Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,57

level there—and then back toward the house.

“When they added on the new wings, they covered at least one of the exterior entrances to the cellar,” Loch whispered, shining his penlight over the walls. “This is the main one. Oakhurst used to be heated by coal.”

Spirit wished he’d stop talking. If Oakhurst was a little creepy during the day sometimes, it was full-on spooky in the middle of the night. And she wouldn’t quite put it past one of the teachers—or one of the proctors—to follow them and then jump out shrieking just to give them the fright of their lives.

The door Loch was indicating looked just like any other door down here, except for the sign that said NO EXIT: KEEP OUT. It was gray metal and looked grimly institutional. But when Loch tried it, much to Spirit’s surprise, it opened.

“What if there are burglar alarms?” she whispered.

“Oh don’t be silly, Spirit,” Muirin hissed. “Who’s going to break in down here?”

“Well . . . us,” Loch said inarguably. “Come on.”

The basement—cellar, really—was the only part of Oakhurst that Spirit had seen that didn’t look shiny new and rolling in money. It was freezing cold and faintly damp, and while Loch’s little penlight didn’t do much to illuminate it, what she could see was dusty, dirty, and generally unused. The walls were made up of wide-spaced wooden planks, and she could even see cobwebs.

“Hey,” Muirin whispered. “Shine that on the floor again.” When Loch did, she made a small sound of surprise. “Somebody put down a new cement floor here. Newer than the house, anyway.”

“How would you know?” Spirit asked, despite herself.

“Daddy Dearest was a contractor,” Muirin said simply. “I spent a lot of time on construction sites when I was a kid.”

“Do people ever put basements under basements?” Loch asked, sounding confused.

It took them a while to find what Loch was looking for. The part of the cellar they’d come in through had contained the old coal bins. From there, they found the (modern) Furnace Room, where Muirin—over Spirit’s protests—grabbed a flashlight to replace Loch’s failing penlight.

“We’re already going to be in trouble if we’re caught down here, what’s one little flashlight going to matter?” she said blithely.

Spirit wasn’t sure what Loch was expecting to find down here. The basement was cut up into a number of rooms (Loch said that was to provide support for the ground floor above) and it was easily as large as the main house. A lot of it seemed to be devoted to storage: there were shelves of ancient computer equipment, a whole room full of broken wooden furniture and tattered carpet ends, things that had obviously been sent here to die—and other rooms filled with shelves that obviously held quantities of things in current use, everything from fifty-pound sacks of flour to industrial-size boxes of trash bags.

Loch kept circling around as if he were lost, clutching Nick’s leather case in one hand. Finally he returned—for the third time—to the Furnace Room.

“It’s here,” he said, sounding disgusted. He pointed at the floor. “Right there.”

“Huh.” Muirin looked around the room, shining the flashlight around the walls and the ceiling. Suddenly she darted off and disappeared behind the furnace. “Maybe through this door, geniuses?”

“What?” Loch spoke loudly and Spirit hissed in dismay. “Sorry,” he whispered.

The two of them groped through the darkness to where Muirin stood. There was about three feet of space between the back of the furnace and the wall, and in the middle of that space was a door—or, rather, a hatch. It looked like a hatch on a ship, with rounded corners and a raised bottom edge, and it was painted the same color as the wall. Between that and the fact that it was a little smaller than an ordinary door, they hadn’t found it before.

“This way through the rabbit hole,” Muirin said.

It was also locked with a padlock.

“How are we? . . .” Loch said.

Muirin handed her flashlight to Spirit and dug around in her pocket. While Spirit and Loch were both wearing their school clothes—the dark brown was the perfect shade for sneaking around in, actually—Muirin was wearing black jeans and a black turtleneck sweater. She looked like an elegant cat burglar.

“Trust me when I say I know everything there is to know about smuggling contraband into fancy private schools specializing in ‘attitude readjustment,’ ” Muirin said. She came up with a ring of keys and shook them at the other two. “And about keeping it hidden once you