or banging her nose against invisible walls.

Maybe it was the whole magic thing.

In all the days that followed, nobody had even so much as suggested that she do the test over. Because she’d spent most of the day in the infirmary, she’d missed her orientation tour, which would have been a walk-through of her classrooms, meeting her teachers, and getting signed up for her “extracurricular” activities, so she’d had to make do with a “virtual” tour online and the slightly scattershot rundown she got from the others. So Spirit had been more than a little surprised to walk into her Science class to find that Ms. Smith was the teacher.

She hadn’t had the nerve to bring up being retested, though—either there or in her magic classes.

Because this was a school for magicians. Of course they got lessons in magic.

Spirit stared down at her notebook and pretended she was taking notes. She was doing her best not to fidget, but it was