Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,46

he was willing to do it, it had to be important. She slipped out the side door with him and hurried down the brick walkway, wrapping her arms around herself against the bite of the wind. November in Montana was a lot colder than November in Indiana.

“Yeah,” Loch said, seeing her shiver. “Sorry. This is important.”

Their destination was the little railway station. When she and Loch arrived, Spirit saw that Addie and Muirin were already there, and Burke arrived a couple of minutes later. Spirit could practically have kissed him when she saw he had two blankets with him—big heavy wool ones, the kind they used down in the stables.

The five of them huddled together under the platform with the blankets wrapped around them. Loch had brought bottles of juice, and granola bars, and apples, and Muirin had several Hershey bars and a Coke, and Burke had some PowerBars and bottled water, and Addie and Spirit both had granola bars tucked down into the bottom of their book bags; they shared out the food as Loch explained why they were all here breaking the rules and missing lunch.

“Nicholas is back,” he said, looking grim. “The police brought him into the Infirmary today. They found him down in Radial this morning—wandering down the street like a zombie.”

“What?” Burke said, stunned.

“How do you know?” Muirin asked suspiciously.

Loch glanced toward Addie. “I’ve been in prep schools all my life, you know? So a lot of the time I’m doing ‘Special Projects’ in my English class, because I’ve pretty much got English Comp covered and they want to keep us busy. So today I started in the Library as a page. It’s pretty cool, actually—”

“Get to the point,” Muirin snapped.

“The point,” Loch said, an edge to his voice, “is that library pages shelve books, and they also run all over the school getting them back from wherever the teachers have left them. All the library books are RFID-chipped, and the school computer can find them. What that means is, A: I have the run of the school during my English class, and B: the library has a great view of the driveway.”

Muirin opened her mouth to say something else, and Addie poked her.

“So I was in the Library when I saw the ambulance from Radial drive up, followed by a sheriff’s car, so I waited about ten minutes, then I snuck down to the Infirmary to see what was going on.”

“But—didn’t you worry about being caught?” Spirit asked.

Loch smiled at her unhappily. “Hey. Shadewalker here, remember? That means invisible and stealthy, and I probably couldn’t fool a magician, but I’m pretty sure Ms. Bradford isn’t a magician, and the cops and the EMTs from Radial sure aren’t. I was able to stand right outside the doorway and hear everything.

“They told Ms. Bradford that they found Nick wandering around the center of town right around dawn. They said he was barefoot and in shirtsleeves, so they took him over to the local hospital for a couple of hours to make sure he was going to be okay. Which he is—physically. The cops are calling it a drug overdose, and now they’re saying that Camilla was involved with drug dealers, and she disappeared because of a drug deal gone wrong.”

“No. No. Absolutely not.” Burke was shaking his head. “Nick’s mom was a junkie. He wouldn’t even touch aspirin. He thought Coca-Cola was the hard stuff.”

“Camilla smoked,” Spirit pointed out.

“Yeah, sure,” Burke said. “And cigarettes will kill you, but they aren’t exactly heroin. Murr, Seth wasn’t bringing anything like that in, was he?”

“Not even pot,” Muirin said, making a face. “He said even beer was too risky, because what if the proctors or the teachers caught someone ’faced? Junk food, mail, some clothes, magazines, software, cigs, condoms—that was it. I’d know.”

“And Seth was the ‘dealer,’ not Camilla, anyway,” Addie pointed out. “Camilla was supposed to meet Nick outside the gym last night. She disappeared off the school grounds. Nick went looking for her—and I don’t care what the police are saying, he would have worn a coat and shoes when he went,” she finished angrily.

“So . . . what are we saying?” Loch asked, looking around at the others.

“That there’s something going on here at Oakhurst,” Spirit said into the silence. “It’s something that makes kids disappear. And either the authorities in Radial are in on it—or they’re being bribed to look the other way—or they’re being . . .” She hesitated. “Bespelled. Bespelled to not notice