Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,40

time and not hanging out in the lounge as much in the evening. Spirit knew that Addie felt hurt by it, because she and Muirin had been best friends, but there wasn’t a lot anyone could say to Muirin without setting her off, which no one, least of all Addie, wanted to do. Spirit just hoped that Muirin wouldn’t do something stupid. Really stupid, like running away.

Meanwhile, even if it was a school dance, there were a lot of things about it that made it different from any other school dance ever. A lot of the kids were showing off: the Ice Mages freezing cups of soda into slushies, the Jaunting Mages apporting food across the room, the Air Mages conjuring up little wind-devils that picked up dust and twisted the streamers around themselves and whirled across the floor like the baby sisters of Dorothy’s tornado. And Muirin wasn’t the only Illusion Mage here.

“You shouldn’t let it get to you,” Burke said, under cover of the music. “Everybody’s magic doesn’t show up at the same time. Muirin got hers when she was twelve. Some kids come here and they’re older than either of us, and they don’t know they’re magicians yet.”

Spirit looked up at him, startled. And relieved, too, because she didn’t think she actually wanted to be a magician, but everyone else was, and it was hard to be left out. “I don’t—” she began.

“Don’t sweat it,” he said. Despite his claims of clumsiness, Burke wasn’t that bad a dancer. Just careful and a little nervous. “Give it a few months and you can—”

He broke off in the middle of a sentence, taking a half-step away from Spirit and looking toward the back of the gym. The dance floor was pretty crowded, but Spirit could see that the door was open, and Nicholas was in the doorway talking to Kelly. He looked really upset.

“C’mon,” Burke said.

“—gone! I was supposed to meet her outside and I waited for ten minutes then I went looking for her,” Nicholas was saying. “She wouldn’t have just gone wandering off!”

“It’s not that warm outside,” Kelly pointed out reasonably. “Maybe she came back in here and you missed her.”

But Nicholas was shaking his head frantically, and Spirit was looking around and couldn’t see Camilla anywhere.

Within ten minutes, everyone knew Camilla wasn’t in the gym and wasn’t in her room. The five of them knew something Nicholas hadn’t wanted to mention around the proctors or the teachers, too: the reason he was sure that Camilla was in trouble was that he’d found her cigarette lighter outside on the ground. It had belonged to her father—a brass Zippo with the Navy world-and-anchor and the initials “CMP” engraved on the lid—and it wasn’t something she’d just drop and not notice. It proved she’d been outside, and it proved—at least to Nicholas—that she was in trouble.

“Let me have it,” Loch said quietly, holding out his hand. “One of my Gifts is Kenning,” he said, when Nicholas just stared at him. “I might be able to learn something.” Loch closed his hand around it, and for a second or two nothing happened. Then he winced, gasping, and forced his fingers open with an effort. He shook his head. “I’m not very good yet,” he said apologetically. “All I got from it was cold and darkness. You don’t need Kenning to know it’s cold and dark out there.”

“I’m going to look for her,” Nicholas said determinedly.

“Not by yourself,” Burke said firmly. “We’ll all go.”

“Coats,” Addie said. “I’ll get ours. Brendan, you get the guys’. Come on.”

“Before the teachers say we can’t,” Muirin muttered under her breath.

But the teachers were out searching, too—at least some of them were. It was a storybook kind of Halloween night—clouds, a full moon, the wind whistling through whatever wind whistled through. There weren’t any fallen leaves to kick through—Burke said the Air Mages got together in the fall and swirled them all up into a cyclone and dumped them twenty or thirty miles away—but aside from that it could have been a Halloween in a movie.

Right down to the missing coed.

Don’t think like that! Spirit told herself fiercely. Camilla was here somewhere, she was fine, they’d find her and everything would be okay. She hadn’t run away. Camilla was one of the few kids Spirit had talked to who actually liked being at Oakhurst better than she’d liked being at home.

But Spirit couldn’t help but think about what Brendan had told her. About how a couple