Novel - Arcanum 101 (with Rosemary Edghill) (5 page)

The Guardians were a loose—very loose—anarchisticly loose—organization of the extraordinarily Talented and Gifted who stood between the Mundanes and the kind of things you usually found only in horror movies and books with black covers. Their purpose for existing was to protect the Mundane World from the Supernatural World in such a fashion the Mundanes were able to go on believing that “things that went bump in the night” only existed in fiction, and the greatest restriction on their power was that they could never give help unless they were asked to do so by the person who was actually in peril.

Guardians were, in many ways, the elite of Mages. By virtue of what they did, and some undefined connection to Powers outside themselves, they were granted more strength than they would have had alone, more magical abilities, and had the benefit of being able to call on one another for help. But like the Knight-Mages of the Elfhames, they walked a path strictly hemmed in by what they could and could not do with their power. It was never to be used selfishly, for instance. Never punitively. Guardians were not judge and jury; they were protectors and defenders. And no matter what your heritage, you could not win your way to the position, nor volunteer for it. It was offered to you—or not.

VeeVee hoped one day it would be offered to her.

The trouble was, the Other Side didn’t have to play by the same rules the Guardians did, and a lot of nasty stuff in the Guardians’ world tended to take the offensive and come after them and those around them. Which was why a lot of Guardians tended to lead solitary lives—and the few who did marry didn’t tend to start families. The idea of producing “Daddy’s little hostage,” just did not appeal.

VeeVee’s parents, however, took the position that the last thing a Hideous Death Monster was going to expect was that the tiny blond-haired, blue-eyed child it had just snatched was going to turn around, pull out a Soul-Blade with the Six Runes of Righteous Destruction written on it, and stab it in the gut with it. So the second her Gifts had manifested, her parents began training her in them. It had been a real pain in the rear to have to attend both regular schools and arcane lessons, pull off good grades in both, and keep the latter secret from the former.

Mind, she’d never regretted it. Especially not after Shadow-Warriors in the pay of the Rudeski family of vampyri invaded the house one afternoon while Mom and Dad were still at work (because being a Guardian didn’t pay the bills, and so both of them had day jobs) with the intent to take her prisoner—or worse. She’d pinned the hand of the first Shadow-Warrior to the table with a handy fork (silver-plated steel, of course), pulled out the aforementioned Soul-Blade and stabbed the second in the gut with it, and then made a run for the bathroom. Once there, using only what was in the bathroom, she’d built a Nine-fold Sphere of Protection that had held until her parents got home and finished the invaders off.

Try explaining something like that to your school counselor when she wanted to know why you showed up at school the next day looking like you’d fallen down a flight of stairs. Backwards. It was only because the folks had had the smarts to file a breaking-entering-and-assault report with the cops that she’d kept them from getting hauled in as child-abusers. She was just glad she wasn’t the one who’d had to come up with the story for the cops.

But at St. Rhia’s, not only did VeeVee not have to come up with a convincing explanation for mysterious bumps and bruises that wouldn’t involve anyone thinking her parents were abusing her, she was safe. Because the entire school was Warded in every possible way—psionically, magically—with shields that, well, if something could actually get through them, they all had problems that were a lot bigger than just whether something had decided to show up to eat her.

She went up the steps of the main building and into the foyer. An enormous staircase led up to the second floor, and on the right, massive oak doors led into a large parlor where a lot of the interviews with new students and their parents were held. A long hallway led to the back of the building, where more staff offices were. The regular-sized door at the left was Ms. Clifford’s office. VeeVee went over to it and knocked, although the door was already ajar.

“Come,” Ms. Clifford said.

Now, given how the rest of the school was tricked out, it would be reasonable to expect that the Counselor’s office would be done up like something out of a 50s health-and-hygiene movie, with white walls with charts and rah-rah posters on them, a big wooden desk, and uncompromising chairs.

Reasonable, but wrong.

VeeVee had seen less-welcoming living rooms. It was exactly the kind of room to encourage a kid to just flop down, relax and talk. It had walls of a color between brown and gold, with funky art on them, mostly folk-art alternating with framed rock posters from the 60s. There were three sofas and three chairs, all of the kind of cushy-casual style that encouraged hanging your legs over the arm and staring up at the ceiling—which was painted with the night sky around Beltane. VeeVee knew it was that time of year—though Ms Clifford referred to it as “May Day”—because she thought she had recognized the star patterns and asked the last time she’d been here. Ms Clifford was a big fan of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, and May First at Oxford was apparently something of an occasion.

For the rest, there were lots of bookcases, lots of books, a good stereo that was always playing something interesting—VeeVee had only been in here once before, but Ms. Clifford’s door was usually open, and VeeVee often stopped outside to listen. There was a fish-tank made up as a kind of water-scape in miniature, a waterfall with plants growing around it and little fish in the shallow water at the bottom of the tank, and a tiny green lizard that lived on the “cliff” part, which fascinated VeeVee.

Ms. Clifford was on the phone. She waved vaguely in the direction of the chairs, and VeeVee flopped down into the one nearest the fish-tank to watch the lizard. So, this wasn’t anything about her. Nor was it about any emergency at home. But now VeeVee was curious: just what was this all about? Ms. Clifford really was a psychiatric pro, specializing in the traumas of the Gifted and Talented. A conservative estimate was that about half of the kids showed up here with Issues and the other half showed up with Traumas, and all of them needed help. Real help—not the fake kind most of them had been getting for years in the outside world.

“Yes, I think we can handle this,” Ms. Clifford was saying. “Yes, the fax came through just fine. What time can we expect him? Good. We’ll look forward to it.”

She thumbed off the phone and turned to VeeVee. VeeVee regarded her with interest. Ms. Clifford interested her because in a school full of people all of whom tended to be outstanding and different in some way or other, Ms. Clifford was utterly nondescript. If you were to try to describe her, you’d find yourself talking about brown hair and eyes, someone who was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor slim, with what Kenny Chandler, the telekinetic, called “a face-shaped face.” And since all of the teachers and staff here had some sort of Gift or Talent, VeeVee really wondered if Ms. Clifford’s was to blend in and be utterly forgettable. If so, the ability had to be psionic, not magical, because VeeVee didn’t pick up any magical vibes from her.

“Well, VeeVee,” Ms. Clifford said, setting the phone back in the charger. “I believe I have a challenge here for you. We’re getting a new student here tomorrow—”

“Ah, and you want me to mentor him!” That much was easy to deduce; all new students got a student mentor assigned to them from among the pool of the more experienced members of St. Rhia’s student body. VeeVee hadn’t done a mentoring stint yet, so she had more-or-less been waiting for her number to come up.

Ms. Clifford nodded, smiling. “This is no ordinary student, though, and he’ll take some careful handling. I just got off the phone with our special contact in the DA’s office; our new student will be coming to us instead of going to prison. He’s on probation for felony arson—that’s the only thing they could actually charge him with, but the things they know and can’t prove are apparently pretty disturbing; he managed to get himself in with a very rough crowd in an extremely short time, and Linda’s just glad they managed to get their hands on him before he actually hurt anyone. He’s a pyrokinetic—so he’ll be Mr. Bishop’s problem as a last resort—and from what I’ve been told, he has attitude enough for any four people.” Ms Clifford smiled. “His name is Tomas Torres. Since he’ll be our first student with an actual police record, I thought I’d give you the chance to decide whether or not you felt this was something you felt you wanted to be involved with.”

She reached across the top of her desk to hand a small stack of paper to VeeVee. There was a picture on top—it was an actual a mug-shot—of a defiant-looking kid in a do-rag. “Where is he from?” VeeVee asked, studying the picture further. Even in the washed-out mug shot she could see he was cute. Antonio Banderas-league cute.

“The family is from El Paso. His mother was born in Mexico, but Tomas was born here. They moved to New York City about three months ago. Broken home. The father did a runner a few years ago and the mother got work up here through a cousin.” Ms Clifford shook her head. “Mother works two jobs. There’s a little sister.”

“Hmm. Lots of opportunity to get into trouble.” VeeVee turned her attention to the rap-sheet. “Fifteen?” She looked at Ms. Clifford speculatively. “So what do they know at the DA’s office that they can’t prove?”

“That he was acting as an enforcer for the local padrone,” Ms. Clifford said with a sigh. “That was why he was setting those fires. He’s a powerful pyrokinetic now, and he’s only going to get stronger as he practices. He needs to be trained—or shut down.”

VeeVee nodded. Harsh as that sounded, if you couldn’t instill or awaken a good set of morals and ethics in someone with powerful abilities, then you had to take those abilities away. Otherwise, well, you ended up with another case for the Guardians to deal with.

“But Linda thinks he’s salvageable,” Ms Clifford went on. “She’s one of ours, or rather, one of your parents’ peers, another Guardian. I hope you feel up to the challenge, because I’d like to have someone mentoring Tomas who knows how to look for trouble, for something wrong that can’t be corrected.”

VeeVee wound a strand of her long blonde hair around a finger uneasily. She wasn’t altogether sure that she’d know the signs of someone going bad. All her training so far had been in dealing with things that were already bad. And trying to kill her. Not much room for confusion there. Then again, he was cute, and he didn’t look like the type to be overawed by her magical ability. That cocky attitude… hmm. A challenge. She studied the picture. She hadn’t always been living in the ‘burbs. Her folks had been very mobile, what with both of them working as a team for the CDC. They tended to go where disease problems were, which meant a lot of places not on the recommended tourist lists. Only in the last couple years had they actually lived in a house rather than an apartment.

“So, what do you think, VeeVee?” Ms Clifford’s voice brought her back to reality, and she set the photo back on the desk. Why try and scry something when you were going to meet the original in the flesh, anyway? One of the unwritten Laws of Magic was: “Never do anything Magically you can do as easily Mundanely. Save the energy for when you need it.”

“I think I’ll look forward to being Mr. Torres’ mentor, Ms. Clifford,” she replied cheerfully. She handed back the file on Tomas Torres.

“Don’t you want to keep this?” Ms Clifford asked in surprise.

She shook her head. “No. I don’t want to give the impression I’ve been studying him. I want this to be like any other mentor gig. I’ll learn about him as we go.” Then she grinned. “From all that free-range attitude, I don’t imagine he’s the kind to keep anything secret for very long anyway!”

Ms. Clifford smiled. “You know, I was pretty sure that was what you were going to say.” She glanced at her watch. “In that case, why don’t you run along down to the Headmaster’s office? I think it’s probably too late to catch up with your Music class anyway, and Mr. Moonlight has a few things he’d like to say to you.”

VeeVee walked down the long hallway that led to the Headmaster’s Study, thinking ruefully that if she’d known agreeing to mentor Tomas Torres would involve an interview with Mr. Moonlight, she might not have been quite so eager to take on the job.

It wasn’t that Inigo Moonlight was cruel or nasty or engaged in any of the kinds of power games that adults—or those in positions of authority—often tried on children and underlings. From Mr. Moonlight’s perspective, after all, VeeVee and Ms. Clifford were probably pretty much the same age, and he had no interest in human power games. Inigo Moonlight was a Seleighe Sidhe—an Elf of the Bright Court—and he was at least a thousand years old.

He was also a Magus Major—which meant he was one of the most powerful magicians the Elves could produce—and the combination of magical power, plus literally centuries of practice and discipline, meant St. Rhia’s could have no better Headmaster. No one—not even Ria Llewellyn, not even Eric Banyon—knew what he’d done Underhill, or what his name had been there, but for the last several centuries Inigo Moonlight had lived on Earth pretty much in retirement, as a kind of occult private detective, until Ms. Llewellyn had talked him into taking over as Headmaster here. Of course he didn’t exactly run the place—his human assistants, Grace Fairchild and Tucker Bell, did all the actual administrative work. Mr. Moonlight just sort of… oversaw things. And grew roses. And sometimes hosted tea parties.

And was just a little… spooky. Not because he was Sidhe; VeeVee had actually encountered Elves before. She just didn’t think that—even Underhill—there were very many Elves like Inigo Moonlight.

She reached the end of the hall and tapped quietly on the door.

“Enter.”

She pushed open the door and walked in.

If Ms. Clifford’s office was designed to be welcoming, Mr. Moonlight’s, well, wasn’t. It wasn’t designed to be intimidating, either. It just was.