Victories (17 page)

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.”

“But why didn’t they just kill us?” Spirit asked.

“Best guess?” Loch answered. “They didn’t have detailed orders. And I don’t think Mordred’s the kind of guy you want to get creative on. So they did everything they could that was covered by their orders, and ran for reinforcements.”

“Who should be
here
pretty soon,” Spirit said wearily, “so if you’ve got any good ideas, now’s the time.”

She looked around the gym. Over near the bleachers, she could see that Burke was talking to everyone, organizing work parties and getting everyone to make lists of what they needed to settle in here. There’d been forty of them at the missile base. Now there were only thirty-two. Vivian was among the missing, and that hurt out of proportion to the loss. It seemed unfair for Vivian to have worked so hard and hidden so long and so successfully only to have fallen into Mordred’s hands now. But at least Elizabeth was still among the survivors.

No,
Guinevere whispered in Spirit’s mind.
Iseult. And Gareth Beaumains, that noble knight. And more.…

Spirit looked around the gym. Maybe her power had gotten stronger since she’d Awakened Dylan, or maybe now she just knew what she was looking for, because despite what Iseult had told her back when she was first telling Spirit about the Reincarnates, Spirit could not only tell which of them were Reincarnates—but who the Reincarnates were. And what she saw—scattered among the Oakhurst refugees—were Guinevere’s friends, vassals, comrades. She saw her friends—but she also saw Arthur, Lancelot, Vivianne.…

Here were Gareth and Iseult, who were also Dylan Williams and Elizabeth Walker. There was Brangane, the sorceress who’d aided Iseult—in this life Maddie Harris—and Bertilak, the Green Knight’s warrior bride—Kylee Williamson. Cei and Bedivere, Dagonet and Morholt, Olwen, Peredur, Laudine, Loholt … and Gaheris, Gareth’s brother.

And Agravaine’s brother, too. Dylan-slash-Gareth had come down on their side. Would Chris Terry make the same choice if she awakened his Reincarnate self? Or would he side with his other “brother”—and the Shadow Knights?

No,
Spirit thought.
I have to believe Chris
—Gaheris—
is a Grail Knight, not a Shadow Knight. That’s why they locked him up.…

In a way, Mordred had done the selection of Spirit’s allies
for
her. And with a dozen Reincarnates, and a dozen magicians, surely they could do … something?

“First things first,” Burke said, coming over to them. “Let’s make sure the Black Snake can’t find us.”

*   *   *

Burke’s plan was elegant. (And, Spirit thought, it had a chance of actually working.) Thanks to Veronica, they knew that there was a bomb shelter in the basement—the school dated from the 1950s—which had been converted to an emergency shelter. It was full of cots, blankets, and cases of MREs.

“Continuing our Cold War motif,” Loch said grandly, as he opened the door. “We present—an actual Atomic Bomb Shelter!”

“It’s for bad weather, mainly,” Brenda Copeland said, walking past him to flip the light switch. Nothing happened, and she made a face. “We lose power a lot around here in the winter, and when that happens, folks need a place to go so they don’t freeze. The school’s got an emergency generator, too, but I don’t guess we’ll be firing it up any day soon.”

“Yeah,” Loch said. “How about not?”

Spirit suddenly realized that while people had been shivering down here during the winter blizzards, Oakhurst had probably had not only its own power plant (both mundane and magical) but enough space that it could take in everyone in Radial without anyone being cramped. (If it hadn’t been a fortress being run by an insane necromancer, of course.) She wondered if this shelter had been needed in the years since Oakhurst had opened—and if so, how often. And at the same time, another part of her was thinking that Mordred was no true lord and knight, to refuse the shelter of his castle to townsfolk in need.

She wondered if this kind of “double vision” was as confusing to the other Awakened Reincarnates as it was to her.