Moonset 01: Moonset

by Scott Tracey

  All of that was threatened, nearly destroyed, because of Moonset.

  They’d been an ordinary coven, nothing special. But something set them on the path to dark magic, and soon there was nothing dark enough, no power too forbidden.

  Moonset’s first strike was the most brutal—the equivalent of a nuclear assault that decimated the heart of the Congress, the ruling body that kept order. The papers called the Manchester bombing an accident, citing a gas leak that stank of a cover-up. Even with the threat of war on the horizon, keeping magic secret was still the first priority.

  Hundreds died—specifically, the hundreds who were strong enough and smart enough to end the Moonset threat. Weeks went by, with no one stepping forward—until our parents did. Even as the acts of terrorism continued, they released statements and appeals. A cult began to form, worshiping the charismatic leader of Moonset, drawn to the movement that fought back for the disenfranchised and the ignored.

  At first, it wasn’t even a war. It was slaughter. Moonset engaged in terrorist acts all over the globe, destroying covens, libraries, anything and everything that could have risen up as a threat to them. The magical world had to fight a war on two fronts—fighting against Moonset while also fighting to keep the rest of the world ignorant of what was really going on behind the scenes.

  Moonset was winning, but then they surrendered. No one really knew why. Theorists suggested they had a moment of clarity, momentarily freed from the dark powers that had overtaken them. But no one knew for sure, because though they were tried and executed quickly, they never spoke a word about the war and no record of their plans was ever recovered.

  We were the only things they left behind.

  “I don’t like this,” Jenna said under her breath at my side.

  “You’re crazy!” The principal’s strident, nasal voice carried all the way down the hall. “I’m not just going to go off with you. In case you haven’t been paying attention, there is a riot going on. I don’t have time for this.”

  “Sir,” his escort tried. And then again. “Sir.” But the principal kept going on in a rant that devolved into references to tailgating and a lack of school pride. The principal’s escort glanced back, as if looking for aid, but Virago ignored him.

  She sighed, shaking her head in irritation. Then she froze, staring straight ahead at a man who I would have sworn wasn’t there a moment ago. With his arms folded and head down, he could have been sleeping. “I’ve got this,” Virago snapped, eyes narrowing to little slits.

  “You should have had this a week ago when you first heard something was coming,” the man said, lifting only his eyes, “instead of waiting until one of them broke the rules. Your boss still denying everything, huh?”

  They’d known there was a threat, and they’d been waiting? Unbelievable.

  Virago’s gaze swept over the three of us, hardening like this was somehow our fault. Even if we didn’t know what this was. I decided to hang back to wait and see how things were going to proceed. Virago wasn’t acting like we were in danger, but the man before us definitely gave off a vibe of dangerous.

  “Who are you?” Cole asked, suddenly belligerent with his chest puffed out. I gestured to Jenna, and she grabbed him by the back of the shirt. He tried to squirm away, but she kept a hand on his shoulder, her fingers digging into the shirt’s fabric.

  “I’m Quinn,” the man offered, pushing himself up off the wall. Quinn was like a black-and-white film brought to life: dark black hair and pale white skin. Bela Lugosi with a Bowflex, and he moved like someone who had been in the military.

  “Hello, hotness,” Jenna muttered under her breath, eyes alight and mouth curved. Oh, fantastic, I thought to myself.

  Because Cole never met a situation he didn’t like to make more awkward, he looked away from Jenna and Quinn, and decided to bark. Even worse, he barked like one those tiny dogs, the ones that yiff instead of ruff.

  Jenna increased the pressure on his shoulder until Cole started to drop. “Ow, ow, sorry, ow!” She held him for a few seconds longer, then released her grip. Cole rotated his shoulder, glaring up at her. “Bully.”

  “Enough,” I said quietly. I took over Cole duty from Jenna, coming up behind him and resting one hand on his shoulder close to the neck. Prime strangling position, if I needed it.

  “I know, kids,” Quinn said sympathetically. “It’s awkward when Mom and Dad fight in front of you. Don’t worry, it’ll be over soon.” He probably wasn’t much older than Virago, but I instantly liked him better, even though my instincts were still on edge.

  “You’re here to evacuate us?” I asked.

  Quinn gave me a brief once-over. “Justin, right?” I nodded, and he smiled in a way that was probably supposed to be charming. Rule number two: never trust adults. And never, never trust anyone from the government.

  “I’m here to make sure everything goes off without a hitch,” he continued. “Malcolm and Bailey are already secure; now we just need to get the three of you.”

  Hearing it from Quinn put me a little more at ease. I wasn’t so much worried about Mal—he could take care of himself—but Bailey was the youngest. Leaving would already be hard enough on her.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Virago said with a roll of her eyes. “Move,” she huffed at us, setting a brisk pace down the hall towards where the principal was still arguing with the other government mook.

  The principal’s office wasn’t far from the front of the building, and that was the way that Virago decided to take us. The school was a hodgepodge of new additions tacked onto a side and renovations to make it look seamless on the outside. The only way to the south side of the building was to walk all the way down the length of the building and turn at the end. Otherwise, the school was a mess of aborted hallways and layouts that folded in on themselves.

  I shook off the twinge running up and down my back, like there were strings sunk into my skin and someone was pulling them for the first time I could remember. I looked at Jenna, then Cole, but neither of them seemed to notice anything.

  At first.

  Jenna slowed, touching my arm. “Do you hear that?”

  Nothing jumped out at me right away, so after a few more steps I stopped entirely, pulling Cole to a stop with me. Jenna had her head cocked to the side, and she was still. So very still. But she was right. There was something. A hissing. Faint.

  “What is that?” she asked, lowering her voice. Cole’s nose was wrinkled up, but he stayed between us.

  “Stop stalling,” Virago said briskly, turning to glare us down again.

  It sounded familiar, like the hiss a of a snake, only softer—but I just couldn’t place it. The hall had grown still around us, without even the sounds of the riot leaking in. Like we were the only six people for miles.

  The sound was getting louder, or rather it was coming from several directions at once now. “Gas leak?” I asked.

  Jenna considered that, then shook her head. “I swear I’ve heard that somewhere before.”

  “When you said there was stuff coming,” Cole piped up suddenly, turning back to Quinn. “Did you mean someone? Or something?”

  Quinn hesitated just long enough for Cole’s eyes to whiten all around.

  Miss Virago snapped. “Enough of this! This day is enough of an embarrassment already.”

  “Jamie Sim told me that there’s monsters who hide in mirrors and glass, and if you look at them, they can steal your thoughts,” Cole fretted. “And the ones that look like dead wood, who can make your life just puddle out of you like blood. And the ones—”

  “Relax,” Quinn said, even as Jenna ruffled Cole’s hair. “You’ve got an armed escort, remember?”

  Quinn, maybe. But the redheaded Virago looked like she’d push us in front of any incoming threat just to be rid of us. Again, not something we’re unfamiliar with.

  The
hissing got a little louder, broken up by tiny tinkling noises. Something struck my shoe and I looked down, only to follow it back towards the source.

  “Jenna,” I said quietly, “look at the walls.”

  The entire front half of the building was built out of brick, the original school from sometime back in the forties. That’s where the hissing sound was coming from. More accurately, from the bricks themselves.

  Jenna’s forehead knitted up in confusion and she took a step forward. “What … ?”

  The mortar between the bricks was crumbling down into sand, spilling out from between the stones like a broken hourglass. In places, larger chunks were breaking free, no bigger than pebbles, and bouncing off the tiled floor where they struck.

  Something swept over me, a feeling, or a warning, and I grabbed Cole and pulled him closer.

  “Honestly, there’s nothing to be scared of,” Miss Virago said, her mouth barely able to express such an incredible amount of contempt. “You’re all being ridiculous.”

  The front of the school exploded inward, just to prove her wrong.

  Bricks were falling. Bricks and … something else cracking and splattering against the tile floor. Crack. Whoomf. Crack. Crack. Whoomf. I opened my eyes, choking back a cough. The dust was already passing, swept away by a rapid surge of rancid air from outside.

  There was a hole in the school. The long wall of brick was exposed like a renovation gone wrong, jagged spots where stones had simply fallen away, and others where they were snapped in half. A few bricks littered the ground, but most had smashed apart like snowballs, a pile of terra cotta ash the only evidence of what they’d been.

  I pulled myself up on hands and knees, and crawled the short distance to Jenna and Cole. We’d been thrown back by the blast, but except for a few moments of disorientation, I was fine. Jenna and Cole were already starting to stir as well, but there was a nasty gash on Cole’s jaw, and his face was paler than normal.

  The principal and his escort weren’t so lucky. They caught almost the full force of the blast, having been much closer than we were. Both of them were slumped and still on the far side of the hole.

  “Justin,” Jenna said in a warning.

  I looked up, and that’s when I saw it. The creature that had caused the explosion.

  The thing that climbed into the school—and it was clearly inhuman—moved with unnatural grace. No matter where it stepped, on sharp edges or exposed wiring, its balance was never threatened. It crept through the wreckage, moving like a spider. Erratic and quick, skittering like this was just a game. It was tall, gaunt, wrapped in strips of cloth and weighted down by dozens of chains wrapping from wrist to torso and neck to ankle.

  “What is that?” Cole asked, his voice rising into a high-pitched squeak.

  The thing looked at him, exposed a mouth of black, crumbling teeth, and smiled.

  The chains should have made it obvious. The way its flesh was rotted and rictus and wrong should have made it obvious. A pallor like spoiled milk, creaking bones, and the chains. Chains that rattled and vibrated so loud my jaw started to hurt, and all other sounds were drowned out underneath it.

  The thing was a wraith. And we were so incredibly fucked.

  Wraiths were ghosts in need of anger management. Their deaths had twisted them, sharpened them into predators, and they were so consumed by memories of the living that they would ravage anything, kill anyone, in order to claw their way back. Though they all had a certain anorexic zombie quality to them, the last thing they were was frail.

  Case in point: the gaping hole where the front of the school had been.

  Quinn was already on his feet. “Pyr toom,” he snapped, holding his hand out. The air above his palm caught fire, collected and writhed against the sides.

  “Siths torak,” the creature hissed. It had a voice like bones breaking, full of crackles and sibilant like a tire leaking air. The spell—and it had to be a spell—swept forward, the air rippling as a sudden displacement of heat blew out the fireball like a birthday candle.

  At its core, magic was a language. Spells were verbal, the right combination of consonants and vowels could summon up a projectile of fire, but just as easily extinguish it. But magic had a cadence and common tonal qualities to it—even if you only knew a few spells, you could recognize the language being spoken.

  The clicks and dips in the spell the wraith used were something foreign, like a dialect I’d never heard before.

  Virago had taken the hardest hit, slumped over against one of the walls, but even she was managing to get back onto her feet.

  “Lex divok,” Quinn spat, thrusting his open palm forward. The creature went flying back suddenly, hit by a wave of invisible force. It tumbled head over foot, an animated skeleton trying to somersault. Every time one of the chains slapped against the tile, I winced, feeling the vibration of it tearing through my skin.

  The moment the creature landed, sprawled in a broken heap of limbs and iron at the farthest end of the hall, Quinn looked up to the ceiling. “Lexic vok,” he shouted, bringing his fist down. The ceiling, the walls, all of it came tumbling down in a shuddering mass above the wraith, drowning it underneath a tonnage of bricks, stone, and at least fifty years of accumulated dirt.

  The collapse lasted for at least a minute before it started to die off. Unlike the wraith’s explosion, Quinn’s was perfectly controlled, a circular hole that was both sharp and precise.

  “Still happy you sat around doing nothing?” Quinn demanded, helping Virago to her feet.

  “Orders were orders,” she muttered, a tangle of hair in her face.

  “We have to get them out of here, now,” Quinn said. “Can you walk?”

  “I—I think so,” she said, pulling away from him to test her balance.

  “Go,” he said. “Chris and I can hold it off.”

  From the far end of the hall, a reverberating crunch interrupted. The wraith was already vertical, standing above a pair of dark-shaped lumps that I didn’t recognize at first.

  “Oh, God,” Jenna whispered.

  The creature’s hand was a canvas of red, and something crimson and splintered dropped from his grip. The principal, now missing his esophagus, which lay about a foot and a half to his right, stared at the ceiling unblinking. The man in a suit—Chris—was just as much of a bloody mess, though he was still gurgling. Until he, too, shuddered and stopped.

  A black tongue licked at decayed lips as the wraith looked at the five of us. “Moonset,” the thing whispered, fighting a smile. “Mine.”

  The sound of the chains, which were now moving on their own like prehensile limbs, drowned out anything else the wraith whispered.

  I saw Quinn’s mouth move, felt the spell shudder into existence around him, but there was nothing but the chains. Hideous ringing, clanging sounds a thousand times more intense than they should have been. The sound was worse now, piercing through me, and at my side I saw Cole and Jenna struggling, too.

  Cole was the first to drop, falling to his knees with hands pressed against his ears. His face flushed as he screamed, howled, but I couldn’t hear it. Jenna dropped next, and then me, until the three of us were huddled together. Jenna and I grabbed Cole, shielding him as best we could and trying to help cover his ears with one of our own.

  “Vex dunn,” I shouted. “Vexic dunn. Vexa dunn.” I screamed out every variation of the only muffling spell that I knew, but though the magic ignited around me, the chains penetrated through.

  There was movement—lots of it—around us, but it was everything we could do to stay together. I felt, rather than heard, Jenna continuing to shout spells into existence, but nothing did any good.

  My muscles screamed, and I tried to shift only to find they wouldn’t respond. It was like being hit with a stun gun, my body was no longer my own, tucked and frozen in place like an abandoned marionette.


  They’re going to die. And it’s all my fault. Keeping Cole and the others safe was my job, my only job. And I’d failed. I should have done something, should have been smarter, or stronger.

  I’m sorry, I mouthed.

  The silence was so sudden it hurt. Agony replaced by an empty void so vast I thought it might drive me mad. A pounding sound that resolved itself into my heartbeat, a rattle that became my breath.

  Quinn towered above the three of us, a little bloodier for the trouble, and had a knife in his hands.

  The echo of what he’d done still hung in the air, creating a poster bed-sized space of safety where sound was normal and even.

  “Keep them safe,” Quinn shouted at the redhead before he started his advance on the wraith.

  The wraith held out his hand, whispered a word, and a wave of gray rushed out from him. It caught up to Quinn and Virago before either of them could deflect or cast a counterspell, and I couldn’t help but watch in terror. They were all that was standing between us and the wraith.

  Quinn aged in seconds, his body shifting, changing, stooping forty years in less time than it took me to realize what I was seeing. His skin became sallow, his posture hunched, his hair went platinum, then full on white, then wisps. Pock marks and liver spots lined his skin. Virago had her back to us, but I could see the color draining from her hair until it was a sterling silver.

  The spell spread across his body, and Quinn’s arm trembled before he defiantly slashed down with the knife. “Aret!”

  The effects of the spell dissipated at once, severed somehow

  by both the knife and the spell, the aging reversing almost as fast as it had started. Quinn straightened immediately, but Virago dropped to her knees, winded or worse.

  “Witchers,” the wraith sneered. “Vermin.”

  “Learn how to use a verb, douchebag,” Cole muttered.

  I clamped my hand down over his mouth, eyes darting fearfully towards the wraith, who appeared not to have heard, thankfully.

  Part of me had known what Quinn and Virago were as soon as they arrived. Witchers. Witchers were Navy Seals, Green Berets, and Chuck Norris combined in one. They were trained, heavily, in offensive spells and in counteracting supernatural threats. A single Witcher was about as deadly as the average coven. A group of Witchers, on the other hand, could take down almost anyone. Or anything.