Novel - Arcanum 101 (with Rosemary Edghill)

by Mercedes Lackey

  The howling was a definite chorus now; dozens of voices, not just one. He tried not to think about what was out there—Eric had said that anything you thought of would appear—but he couldn’t help it. Dogs hunted in packs. So did coyotes and wolves.

  He heard Ms. Smith talking to Kenny and Johnny, directing them at targets. Pick them up, throw them, shove them, stop them-

  Tomas looked for shadows in the mist and launched Fire at every one he saw. He didn’t try for elegance or control—the fireballs he conjured would have torched entire cars back home—and when he had to hit something in the air ahead of them, the ponies ran through a rain of falling sparks.

  He didn’t know how long he could keep this up. He hadn’t been practicing endurance, only control. And he was already tired from showing off for the Low Court Sidhe. What if he ran out of fire? Kenny was good, but all he could do was shove them; Johnny could throw things a long way, but Tomas didn’t know if he could throw really big things. Only Tomas’s power could really hurt them.

  Suddenly the buckboard made a sharp right turn and he was nearly flung over the side. Ms. Smith grabbed him around the waist, yanking him backward. He sprawled on top of Kenny and Johnny, kicking and elbowing at them as he struggled to get to his knees, because he couldn’t fight what he couldn’t see. He heard Eric swear, and now the ground beneath the buckboard’s wheels was so bumpy that it spent more time in the air than on the ground, and each time it landed it came down with a crash that jarred Tomas so badly that he saw stars. Somebody was crying, and Johnny was saying something over and over—not even a swear-word—and Tomas realized that he’d bitten the inside of his mouth.

  And behind them, the mist started to swirl, like water going down a drain, and turn pitch-black.

  There was a bright flash of light. Tomas felt his ears pop and his stomach lurch, and the buckboard jounced slowly to a gentle stop.

  “Warn a girl, will you, Banyon?” Ms. Smith snapped.

  Eric laughed. He sounded relieved.

  Johnny shut up.

  “Oh yeah,” Kenny said, over and over. “Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah…”

  They were out of the Chaos Lands.

  Tomas blinked, squinting against the light. Not sunlight, exactly, because he really hadn’t seen any sunlight since he’d come through the first Gate, but the sky was so blue it made his eyes water, and the wagon was resting on grass as short and green as if they were on a golf course, and a gentle breeze that smelled like roses was playing over his face. He looked around wildly, but all there was to see was the edge of a forest that could have come out of a photograph. Tall trees, with bright yellow and blue butterflies flitting around the lower branches, and everything looking as peaceful as Church on Sunday.

  “Everybody okay back there?” Eric asked.

  “Fine,” Ms. Smith said.

  “There’s no telling what those things were,” Eric said a few minutes later. “Either they were created by the Chaos itself, or possibly they were creatures trapped there when the lands started to dissolve back to Chaos.”

  Eric had called another rest-break. Both he and Mr. Moonlight swore they were all perfectly safe now that they were on this side of the Gate, and they’d driven on for a few minutes until they found a single enormous tree standing by itself in the middle of the meadow. Chloe said it was an oak tree—a dancing oak, whatever that meant. They’d stopped there, and Eric and Mr. Moonlight had spread out the picnic blankets again. Most of their picnic supplies had gone to ransom Destiny, Megan, Johnny, and Chloe from the Low Court Sidhe, but there were Cokes and candy bars left, and Eric used his magic to ken them (which was kind of like Xeroxing them), so there were plenty to go around, and Mr. Moonlight conjured crystal goblets and bowls full of water out of nothing, as far as Tomas could see. Everybody sat around and washed their faces and tried to pretend that they all hadn’t been scared out of their minds just a few minutes ago—as far as Tomas could tell, the only one who hadn’t actually been scared was Mr. Moonlight.

  There were plenty of bumps and bruises to go around, too—the girls were banged up from rolling around on the floor of the wagon and Kenny had a sprained wrist and Johnny had a big bleeding gash over one eye—but Ms. Smith was a Healer, and once they’d all caught their breath, she fixed them all up. Kind of like the school nurse, if your school nurse was some kind of bruja.

  Being Healed was weird. She touched his face—his lip was already starting to puff up where he’d bitten through it—and Tomas felt a weird tingling feeling run all the way through his face and jaw. And then all the pain and swelling was gone, and Ms. Smith was sitting back, rubbing her fingertips together and reaching for a Coke as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  “But they’re all gone now?” Megan asked nervously. She kept looking back over her shoulder, even though none of them could actually see the Gate they’d come through.

  “Indeed they are not,” Mr. Moonlight said. “They are precisely where they were before—in that which was once Prince Panariel’s Domain before his unraveled. If they were but manifestations of the Chaos Lands, they were nothing more than the manifestations of our own thoughts.”

  “And whatever they were,” Eric said firmly, “they can’t get through the Gate. Only the Sidhe—or one of the other powerful inhabitants of Underhill—can use the Gates to travel between Domains. But I think we’re gonna scrub the rest of this field-trip and head on home anyway. I think we’ve all had enough Underhill for one day.”

  Tomas looked around at the others. Nobody was actually crying—though a couple of them looked pretty close. It didn’t matter how cool Eric and the other teachers were playing it, though. They could all have gotten killed just now, and all of them knew it, because they’d taken an accidental wrong turn into a neighborhood that was supposed to be safe, but wasn’t.

  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 ki
ds, 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.”