Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,59
it out carefully and set it aside. Beneath it was a two-sided silver frame. In one side was a picture of a smiling dark-haired girl with her arms around the neck of a panting golden retriever. Behind her stood a man and a woman, obviously her parents. In the photo on the other side, a handsome boy teased the same dog with a Frisbee. Brother? Boyfriend? It didn’t matter. No matter what, Tabitha Johnson wouldn’t have left that behind when she left Oakhurst.
Not if she’d had a choice.
“Hey, kids, look at this,” Muirin said. She walked over to the table with a file folder in her hand. “Those file cabinets are all full of files. There must be hundreds of them. I looked at some of the dates. They go all the way back to the seventies.”
“That’s when Oakhurst opened,” Loch said. “It’s probably just their dead files. You know, former students? They’d have to keep them forever.”
Muirin snickered cruelly. “ ‘Dead Files’ is right. This is Camilla’s. Let’s see what the Powers That Be had to say about the trailer trash.”
“That’s not very nice,” Spirit snapped.
“She’s gone, what’s the harm?” Muirin said. She flipped through the manila folder. “Transcripts, notes from the teachers—huh, she was getting better grades in Art than I am—evaluations from her magic coach—Kissyface Bowman always was too easy on anybody with a flashy Water Gift—Demerits . . .” She stopped suddenly, as she got to the last page, and stared down at the folder in silence.
“What?” Loch said. Muirin simply held the folder out to him mutely.
He took it, and looked down at the last page. Spirit looked over his shoulder. There was just a single page there at the end, something it would be easy to take out and dispose of if for some reason you were going to hand it over to someone. At the top of the page there were several lines of illegible handwriting. The rest of the page was blank.
Except for a large red stamp that said: “Tithed.”
And the date.
Halloween.
EIGHT
Loch dropped the folder. The papers scattered everywhere. He stepped back quickly, as if the folder contained something dangerous.
“Tithed,” Muirin whispered harshly.
In that split second, the world seemed to lurch dangerously, and Spirit remembered the nightmare moment when she’d felt her parents’ car spin out of control—of thinking it would be bad, then worse-than-bad, then the blind mindless terror that swallowed up all thought. She’d relived that terror for weeks afterward, its echo enough to drag her up out of even heavy sedation.
It was like a flash, only negative, and before any of them could react with more than a flinch, there was something in the road—right in the middle of the road. It was—
Oh God! It couldn’t be—It couldn’t be—
And it looked at them and Mom screamed and Dad yanked the wheel sideways—
She’d told herself for months that what she’d seen wasn’t real. And now she was at Oakhurst, and she knew it could be, that it was, that whatever it was, it had come for Camilla Patterson and it had come for Nick Bilderback and it had come for Seth Morris and it would come for her. She had somehow eluded it once. She’d never be able to escape it a second time. Terror turned her insides to liquid.
“We have to—We have to—” Loch stammered in a stunned disbelieving voice.
“Burn this whole place down,” Muirin said viciously. “All of it—just burn it!”
“No. Wait.” Spirit dragged in a deep gasping breath, clutching her hands into fists to stop them from shaking. She was so terrified that all she wanted to do was burst into tears and hide. And if she did, all that would happen was other kids would end up just like her. And Loch. Burke, Muirin, Addie—and all the kids who’d died here.
She took another deep breath, closing her eyes tightly. Play hard and think harder. Mom always said that. “We need to put everything back the way it was. We need to get out of here without anyone noticing. We need to find out what t-t-tithing means,” she said, stumbling over the horrible word. “Tithed to who? What? And by who? Who put that note in there? Why? Was it supposed to be a warning in case someone came looking into these records?”
“It can’t be everybody doing this,” Loch said. He sounded better now. Calmer. As if Spirit managing to hold onto things was making it possible for him to do the same. “Not all the teachers.