Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,45
but the picture it painted was a chilling one.
As Burke had told Spirit the night before, a few kids vanished every semester, and (so they were told) a few kids graduated early. But none of the “graduates” were ever heard from again. They didn’t write to any of their friends still at Oakhurst, even though their letters ought to have been let past the school gatekeepers and delivered to their recipients.
“And Tabby Johnson and Ryan Miller graduated last year—supposedly—and both of them knew about the thing Seth had. They could have sent a letter through the post office box in Radial and it would have gotten here. They never did,” Muirin added. “If we weren’t a bunch of orphans—if Oakhurst didn’t have so much money—any other school would be investigated if so many kids kept running off and vanishing. I mean, I don’t have any money, and I know Burke doesn’t—and neither do you, Spirit—but Loch isn’t hurting—and Addie, you’re stinking rich. What happens to your inheritances if you just vanish?”
“My father’s estate is set up as a trust that I can draw on once I’m twenty-one. I get full control of it when I’m twenty-five,” Loch said. “I guess if I . . . vanish . . . it goes to some charity.”
“Like Oakhurst. An orphanage that takes in a bunch of poor kids would qualify, right?” Muirin said.
From the stricken look on Loch’s face, Spirit guessed it would. And Muirin wasn’t finished yet. She said that for a week during the summer, Oakhurst held “Alumni Days,” during which a number of former students returned to visit. Most of the students were kept completely out of the way of the visitors and barely saw them at all—but a few of the kids, and even some of the teachers, disappeared from their classes for that whole week, and the kids who were involved in Alumni Days refused to talk about what they’d been doing when they came back.
“But everybody knows about that,” Burke said slowly. “It’s just . . . I always figured . . . Doctor Ambrosius always says we’re going to be important people someday. So I kind of thought . . . it might be kind of like a job interview. You know, they might be going to go to work in their companies after they graduated.”
“You are too good to live, Burke,” Muirin said disgustedly. “Have you forgotten we’re all magicians? And why wouldn’t they talk about it afterward?”
“A secret society,” Loch said. Everybody looked at him. He shrugged slightly. “They have them in colleges. They’re like fraternities, most of them, except one of the rules is that you can’t talk about being a member.”
“So what kind of an exclusive club like that would Oakhurst have?” Spirit asked. “Who’s in it—and what’s it for?”
No one had an answer for her. And the clock had ticked over to eight o’clock and they were out of time to wonder about it.
The four hours of Spirit’s morning classes seemed to drag on forever, and she had difficulty concentrating, even though they were fairly mindless: English, History (regular History, not History of Magic), and Art. Everyone was restless, but most of Spirit’s fellow students seemed to be more pissed-off at Camilla picking the night of the dance to run off—and ruining it for them—than worried about her. She was surprised, after what had happened when Seth disappeared, that the school hadn’t even seemed to notice that Nicholas was gone at all.
Had Muirin’s love of gossip and drama made her blow up a collection of unrelated incidents into a huge conspiracy? Was this Muirin’s way of grieving for Seth—making his disappearance into part of an enormous persecution of the Oakhurst student body?
Or was Muirin right? When you looked at the cold, hard facts of it . . . how could she not be right?
Spirit was on her way to the Refectory at the end of Third Period when Loch showed up in the hallway. They didn’t have any morning classes together—he was in a different “module” for History and English, and he had Science while she had Art—so she was a little surprised to see him. She was even more surprised when he put a hand on her arm and drew her toward the wall.
“Skip lunch,” he said. “Come on. We’re taking a meeting.”
She’d thought Loch would be one of the last people to flout the Code of Conduct, so if