Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,51

said, and they all made wry faces of agreement.

“So I guess what he said doesn’t mean anything to any of you?” Loch asked. And, when they all shook their heads, he added: “Well, we’d better find out what it does mean, because Nick ran into something out there that did something to his mind, everybody’s covering it up, and I have the feeling that at least some of them already know what did that to him. And if it happened to Nick—it can happen to any of us.”

On Monday afternoon, in the hour before dinner, Muirin and Spirit were in the Oakhurst Library trying to follow up on the clue Loch had gotten from Nick. So far it had been slow going: Spirit had been occupied with the surprise paper from Ms. Groves all weekend, and Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were martial arts class, which ate up another hour and a half after regular classes. Muirin had fencing classes in another section of the gym complex that the fencers shared with the gymnasts, and despite her boasts that she was “so advanced” as an Illusion Mage, she still had to practice, and constantly, because the teachers always wanted to see improvement in your spellwork.

Not that Spirit would know anything about that.

In addition to everything else, Spirit was doing her best to squeak out the promised hours to practice with Burke. She’d only managed it once so far—on Sunday afternoon—but she could already tell it had made a difference. Burke was a kind and patient teacher. He didn’t expect her to know any of this stuff already, but he had an unswerving belief that she could learn it. And he was willing to demonstrate the basic moves as many times as she needed, gently point out her mistakes, and show her how to fix them.

Spirit thought he’d make a much better teacher than Mr. Wallis.

“I just like people,” Burke had said, shrugging. “They’re basically good, you know. Or they want to be. Sometimes they get scared, or confused, but underneath that, they’re really good.”

While Spirit could definitely see what Muirin meant about Burke being “too good to live,” she thought his attitude was . . . kind of nice. And even one lesson had made a difference in class that day. She thought if it kept up, she might manage to get through the exhibition at the end of the month with all her limbs intact.

But classes and exhibitions and their “regular” lives at Oakhurst had suddenly become nothing more than an elaborate lie they were telling everyone. Their real lives revolved around solving the mystery of Nicholas Bilderback’s last words to Loch.

“The horns—the horns.” They could only hope they could figure it out before anyone else vanished.

Their research would have gone much faster online, but as Muirin had pointed out, online research left online traces. And besides, some of the sources they needed were only actual, not virtual. At least it wasn’t unusual for them to be in the Library at all hours. Mr. Jackson and Ms. Anderson were the librarians who took care of the collection, and the rest of the work was done by the students.

The five of them had tacitly decided that Nick must have been attacked by magic. If he’d been attacked by someone and drugged, there would have been marks on him—and the hospital would have tested for drugs, and the police in Radial would have had actual facts to go on, rather than just a story they really liked. The only thing that really fit the few facts they had—Camilla just vanishing and Nick turning up in the condition he had—was magic.

There were a lot of references to horns in magic and folklore, but so far none of them were very useful. Muirin and Spirit had ruled out the Horn of Gondor, since that was fictional. But that left Gjallarhorn, which the Norse God Heimdall would blow to announce Ragnarok; the Amalthean Horn, which some legends said gave forth food and drink and other legends said spewed out demons; the Horn of Roland, which had the power of summoning Arthur’s Knights from their enchanted sleep; and a number of references to things like unicorn’s horns. None of those things would have hurt Nick—at least not without leaving a lot more evidence behind, like a plague of demons or the end of the world.

“This is useless,” Spirit said in frustration, closing the latest book. It was about the size of a telephone book and weighed