Novel - Arcanum 101 (with Rosemary Edghill) Read online

  “Sit down, Miss Langenfeld. How does the world find you today?”

  “Very well, thank you, sir.” Formality was a plus in dealing with any of the Sidhe, and that went double for dealing with St. Rhia’s Headmaster. She sat down and folded her hands demurely in her lap.

  “I presume our Miss Clifford has spoken to you about our newest student already—and that you feel yourself capable of accepting the challenge he presents?”

  “I think so,” VeeVee said. “And I know that if I’m not, I won’t be foolish enough not to say so as quickly as possible.”

  Mr. Moonlight smiled. “An excellent answer. We can never, after all, be entirely certain of what the future will bring until it arrives. Even the Gift of Foreseeing is not entirely reliable in that regard. You’ve shown excellent judgment in the past, however, and I believe that, with your assistance, we may be able to preserve his Talent and harness it to the service of good works. I am also certain that this will be no simple task. The Children of Earth—especially the very young—are often remarkably set in their ways. You must impress him in whatever fashion you feel is best, Miss Langenfeld. I believe we will need to throw him off-balance at once so that he gives the other students—and especially the teachers—the respect they deserve.”

  VeeVee blinked in surprise. Students were generally strongly discouraged from flaunting their Gifts and Talents outside the labs and classrooms. Had Mr. Moonlight just given her carte blanche to do anything she liked anywhere on campus?

  He inclined his head, and she knew she’d guessed right.

  “At the moment he believes he is an enormously special individual. I am relying upon you to impress upon our young man that he is perhaps not as unique as he believes.”

  VeeVee couldn’t quite hold back a smile of her own. So Mr. Moonlight wanted her to take Tomas Torres down a peg or two, did he? Well, she could do that.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “I’ll do my best.”

  “I know you will, Miss Langenfeld. And if you should sense any… extraordinary… difficulties in the weeks to come, please feel free to share them with me. My door is always open.”

  “Yes, sir. Of course sir.”

  She got to her feet. The interview was at an end.

  The next day, at noon, the van from the city arrived. She and Mr. Moonlight were on the steps to meet it.

  Tomas was much handsomer in person than in his mug-shot. Still wearing that do-rag, and now with a pair of cheap sunglasses, too. He was having a hard time deciding which of them to stare at harder—she was used to getting appreciative looks from boys, but he was obviously smart enough to know—or to sense—that Mr. Moonlight was somebody he’d better not blow off. He kept his attention on Mr. Moonlight as the van drove off behind him.

  “Welcome to St. Rhiannon’s School for Gifted and Exceptional Students, Mr. Torres. I am Inigo Moonlight, the Headmaster of this facility. Did you have a pleasant journey?”

  “Uh… yeah,” Tomas said. He looked wary and baffled, but he still hadn’t quite lost his swagger.

  “Very good. I trust you will enjoy your time with us, and learn everything the staff has to teach you. You will be seeing Ms. Clifford later to discuss your academic placement, and anything else, Miss Langenfeld can tell you. Again, welcome to St Rhiannon’s,” Mr. Moonlight finished gravely. He gave a curt nod and turned, leaving the two of them standing alone on the sidewalk.

  “I’m Valeria Victrix Langenfeld, but most people call me VeeVee,” she said, without offering her hand. “I’ve been assigned as your mentor.”

  Tomas looked faintly affronted. “Mentor? Mentor for what, rubia?. I don’t need no mentor for nothin’, chinga. Not from you… Why, what you got?”

  One corner of her mouth lifted in a sardonic smirk. Tomas Torres definitely had attitude to spare. But he’d paid careful attention to the rather brief welcome Inigo Moonlight gave him, so maybe his instincts were as powerful as his attitude. She hoped so, for both their sakes.

  “What I got,” she said carefully, “Is this—”

  With a gesture and a twist of her mind that summoned raw power from one of the ley-lines beneath the school, she set herself on fire. Not illusory fire. Real fire. Fire more than hot enough for Tomas to be scorched by the flames that were her favored element. He was a pyrokinetic. That ought to impress him.

  It did. He leapt back, yelping, “Que onda oye!”

  She had no trouble translating that. “Whoa!”

  She doused the flames with another gesture.

  “That, Hot Stuff,” she said, “Is why you are here. That is what St Rhia’s is all about.” Now she grinned. “It’s not a reform school, chico. It’s a school where a guy that can toss fireballs at cars is less scary than midterms.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “All right, chico,” she said after giving him a moment to recover. “Grab your bag. First stop on the nickel tour is the dorm.”

  Man, this guy wore every feeling he had smack on his face. She said “dorm” and his face fell about a million miles. She rolled her eyes as he heaved up the dropped gym-bag; from the look of it, there wasn’t a lot in there.

  She took off at a brisk pace—because she was so short, she’d had to run most of her life just to keep up with people—and he ambled along with his shoulders slumped. “We’re in Gotham County, New York,” she said, heading for the dorm building. “We’re in the middle of about a hundred acres of woods, and this place used to be the county mental health hospital. Back in the ‘seventies they decided sick people needed to be what they called “mainstreamed” so they could close places like this down. Which is why you have street-people wearing dead cats on their heads and talking to themselves now—that’s what happens to people who need to be in hospitals when they get “mainstreamed,” cause they sure can’t make it in the outside world.”

  He snorted. “So?”

  “So nobody wanted an old “looney bin.” Place is a bitch to heat, it never did have central air, and it was falling apart. Besides having the rep of being haunted. Which it isn’t. Here’s your dorm.” She ran up the cracked cement stairs, and opened the door for him.

  Since everybody was in classes, the place was quiet for a change. Their footsteps echoed down the hall, a grim looking corridor lined with heavy metal doors with teeny windows in them.

  “So anyway, there weren’t a lot of potential buyers, and the county wanted a fair chunk of change for the place. And this is your room.”

  The metal frame that used to hold a patient’s medical records now had a card slid in it. It said “Tomas Torres” in plain lettering off the office laser-printer. None of the doors locked since the renovation; half the student body had abilities that would allow them to get around most locks, and the other half had problems—of one sort or another—that meant the staff might need to get into their rooms quickly. So the whole school was on the honor system—you might be able to walk into somebody else’s room any time you wanted, but you’d damned well better respect their privacy. And their ownership rights.

  VeeVee pulled open the door to Tomas’s new room and waved him through. She knew it probably looked like a jail cell to him. There was a metal bed bolted to the green linoleum floor right under the window—relic of St. Rhia’s asylum days. A desk, dresser, nightstand, all dull brown-painted wood, part of the original furnishings for the “minimum security” patients, stood against the beige plaster walls. A built-in closet. That was it. There were communal bathrooms—and showers—at the end of the hall.

  “Yeah, this is what you get,” she said, ‘cause you didn’t need to be an empath to read the hunching of his shoulders, the tension in his muscles. “But we’re allowed to do whatever we want with the rooms—look, don’t take my word for it, drop your bag and get out here.”

  Right next door was Chris Shakleford’s room. VeeVee opened the door and stepped inside. Chris wouldn’t mind—heck, considering Chris’s Talent, he’d probably known last week she was going to do this: Chris was a preco
g, and while his visions of the future weren’t really predictable, they were fairly accurate when they did happen.

  Chris was one of the Goths, and his room was a goth-kid’s haven. Floor, walls, ceiling, all black. Fake-leather drapes at the windows, also black, of course. He’d tricked out the bed to look like a sarcophagus. The furniture—black—had little steel skulls for knobs. On the wall were death-metal band posters and black and white photos of graveyards. In fact, the only color anywhere in the room came from the screensaver on the computer monitor.

  “Oh,” she said, offhandedly. “You’ll be getting a computer as part of your official school equipment. We have a LAN and full ‘net access. Just if anyone outside of the school asks, you got it from your mother.”

  Tomas stared at her as if she had been speaking Urdu. Maybe she had been, to him.

  “Anyway, you can see, you can do whatever you want with your room except set it on fire.”

  “Using what for money, chica? Or is all that going to be part of the school equipment, too?” Tomas sneered.

  VeeVee winced inwardly. Her parents gave her an allowance. Chris played the stock market—under supervision, of course—because he was one of the school’s many runaways. Some of the students had families who provided for them. Tomas, obviously, was not going to be in that category.

  And while of course Ria Llewellyn was rich enough to be able to give every student there a thousand dollars a week spending money out of LlewellCo petty cash and not miss it, that just wouldn’t be a good idea. For one thing, some of the kids wouldn’t be able to resist talking about it to their families. For another, they were here to learn, not shop.

  “Well, you can at least repaint everything in better colors—you can pick out anything you like from Stores. And if there’s anything you like in Storage you can bring that up. Lamps and bookcases and rugs and things. It won’t belong to you, but you can use it.” She shrugged. She knew better than to offer him charity.

  “So I can paint,” Tomas said grudgingly, as the two of them walked out of Chris’s room back into the hall. The hall looked pretty much the way it must have looked, well… forever: yucky green two-tone walls (light above, dark below) and yucky green floor. If you hadn’t been a few fries short of a Happy Meal before you got here, you probably would have been after you’d stared at that color scheme for a while.

  He went back to the doorway of his new room and looked around. “An’ maybe take the, eh, bars off the windows?” he said pointedly.

  She snorted. “Maybe the bars used to be there to keep the loonies in, but let me tell you, chico, they’ve been left on to keep other things out.” At his look of disbelief, she shrugged. “Come on, I need to show you the rest of the campus. Don’t worry about your stuff. Nobody’s going to take it, and if they do, not only will you get it back—or better—but they’ll be sorry they did. This building is the guys’ dorm—there’s about twenty kids here and on the floor above—next door is the girls’—there are four dorm buildings, but there’s nobody in the last two yet—and across the way is the infirmary, where Doctor Carter and Nurse Irene live.” She gave him a sardonic look. “And don’t even think about it. They never sleep. You’d be better off trying to sneak past a pit bull on crack as to try to get into our dorm after lights-out.” She paused meditatively. “They caught Johnny Devlin trying to get from the boys’ dorm to the girls’ dorm after lights-out a month ago. He won’t say what they did, but now he won’t even ask them for an aspirin.”

  She led the way out of the dorm, and on a long circular tour of the grounds, pointing out the classroom buildings, the dining hall, the admin building—which Tomas had already seen upon his arrival—and the vacant buildings, then taking him on a brisk hike around the teachers’ cottages, all the while giving a running account of what was where and who did what. She could tell it was more information than he could really take in—well, as long as he saw Ms. Clifford tomorrow morning at nine for his Intake Interview and Academic Placement, and then saw Mr. Bishop after that for his first Psionics lesson, he really didn’t have to remember anything else. And today was more about overawing him than about telling him things, really.

  Finally—just as she’d expected he would—Tomas interrupted her. “All right, chica, you been tellin’ me everything ‘cept what you did to get stuck here. So what was it? You run away? Steal stuff? Drugs?”

  She’d been expecting this, too. She turned around and laughed. “You don’t get it. You watched me set myself on fire—and not get burned—and you still don’t get it! Everybody here is special—”

  “You mean muy loco,” he muttered, sneering.

  “If it’s crazy to Call Fire like I did, and like you can—” she shrugged. “The rest of us are here ‘cause we want to be. Annabel calls storms. Sarita Heals, and Chris sees the future. Lalage’s a Witch, like me—”

  “Whoa, whoa—a Witch? Like—” he clearly fumbled for a comparison. “Like on Charmed or something? Or you mean brujeria—”

  “Brujeria” was Black Magic, and something much closer to Shamanism than to anything either VeeVee or Lalage called Witchcraft. VeeVee decided to explain, not that the explanation would do him much good at this point.

  “I’m a techno-shaman and a Fire Witch; I do combat magic. Nothing like on TV or movies.” She shook her head at him. “It’s complicated, but I’ve been doing this since I was nine, and this is the safest place for me ‘cause my parents travel a lot.”

  “You mean they dumped you here.” His look was a mixture of pity and contempt and again she had to laugh.

  “OK, I was saving the best part for last, but I guess I’ll show you now. You come have a look at the Student Union and tell me I was dumped here.” Once again, she set off at a brisk pace and was pleased to see that he actually had to stretch his long legs a good bit to keep up. She was heading for the building that held the dining hall, and he was about to get the surprise of his life.

  They stopped in at the dining hall first. Their tour of the grounds had occupied most of the lunch hour, and the place was empty again—nothing to see but long rows of refectory-style tables and benches. If Tomas was hungry, they could probably go around to the back and cadge a snack before dinner; nobody went hungry at St. Rhia’s.

  Lunch was always sandwiches, though you could have them toasted if you wanted. The setup was a lot like a good Subway Shop except there were lots of veggie choices. It beat the heck out of the “mystery meat” and bland mac-and-cheese in most high school cafeterias.

  Dinner was another affair altogether.

  VeeVee had seen St. Rhia’s austere little brochure. “Students will be encouraged to sample the cuisines of many countries at dinner-time,” it said primly. At best, this was misleading. At worst, you could say that the brochure was lying through its teeth. The “encouragement” consisted of the following: you could eat what was on the line, or you could have yesterday’s leftovers heated in a microwave—if there were any leftovers—or you could build yourself another sandwich. When confronted with their first sight of, say, stuffed Portobello mushrooms or calamari, it was surprising how many of the kids opted for bologna and cheese on white.

  To be fair, the chef—because the guy in charge of St. Rhia’s kitchen was a chef, a chef with Talent as almost all the staff were, though no one knew exactly what his Talent was—didn’t spring really weird stuff on the kids very often. And there were some things you could count on: Friday night was always pizza night, for instance. VeeVee had gotten an international palate over the years, so she regarded the forays into the unexpected with anticipation. But the faces of some of the kids—half of them the ones from the inner city, which made sense, but a lot of them runaways from white-bread suburbs—when confronted with something they didn’t recognize was entertainment in and of itself. Lalage, for instance… you would have thought that with a name like that, she’d be as used to exotica as VeeVee was. But no. The first time she had been presented with sushi, you’d have thought she’d been handed
a bowl of monkey brains.

  Come to think of it, VeeVee was kind of looking forward to seeing Tomas’s reaction to sushi.

  They went back outside.

  VeeVee folded her arms over her chest and grinned. Tomas’s jaw was somewhere on the floor.

  As well it should be. Behind a forbidding cellar door was Ria Llewellyn’s most expensive concession to the fact she had forty-odd kids locked away from malls, fast-food joints, and skating parks.

  The Student Union was in the cellar of the Dining Hall. It had been an ordinary storage cellar before the renovation, but now the food storage had been moved upstairs and the basement had been put to a much better use. Now top-of-the-line commercial-quality Arcade machines lined one wall. Six game-consoles took up the next, with a seventh solely dedicated to Dance Dance Revolution. The biggest plasma-screen TV VeeVee had ever seen occupied the third wall, hooked up to a DVD and VCR that read both PAL and NTSB format video. There was full satellite too, and a cable package that got just about every station there was. The one thing you couldn’t have in your room was a television, because there was no reception and no way to get cable or satellite into all those individual rooms—of course, with full Internet who needed one? And for a lot of shows, it was a lot more fun to watch together on a 120” screen. The “furniture” was all the expensive kind of beanbag chairs, easy to clear off the floor for whatever reason. A microwave, a restaurant-sized fridge, and a drink machine rounded out the fourth wall. Right now, with everyone in class, the place was silent except for the pings and sound effects of the arcade and pinball machines.

  “‘Dumped?’” VeeVee prodded.

  “I bet everybody doesn’t get to use this stuff,” Tomas said snarkily.

  “Actually, we do,” VeeVee said, tossing her head. “You can use any of the machines—or anything else down here—once you’ve done your coursework, whatever it is. Of course, you do have to access both the pinball machines and the arcade games with your ID card, which keeps track of the amount of time you spend on the machines. So you can’t goof off.”