Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,54
to drag on forever. It was boring and terrifying at the same time: they had to behave exactly as they had been—right down to hanging out on IM at night—and they could never even hint to someone outside their group that they suspected there was something going on.
At the same time, they couldn’t let Oakhurst notice there was an actual them, either. Spirit had started out only suspecting that Oakhurst didn’t want you to make good friends—not the kind of friends you’d be drop-dead loyal to—and the more she looked around, the more hints she found that she was right.
Zoey Young and Jillian Marshall were the two girls who’d arrived at Oakhurst before Spirit, and they’d become close friends. Both of them—and Spirit—were in the same afternoon History of Magic class with Ms. Groves. Then Zoey got switched to the morning class, and Ms. Groves announced—in class, so everybody knew—that it was because Zoey was “more advanced.” Spirit knew that Jillian was the better magician. Jillian knew it, too. She stopped sitting with Zoey at meals.
When Spirit mentioned that to the others, Addie didn’t seem to see anything odd in it, and Spirit wondered if she was being overly paranoid. The truth was that Oakhurst rarely needed to meddle that much to keep all of them at each other’s throats. With all the competition going, it was hard to stay friends with someone. On Wednesday in kendo, she’d been sparring against Jenny O’Connell, and when she’d blocked with her shinai, it exploded into splinters and ash in her hands. Somebody had carefully burned the bamboo-slat sword to cinders from the inside out. Jenny backed off and let Spirit get another shinai.
Spirit had thought Jenny was being nice until she saw her laughing with Andy Hayes about it after class. Andy wasn’t taking kendo—but he was a Fire Witch. So much for being nice; Jenny had sabotaged her sparring session.
When Spirit wasn’t dealing with her classmates, or trying to be “normal for Oakhurst,” she was helping the others try to figure out what was going on. What she was actually figuring out was that this kind of double life left her feeling as drained as those first weeks of rehab had—when she was struggling to reclaim her own body. There were never enough hours in the day, and they weren’t much closer to figuring out what the “Whatever” was (Muirin’s name for it had stuck), either. They were guessing it was something that had to vanish with the dawn, but there were a lot of magical things that did that.
On the other hand, they were starting to develop a scarily long list of missing students.
Oakhurst Academy had opened almost forty years ago, according to Loch. They couldn’t exactly ask any of the proctors or the teachers about kids who’d disappeared from Oakhurst before they turned twenty-one, but Burke was well-liked and knew everyone—and he had a good memory. When he sat down and thought about it, he came up with something that startled all of them, even Muirin. At least two kids had left Oakhurst in the weeks around the Fire Festivals and Cross-Quarter Days for as far back as Burke could remember. And if it had been going on for the last four years, well, there was no reason to think it hadn’t been going on for the last forty years. They were all orphans. Who’d know—or care—if one of them vanished, so long as everything looked right on the surface? Like Loch said, if the paperwork was all in order . . .
Oh, there were dozens of explanations. Illness, injury, ran away, long-lost relative turned up, transferred to a different boarding school . . . kidnapped by space aliens, for all Spirit knew! The point was, Oakhurst was like a Roach Motel in reverse: kids checked out—and they never checked back in again.
The double life was exhausting and nerve-wracking, and the expected attendance at the football game was pretty much the last straw. As the victorious players trotted from the playing field, Spirit decided her plans for the rest of the afternoon would be curling up with a good book, and . . . curling up with a good book. The football game had just been a reminder that Oakhurst encouraged confrontation and conflict—five players had been carried from the field into the hands of the Healing Mages—as well as a reminder that there was nobody any of them could turn to for protection. And if that wasn’t bad