Novel - Arcanum 101 (with Rosemary Edghill) (4 page)

Last night he’d thought it was a great idea, because he’d spent last night in Juvenile Hall, and if prison was anything like that, it was definitely some place he didn’t want to be.

Yesterday afternoon, when he’d met with his probation officer for the first time—and found out he wouldn’t have to see him at all while he was up at St. Rhiannon’s—he’d also thought going off to this place would be great. Mr. Blaylock had treated him like something he’d scraped off his shoe, like he was sure Tomas was not only guilty—and he hadn’t even had a trial—but like he was never going to be able to make something of himself ever. If this was the way they treated guys who came out of prison, no wonder so many of them went right back in.

Blaylock had given him a long list of things he couldn’t do while he was on probation—drink, carry a gun, use drugs, get a credit card, vote, buy a car without permission, hang out with criminals, commit another crime—half of which Tomas couldn’t do anyway because he was fifteen and the other half of which he didn’t really want to do in the first place.

This morning he hadn’t thought much about the school at all when Blaylock came down to his nice cozy little cell to get him and turn him over to the driver of the dark maroon van with “St. Rhiannon’s School for Gifted and Exceptional Students” painted on the side in a funny sort of script. He hadn’t slept very well. The bed had been hard—and it stank—the lights had been on all night, and the place had never really gotten quiet.

He’d said his goodbyes to Mamacita and Rosalita already; they’d come to say adios yesterday, during official visiting hours, since Mamacita had already lost the day at work because of him. Saying goodbye had been hard. He could tell Mamacita was about ready to cry, and angry at the same time. She’d wanted to give him a lecture about doing good at this school, but she’d probably figured out a lecture was the last thing he wanted to hear. Rosalita had just stared at him with big sad eyes, and in a way that was worse, because he had the feeling she knew exactly what he’d done and how bad it was, and he knew that somehow he had failed her. And that wasn’t fair, nothing about this was fair, he’d done all of this for her.

Hadn’t he?

But who was going to take care of her now that he was gone? Who was going to walk her to and from school, and make sure she ate, and make sure nobody laughed at her when she talked to the friends that nobody but her could see?

He wanted to tell Mamacita about the money tucked into the back of the kitchen cupboard, but somehow he didn’t dare. Maybe it would still be there when he got back. Maybe she’d find it and forgive him.

He didn’t know any more.

So this morning he’d gotten into the van with the little bag Mamacita had packed for him, and tried not to think about anything at all. Reform School had to be better than prison, and certainly easier to escape from. As the van sped through the steel canyons of the city, he stared out the window broodingly, frankly expecting at any moment it would pull into a security gate, and he could start the process of figuring out how to get himself out while he pretended to go along with the program.

But it didn’t.

In fact, the van kept going. An hour passed, then two, and by then Tomas was really worried. They were out of the city, out of the ‘burbs—all he could see was trees and Interstate. Were they going to Canada? If he did manage to get over the wall—he was sure by now this place, wherever it was, had a wall—where was he going to go? By the time the van actually pulled off the Interstate, he had no idea at all where they were, but they drove for another half hour along back roads before they finally got to where they were going.

It did have gates after all, although they wouldn’t keep anybody out—or in. They were just sort of standing there, open, at the foot of a long drive at the bottom of a hill. There were more trees than he’d ever seen in his life.

There was no way he could escape from this place. None.

Then they got to the top of the hill and he saw the place itself.

It was a freaky dump.

The van pulled up in front of this ancient old house like out of some kind of a horror movie, and surrounding it were a bunch of sad old two-story buildings that practically screamed “low rent housing project.” Cracked old sidewalks connected them.

And there were bars on the windows. What the hell had he gotten himself into?

There were two people standing on the steps of the Horror Movie House. One of them looked like he really belonged there: he was a tall—really tall—skinny, long-faced pale guy with the whitest hair and the greenest eyes Tomas had ever seen, wearing a black, really formal kind of suit with a vest. Looking at him gave Tomas a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t fear, exactly—not what he’d felt looking at Señor Prestamo—but it was like that. Like you’d better pay very close attention whenever this vato was around, because if you didn’t, it could cost you. Why this guy, who didn’t look like he could crush a paper cup, would make Tomas’s hackles go up, he could not imagine.

But the other…

Oh, she didn’t look like she belonged here at all.

She was tiny, blonde, and Anglo; as perky as a cheerleader in a commercial, wearing a cute little t-shirt and a nice denim skirt that showed off a pair of legs that almost made Tomas forget about the scary old guy for a minute. She had long hair—he liked his mujeres with long hair—pulled back in a nice bouncy ponytail, and when she saw him looking at her, her chin came up and her pretty blue eyes flashed. Oh yeah. This one had a temper. And she didn’t look like one of the dumb blondes, either. Brains and beauty, both.

Maybe this place wasn’t going to be so bad, if it had chicas like her in it…

“We’re here, Mr. Torres. You can get out of the van now,” the driver said. There was a popping sound as the doors unlocked.

That was when Tomas realized he’d just been staring out the window at both of them like an idiot. He grabbed his duffel off the seat beside him—he was sitting in the back—and dragged open the sliding side door of the van. He slammed the door behind him, swinging his bag up over his shoulder, and before the echoes had died away, the van was driving off.

“Welcome to St. Rhiannon’s School, Mr. Torres,” the scary tall dude said.

The classroom was depressing.

It would have been almost impossible for it not to be. Four plain, stucco-over-concrete walls painted in Institutional Green held a dozen students who sat at scarred and battered wooden desks that had been old before their parents had met. The floor was covered with equally-ancient linoleum, in a gray speckled pattern that looked dirty even when it was clean. The lighting was overhead fluorescent tubes of a style that hadn’t been manufactured in decades, harsh and unforgiving, the sort of thing that made everyone look like a pale, washed out Goth. The fact that half the students in this class were pale, washed-out Goths didn’t help—the lights made them look as if they’d been dead for a week.

The view through the single window in the room was pleasant—woods and grass and sky—but the window, like most of the windows here, had bars on it, and that really spoiled the view. But then, when your school was in a decommissioned nuthouse, you tended to get things like bars on the windows.

Despite the surroundings, the class itself was anything but depressing. In fact, even the Goths were leaning forward in their seats with interest.

Mind, it didn’t hurt that Eric Banyon, the teacher of this class, was by all feminine standards, “hawt.” The fact he was also well and truly taken did not prevent virtually every red-blooded female student in the school from eying him with that peculiar moony daydreaming expression usually seen on the faces of preteens ogling a photo of Justin Bieber. Pretty much everyone agreed he looked enough like Johnny Depp to be the movie star’s double, with that kind of competent-yet-vulnerable air that was just as irresistible as an Elven glamourie.

The class was music—with a difference. Eric was dissecting a series of folk-ballads. Now for most high school students, this would be yawn-making in the extreme. Not so for the M-track kids of St. Rhiannon’s School for Gifted and Exceptional Students. The ballads Eric was teaching them about just might mean the difference between nailing a friend or possible ally by accident and being blindsided by someone you didn’t recognize as a foe. That was because St. Rhia’s was a school for people with “powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.” And the M-track students were budding magicians.

Or, in the case of Valeria Victrix Langenfeld, Mages in full bloom. She’d been a practicing magician since she was nine, and training in combat magic since she was twelve. By now she was a specialist, a techno-shaman, someone who used the common artifacts of everyday modern life—rather than arcane instruments and ingredients of the past—to make her spells work.

She didn’t need this class, but she listened intently anyway. For starters, Eric was a Bard, and that was a discipline she knew very little about, so it was likely he’d have a slightly different approach to this than any of her other teachers, past and present. For another, this was filling part of her Art and Lit requirement. For a third—if she was ever made a Knight-Mage Underhill—one of her ambitions—she’d have to have mastered three of the Arts as well as combat-magic and swordsmanship. And for a fourth, well—Eric Banyon was hawt.

So it was with annoyance that she sensed one of the headmaster’s runners just outside the door, waiting for Banyon to pause before making an entrance. “Sensed,” rather than saw, because of course the door was closed and quite solid, but VeeVee had been able to see magical auras since she was six, and the runners were all magical constructs. They looked like students, but that was part of the whole ruse of making St. Rhia’s look like an ordinary boarding school—even to some of the other students.

Eric could, without a doubt, sense the runner too. He gave no sign he had, but the fact that he wrapped up the discussion of “The Wife of Usher’s Well” pretty quickly after the runner first appeared was pretty much a giveaway.

A couple of the other students sensed the runner as well; VeeVee could tell by the way they shifted in their chairs and looked quizzically at the door. None of them were nearly as far along in their studies of the Arts Arcane as VeeVee was, but then, most of them had been born into Mundane households and had found their way here by just about every means possible other than the straightforward one.

But when your mother was a Finnish Witch who could whistle up storms, and your father was a hereditary German vampire hunter descended from the Van Helsings, you tended to get your Gifts and Talents ID’d pretty early in life.

And when both of them were Guardians to boot, when someone started up a school specifically created to train the Gifted and Talented safely away from the prying eyes of the Mundanes, you could bet you’d probably find yourself enrolled faster than you could say “athame.”

The runner tapped once on the door as soon as Eric stopped speaking and opened it. There were two “models” of runner; this one was the cute-and-sassy schoolgirl in a plaid skirt, knee socks and white shirt. The other was the bespectacled-and-studious, but darkly handsome, boy in dark pants and a blazer. Both of them looked pretty familiar if you were into anime—and VeeVee suspected St. Rhia’s headmaster, Inigo Moonlight, watched a lot more Cartoon Channel than he was willing to admit.

The runner whispered in Eric’s ear and departed. Eric looked at her, and crooked a finger. Obediently she rose and came up to the front of the class.

“School Counselor wants to see you,” he said, and one elegant auburn eyebrow rose. “No, I wasn’t told why. Except to say don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong at home.”

Well that did quell the moment of panic. VeeVee hadn’t seen Sarah Clifford except at her intake interview—the school counselor saved her time for people with real problems, and VeeVee was one of the few, the lucky, who came from a stable home with understanding parents, even if they were freaking old-fashioned about some things. In fact, the more she saw of other peoples’ parents, the more VeeVee appreciated her own.

“Get your things, and report in, VeeVee,” Eric continued. “The rest of the class is going to be on “Tam Lin” anyway, and I doubt there’s anything about that ballad you don’t already know.”

She nodded, and went back to her seat to get her backpack and stow her books. Eric was right. “Tam Lin” was a staple teaching element with all the teachers she’d had. She must have mined it for information a dozen times all told.

The Counselor’s office was in the Main Building. The Main Building was the only one that didn’t have bars on the windows—well, except for the little cottages where the resident doctors had once lived with their families. The teachers lived in those now. But the school offices—and one or two of the classrooms—were all in what had been the old Administration Building, built in 1913, and designed to look pretty much like a scaled-down, red brick version of Mad Ludwig’s Castle.

Outwardly, the school looked like a train-wreck because that was what people expected an “alternative” school to look like, and if it was sleek and posh, or all comfy-English-manor, outsiders would begin to wonder. But the fact was that VeeVee, and most of the other Advanced kids here, could have practically any teacher, on practically any subject, just for the asking. That was the sort of thing that happened when your school’s founder and benefactor was a multi-billionaire—and a half-Elven Mage to boot.

And that made St. Rhia’s the best school VeeVee’d ever been at in her entire life. She had friends here. She never had to lie about anything—and lies could be fatal to a magician, because words were Power, and when spoken by a Mage could twist and turn and bite you in the butt if you were lying.

With both of her parents being Guardians, there’d been a pretty good chance she’d turn out to have some sort of magical ability. She wasn’t a Guardian herself, of course. Even though they’d been in existence for thousands of years, even the Guardians didn’t know where their special abilities came from, or just what would confer them—or when.