Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,12
he said that last word made it clear without explanation that he meant magic. “Now, on that note, I shall return you to Ms. Corby’s capable hands. She will show you to your rooms and acquaint you with what you can expect from here on. We will have another interview in a few days when you have settled in. Good day.”
The doors opened at another of Doctor Ambrosius’s gestures. He turned his chair so that it faced the fire, with his back to them. Spirit and Loch slowly got up and walked back out into the Entry Hall. The door closed behind them. The receptionist wasn’t at her desk, and Ms. Corby wasn’t there either. In the echoing silence, Spirit and Loch looked at each other.
“Did I just have a really vivid hallucination?” Loch asked.
Spirit swallowed hard. “If you did—” she began.
“Hey!” Loch said. “You’re bleeding.” He nodded at her right arm.
As if him saying the words made it real, suddenly her arm twinged with a sharp pain. “Ow!”
She held out her arm and stared at it. She’d worn a sleeveless blouse to leave the hospital, and had been regretting it ever since she arrived in Montana. I guess it’s just as well, she thought, half-hysterically, they say it’s impossible to get bloodstains out of a white blouse. . . . From wrist to elbow her arm was scored with a deep, angry-red scratch. It looked exactly like a cat scratch—if the cat had claws as long as her arm.
Or like an owl’s talons—if you were the size of a white mouse.
“Um . . . maybe not a hallucination,” she said quietly.
THREE
When Ms. Corby appeared a minute or so later, she had a man in a business suit with her. “Miss White, with me. Master Spears, with Mr. Devon,” she said with detached pleasantness. “The Young Ladies’ Wing is to the right, the Young Gentlemen’s to the left.”
For a moment, Spirit felt a flash of panic. Loch was the only person in this whole place she knew! But then she forced herself to be calm. It wasn’t as if they were being incarcerated, and after that interview with Doctor Ambrosius, it was pretty clear that being separated from Loch was the least of her worries. The four of them walked back beneath the balcony to where there was a perfectly ordinary set of double doors—a far more ordinary set than those that led into Doctor Ambrosius’s sanctum.
“Are you teachers?” Spirit asked, as Mr. Devon held open one door for them.
Ms. Corby looked faintly amused. “Certainly not. Mr. Devon and I assist Doctor Ambrosius directly. He has more to deal with than just this school.”
“Are you—” Loch hesitated over the word.
“Magicians?” Ms. Corby asked, sounding more than amused now. “Mr. Devon is, I am not. But everyone here knows what Doctor Ambrosius is, and what you youngsters are.” She turned her head slightly, arching her eyebrow at him. “It would be rather silly to try and hide it from the ones who work here.”
Spirit felt a little rattled at that. Either everyone here was in on some kind of massive deception, or—
Or it was real. And she couldn’t help thinking, with a feeling of icy fear, about what she had seen just before the accident.
They were at an intersection. Ahead were glass doors leading into what could not by any stretch of the imagination be called a “cafeteria.” Not when it was full of long wooden tables covered with snowy linen tablecloths, lined by plain, if elegant, chairs. To the right and left were more double doors like the ones they’d just come through.
“As I said,” Ms. Corby interrupted her thoughts, “Young Ladies to the right, Young Gentlemen to the left.” She walked off—again, without beckoning to Spirit or looking to see if she’d followed—and Spirit hurried after her.
The hallway was decorated like the Entry Hall. It was the rich man’s version of “rustic,” lit with deco-Egyptian cast bronze lanterns. It looked like the hallway of an expensive hotel, except that each of the doors had a little engraved plaque with someone’s name on it.
“We assumed you would prefer to be on the ground floor,” Ms. Corby said, as if she didn’t care one way or the other what Spirit preferred. “If not, just e-mail me. There are empty rooms on the second and third floors and we should be able to move you in a day or two.” She paused beside one of the last two doors before a staircase.