Novel - Arcanum 101 (with Rosemary Edghill) (19 page)

It was nobody’s fault—nothing anybody had done deliberately. It had just happened.

He could say he was never going to Underhill again, and he was pretty sure that if he put his foot down, nobody would drag him back here, but…

There’d been that thing on his last field-trip. And the fact that Eric had just, oh-so-casually, mentioned that there were a lot of things down here that could go walking through the Gates—walking out into his world—any time they felt like it. Mr. Moonlight had, after all, hadn’t he?

So, really, no place was safe. No place had ever been safe, really; the only difference was that now he knew it. And—as all the teachers at St. Rhia’s kept helpfully reminding him—kids with powers like his, Gifted and Talented alike, were pretty much a Salad Bar for a lot of them. He wasn’t sure whether he was better off knowing that or not, but what he did know was that he really wanted to get back to St. Rhia’s and talk out the whole day with VeeVee. He was glad, now, that she hadn’t been with them. He’d been scared in the Chaos Lands. He would have been terrified if she’d been along for the ride.

But unfortunately, by the time they got back to St. Rhia’s, it was too late for that. The route they took back to the Everforest Gate—an extremely safe path through long-established Domains, Mr. Moonlight assured them—got them back to New York later than Eric had hoped. It was well after sunset by the time they stepped through the Gate, and they had to stumble back to the van in the dark.

Because of their late start back to the school, they ended up stopping for dinner along the way. He tried to enjoy it. Mr. Moonlight insisted on stopping at a real restaurant—not one of the Thruway fast-food places—and it was the fanciest place Tomas had been to in his entire life. Johnny tried to order a cocktail—not that he got very far—and Ms. Smith even loaned Tomas her cell phone so he could try calling VeeVee, but when he got bumped to voicemail Tomas hung up without leaving a message. He couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound really lame, anyway.

When they finally got back to St. Rhia’s it was after midnight. The Friday Night Dance was breaking up. He looked around inside, and didn’t see VeeVee anywhere. He did find Lalage, who told him that VeeVee had said she planned to spend the evening studying. But he knew that the Library closed at seven on Fridays; that meant she’d probably spent the evening in her room or maybe the Student Union. It was after ten—lights-out, which meant he couldn’t go into the Girls’ Dorm; he checked the Student Union and she wasn’t there.

He sighed, acknowledging defeat. She was probably asleep by now anyway. And while he did want to talk to her, this wasn’t exactly urgent. He’d be seeing her in a few hours. It was already—barely—Saturday morning. They’d have the whole day together. Their first date.

Whistling to himself, Tomas went off to bed.

It wasn’t the phone that woke her up around four A.M. Saturday morning. The phone just punctuated the rocket-transition from dream-state to wakefulness. And VeeVee knew before she put her hand on the phone who it was that was calling.

“What’ve we got?” she asked, her voice still foggy with sleep, but her brain alert enough.

“Nightflyers,” her mother’s voice said, in that flat, professional tone that told VeeVee this is not a drill. She shuddered; that word alone told her how serious it was. The Nightflyers came from—somewhere. No one quite knew where; fortunately there were never many of them at a time, and doubly fortunate that when they did somehow manifest, it was rare. They looked most like enormous manta rays, but manta rays made of shadow and darkness, that shifted their shapes—not to anything recognizable, more to vague suggestions of something—a flapping cloth, a pool of darkness, the hint of something at the back of a dark alley.

And they killed. Oh, so very efficiently, they killed, sucking not just the life out of the body, but draining the personality and—it was hinted—the soul. Like something out of a horror movie, they swooped in out of nowhere and fed, and vanished.

It was, horribly, possible to summon them from wherever it was they came from. In the past, some fools had done so deliberately, thinking that they were like ordinary demonic creatures and could be constrained by the usual magical means. Those people pretty quickly found out this was not true, as the summoned creatures turned on the one that had brought them, floating across the bounds of magical circles as if the lines were mere children’s chalk-scribbles.

“Where?” VeeVee asked, snapping the phone on “speaker”, and scrambling out of bed. “Just outside of Lefever Falls. Some old recluse somehow managed to summon them. Three.”

VeeVee didn’t bother to ask about the fate of the “old recluse.” He was unlikely to have survived his experiment. She thought about asking if there were any other victims, then thought better of it. She didn’t really want to know. There was nothing she could do for them, and their fates would only prey on her mind. “ETA?”

“We’re half an hour out. I thought I’d give you as much sleep as I could.” Her mother’s voice turned warm and sympathetic. “We’ve already cleared it with Moonlight.”

Small wonder, the man didn’t sleep. He also didn’t answer the phone, but that wasn’t how Moira Langenfeld would have contacted him. “Right. I’ll meet you at the front gate. No point in making the kids curious to see a car drive up at godawful A.M.”

She had already gotten into the part of her closet that held something no one here at school had ever seen.

Her armor.

It looked medieval, and it was a combination of modern and ancient as only the Elven smiths of Fairegrove could create. Modern polymers and ancient hand-tooling, it was light as a coat and jeans, flexible as silk, bulletproof as well as resistant to fire, ice, acid, weapons and a host of inimical magics.

“Roger that.” There was a click as her mother disconnected the cell phone, even as VeeVee was peeling out of her pajamas and donning the armor, starting with the undertrews and shirt. She was lacing on the greaves when she suddenly remembered what day it was.

Saturday.

The day of the mall-trip. Of her date with Tomas.

Savagely she swore as she continued to lace on the bits of armor. She couldn’t wake him up to tell him what was going on. She couldn’t even leave a note. No one was supposed to know about these little absences, much less the reasons for them. It was the job of the Guardians to keep what they did secret…

So she was going to stand him up, and totally blamelessly, but he wasn’t going to know that.

Dammit! It wasn’t fair—

She could only hope that Mr. Moonlight or one of the other teachers would get to him and give him some sort of explanation before the bus left. Because right now, she had a ride of her own to catch.

As one of the Sidhe, Inigo Moonlight (oh, he had possessed another name, centuries ago, and many of those Underhill still knew it, but he had lived entirely in the World Above since England began her rise to power) that did not sleep, nor did he occupy himself overmuch with the running of this school that he oversaw as a favor to Ria Llewellyn. It entertained him—and there were few things that did, at his age—and it was a great force for Good in the World Above (and it seemed that there were fewer of those with each swift turn of the seasons) but there were many calls upon his attentions.

Tonight, for example.

The Everforest Node would have to be moved soon. While this was obvious to most, it was not obvious to all, and placing it where it would seem to be under Ria Llewellyn’s control was not a plan that met with universal consent. Many remembered her father, Prince Perenor, and that not kindly, for the Unseleighe Prince’s plotting had nearly brought about the destruction of Elfhame Sun-Descending, and Elven memories were long.

To obtain agreement first, for the Node to be moved, and second, for the Node to be moved here required the thing that Inigo Moonlight detested most in both worlds: meetings.

One—and if fortune smiled, it would be the very last—was set for this very night, on the Underhill side of the Everforest Gate. He would be gone at most a day, perhaps two.

He walked down the steps of the Main Building. His Elvensteed was already waiting for him. His staff was used to his absences. There was no need to burden them with additional advice.

And then, perhaps, upon his return, he could devote himself entirely to his roses. They really were coming along well.

Saturday morning Tomas was up even before the alarm went off. He dressed quickly and with care—he’d dressed well for Underhill, but he’d saved his best clothes for today—a crisp white shirt and a new pair of jeans. He wore his good black boots, too, the ones he wore to the dances—there weren’t going to be any long hikes through mud today. He was going to the city—or what passed for one around here, anyway.

The bus would be leaving early—it would stop for breakfast at one of the rest-stops on the Thruway, which was another perk of going—more junk food. He even had some spending money—not a lot, about thirty bucks, but Chris had slipped it to him a couple of days ago, saying it would be crazy and stupid for Tomas to be wandering around Poughkeepsie without even cab-fare or phone change in his pocket. “You can run a tab,” Chris told him. “In a year or so—maybe sooner—you can probably pick up some spare change working on the teachers’ cars. Plus, once you’ve paid for your car and its parts, all the work you do down at the Garage comes to you as cash.”

“It does?” Tomas had asked, stunned.

“Sure,” Chris explained patiently. “What? You think when you leave they just turn you out with a hot car and the clothes on your back? You’ll pay me back when you can. Don’t make yourself crazy. I can wait.”

So Tomas didn’t feel bad at all about taking the money, since it wasn’t charity.

But when he got to the place where the bus would be leaving from, VeeVee wasn’t there. Almost everyone else was there; there was already quite a crowd assembled on the steps of the Main Building, and Tomas recognized a lot of familiar faces.

Not everyone at St. Rhia’s was going, of course—the trip was only for the older students, so that meant only about two-thirds of the student body was here—but even though that meant about thirty kids, VeeVee was easy to pick out of a crowd. And she should have been looking for him.

But she wasn’t. Because she wasn’t here.

Was she late? Maybe, if she’d been up studying late and overslept.

All around him everyone was laughing and talking, discussing their plans for the day. Everyone but Tomas had gone before and knew what to expect. The bus was going to take them to some place called The Galleria—some big-ass mall—and everybody was talking about movies they wanted to see, books and music and games and videos and clothes they wanted to buy (you couldn’t order anything over the Internet here, even if you were one of the few students with a credit card; it was one of the school rules), or just seeing people who weren’t them.

Where was VeeVee? Tomas looked around for someone who might know, and finally spotted a likely candidate. He ambled over.

“Hey, Des. You seen VeeVee this morning?” He did his best to sound casual. Like it was no big deal.

Destiny stopped and frowned, looking around. “Isn’t she already here? She wasn’t in her room when I got up this morning; I figured she might have gone over to the Library really early to get in a couple of hours before the trip.”

Or maybe she just decided that a day spent studying would be more fun for her than going at all, Tomas thought. Hadn’t she said she hadn’t been planning to go until Tomas asked her to go with him? Well, maybe I won’t go either.

Just then the bus came chugging slowly up the hill and everyone cheered. Five minutes ago Tomas would have joined them, but not now. The bus pulled to a stop and the doors hissed open; everybody began shuffling into an approximation of an orderly line to board.

Tomas began to walk away.

“Hey! Tomas! Where you going?” Lalage ran over to him and grabbed his arm.

“Nowhere, I guess.”

“But the bus is leaving! C’mon.” She looked at his face. “You’re waiting for VeeVee, aren’t you?”

Tomas didn’t answer.

“Well, she’s obviously not coming, but that’s no reason for your day to be ruined, too, is it?” Lalage said. “So you were going to go with her. So what? Come with me. It’s a beautiful day, we’re going to get to go off campus, come on. We can have some fun.”

She smiled at him, and Tomas hesitated. Lalage had been flirting with him practically from the day he’d gotten here. She’d never hidden the fact that she liked what she saw. And she was easy on the eyes herself—a gorgeous redhead with curves in all the right places. If not for VeeVee….

Well VeeVee wasn’t here. And from the look of things, she didn’t want to be here, either.

“Sure,” he said. “Let’s have some fun.”

They found seats next to each other near the back of the bus—fortunately they weren’t the last ones on board, and there were still some sets of seats together. A few minutes later, the doors closed and the bus pulled out. Tomas realized he’d been hoping—right up to the last moment—that VeeVee would show up. Maybe she was just late. Maybe she’d lost track of the time. But as the bus rolled down the drive and out the main gates of the school, he had to admit the truth.

She’d stood him up.

She hadn’t even had the guts to say: no, I don’t want to go out on a date with you, barrio boy. She’d said “yes” and then she’d blown him off. Left him to twist in the wind.

“So, I guess you guys had a pretty exciting time yesterday?” Lalage said. “Megan said she was going to tell me about it today, but hey. I’m sitting with you, right?”

Tomas turned to his seatmate and flashed her his most dazzling smile. “You have no idea,” he said.

He told her about going to Underhill with Kenny and Megan and the others. Lalage said she’d been—a few months ago—but there hadn’t been too much trouble when her group had gone. Their lunch had been stolen by pixies and Lauren had gone running off after a unicorn and gotten lost, but they’d actually reached Elfhame Misthold just the way they were supposed to.

“But I’m not sure what I would have done if what happened to you had happened to us,” she said.