Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,56

books as you liked from the Library, but you could only keep them for seven days, and if you didn’t return them on time, you got demerit points, and they were assessed per book, not per you-had-overdue-library-books. And of course they had to be returned in good shape. But aside from that, they didn’t care what you read, and it was one of the nicest libraries Spirit had ever been in.

Ms. Anderson looked up as they walked in, nodding briefly before returning to the book she was reading. On a Saturday after dinner, the Library wasn’t too crowded, though there were about half a dozen students sitting up near the front, typing away on their laptops, a stack of reference books beside them.

The five of them went back into the stacks, to what had become Spirit and Muirin’s usual study table. There wasn’t as much light back here as in the rest of the Library: during the day, the freestanding shelves cut off most of the light from the windows, and at night, they blocked a lot of the light from the chandeliers. Also—by some fluke of the building’s construction—laptops in this corner couldn’t get a signal to connect to the school intranet.

So it was perfect.

Spirit settled into a seat and waited with ill-concealed impatience while the others collected chairs and settled around the table.

“Okay,” Burke said. “So I get back from the game today, and Brendan comes over, because he was going through all his stuff to find all the books he needed to take back to the Library, and he had this.”

He reached into his blazer pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. He set it on the table and unfolded it carefully. Inside was a tiny zip-up carrying case with the initials “NB” hand-painted on one side in flaming letters.

“What is it?” Spirit asked. She was curious in spite of herself.

“It’s an earbud case,” Burke said. “Brendan said Nick was studying in his room a few days before the dance. Nick brought his earbuds with him so he could listen to music without bugging Brendan. He was looking all over for it later—and Brendan forgot he’d left it there. So now Brendan doesn’t just want to throw it out, and Nick’s room’s already been emptied. I said I’d take care of it.”

Spirit couldn’t figure out why the others looked as if this was a really big deal. So Burke had found Nick’s earbud case. So?

“It’s something Nick handled a lot, and something he cared about,” Burke said. “Loch should be able to use his Kenning Gift to trace it back to where anything that has an affinity with it is.”

“We know where Nick is—or where he’s supposed to be. Billings,” Loch pointed out.

“Sure. But his stuff isn’t in Billings,” Addie said. “And they probably didn’t just toss it out—because somebody might notice, and wonder why. And if they didn’t . . . then maybe it’s with other stuff they’ve got stored.”

“And if it is, and I can find where that is, who knows what else I might find?” Loch said, looking excited.

“Well, you’re going to have to be careful,” Muirin said warningly. “And you’re going to need help.”

When Muirin said that Loch would need “help,” it’d never occurred to Spirit that the help Muirin meant was her. But as Muirin explained, if Spirit hadn’t come into her magic yet, that also meant a magician couldn’t sense her by following her magic. So in the event Muirin and Loch were caught, Spirit could get away to warn the others.

Probably.

It’d seemed like a crazy idea after dinner, and it seemed like an even crazier one three hours after Lights Out, when she, Loch, and Muirin—all dressed in their darkest clothes—went sneaking down the back stairs of the main building.

Loch was the one who had to do the actual Kenning spell, and Muirin was coming along at least partly—Spirit thought—because Muirin could never bear to be left out of any “adventure,” no matter how dangerous, and partly because her ability to cast illusions might give them some protection.

Spirit had never been gladder about Loch’s obsession with local history. The Kenning spell pulled him in a straight line—as if there were an invisible string stretching between the object he held and the objects for which it had an “affinity”—but he wasn’t forced to follow it slavishly. He could tell that it led down, so he led them around the main rooms of the house, into the classroom wing, down into the basement