Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [1]
* * *
As the sounds got closer, Spirit could see Jeeps, SUVs. The vehicles were rusted and burned out, as if they’d come from some supernatural junkyard. Lashed to every grille or hood was a set of antlers: deer, elk, even moose, and each vehicle held passengers. Some leaned out the sides of doorless, roofless SUVs. Some stood in the beds of pickup trucks, whooping and hollering and urging the drivers onward. They were dressed in the ragged remains of hunting clothes—hunter’s orange and red-and-black buffalo plaids and woodland camo. Skeletal hands gripped roll bars and steering wheels and door frames. Eyeless skulls covered in tatters of rotting flesh gazed avidly toward their prey. Every single one of them was dead.…
* * *
The Wild Hunt was supposed to be a myth, a folktale, a legend: a ghostly troop of riders—a hunt—that galloped across the sky, capturing or killing anyone it met. It hadn’t been supposed to be real. Spirit wanted to think she and her friends—Loch, Addie, Muirin, and Burke—had actually managed to destroy the Wild Hunt, but she was pretty sure they hadn’t. They couldn’t possibly be that lucky.
At least they’d made it go away. Spirit burrowed deeper under the covers, shivering at the memory. They’d been crazy to try taking on the Hunt by themselves. It was a miracle they’d won. And their reward for doing the impossible had been a pat on the head from Doctor Ambrosius, Oakhurst’s headmaster.
And that was an odd thing that stood out even in the middle of the general weirdness that was Oakhurst. On the day she and Loch had arrived, Doctor Ambrosius had told them that they—everyone here at Oakhurst—had enemies, and that a final showdown was coming. That was why he brought all of them here after their parents died. That was why he was training them in magic.
So if that’s true, wouldn’t he be a little more interested in the fact that there is a band of ghosts or demons or elves running around outside his magical shields?
They’d already figured out that the Hunt had been raiding on the campus as well as off it. Oakhurst was surrounded by an invisible magical barrier—its wards—that wouldn’t allow anything that didn’t “belong” at Oakhurst to come in. For the Hunt to be able to raid on campus …
There had to be someone at Oakhurst—one of the teachers or one of the staff—letting them in.
And they had no idea who that might be.
At least we’re still alive to try to figure it out, Spirit thought glumly. That beats the alternative. I guess.
Then again, the alternative was Christmas at Oakhurst.
There were no real “holidays” here, only a few days in which they didn’t have classes, and despite the fact that there was a town only a few miles away, the students here were as isolated as if they were in prison: no television, no Internet—no junk food!—and the only movies they could watch were on the “approved” list. The rules were relaxed—just a little—at the school dances. That seemed to satisfy most of the kids. It only made Spirit think of how much she’d lost.
I hate this place, she thought numbly. And not because Doctor Ambrosius turned me into a mouse during my “Welcome to Oakhurst” interview, and not because I’m the only one in the entire school who can’t cast spells, and not just because even the teachers here are trying to kill all of us, and not even because I’m pretty sure this whole place wants us to all hate each other. I hate it because they even turn the holidays into work.
The month of December had been packed not only with classes—and everybody’s course-load was brutal—but with preparations for their so-called week of vacation. It wasn’t really. There were a lot of requirements, like snow and ice sculptures, including a snow castle and a snow maze. You’d think stuff like that would be just for