Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [3]
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The dining room was nearly empty. A lot of the school rules were relaxed a little over the Christmas holiday, so you didn’t have to show up for breakfast if you didn’t want to, though if you missed it, you had to starve until lunch. Today, missing breakfast meant you’d be stuck until about two-thirty, because the formal meals were always later than regular lunch. But even so, it looked as if at least half of the other kids had decided to skip breakfast in favor of more sleep. Not that it would be much more sleep, because there was a mandatory “spiritual education” service at ten. Any place else, it would be a church service, but Oakhurst was special. In the not-good way.
Addie, Burke, and Loch were already in the Refectory, sharing their usual table. Burke, as usual, was working his way through an enormous “healthy” breakfast: eggs and toast and sausage and potatoes and orange juice. Addie was crunching delicately away on a slice of toast, with a mug of tea at her elbow. Loch had a plate of bacon and eggs in front of him, but he was pretty much ignoring it to talk to the others. The moment Spirit slipped into her seat, one of the servers came around to ask her what she wanted for breakfast. (That was another creepy thing about Oakhurst. It was like living in a combination of Motel Hell and a fancy restaurant, because they had waiters and waitresses serving them at every meal.)
“Waffles!” Muirin said eagerly. “And cocoa, and orange juice, and bacon, and—”
“Just cornflakes, thanks,” Spirit said, cutting Muirin off. At least during “vacations” you didn’t have to eat a whole Healthy Breakfast if you didn’t want to. The server nodded and walked away.
“Boy, somebody woke up in a bad mood this morning!” Muirin mocked.
Spirit glared at her, her blue eyes crackling with anger. “My parents are dead,” she said, biting off each word. “My sister is dead. I don’t even have any pictures of them because our house burned down while I was in the hospital having my third—or maybe it was my fourth—surgery after the crash. And now I’m here. And it’s Christmas. So why don’t you tell me what I’ve got to be perky about?”
“Well,” Loch said, after a moment, “you don’t have to go out and fight the Demon King of Hell today.”
Addie gave a startled snort of laughter. It always seemed so odd when Addie made a rude noise. She was a plump girl with brown eyes and long, smooth, jet-black hair, and she looked a little like Snow White and a little like Alice in Wonderland, and a lot like somebody very prim and proper and maybe even stuck-up. And nothing could be farther from the truth, even though she was—Spirit had been stunned to discover—the sole heir to Prester-Lake BioCo., a pharmaceutical company worth literally millions.
“True,” Addie said. “Unfortunately, you do have to attend the concert. Sorry,” she added. Addie was in the Choral Society, so she’d be performing. Spirit was starting to suspect Addie’d joined the choir so she wouldn’t have to attend the concerts. They were deadly dull.
The server returned with the plate of waffles and the bowl of cornflakes. Of course, since this was Oakhurst, they couldn’t just be regular normal cornflakes. No, they were topped with slices of banana that had been dusted with brown sugar. Spirit picked up the milk pitcher and poured milk into her bowl.
“I know today’s gotta be pretty awful for you—both of you,” Burke said, nodding to include Loch in the statement. “It’ll get, I don’t want to say ‘better,’ but you’ll get used to it.”
“Used to it hurting,” Spirit said. She inhaled deeply, blinking against tears.
“Yeah,” Burke said, and Addie nodded in sympathy. Addie had been orphaned three years ago, and Burke had been an orphan all his life—he had a set of foster parents in the Outside World that he talked about going back to once he graduated.
“I kind of wish it did hurt,” Loch said quietly. Loch was the only other