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

abusers, but this wasn’t the same thing at all. Sure, her parents would throw her to the wolves. But they’d throw themselves to the same wolves. In VeeVee’s family, everyone would go down fighting off the wolves. If there were any survivors, they’d certainly mourn, but that didn’t mean the survivors would make any move to stop someone from flinging themselves into the battle if the same thing happened again.
    They’d even shove them into it.
    The stakes were too high.
    But the Langenfelds were hardly the usual sort of family. There had been Guardians on both sides of the family for as far back as there were records. No one was ever forced or even pressured to become a Guardian—when the Power was offered, there was always the chance to refuse—and the perils of Guardianhood were many—yet out of every generation on both sides of VeeVee’s family for as far back as they had records, there had always been at least one who had accepted the task.
    Would the power be offered to VeeVee? She didn’t know yet. Would she take it if it was?
    Yes.
    She dragged her attention back to Eric.
    “Here’s the thing,” Eric was saying. “We—humans—our will and imagination, have enormous impact on the world of mythagos—creatures who are created by and live because of magic. As a result, these days you’re just as likely to encounter something like the bean-sidhe that’s become a rock singer and now uses its voice to mesmerize, as you are to run into the classical version. Human dreams and nightmares call and feed these creatures, and human dreams and nightmares change them. That’s what our field trips are about. When one of these creatures is found in this area, once the—ah—“agent” in question knows it’s something our classes and teachers can handle, it’s referred to us to deal with.”
    So there was going to be one of the special field trips? VeeVee felt a spark of excitement. And if Eric was talking about it to the Music Arts class, it looked like it was going to be opened up to more than the Advanced classes this time.
    Up until now, only the Advanced students had gone on these “hunting trips,” and although VeeVee was certainly an Advanced student, the teachers here hadn’t wanted to include her on one of the trips until they’d seen her in action. Now that they knew just what she could do, VeeVee would have gone along on the last one, except for the fact her parents had pulled her for a job of their own. It had been great experience, but she missed the whole idea of going on a class trip with kids closer to her own age.
    “We have people from both the M—and P-tracks along on these things since it’s good for both sides of the school to see these things, and because you never know what’s going to be the most effective means of dealing with a problem until you get there,” Eric said.
    Lalage raised her hand. “Why don’t we know?” she asked. “I mean, if an agent has already seen whatever it is—”
    “Because the agent probably hasn’t seen it,” Eric answered. “What the agent is doing is almost always identifying an anomalous power-signature remotely, and then verifying how strong it is, also remotely. Kind of like spotting something on radar and getting a feel for what it is.”
    He didn’t mention something that VeeVee was pretty sure most of the kids here didn’t know: that the agents in question mostly worked for LlewellCo. Ever since Ria Llewellyn had decided she’d had enough of being called into situations long after they’d become emergencies, there’d been a sea-change in the way those mages allied with the Elfhames Underhill and some of the Guardians started to operate. Thanks to what Eric and Ria and a small group of Guardians in New York City had started, there was an uneasy, but real, alliance among the three groups, with LlewellCo Mage-tech watching for problems, LlewellCo agents monitoring the tech, and a LlewellCo “Coordinator” deciding who or what