Novel - Arcanum 101 (with Rosemary Edghill) (23 page)

Consuelo had burned them all, every one, and prayed that the evil was gone from her house.

But it wasn’t. It was in Rosa, and she would do anything she had to do to root it out. And she would go home, go to the people at the estación de la television, and tell them all just what sort of school this was. They would help her.

She tightened her grip on Rosa’s arm. Rosalita was usually so good, so quiet. And now she was screaming, crying, acting like a wild thing. More proof that the school was a bad place.

“Mama! You have to listen! I want to go to St. Rhia’s! I want to stay here! Everything they said about me is true! I do hear voices! Mama, sometimes they frighten me! Mama, I am like the other children there—if they know about things like what I can do, maybe they can tell me about it—Mama, maybe they can make the bad voices stop—”

“No! You aren’t a witch, you aren’t cursed in the blood—you have the Devil in you! I tried to pray him out of you, but I wasn’t strong enough! You’ll go to the convent, and you’ll say prayers all day long under the eye of the Virgin Herself, and if you have to pray until you’re old and grey—” thatBoth of them were shouting so loudly that they didn’t hear it at first. Suddenly Consuelo did—a loud crashing in the woods. She put both hands on Rosalita and shook her violently enough to make her fall silent.

“We must run, hija.” Her only thought was that those gente traviesa from that horrible school had sent people after her to kidnap her precious Rosalita and kill her to keep her from telling everyone what they were. But the sounds were much too loud.

She barely managed a few steps when something struck her, knocking her to the narrow road. She rolled onto her back in time to see a dark blurred shape—clutching Rosalita—vanish into the woods.

She screamed.

Tomas was still standing in the middle of the quadrangle, wondering how the day could have gone from “okay” to “complete disaster” in the space of a heartbeat, when he heard a crash. Kurt had collapsed, knocking over one of the tubs of drinks. A couple of the other kids were on their knees, too.

And Ms. Smith had gone white with pain. She pointed. In the direction Mamacita and Rosalita had gone. Tomas didn’t need any more information. He took off running.

He’d always been a fast runner—it was a survival skill in the barrio—and his time at St. Rhia’s—good food and plenty of exercise—had only made him faster. It took him less than five minutes to reach the place—only a few hundred yards down the drive—where his mother had stopped. Rosalita wasn’t there.

Consuelo Torres was sobbing hysterically—incapable of talking—but not so out of control that she couldn’t direct help toward her daughter. She pointed off into the woods, and Tomas ran in that direction without a single thought as to what he might be chasing.

The trail was easy to follow. This wasn’t an Elven Wildwood or a State Park; the underbrush was messy and tangled, and something—something big—had smashed and trampled it.

And suddenly—up ahead—he could see a flash of pink.

Rosa’s dress.

He’d slowed down a little when he got into the trees. Now he speeded up, running all-out again, because he could hear her crying, no, screaming, and she was his Rosalita, his hermana, and she should never make sounds like that, never.

He was close enough to see what had taken Rosalita now, and if he hadn’t been at St. Rhia’s for almost three months, if he hadn’t been on the school’s little “field trips”, he would have stopped dead and panicked. Lost his temper, lost his head, done something dangerous and stupid.

But he didn’t.

A thing was holding Rosa. It was big—she looked like a doll in its hands. It was dark in here under the trees, but the thing was even darker, hard to see, the way something you tried to look at outside in the middle of the night would be. It made his eyes hurt to look at it. Big, and hairy—or blurry, he wasn’t sure—and shaped like a comic book monster: tiny short legs and long arms that nearly brushed the ground. Colored lights swirled around its head. As they touched it, they vanished, and it cackled with glee, a deep grating sound that actually made Tomas sick to hear.

And it got bigger.

He wasn’t imagining it. It sucked in the lights, and it grew.

It hadn’t seen him yet. When it did, it might run, or it might attack. He had a split-second to decide what to do. He could use his fire against it. But it was holding Rosalita, flung half over one shoulder. Tomas had to decide—right now—did he have enough control over his fire to hit the monster and not hurt his sister? If he was wrong, he could kill her.

‘You have to decide now, Tomas. Either you control your fire, or your fire controls you. There’s no third choice.” Mr. Bishop had said that to him.

I control my fire.

He raised his hands and extended them, feeling the power wake up from wherever it slept when he wasn’t using it. Heat swept through his veins, and tiny white-hot pellets of pure Fire shot from his fingertips: the pure essence of Fire, hawter and more intense than anything he had ever Called before in his life. They sprayed out over the monster, striking its legs, its torso, the arm that wasn’t holding his sister-

They had no effect.

Except for one. The monster saw him. And for a moment Tomas thought—hoped—it would attack him, because then he could run, run back to the road, toward help, leading it after him.

But it didn’t. It merely laughed louder, that grating nerve-rending cackling…

And vanished.

One moment it was there, in the clearing, surrounded by a web of dancing lights, sucking them in, growing.

The next it was gone.

Tomas ran forward, unable to believe it.

“Rosa!” he shouted. “Rosa!”

There was no answer. No sign of her. Only the trampled grass and broken bushes—the only indication at all that something had been here—and a few charred places where sparks from his fire-pellets had drifted to earth. He ground them out, barely conscious of what he was doing.

“Tomas?”

He swung around, hands up to defend himself.

It was VeeVee.

Panting, disheveled, she looked as if she’d been running farther and longer than he had. He didn’t care. He didn’t care about the bad blood between them, or the past week, or anything. What he cared about now was that of all the people in the whole school, he was the one he trusted most to help, the one he knew could help. She had cut down one monster. She could find this one, and when she did—

“Something took my sister, VeeVee,” he said brokenly.

“Yes,” she said, struggling to catch her breath. “Let me work.”

She dropped to one knee and pulled a knife out of her waistband. He wasn’t surprised. VeeVee carried that knife with her everywhere. She closed her eyes, raising the blade above her head, and then holding it out over the ground. He could see her lips moving.

“Trollking,” she said, getting to her feet and sheathing her athame again. “Did you see it?”

“I—yes.”

“Did you see any colored lights? Any lights at all?”

“What does—VeeVee, we’ve got to go after it!”

“Yes. But it’s not going to hurt her, Tomas. It needs her. The lights. Did you see any?”

Frightened as he was for Rosalita, Tomas had to believe that VeeVee knew what she was talking about. And that she wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important. “Yeah. A bunch. Around its head. They kept disappearing. And it… it seemed like it was getting bigger.”

VeeVee smiled sourly. “It was. Those lights? Your sister was calling for help. They were spirits. Trollkings feed on spirit-energy. I don’t know how it got here, but it’s tricking Rosalita into feeding it, and the longer she does, the more powerful it’s going to get. Come on.” She turned, heading back toward the road.

“Why—wh-where are we going?”

“Back to the school. If we’re going to hunt it down and get Rosalita back, we need to organize a proper hunting party.”

By the time the two of them reached the road again, one of the school cars was there, and Señora Clifford and Ms. Smith were helping Mrs. Torres into the back.

“Tomas?” she gasped, when she saw him.

“Don’t worry, Mamacita,” he said. “Rosa’s going to be all right.”

The Trollking had come at the worst possible time—if any time could be said to be a good one. This was the day of the picnic, and some of St. Rhia’s students actually had parents who visited. By the time the school car passed through the gates again, the space in front of the Main Building had already collected a few visitors’ cars. As soon as Ms. Clifford led Mrs. Torres inside, telling her firmly that Rosalita was all right and would be back soon, VeeVee told Ms. Smith everything she knew about what they were facing.

Ms. Smith groaned. “That’s gotta be what Chris was having his vision about. I wish to hell precogs had more control. And I really wish we could drop everything and circle the wagons, but we can’t.”

Tomas looked alarmed. “But it’s got Rosa! Mi hermana—it’s dangerous, and—”

“Yeah, kid, it is,” Ms. Smith said with a sigh. “But so is letting everybody know what’s going on here at St. Rhia’s. So we need to keep the really big guns here, to make sure nobody sees anything they shouldn’t, and to make sure it doesn’t get onto the actual campus. Think you guys can handle it?”

VeeVee nodded. “Won’t be tougher than what I’ve tackled before. I’ll need some backup, though, you don’t go after one of these things alone. I can’t track it easily. A Healer. Lalage—she’s the best balance for my Fire Magic. Mr. Bishop.”

“Right. Let’s go round up a posse,” Ms. Smith said.

“Why Mr. Bishop?” Tomas asked in a low voice. He’d said his Talent was psychometry. That didn’t seem as if it would be particularly useful today.

“Some people have two Talents. It’s not common, but it happens,” VeeVee said. “Mr. Bishop senses Talent. He can also turn them off—that’s why he trains new Talents. When we find Rosa, we’ll want him to dampen her power temporarily and sever the link between her and the Trollking.”

Tomas thought about that for a moment. “He can turn off Talents? Can he do it, like, forever?”

VeeVee hesitated for a moment. “Yes. It’s a last resort, though. Your Talent… it’s part of what you are.”

Ms. Smith moved quickly through the groups of students—nearly everyone was gathered outdoors by now—finding the people they needed. Aimee King and Gareth Moore were both Sensitives—Aimee was a Psionic, Gareth was a Mage, so they were covered both ways. Mr. Bishop arrived in the middle of Kayla’s explanation to them about what was needed, and attached himself to the group without needing to be asked.

Last was Lalage. Tomas was a little surprised that VeeVee had asked for her, considering everything, but he already knew that VeeVee took her work very seriously.

Lalage was standing in the middle of a group of girls that Tomas knew slightly. She looked pleased to see him, puzzled and wary to see VeeVee with him, and then simply confused. Ms. Smith beckoned her over.

The explanation was quickly made, and to her credit, Lalage didn’t hesitate to agree to help.

“And I guess, if you need a Healer along, that’s going to be me.” Kurt Richards had been standing at the edge of the group of girls talking to Lalage, and had followed her over to Ms. Smith.

Lalage looked at him in surprise. He regarded her steadily. “VeeVee’s said that the Trollking won’t want to hurt Tomas’s sister. So there really won’t be anything for me to do, will there?”

Oh. Oh.

Everyone always thought that because she was beautiful—and knew it—Lalage was stupid, but in fact, if you were beautiful, you’d better be smart. And she was. She’d known from the moment VeeVee had walked in on her and Tomas in his room that the boy had it bad for the school’s Ice Princess—who would have guessed that the Fire Mage would be the thing that sunk the Titanic?—and there was nothing on earth (or for that matter, anywhere else) that was going to change his mind.

And sure, she was jealous, but not really of VeeVee. And yeah, it would be nice if Tomas was in love with her—because he was not only drop-dead gorgeous, but smart and funny and sweet—but what she wanted more than Tomas was what Tomas and VeeVee had (because she had no doubt that VeeVee was just as much in love with Tomas as he was with her): that kind of whole-hearted love, the kind she’d always thought you only saw in movies and books, because no one had ever loved her that way.

She’d thought. Until just this moment. The way Kurt had looked at her, how he’d been around Tomas, how he’d been around her before all this… now all the little bits suddenly fell together into a picture and she stared at him without blinking while everyone talked.

She’d thought nobody cared about her. Not special.

But… Kurt did. He was volunteering to go off into the woods with them—instead of Ms. Smith—just because she was going. So she smiled at him, and said:

“Don’t worry, Ms. Smith. I’ll keep an eye on him.”

And Kurt smiled back.

“All right then. Let’s go,” VeeVee said.

They’d moved fast. It was less than ten minutes from the time VeeVee had joined Tomas in the clearing to the time the seven of them—Tomas, VeeVee, Kurt, Lalage, Aimee, Gareth, and Mr. Bishop—were back there again. Aimee and Gareth began circling the clearing, trying to pick up the Trollking’s trail.

Tomas was more worried than he’d ever been in his life. He could face danger to himself and not think about the worst that could happen until everything was over—but this? This was Rosalita in trouble, his baby sister, and he could feel himself drawing closer to panic with every minute that passed.

“You have to focus, Tomas,” VeeVee said quietly. Her voice was pitched too low for anyone standing even a few feet away to hear, but even so it made Tomas jump. He felt a flash of anger, but quickly suppressed it. He knew she was right. But it was so hard!

He turned toward her, knowing he looked as miserable as he felt.

“The Trollking is a creature of magic,” VeeVee continued softly. “Your Talent isn’t going to be much use against it, but that’s not why you’re here. You’re the only one Rosalita knows. She’ll trust you. You have to be strong for her.”