Novel - Arcanum 101 (with Rosemary Edghill) Read online

  He was freezing and he hated rain, and he didn’t know where he’d dropped his flashlight. It was a good thing it didn’t matter. The sky was lighting up like a Fourth of July gone really wrong, and straight ahead there was a purple light flashing on and off like some kind of mad neon sign.

  Lalage hadn’t screamed again, and Tomas knew that was a bad sign. If you screamed, you were alive.

  When he got there, the first thing he saw was Kurt on his hands and knees puking his guts out and covered in mud.

  The second thing he saw was Lalage. Even though she was soaked to the skin, her hair was flying around her like she was bone-dry. And she was glowing.

  The third thing he saw was what she was pointing at.

  It was maybe fifteen feet tall, and for one long moment Tomas was perfectly calm, because it didn’t seem to be real at all; maybe one of those wacky sculptures like the Art Students liked to make. It was shaped sort of like a person, and he could see pieces of twisted metal, and a couple of sets of antlers, a lot of sticks, and a bunch of leaves and vines-

  Then it moved, reaching out toward Lalage, and he saw there were some kind of body parts hanging down from the inside; that it was shaped kind of like a man; that the vines were writhing all over it, alive-

  When it tried to hit Lalage, there was the same purple flash he’d seen from a distance, and she made a sound like the thing had hit her, instead of something about five feet away from her. And Tomas knew if it ever got past that thing he couldn’t see, it was going to rip her to pieces.

  And he knew he’d been wrong. The monster was real.

  Burn it! You’ve got to burn it!

  But he was freezing and soaked to the skin and he didn’t think anybody on Earth could start a fire in the middle of a freakin’ monsoon.

  He had to try.

  “It’s all about control, Tomas. You control the fire. The fire does not control you.”

  Tomas took a deep breath. He shut out the look on Lalage’s face and the sight of the monster she was facing. He shut out the way he felt and all his doubts. He concentrated on the fire. His fire. His Gift.

  Burn!

  A thin tendril of smoke coiled up from the body of the nightmare.

  This was the point at which Tomas had always stopped before, since everything he’d ever tried to burn in the past had been dry and flammable, and as soon as he’d kindled it he hadn’t needed to do anything else. But this time he couldn’t stop, because the moment he did, the rain would quench his fire. He kept pushing with his power, pouring whatever it was he did that Called Fire into the monster, willing it to burst into flame. Whatever he was doing, the thing seemed to notice, because it stopped trying to get at Lalage and turned toward Tomas.

  Lalage sank to her knees with a gasp as it stopped attacking her. Tomas didn’t dare stop to look at her to see if she was all right. He kept pouring everything he had into that thing. Now he was sweating like a pig and starting to shake. He didn’t know how long he could keep this up—everything he’d practiced so far had been about control, not about force, but right now that was what was needed. And when the monster’s patchwork body finally went up in a rush of fire Tomas still couldn’t stop. As the flames licked over its body it reared back, slapping clumsily at itself, just as if it were alive. But to Tomas’s horror, it didn’t burn up. It just changed shape as parts of it burned away, getting smaller, reforming….

  “Stop! Tomas, stop!” VeeVee ran past him, her dagger in her hand. “You can’t kill it! I can!”

  Black spots were dancing before his eyes now, and he felt like he was about to pass out. Tomas didn’t know if he stopped because she told him to, or because he couldn’t keep pouring Fire into the monster another second. By now it was only about the size of a man, but it was all black and charcoally, and the metal parts of its body had melted and fused under the heat of Tomas’s flame to make a weird sort of armor over half its body.

  He sank to his knees in front of Lalage, gasping for breath. He didn’t even have enough air left to yell at VeeVee to stop before she got herself killed. All he could do was watch as she ran right up to the monster, body covered with a kind of pale blue flame, and plunged her dagger into its chest.

  Everything about the monster suddenly seemed to… blur… for just a moment, and then it was crumbling. The wind and the rain whipped pieces of it away. Heavier pieces—metal, bones, antlers—fell to the ground.

  All of a sudden it stopped raining.

  “Are you all right?” VeeVee demanded.

  Tomas just stared at her.

  “Gaia and Bhride!” Lalage groaned, shaking her head. Her red hair was plastered to her skin. “What was that?”

  “Some kind of hybrid spirit, I think,” VeeVee said. Tomas watched as she wiped the dagger on her jeans and tucked it away again. “Kurt? You okay?”

  “I am now,” Kurt said, sitting up with a groan. “Sorry. I… When it showed up, it was just like a punch in the gut.”

  Tomas saw VeeVee nod, as if what Kurt was saying made sense to her. “You saw that metal?” she asked VeeVee. “It looked like part of an ultralight—you know, one of those little one-person sport planes?” Lalage said. She got carefully to her feet and put out a hand to help Kurt up.

  “If the pilot managed to crash in the wrong place—and died—his death energy might have woken up something in one of the old hidden burial mounds around here,” VeeVee said. “The result has probably been wandering around for weeks, feeding on animals and getting stronger.”

  “Working its way up the food chain,” Lalage said, shuddering.

  “What are you talking about?” Tomas demanded. He scrambled to his feet. His head hurt, but aside from that—and being wet and cold—he didn’t feel too bad.

  Except, of course, for having been wrong about the monster.

  “They’re talking about magic,” Kurt said. He took a deep breath, and groaned, shaking his head.

  “Hey! Are you guys all right?”

  Brian and Ethan came running toward them, slipping and sliding through the wet grass, their flashlight beams bobbing everywhere. Oddly, Brian’s clothes and hair were completely dry.

  “Better than you’re going to be when Mr. Songmaker and Mr. Bishop find out what you did,” VeeVee snapped, turning on them in a fury. “Did it ever occur to either of you idiots you could have gotten Aimee and Annabelle killed?”

  Both boys stopped where they were, their looks of worry changing to expressions of guilt. Kurt flinched, and rubbed the back of his neck.

  “Well, uh, Aimee wanted to switch, and, um, Ethan and I figured, well, she and Annabelle…” Brian said slowly.

  VeeVee opened her mouth again, and Tomas had the idea that whatever was going to come out of it just couldn’t be good. “Hey, chica, come on. Maybe we ought to be getting back and see how the others are? Besides, it’s cold out here,” he said.

  VeeVee shut her mouth with a snap, but he could tell she was still furious. He couldn’t really figure out why. They’d killed the thing, hadn’t they?

  “So what have we all learned tonight?” Mr. Songmaker asked.

  An hour later everyone was back at the campsite, changed into dry clothes and gathered around the campfire again, this time with mugs of hot cider.

  “That magic sucks,” Tomas said feelingly.

  Lalage and VeeVee glared at him.

  “Well,” Mr. Songmaker said, “there’s good magic and there’s bad magic. Ah guess you got a sample of both tonight. VeeVee was pretty much right, it looks like—there was a flying accident up here about six weeks ago, and some fella managed to get hisself killed—probably on top of an old burial ground, as far as Jeanette an’ Ah could tell. The energy released with his death grabbed a hold of something that would otherwise have stayed safely asleep—like pouring gasoline on a fire that isn’t quite out. It made something that wasn’t quite one thing or the other, but what that it was, was hungry. It was able to feed itself on plant, insect, and animal life—which is why you
r Green Witch powers weren’t having much effect on it, Lalage; they were just feeding its energy. And once it took a human victim…”

  “Its power and ability would not only have increased tenfold, but its intelligence would have, too,” VeeVee said grimly.

  Mr. Songmaker nodded. “Just as well we caught it in time. If it fed on a human, that would be bad enough. If’n it got its hands on someone with Talent…”

  “Then there’s yelling, and running, and screaming,” Ethan said. The words were humorous, but his expression wasn’t. He looked thoroughly shaken by his narrow escape tonight.

  “And Kurt, might be you want to work a bit harder on your shielding,” Mr. Songmaker added.

  Kurt nodded. “I wasn’t expecting… that,” he said, sheepishly.

  “I wasn’t either,” Aimee said loyally. “It was… hungry.”

  “It wanted,” Kurt said. “And it hurt. But it wasn’t anything I could fix.”

  “And if’n you’d tried, you would of found yourself in a power o’ trouble,” Hosea said. “And as for you, Aimee, if’n you’d stayed with Brian, it could be you might not have been taken quite so much by surprise.”

  Aimee hung her head and fiddled with the ends of her long hair in shame.

  “It was my fault, too,” Brian said. “If I hadn’t—”

  “Next time, you’ll know,” Mr. Bishop said simply.

  “You knew what was out there!” Tomas said angrily. “And you let us walk right into it!”

  “That was what you were out here to do,” Mr. Bishop pointed out reasonably. “And we were right behind you to step in if things got completely out of hand. Talent draws Talent: in your future lives, whether you choose lives of Service or not, it’s more than likely you’ll find yourselves facing problems like this again. You’ll need to know how to respond.”

  Tomas looked around the campfire.

  Kurt still looked like he’d been hit over the head with something, and Aimee and Annabelle looked as if anybody even said “boo” to either of them, they’d run screaming. Ethan looked angry, and Brian looked guilty. Lalage looked pretty excited, like she’d like another monster to come along so she could take another swing at it. VeeVee looked mad enough to be spitting fire herself.

  Every single one of them looked like they believed every single word Mr. Bishop had just said.

  And Tomas?

  He didn’t know what to believe. This morning he’d been sure he knew exactly how the world worked—and there was no place in it for either monsters or magic. Now? He’d seen both. He had to believe.

  But he didn’t have to like it.

  VeeVee was so angry she couldn’t speak, which was just as well, since what would have come out of her mouth would not have made anyone feel better. Hosea Songmaker could probably tell just how angry she was, and if he couldn’t his possessed banjo Jeanette surely could. She wasn’t at all surprised when Hosea gave her a look and nodded towards his tent. She didn’t even wait to make sure the other kids were back in their own sleeping bags so they didn’t get the wrong idea. She unzipped the flap, crawled inside, and dropped down on the canvas floor, seething.

  Hosea was right behind her, closing the door-flap against the bugs.

  “All right, young’un,” he said, reaching up to turn on a lightweight LED lantern hanging from the criss-crossed supports at the top of the dome. “Let’s hear it.”

  “You explained it to them!” she burst out. “You told them, one M, one P, so they could protect each other and cover the holes in each other’s defenses. The only one who thought this was a snipe-hunt was Tomas! And the first thing they do is trade partners! What did they think this was, some sort of game? Somebody could have gotten hurt or even killed out there, and why?” She punched the floor. “Because they’re idiots!”

  “Because they’re young’uns,” Hosea said mildly.

  “They’re Talents!” she fumed. “That’s no excuse—”

  “Whoa, whoa, now hear me out,” Hosea interrupted. “Y’all’ve been a workin’ Talent for how long now?”

  “Since I was nine, and even then I wasn’t that stupid!” she exclaimed.

  “And y’all’ve been out there, doin’ adult work, Guardian work fer a couple years.” Hosea shook his head. “VeeVee, none of them others have been workin’ Talents fer half as long as you, ‘cept mebbe Lalage, and ah guarantee you, none o’them is going to up to yore standards fer a couple o’years yet—”

  “It was amateur!” she retorted. “It was childish!”

  Hosea shrugged. “‘Pears to me that’s about normal.”

  “But we can’t afford to pretend be normal,” she said flatly, getting a startled glance from him. “You ought to know that. We’re extraordinary. Extraordinary things happen around us, usually bad. And we have to be ready for them. Always.” She looked down at her hands, hands that had done things few here would have guessed. “Acting like other people is a luxury, and we don’t have that option anymore once our Powers start to manifest.”

  Hosea ran his hand through his hair, a baffled expression on his face. “Sugah, ah know y’all are a pro, but th’ rest o’ the kids—”

  VeeVee looked up at Hosea, her anger as hot as any fire she could conjure. “We might be kids, but we had damn well better act like pros in the field. Because if we don’t… someone is going to die. And if we don’t do everything we can to make sure they act like pros, that’s going to be on our heads.” She leveled a peer-to-peer, challenging gaze at him. “You want that? ‘Cause I don’t.”

  Tomas’s plans for the evening had pretty much gone out the window now. When he’d thought—and Dios! It seemed a lifetime ago!—that this was going to be all a way to scare everybody, he’d planned on giving VeeVee a hard time for believing in it, then making it up to her by being nice, not rubbing it in too much, maybe getting her off alone for a little before the chaperones hauled them all back to their tents.

  Now though—she was mad, and even if he hadn’t been seriously shaken by what had happened, the last place he wanted to be was anywhere near her. He’d never seen her like this before. Annoyed, si. Even a flash of anger now and again. But not mad like this. He only hoped Mr. Songmaker could cool her out because… oh man this was the kind of mad that could bust out in bad ways.

  The other three guys crawled into the tent right after him, Kurt, who shared it with him, looking seriously shook, the other two, puzzled. “I don’t get it—” Ethan said. “I mean, Jeezus, you’d think me and Brian had done something—man, VeeVee is wound way too tight—”

  Tomas saw Ethan still didn’t get it. OK, yeah, VeeVee was wound tight, but she had a good reason to get a mad on. Listening to Mr. Songmaker and he still didn’t get it. “Look, cholo, you messed up.”

  The tiny lantern showed Ethan’s face pretty clearly. He looked as surprised as if Tomas had just starting reciting Shakespeare or something. “But all we did was—”

  “You unbalanced the tires, man!” Tomas shook his head. “You ‘member what happened when Señora Davies showed us unbalanced tires an’ how they can wreck things? Mr. Songmaker balanced the tires with us when he paired us up, so’s we could cover blind spots. You went an’ unbalanced the tires, an’ the car just about rattled itself to pieces.” He shook his head. “Man, that—That could’a been bad. Anyway, I bet that’s why she’s mad.”

  “But the teachers—”

  “An’ what if that thing had got them before it got to us, huh? What if it had friends? You can’t count on nobody if you can’t see ‘em, and sometimes even if you can.” He thought about all the people that might have turned on him and given him to the cops. Okay, these kids weren’t like that. But—things happened. “Somethin’ like this, muy loco stuff, you don’t know, so you gotta stick to the plan so at least everybody knows where everybody’s supposed to be.”

  Now how VeeVee knew that, and how she’d guessed what that thing was and how to bring it down… well, maybe it was luck and maybe it was something else he didn’t
want to think about right now. But he knew it was true.

  Ethan, at least, was nodding and now looking as guilty as Brian. Tomas punched him lightly on the bicep. “Get some sleep,” he said. “It’s a long hike back in the morning, no? I’m beat.”

  Ethan nodded, paused, then wordlessly crawled out of the tent with Brian behind him. Tomas took over his own sleeping bag with a sigh. “This magic stuff—” he said to Kurt, as he wedged himself into his bag. “It’s muy loco. I mean, I thought you were all—” He fumbled for words. “It don’t seem right.”

  “You get used to it.” Kurt said wearily. “How is it weirder than psi? They both use stuff you can’t see to do things you can.” He turned off the lantern and crawled into his own bag. “In fact,” he continued, somberly, “I wish what I did was magic.”

  OK, that was just crazy talk. “Que? What kinda sense is that?” Tomas asked. “I mean, what we do, that’s science, you know? Like there are laws, it isn’t wave your hands around an’ spooky stuff happens—”

  Kurt snorted. “If you haven’t figured out by now, havin’ VeeVee as your mentor, that it ain’t just waving your hands around… Magic has more laws than psi and—ah hell. Ask her. Thing is, you don’t have to do magic. Fact, it’s easier not to. Easy to control doing it or not doing it, easy to shut it off. This—I can’t shut it off. And neither can you, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  Tomas was stunned into silence by that. Kurt was right.

  “When this first started… this healing, this feeling what’s wrong with people, with things… I thought I was gonna die. It all came on all of a sudden, and pretty much full power.” Kurt turned over in his sleeping bag. “My folks… they didn’t get it. First they thought I was makin’ it up and sent me to counselors. Then the counselors told ‘em I was psycho, an’ they tried every kind of drug there was on me. I was sick all the time from the drugs and sick all the time from feelin’ other people being sick and sick from tryin’ t’help ‘em. Finally they were gonna lock me up—” He made a sound that wasn’t a laugh. “That would’ve been just great, lock me up with nothin’ but sick people. So I just—ran. Stole their ATM cards, cleaned out their wallets, got as much cash as I could and ran. Went to a 24-hour superstore, got camping stuff, got a bus ticket—Allegany State Park, I just wanted to go somewhere there weren’t people. Or at least where I could get away from people. I snuck in through the woods, figured out where people were camping, camped far enough away I couldn’t feel them but close enough I could sneak down, use the showers, get water, steal food.” Kurt laughed a little for real now. “Funny how smart you get when you’re around crazy people. Turned out I didn’t have to steal much food. People always bring too much, or stuff they thought they’d want to eat and don’t, and that’s usually good stuff like fruit, beef jerky, bread. They bring healthy stuff, then eat junk, same as always. End of the weekend, they pitch what they didn’t eat. Pitch a lot of things. I figured I was doin’ OK. Didn’t think that where someone like me was, there might be somethin’ around that’d think I was mighty tasty.”