Novel - Arcanum 101 (with Rosemary Edghill) Read online

  “Maybe I do,” Tomas said casually. He was a lot more interested in VeeVee than he was in Lalage, but it was nice to have choices, and maybe he could use Lalage to make VeeVee jealous…

  There was a crunching sound behind him, audible even over the sound of the music, and when Tomas turned around, he saw Kurt Richards setting his crushed soda can carefully down on the table.

  Then he saw VeeVee walk out onto the dance floor and he forgot all about the incident.

  VeeVee usually wore her favorite baby-tee and low-rider jeans to the dances—no real reason to dress up, since she intimidated the crap out of most of the guys and generally ended up dancing alone—but tonight she stood in front of her closet, frowning at the contents.

  Ah, there were the fruits of her secret vice. Sewing.

  When you moved a lot, you needed hobbies that were portable. She’d started out on dolls, rescuing them from thrift stores and making fantastic costumes for them. Then she’d found some great adult clothes in the same thrift shops and started cutting things down and tailoring them for herself.

  By day, she’s an ordinary student; by night, she becomes a Gothic Lolita…

  VeeVee loved the whole New Romantic gig. The lace, the satin, the velvet, the floaty chiffon, the leather waist-cinchers, the brocade corsets… She had an entire closet full. Most of what was in there she’d made for herself, cutting down thrift-shop wedding gowns and prom-dresses, making skirts and tops and bustiers. The only things she hadn’t made were the corsets and leather cinchers and boots.

  And she hardly wore any of it. There didn’t really seem to be a point. When she’d first arrived here, she used to wear her creations, but after a while it was just easier to throw on something quick. Dressing for herself seemed kind of narcissistic, and as for dressing for the guys, well… who was there? Devlin was a pain, Chris was intimidated by her, and so were Tyler and Ethan. Aaron and Brian did nothing for her, and they had this habit of switching girlfriends every couple weeks anyway. Gordie wasn’t exactly intimidated, but he was always giving her the hairy eyeball, maybe because he couldn’t get even surface thoughts through her magical shielding. Kenny was a slob, Gareth was OCD, and anyway, he and Lauren had a thing going. That left Kurt, and anyone with two functioning braincells could tell Kurt had a major crush on Lalage.

  Well maybe dressing to please herself wasn’t all that narcissistic after all. Otherwise the stuff just wasn’t going to get worn, and what was the use of that?

  She groaned, looking at her stash. How to not look like she was dressing up just to impress Tomas? Everyone knew she didn’t dress up for the dances…

  And I’m not dressing up to impress Tomas. I just want to wear some of this stuff for a change. I never get to wear it.

  Finally VeeVee arrived at what she thought was a reasonable compromise. A flirty, multi-layered chiffon skirt—short in front, long in back, in bright red. The red-and-black second-hand haori she’d gotten on eBay. And the black leather waist cincher with the red hot-rod style flames on it. She’d worn the haori and belt with jeans to the dances before, though not with the skirt. And in case she got too hot, the little black brocade bustier under the haori coat. Black Ceili—Irish folk dance—shoes.And then she looked at herself. And sighed.

  She looked all dressed up. There was only one person here who was new, and only one person here who she was mentoring.

  She was not trying to impress him!

  With a growl, VeeVee examined herself in the mirror again. All right. She lost the haori and the waist cincher. That left her with the skirt and bustier. Still too dressy.

  Tee with a touch of lace that she wore to class and the skirt? Or bustier and jeans?

  Bustier and jeans, she decided, and, with a sigh of regret, hung the skirt back up. Then, instead of jeans, she changed her mind at the last minute and grabbed the denim miniskirt instead.

  She thought about having her hair loose, then decided to put it up with a few loose, curly tendrils.

  Finally she was ready, and, with a last look at the mirror, she sauntered out of the now-empty dorm.

  By now it was dark, so she conjured a ball of Mage-fire to light her way, sending it to follow a little behind her and above her head.

  She paused at the entrance to the dining hall, listening to the band. The guys were getting really good… then again, they all had some capacity for Bardic abilities, and Eric and Hosea were teaching them. A quick glance through the door didn’t show her Tomas and she felt a pang of disappointment and almost went back to her room.

  But then VeeVee squared her shoulders. After all, what was the use of being a mage if you couldn’t supply yourself with a dance partner?

  And the music was really good.

  She stepped aside into the corner, cast a quick summoning circle, and issued an invitation.

  Something immediately shimmered into being; red-haired, green-eyed, with a wicked grin and a bow and a flourish. And sharply pointed ears.

  She raised an eyebrow. This was not only an Elf, it was one she knew. But before she could say anything, Nierin ap Bedwyr grinned and bowed with a flourish. “Ah, my sweet Valeria!” he said, in mock-mourning. “I hear an invitation to dance, I come in answer, and lo! It is you! Is this the only way I can see you? You never call, you never write—”

  “Would you answer me if I had?” she asked pointedly. “Besides, the last time I saw you, I was thirteen and you were describing me to Mom and Dad as “your grubby little virago—’”

  “And so you were.” Nierin waggled his eyebrows at her. “You seem to be finishing out rather nicely, though. Cleaner, certainly.”

  She rolled her eyes. She’d been dazzled by Nierin when they first met, of course. Fortunately she’d had her parents around to keep her from making a complete fool of herself. “Come on,” she said shortly. “Let’s dance.”

  Naturally Nierin was an excellent dancer. What was most amusing to VeeVee was that the other dancers—even those who should have known better—took him for an illusion. It amused him too, and when Tomas finally swaggered across the dance floor to her, ignoring Nierin, the Sidhe grinned at her and faded into invisibility as if he really had been an illusion.

  “Yo, VeeVee,” Tomas said. “Wanna dance?”

  “I was dancing,” she retorted sharply.

  He smirked, saying nothing. Just at that moment the band started another song, with just enough of a Latin rhythm she decided it was about time to lay down a challenge.

  The shine footwork—and hipwork—she did was salsa… but the challenge in her eyes and her steps were pure flamenco.

  Bring it.

  Tomas’s eyes widened, then narrowed. His “reply” was half salsa, half hip-hop. VeeVee followed, shadowing what Tomas did one beat behind him and adding some flourishes of her own for good measure.

  Anything you can do, I can do better.

  She evaded his hands, and noticed out of the corner of her eye that the dance floor was clearing around them. The band had picked up on that too, and instead of breaking for the next song, they bridged right into it.

  Tomas was sweating. So was she, and her hair had come undone; she made use of that by tossing her head to punctuate her movements. By this point, their dancing was part-sparring and part-flirting; Tomas had a grin on his face and kept trying to capture her hands, while VeeVee knew her eyes were dangerously alight and there was no way he was going to touch her unless she let him.

  The band gave out first. VeeVee sensed they were going to end with the third song rather than bridge to a fourth, and she spun out of reach and hit a challenge-pose on the last note.

  Then, as some of the kids broke into whistles and applause, she ducked out and headed for the drink-table, searching for the magical signature that was Nierin. Tomas stayed on the dance floor, wearing that smirk, acknowledging the applause.

  Nierin was gone of course. She sighed, and shook her head. Elves.

  She downed a water, then ducked into the girls’ washroom to put her
hair back up. When she came back out again, the sound system had taken over while the band took a break, and Brian and Megan were in the center of the floor, engaged in a playful version of a Magician’s Duel. Their avatars were mostly illusion, and it was pretty much the magical version of a video game. In fact, the glowing figures between them, battling it out, bore suspicious resemblance to certain Immortal Konflict toons…

  VeeVee tucked herself up to the side of the room and invoked Shadow to give herself a little time to breathe. She didn’t want Tomas to come looking for her just yet. This wasn’t quite the spell that would make people’s eyes slide right past you; this was more as if you were sitting in a very deeply shadowed corner of the sort so beloved of fantasy writers. People would register someone was there, but not really know who you were unless you spoke.

  “…dunno, he doesn’t do anything for me.” Lalage Chisolm and Jamilla Adams drifted within hearing range, fresh sodas in their hands. Jamilla was the one talking, and it was pretty clear from her next words who it was she was talking about. “That whole Latino macho attitude makes me want to slap him into next week. I dunno how VeeVee puts up with it, but I guess she has to since she’s his mentor.”

  “Well I think he is hawt, girlfriend,” Lalage replied, tossing her mane of red hair. “I can’t believe VeeVee isn’t jumping him. I would.”

  “I wouldn’t.” Jamilla wrinkled her nose. “Boy needs some of the barrio polished off him first. Maybe he can get away with treating a girl like an accessory back home, but he’s not back home.”

  Lalage giggled. “I bet I can think of a few ways to change that attitude.”

  “Yeah, like giving him a good whack in the—hey, Tomas.” Jamilla abruptly changed the tone of her voice as Tomas eeled past a couple of the other kids.

  “Hola, chicas.” Tomas smirked and preened, basking in Lalage’s obvious admiration. “Either of you wanna dance?”

  Lalage tossed her hair and smiled winsomely, obviously about to accept. But she was just a second too late. VeeVee dismissed the Shadow and stood up.

  “I do,” she replied, as Tomas registered her presence with a start. “That is, if you think you’re ready for round two.”

  He grinned, and made a mocking bow towards the dance floor.

  “Bring it on, rubia.”

  “Oh, I will, cholo,” she replied, settling herself and getting her balance. “Just try and keep up.”

  “Fairy Tales, suitably fractured,” said Eric Banyon, sitting on the edge of his desk at the front of the classroom. VeeVee leaned forward in her chair. She had a suspicion she knew where this was going, and if she was right, Music Arts class was about to get a whole lot more interesting.

  “We’ve been covering all the traditional beasties and boggarts of ballad and folklore since this class started, but magic, and Underhill, are not frozen in time, and these things get changed. Sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose, but they do get changed.”

  VeeVee nodded; alone among the students at St. Rhia’s, she had seen that first hand. There were places Underhill that were direct copies of the work of illustrators from John R. Neill to Todd Lockwood; of movie sets and real-world buildings; of places like Graceland: of basically anything the human imagination could cook up…

  It was June now, but while other private schools took a break over the summer months, St. Rhia’s didn’t. Most of its student body had no place else to go, and St. Rhia’s had too much to teach them. When you were cramming scholastic and vocational courses into the school week alongside practical training in either magic or psionics, there were never enough hours in the day.

  And when you added field trips…

  No one else among the students at St. Rhia’s had been Underhill to see the things Eric was describing. But VeeVee had been helping her parents since she was twelve, and some of those jobs had been Underhill. VeeVee’s Gifts were geared towards combat, and her parents’ were not, so when they couldn’t get a combat-mage in an emergency, well, they used what they had. Which had often been their own daughter…

  Eric, the class, all faded for a moment as VeeVee’s thoughts turned shadowed. She was very, very different from anyone else here. Tomas Torres thought he was the odd man out at St. Rhia’s. He had no idea.

  VeeVee often had to deal with things no other student here had ever had to face, but her relationship to her parents was probably the most complicated. She was not just a daughter: she was a warrior in a long, long battle against the Darkness, and her parents not only accepted that, they embraced it. How could she explain to someone else that, although she knew her parents loved her unstintingly, she also knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that if her parents ever had to choose between saving their daughter and saving, if not the world, then certainly a great many people, they would without a moment of hesitation sacrifice their daughter.

  Just as they would sacrifice themselves.

  Kids were thrown to the wolves all the time by abusers, but this wasn’t the same thing at all. Sure, her parents would throw her to the wolves. But they’d throw themselves to the same wolves. In VeeVee’s family, everyone would go down fighting off the wolves. If there were any survivors, they’d certainly mourn, but that didn’t mean the survivors would make any move to stop someone from flinging themselves into the battle if the same thing happened again.

  They’d even shove them into it.

  The stakes were too high.

  But the Langenfelds were hardly the usual sort of family. There had been Guardians on both sides of the family for as far back as there were records. No one was ever forced or even pressured to become a Guardian—when the Power was offered, there was always the chance to refuse—and the perils of Guardianhood were many—yet out of every generation on both sides of VeeVee’s family for as far back as they had records, there had always been at least one who had accepted the task.

  Would the power be offered to VeeVee? She didn’t know yet. Would she take it if it was?

  Yes.

  She dragged her attention back to Eric.

  “Here’s the thing,” Eric was saying. “We—humans—our will and imagination, have enormous impact on the world of mythagos—creatures who are created by and live because of magic. As a result, these days you’re just as likely to encounter something like the bean-sidhe that’s become a rock singer and now uses its voice to mesmerize, as you are to run into the classical version. Human dreams and nightmares call and feed these creatures, and human dreams and nightmares change them. That’s what our field trips are about. When one of these creatures is found in this area, once the—ah—“agent” in question knows it’s something our classes and teachers can handle, it’s referred to us to deal with.”

  So there was going to be one of the special field trips? VeeVee felt a spark of excitement. And if Eric was talking about it to the Music Arts class, it looked like it was going to be opened up to more than the Advanced classes this time.

  Up until now, only the Advanced students had gone on these “hunting trips,” and although VeeVee was certainly an Advanced student, the teachers here hadn’t wanted to include her on one of the trips until they’d seen her in action. Now that they knew just what she could do, VeeVee would have gone along on the last one, except for the fact her parents had pulled her for a job of their own. It had been great experience, but she missed the whole idea of going on a class trip with kids closer to her own age.

  “We have people from both the M—and P-tracks along on these things since it’s good for both sides of the school to see these things, and because you never know what’s going to be the most effective means of dealing with a problem until you get there,” Eric said.

  Lalage raised her hand. “Why don’t we know?” she asked. “I mean, if an agent has already seen whatever it is—”

  “Because the agent probably hasn’t seen it,” Eric answered. “What the agent is doing is almost always identifying an anomalous power-signature remotely, and then verifying how strong it is, also remot
ely. Kind of like spotting something on radar and getting a feel for what it is.”

  He didn’t mention something that VeeVee was pretty sure most of the kids here didn’t know: that the agents in question mostly worked for LlewellCo. Ever since Ria Llewellyn had decided she’d had enough of being called into situations long after they’d become emergencies, there’d been a sea-change in the way those mages allied with the Elfhames Underhill and some of the Guardians started to operate. Thanks to what Eric and Ria and a small group of Guardians in New York City had started, there was an uneasy, but real, alliance among the three groups, with LlewellCo Mage-tech watching for problems, LlewellCo agents monitoring the tech, and a LlewellCo “Coordinator” deciding who or what needed to deal with said problems. No more vague “disturbances in the Force.” No more vague feelings of impending trouble. No more tea-leaves or crystal balls or card-reading…

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Stuff could still crop up out of nowhere almost overnight. And there were Guardians and other Mages who refused to work with a corporation, with Ria, or both. But for most hot-spots, at least in North America, LlewellCo now provided the early warning system for magical trouble. The “Defense Against The Dark Arts” had finally moved into the 21st century.

  VeeVee’s parents loved this, but there were plenty of Guardians who thought they were crazy for trusting an outsider. VeeVee was going to stay out of the argument; not only was she a non-Guardian and a teenager, no matter what she said, the fact she was attending a school also sponsored by LlewellCo would be held against her.

  “Now, much as I would like to haul all of you along on this, the limit this time is going to be those with combat-oriented talents,” Eric concluded. “VeeVee, Lalage, Ethan and Brian. The P-track teachers will be picking the Psis, but one I can promise will be going will be Kurt. Never, never, never go on a Hunt without a medic.”

  Well. Combat-oriented, hmm? There was one P-track candidate VeeVee could think of that fit that description. The question was, did he have his power under enough control?