Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [7]
But there’d been nothing. Not one word about their classmates who were dead. Not one word about the fact that there were people here—and she’d even been one of them—who’d been marked for death at the hands of the Wild Hunt. It was just: too bad, so sad, you’ve lost your real families, people you knew, there’s someone—probably inside the school!—that wants to kill you all, just forget about it, here’s your iPod or your digital camera or your makeup kit or your Wii.
Even her own friends hadn’t talked about what it all meant. Okay, maybe they were kind of in shock, but now they knew. Oakhurst wasn’t safe. The enemies Doctor Ambrosius had talked about weren’t out there. They were in here. Killing people. If the five of them wanted to live long enough to graduate—not to mention everyone else here living to graduate—they had to find out what was really going on. She knew they’d all been lied to. But adults lied to kids all the time, playing the “it’s for your own good” card. Those kinds of lies were annoying, but they didn’t mean the person lying to them was out to kill them.
But some people here were.
Who could they trust?
Muirin had mentioned a secret society within Oakhurst called the Gatekeepers. Loch said secret societies were common at private schools and at colleges. There was Skull and Bones at Yale, for example, or the Seven Society at the University of Virginia. But if the Gatekeepers were—as the others seemed to believe—just a kind of “honor society,” why wasn’t it made public? The students here were encouraged—were forced, really—to compete with each other at everything. It didn’t make sense that Oakhurst would miss an opportunity to make them compete with each other to join the Gatekeepers.
She hated the whole idea of seeing the world in terms of Good Guys and Bad Guys—as if she was living in a Star Wars movie, and you were either a Sith Lord or a Jedi Knight. But there didn’t seem to be a lot of middle ground. Were the Gatekeepers Good Guys or Bad Guys? What did they have to do with the Alumni who visited here every summer?
What happened to all the kids who—supposedly—graduated? They never wrote to their friends. Nobody here got any mail.
They had to start figuring out what was going on. Now—before whoever it was who had been behind the Wild Hunt came up with a new way to kill them.
Could they trust their fellow students? Maybe some. But which ones? Could they trust the teachers? Doctor Ambrosius? Half the time he was scary as all get-out, ranting on about the Final Battle. The other half of the time he was a doddering old man who couldn’t even remember your name. Was he another victim of the Bad Guys? If so, how could they possibly rescue him?
She was so lost in her own thoughts that it wasn’t until Loch nudged her sharply in the ribs that she noticed Ms. Corby standing in front of her with a look of impatience and irritation on her face. She was holding two small boxes wrapped in gold paper with a cream-and-brown design on it (the Oakhurst coat of arms, of course).
For a moment Spirit locked eyes with Doctor Ambrosius’s assistant. She wanted to say that she didn’t want Oakhurst’s gifts and she didn’t want to be here, either. But she didn’t quite dare. She reached out for the gifts. Ms. Corby held on to them, staring at her meaningfully.
“Thank you, Ms. Corby,” Spirit said, flushing angrily. Ms. Corby smiled in triumph and handed Spirit the boxes before turning away. Spirit’s last name began with “W,” so there weren’t too many more gifts to hand out.
Spirit looked around at the others. Addie had a long flat box under one arm. It was about the size and shape of a board game. Burke was holding a large square box, a cube about twelve inches on a side. Muirin had a small box about three by three by ten.
And Loch had two boxes identical to hers in every way—except for the fact that they were wrapped in dark brown paper with the design on them in cream and gold. She