Victories

by Mercedes Lackey

  And the idea that the big plan now that they’d escaped and finally knew the truth about what was going on was for them to just sit here and not tell the authorities … well, Oakhurst hadn’t been big on trust and cooperation, but one thing it had hammered home to all of them was submission to authority. And trying to understand that nobody in authority could help, well.… That was hard to accept.

  So Spirit did the best she could to answer the (same old) questions, and to not sound as frustrated as she felt at having to. It was after midnight when she could finally stagger back to her tent to collapse, and half the tents were still lit up inside.

  Maybe their inhabitants were just afraid of the dark.

  God knew she would have been, if she’d found out all of this just today.

  * * *

  The flash of the cigarette lighter was bright in the darkness. Allan Tate didn’t know where it had come from—even a book of matches was contraband at Oakhurst—but a moment later he caught the sweet scent of burning tobacco. Somebody was really going off the rez. He’d seen enough war movies—one of the few things he liked that weren’t banned at Stalag Oakhurst—to know that sentries didn’t smoke on duty (even if any of them had actually been old enough to smoke, except maybe that crazy lady who seemed to be in charge of this place). Lighting a cigarette screwed up your night vision. And the enemy could smell a cigarette from miles away and make your position.

  Not that any of them were real sentries. And there probably wasn’t a real enemy, either. All of this was just some kind of a game. Sort of.

  Oh, he believed that everybody at Oakhurst was out to get them. But he sure didn’t believe that Doc A was some kind of criminal mastermind. It was probably some kind of CIA or FBI or Homeland Security thing, where the government had finally found out about magic and wanted to get its hands on all of them.

  Yeah. That was it. Forget about Breakthrough and all that crap Mark Rider was dishing out. Working for the Feds would be the real deal. Carry a gun, have everybody respect you. Probably get to have anything you wanted, because they’d know they needed you. It’d be cool. They’d want him particularly, because he was School of Air. All the best stuff was School of Air. Shadewalking, Animal Communication, Animal Control.…

  And Illusion. That was better than all the others. And he had it.

  It was one of the reasons he’d volunteered to stand guard. He figured that’d be a good way to get in with the inner circle here. Find out what was really going on. That way, when They made their move (whoever They were), he’d be in a position to negotiate. Maybe even dictate terms. Spirit had been smart to get them out of Oakhurst, sure. But she’d only been half smart. She’d been taken in by that dumb cover story. He was going to be all smart.

  It was easy enough to cast an illusion that made him seem to vanish. He’d need to be quiet, because it would only mask sights, not sounds. But from the look of things, whoever was out here smoking wasn’t going to be paying much attention.

  Allan drifted closer. Now to see what they were up to.…

  “Brett! What if they catch you?” Allan heard Juliette Weber clearly, even though she probably thought she was keeping her voice down.

  “What’re they going to do?” Brett Weber answered. “Kick me out?”

  “No, but— And where did you get them, anyway?”

  “Five-finger discount at that place we stopped at to use the rest rooms. You know, if I had magic like that girl does, I wouldn’t waste it. I’d make myself a whole suitcase full of cash.”

  “Yeah? What if it wasn’t real? You know—counterfeit.”

  Allan nodded approvingly. Juliette was pretty smart for a mundane. And pretty, too.

  “Okay, gold and diamonds, then.” Brett sounded irritated. “You know, none of this is really fair. Look at all the stuff that’s happened to us—our whole town got erased—just because we’re supposedly in the middle of this whole big supposed witch-war.”

  “But.… Spirit wasn’t lying, Brett. You saw those things at the Library when Erika and Bella got killed. And … what happened at the Dance. They say Muirin’s dead.”

  “So? Bella and Erika are dead, too. And probably Kennedy, the skank.”

  Allan heard Juliette snicker briefly. “Yeah,” she said. “Nobody cares what happened to us.”

  “Yeah. Not then, and not now. So I figure we’d better be smart, and look out for oursel—Hey!”

  There was the sound of a scuffle as Juliette snatched the cigarette away from Brett. Allan could see the two of them were standing at least three feet to the wrong side of the spray-painted line on the ground. He shrugged. They didn’t have any magic. What could it matter?

  “Yeah?” Juliette said suspiciously. “How? We’re out here in the middle of nowhere. It’s not like we can call our folks to come pick us up.… Brett! Do you think they’re going to be okay?”

  “Sure,” Brett said, too quickly. “You heard what Spirit said. That guy wants to turn all of us into, like, medieval serfs. He needs them. And anyway, we can rescue them.”

  “How?” Juliette said, just as quickly. “Brett—”

  “Look, Jule. All this talk about getting rid of this Mordred guy, that isn’t going to work. If it would, they would’ve done it already. Isn’t everybody saying there’s no point in calling the cops or anything because he’ll just fry their brains? If I’d known all that back in town, I wouldn’t’ve left, and you wouldn’t either. You want to spend a couple of weeks camping out in the middle of nowhere—and by the way, I didn’t see any bathrooms—before we get rounded up and shot? I figure whatever he’s doing, we should help him do it. If we do, I bet he’ll be grateful and give us anything we want.”

  Allan sneered. Idiots. Doc A would be glad to get them all back, but if Brett Weber thought he’d be grateful to some small-town yahoo who didn’t even have any magic.…

  All I have to say is, I’d sure like to be there when Doc A turns Brett into a mouse. I bet he wouldn’t turn him back, either.

  He turned around and walked away, being careful to stay inside the Wards. Tomorrow morning he’d tell Spirit what he’d overheard. Or maybe Addie—it wasn’t any secret she was some kind of big heiress. Then they could arrest the Webers—there had to be some place to lock them up around here—and then he’d have proven his loyalty. He figured that would give him the leverage to make his move. He glanced at his watch. Almost two a.m. The next shift would show up soon, and he didn’t want them stealing his thunder.

  He hunted around until he found a chunk of rock on the ground. Nothing too big. Then he took careful aim, and chucked it toward the Weber kids.

  It bounced off the ground in front of them, and he heard Juliette yelp. But it did what he’d wanted it to. Juliette threw the cigarette out into the dark, and she and her brother moved back inside the boundary line.

  * * *

  Spirit didn’t know why she woke up. One moment she was sound asleep, the next she was lying in bed, eyes open, noticing that the sky outside the tent was paling with dawn. That meant it was somewhere around seven a.m. She didn’t really feel that six hours of sleep was enough, but in the last couple of weeks she’d gotten used to the idea that the day began with dawn. On the other side of the tent, she saw Burke turn over, and knew in another moment he’d be squirming out of his sleeping bag and getting ready to greet the day.

  This would probably be a good time for her to finally go down into the bunker and talk to Merlin. Spirit knew she needed to check with him about what they were going to do next, but she hadn’t wanted to do it when it was likely one of their guests would follow her down. Loch and Burke were right: their refugees were volatile. She hoped that if she could just—

  Spirit never remembered later what she’d hoped for, because that’s when the screaming started.

  There was a half second when she couldn’t identify the meaning of the sound. That it was sound, yes. But that was all. And then it came clear, the way an image would when a page finished loading, and she
was scrabbling for her sneakers, struggling out of her sleeping bag. For a few seconds more she hoped it was nothing worse than a bunch of the students trying to settle old feuds.

  Then she heard the call of the hunting horn.

  The Shadow Knights had found them.

  Instinctively Spirit ran toward the sound, thinking of all the things she should have done. She should have put the people without combat magic together, made sure they knew where to run and hide. The four of them had been too confident yesterday, certain they’d escaped, certain the Wards would protect them.

  Now they were all going to pay the price.

  The pen became the Sword in her hand as she ran. Burke was on one side of her, Loch on the other. Addie (Spirit knew) was going to do whatever she could to help using the Cauldron.

  She heard the clatter of hooves on asphalt. That’s insane, Spirit thought wildly. They can’t have ridden here on horseback.… But however they’d gotten here, she and the others were facing mounted Shadow Knights—and worse. There were a bunch of the giants they’d seen at Oakhurst. And other things. Things that should not be seen by the light of an April dawn.

  It was chaos. She saw a couple of the horses go down—one of the Water Witches had covered the ground with a sheet of ice. There were swirls of dust as Van and some of the other Air Mages made miniature tornadoes. Some people were fighting back.

  But most of the kids just ran.

  Spirit reached the foremost of the Shadow Knights, and swung her Sword. She acted out of instinct, but it didn’t matter. Excalibur passed through the horse’s body like smoke, and horse and rider disappeared.

  Illusions! But not all of them are! And what do they want…? It was not a question that Spirit White would have asked, but it was foremost in Guinevere’s mind.

  Ahead of her she saw Loch and Burke attack one of the giants. This time Loch didn’t use his Spear as a club—he drove its point directly into the torso of his attacker. Spirit flinched, but a moment later she understood the reason for Loch’s ruthless attack. The giant toppled with a crash, but the body that hit the ground wasn’t flesh, but stone. Within seconds, it was nothing more than a jumble of boulders.

  Spirit smelled smoke and spun around, looking back the way she’d come. The tents! They’re burning! She didn’t know whether their attackers had set them on fire, or some of the panicked Fire Witches, but the result was the same.

  There’s no cover out here—just a few broken-down shacks. We can’t hold them off. We can’t stop them. We have to get out of here.

  “Come on!” she shouted, as loud as she could. “This way!”

  She saw Burke’s teeth flash as he nodded. He flung his fists out, and his Shield appeared, blocking a blow from a giant fist. Loch ducked under Burke’s shield with Arondight, and another monster became unliving stone.

  Spirit turned and ran toward the abandoned missile silo.

  They’d all been trained to be soldiers at Oakhurst, Reincarnates or no. Several of the other kids had armed themselves with whatever they could find—those of them who weren’t simply living weapons—and were sheltering in doorways and windows and against the broken remnants of walls.

  The next thing seemed to happen in slow motion. She saw the bright brittle flare of sunlight on plate armor—a Shadow Knight, wearing whatever Mordred thought of as fancy dress the last time he’d been out and around—saw the horse gallop toward the shack that concealed the entrance to Merlin’s bunker, saw the rider flourish, not a sword, but a bag in Army green, and she just had time to think satchel bomb as he reined in and threw.

  But Spirit wasn’t his target.

  The bomb went past her, through the inner doorway, slid across the floor and over the rim of the hole in the floor. She saw that in a snapshot glimpse as she was turning and running. It didn’t even matter that she was running at the Shadow Knight, so long as she was running away from the explosion to come. When it came, the ground jumped, and Spirit screamed in shock.

  What came next was hazy and disjointed and fragmentary. As if it was coming from somewhere outside herself, Spirit heard herself shouting at everyone to get back to the bus. People ran toward it, passing the word, doing sweeps to gather in the stragglers. If there was one thing they taught you to be good at, at Oakhurst, it was war. People ran for the bus while other people set up obstacles in the path of the Shadow Knights and their monstrous allies. Then Burke grabbed her up and tossed her through the open door of the bus, and Loch caught her, staggering, and Addie floored the accelerator, keeping the door open for Burke to chase them, catch them, and board.

  The windows were darkened with mud and smoke, and even, in some places, covered in frost. Addie drove halfway by guess as her passengers screamed or cried or shouted, and Spirit, Loch, Burke, and Dylan staggered along the aisle trying to get an accurate count of survivors. There’d be time later to pick up the pieces, to assess the damage, to figure out what had happened and why they were all still alive.

  “Somebody tell me where I’m going!” Addie shouted, her voice high and tight.

  “Macalister!” It was Veronica Davenport. “Macalister High School—do you know where it is?”

  “Right down the road from The Fortress,” Loch said grimly.

  “They won’t go near it,” Veronica said. “You can see it from the main highway. It’s only about six hundred yards off it.”

  “And the Shadow Knights wouldn’t want to attract attention by making it vanish overnight,” Addie said in realization.

  “Okay,” Spirit said, before Burke could add anything. “It sounds good. Let’s do it.”

  Burke looked at her in faint surprise. Guinevere had always let Arthur lead—or at least, let him be the public face of decisions they’d made jointly. But the more she’d deferred to him, the more Arthur had felt he needed to prove himself. To gain the position of leadership by right, and not as a gift.

  It had made him reckless.

  Not this time, Spirit thought. This time she wasn’t taking a back seat to make things easier for people who couldn’t handle the idea of everybody having opinions. And she knew Burke wouldn’t want her to.

  They were all on edge, expecting attack at any moment, but it didn’t come. Finally Addie pulled the bus to a stop. “I can’t stand it,” she said. “Let’s at least take a look.”

  Warily, the five of them—including Dylan—got out of the bus and looked back the way they’d come. It was a beautiful spring morning—except for the column of black smoke in the distance.

  “Where’d they all go?” Dylan demanded.

  “A better question is: where’d they come from?” Loch said. “Horses couldn’t have covered the distance between Radial and the base in.… In the time between us busting you guys out of Oakhurst—Radial—and now.”

  “Not to mention, ‘how did they find us?’” Burke said.

  “That isn’t as important as how we managed to escape,” Spirit said pragmatically. “They had a lot of, well, supernatural creatures with them. For lack of a better word.”

  “But I don’t think there were a lot of actual Shadow Knights,” Loch said. “Most of the ones I saw were illusions.”

  “That explains why they left. But what did they want?” Addie asked.

  “Can’t you guess?” Spirit said bleakly. “They wanted Merlin. And they got him.” The Bad Guys threw a bomb down into the bunker, and blew up everything there, and now Merlin’s dead.

  “But he’s in the Internet,” Loch said blankly.

  Spirit didn’t think it mattered. The Internet was so big that if a bomb ripped you loose from a specific IP address, you could search forever without finding that specific point ever again.

  About a dozen kids hadn’t made it onto the bus, and Spirit was pretty sure they’d vanished during the battle. Brett and Juliette Weber, Emily Davis—everyone, in fact, with the Scrying Gift, so Cassie Moore was gone too.

  “Look on the bright side,” Dylan said. “Even if they took prisoners, they can’t get
anything useful out of them. Nobody but us knows about the Reincarnates, and nobody knew where we were going to go.”

  They got back on the bus. There was nothing else to do.

  SEVEN

  Macalister High School served all of Macalister County, no matter where you lived: some of its students had a two-hour bus ride each way to get there (at least they had before the Spring Fling). When they got there, the school was deserted. Spirit had wondered where all the other teens were—since the school was deserted—until Veronica said the entire population of the county had been gathered into the village beneath The Fortress’s walls.

  “We all went to the Dance, we all ended up there,” she said, shrugging. “And our folks, too.”

  Compared to the one at Oakhurst, the Macalister High gym was small and shabby, but it was still plenty large enough to hold everyone who’d been on the bus—and the bus, too. One advantage to having Reincarnate selves was that those of them who’d had magic in their other lives—mainly Addie—were now much better at it. The moment Addie had taken her “key ring” out of the ignition, it had reverted from a magic school bus to a decidedly non-magical black van. Addie had simply driven it inside. At least, Spirit hoped, it wouldn’t attract the Shadow Knights’ attention now.

  “I think we’ll be safe here,” Loch said. “At least once we’ve put Wards up. And I think I’ve found out how the Shadow Knights found us, back at the silo,” he added. He gestured toward one of the other students: Allan Tate, Spirit thought his name was. “Allan said Brett and Juliette were outside the Wards last night. Based on what he said, and what I’m guessing, Mordred had flying squads out searching for us, and they did enough to alert them.”