Novel - Arcanum 101 (with Rosemary Edghill) by Mercedes Lackey Page A

to slap him into next week. I dunno how VeeVee puts up with it, but I guess she has to since she’s his mentor.”
    “Well I think he is hawt, girlfriend,” Lalage replied, tossing her mane of red hair. “I can’t believe VeeVee isn’t jumping him. I would.”
    “I wouldn’t.” Jamilla wrinkled her nose. “Boy needs some of the barrio polished off him first. Maybe he can get away with treating a girl like an accessory back home, but he’s not back home.”
    Lalage giggled. “I bet I can think of a few ways to change that attitude.”
    “Yeah, like giving him a good whack in the—hey, Tomas.” Jamilla abruptly changed the tone of her voice as Tomas eeled past a couple of the other kids.
    “Hola, chicas.” Tomas smirked and preened, basking in Lalage’s obvious admiration. “Either of you wanna dance?”
    Lalage tossed her hair and smiled winsomely, obviously about to accept. But she was just a second too late. VeeVee dismissed the Shadow and stood up.
    “I do,” she replied, as Tomas registered her presence with a start. “That is, if you think you’re ready for round two.”
    He grinned, and made a mocking bow towards the dance floor.
    “Bring it on, rubia.”
    “Oh, I will, cholo,” she replied, settling herself and getting her balance. “Just try and keep up.”
    “Fairy Tales, suitably fractured,” said Eric Banyon, sitting on the edge of his desk at the front of the classroom. VeeVee leaned forward in her chair. She had a suspicion she knew where this was going, and if she was right, Music Arts class was about to get a whole lot more interesting.
    “We’ve been covering all the traditional beasties and boggarts of ballad and folklore since this class started, but magic, and Underhill, are not frozen in time, and these things get changed. Sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose, but they do get changed.”
    VeeVee nodded; alone among the students at St. Rhia’s, she had seen that first hand. There were places Underhill that were direct copies of the work of illustrators from John R. Neill to Todd Lockwood; of movie sets and real-world buildings; of places like Graceland: of basically anything the human imagination could cook up…
    It was June now, but while other private schools took a break over the summer months, St. Rhia’s didn’t. Most of its student body had no place else to go, and St. Rhia’s had too much to teach them. When you were cramming scholastic and vocational courses into the school week alongside practical training in either magic or psionics, there were never enough hours in the day.
    And when you added field trips…
    No one else among the students at St. Rhia’s had been Underhill to see the things Eric was describing. But VeeVee had been helping her parents since she was twelve, and some of those jobs had been Underhill. VeeVee’s Gifts were geared towards combat, and her parents’ were not, so when they couldn’t get a combat-mage in an emergency, well, they used what they had. Which had often been their own daughter…
    Eric, the class, all faded for a moment as VeeVee’s thoughts turned shadowed. She was very, very different from anyone else here. Tomas Torres thought he was the odd man out at St. Rhia’s. He had no idea.
    VeeVee often had to deal with things no other student here had ever had to face, but her relationship to her parents was probably the most complicated. She was not just a daughter: she was a warrior in a long, long battle against the Darkness, and her parents not only accepted that, they embraced it. How could she explain to someone else that, although she knew her parents loved her unstintingly, she also knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that if her parents ever had to choose between saving their daughter and saving, if not the world, then certainly a great many people, they would without a moment of hesitation sacrifice their daughter.
    Just as they would sacrifice themselves.
    Kids were thrown to the wolves all the time by