Novel - Arcanum 101 (with Rosemary Edghill) by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online

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