Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [59]
She blew her nose as he added, almost to himself: “And I wish I could get Dylan to believe that.”
She hesitated a moment. Then she made up her mind. “That night … the night of the wreck … I saw something,” she said. “And the crash wasn’t an accident. There was something like—okay, it must have been an explosion of some kind of magic, like a flash of light, except it was dark.”
“Dark, like absence of light, or dark, as if all the light was being sucked into something?” he asked, his eyes suddenly going sharp and bright.
She blinked. She’d never thought of it that way. “The light being sucked into something,” she replied slowly. “So that’s some kind of magic?”
He nodded, and his brows creased. “All the Schools of magic have opposites, like matter and antimatter. You probably haven’t gotten that far yet. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing inherently evil about the opposite, any more than antimatter is evil. But if the usual forms of our magic are hard to control, the dark forms are even harder, because they’re rooted in chaos.” Doc Mac ran his hand over his balding head. “So you saw a manifestation from a magician who was either extremely powerful or just bug-out crazy. Or both. Go on.”
“Something—was just there, in the middle of the road.” She shuddered. “I think Dad saw it, too. It was—I’m not sure what it was. It was—I thought it was a man. A big man, but it was like the light was sucking into him, and—I don’t remember exactly, just that it was evil. And I knew, I knew that it was after me.…” She started to cry again, and stifled it. “It was, wasn’t it? It was after me, and it was hunting me. If it hadn’t been after me, they’d still be alive. Wouldn’t they?”
She couldn’t help it, a sob escaped on the last word, and that set her off again, wailing softly, the guilt filling her chest and throat and choking her. She cried and cried until her eyes were all gritty and her nose was sore. Once again, Doc Mac let her cry herself out. When she got herself back under control, he sighed.
“I’m not going to blow smoke at you,” he said. “Yes, I think you did see something evil. And it was there to kill you. And yes, the rest of your family died because of it. But Spirit”—he leaned over and fixed her with an intense gaze—“Spirit, that does not mean that you are to blame, any more than you would be to blame if you were the only survivor of a mass murderer. Whoever sent that thing, whoever did this in the first place—that is who is to blame. Not you.” He sat back in his chair. “This is one of those ‘bad things happen to good people’ situations. This magician, or group of magicians—they made the choice to hurt people. You didn’t hunt them down to taunt them, you didn’t do anything to them; in fact, you didn’t even know they existed until you came here. They are the bad guys. They are the ones who hurt people. You are innocent; the only thing you did ‘wrong’ was to be born, and you weren’t exactly the one responsible for that. And I want you to keep repeating that to yourself until you believe it, all right?”
Spirit nodded, hesitantly. This was crazy. Here she was pouring out her secrets to someone she didn’t even know—and yet Doc Mac was the first person here besides her friends she had ever felt was a real human being, and trustworthy.
And she wanted to keep right on trusting him.
He smiled a little at her nod. “Good. Now, you hop along to class. If you need me, you know where I am.”
* * *
“… I didn’t tell him about the Hunt or anything,” Spirit concluded, as she and Loch continued to page slowly through the scrapbooks, “but I wanted to. What do you think?”