Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,69
to go just telling everybody else about this and seeing if they have any good ideas? Sure! Then we can all be down there! Except Ads, of course—she’s got her trust-fund lawyers looking out for her!” Muirin said viciously.
“Spirit didn’t say that, and you know it,” Burke said. “She’s just worried because she’s your friend. But look: does it really make sense that the Whatever and whoever’s serving it would be stupid?”
“Huh,” Loch said, sounding surprised. “We’ve kind of been assuming that the Whatever is working for whoever’s on the inside here. But what if you’re right, and it’s the other way around? Because if kids have been disappearing for forty years, the only one who’s been at Oakhurst that long is Doctor Ambrosius.”
“We don’t know that they have, Loch. That’s one of the problems,” Addie said. “If—”
“Will you all stop getting sidetracked by unimportant things?” Spirit demanded, trying to keep a leash on her temper. “It doesn’t matter. Find out what the Whatever is and how we stop it. That’s what matters!”
“Huh,” Muirin said speculatively, losing some of that angry spark. “So . . . how do we do that?”
Burke looked at Spirit. She shrugged helplessly.
“We can’t follow up Nick’s clue; we tried,” he said, ticking the points off on his fingers. “Whoever’s letting the Whatever onto the School Grounds and cleaning up after it probably hasn’t left a Monster Manual around with the page conveniently marked for us. We have twenty-four days until the Winter Solstice, and we have to figure out how to stop the Whatever once we identify it, or one and probably two more kids will die. We can’t ask anyone for help, or we might be asking the wrong people—or they’ll tell the wrong people what we asked. So we decide—now—whether to approach somebody else here for help in identifying the Whatever— or we have to decide we’re okay with a couple more people dying and hope we can figure it out by February.”
“Isn’t approaching somebody for help in identifying the Whatever the same as asking them for help?” Addie asked, after a long moment when nobody said anything.
“Oh. No. No,” Loch said, sounding as if he’d found the solution. “We can ask someone for help—but we don’t have to tell them why they’re really helping. Right?”
“I think,” Addie said slowly. “I think that could work. We get someone with the Scrying Gift, and we ask them to See something for us. Everybody does that all the time. We make it something that seems reasonable—”
“But something that will tell us what we need to know!” Muirin said. Her eyes gleamed avidly.
“They won’t be hurt, will they?” Spirit asked doubtfully. She’d studied Scrying, the way she’d studied all the Mage Gifts of all the Elemental Schools, but it still seemed so unlikely. See something somewhere else than where you were, okay—a television camera could do that. But view the past and the future? That was pure science fiction.
“A Scrying Mage just Sees what they’re looking for,” Addie said. “They don’t experience it. It’s real, but it’s not like it’s right there.” She thought for a moment, chewing on her lower lip. “It’s going to be hard to find somebody who’s got a strong Gift and stays awake while they use it.”
Muirin snorted. “Yeah, because it isn’t going to be a lot of use to us if we have to hang around waiting for them to wake up and tell us about it.”
Especially, Spirit thought, if just seeing it had the same effect on them as it’d had on Nick Bilderback. But right now, this wasn’t just the best idea they had.
It was the only idea they had.
NINE
Wednesday was December first. Three weeks from today, either somebody else would be dead, or they would have stopped the Whatever. No pressure, right? Spirit thought to herself.
The pop-up calendar app on her desktop told her that the twenty-first wasn’t just the Solstice, but a Full Moon. If this were a movie, she could hack into the school’s main database and run a search on every student who had ever been here. She could find out which ones had left before the age of twenty-one, and when, and then she could just hack her way out onto the Internet and cross-index that with the Naval Observatory’s ephemeris. And then she could find out what lunar phases those dates corresponded with and get all the other information she needed, too. Like complete bios on all the Alums. If she had