by Scott Tracey
Buried in the soil? What? I looked at Quinn, who breezed past me. “He’s been a mechanic here for thirty years; it’s not like he ever went into hiding. The only reason we know anything is because he approached Justin and Mal.”
“I don’t care if he’s selling used cars on the side of the road,” Illana said harshly. “Someone didn’t do their homework. Especially during a time like this—that’s inexcusable.”
Illana headed for the door, and I followed in her wake. She must be used to it, I figured. People scurrying after her, letting her set the current and forcing their direction. Jenna had been right about that much, at least. Illana was here for a reason, and it wasn’t what she was telling us. It wasn’t anything like what they were telling us.
“We’re still in danger, aren’t we?”
Illana didn’t pause. The door opened, then the screen door, and she stepped through into the afternoon sun. “There’s always danger. But danger and opportunity are fast friends. So take your opportunity, and show me who you’re going to be. A child of Moonset, or a child of the Congress.”
Eleven
“Sutter and Denton, seniors, first brought the incidents to the school’s attention. Initial speculation was confirmed after a Coven was dispatched to Carrow Mill. Someone was altering the junior class: they had been made docile; their passions extinguished. At the time, no one wondered why Moonset had been immune … ”
Council Investigation Report
Eyes Only
When I came back into the kitchen, Quinn was waiting for me. I bypassed him, went to the fridge, and grabbed a bottle of water. Why were the adults so hell bent on keeping us in the dark? They weren’t making it any secret that something else was going on in Carrow Mill, but they refused to tell us what.
“You should go check on her,” Quinn suggested, glancing towards the ceiling.
“Are you new?” He must be. Either new, or crazy. I grabbed my coat out of the front hallway closet. “I’m keeping my distance until she calms down. I’ll be over at Mal’s.”
“School tomorrow,” he said, almost sounding like a parent.
“You’ve met Mal, right? He loves a curfew almost as much as he loves school,” I called, already halfway out the door.
We hadn’t talked much about school. Or at all. The fact that it was tomorrow, and I’d forgotten, only proved how off kilter things were here. The weirdness of Carrow Mill trumped any attempt at normalcy. Sure, we’d done the normal kinds of school shopping—buying supplies, backpacks, the usual, but it hadn’t been any sort of priority.
Until now.
“Did you know school starts tomorrow?” I asked Mal as I walked into his room.
He didn’t even really need to answer. His bag was already packed and sitting next to his computer desk. “Is that a trick question?” he asked, looking up from whatever he was doing.
“You could have at least reminded me.”
Mal arched an eyebrow at me and closed the laptop. “Are we really going to talk about school right now? What’d she want?”
I shrugged. “We’re not ‘supervised’ enough. Supposedly, that’s why she’s moving to town.”
“She’s moving here? Can she even do that?”
“Is anyone really stupid enough to tell her she can’t? I have the feeling that the sun doesn’t even rise unless she wants it to.”
Mal crossed the room and closed the door. “I don’t think Nick’s home, but it doesn’t hurt to be careful,” he admitted. “I’ve been trying to look up that thing from the other day. The symbol?”
I perked up at that. “Any luck?”
“Not yet,” he said. “But I know I’ve seen it somewhere before.”
“While we’re talking about it, what was that crap with Ash?” Mal looked confused, so I continued. “Interrogating her about the fire? Having her ask her dad? Aren’t you the one always preaching that we should blend in? That we shouldn’t call attention to ourselves?”
He snorted. “You’re just mad I wouldn’t leave you alone with your little girlfriend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Maybe I’m not the one that needs to remember that,” he said, suddenly serious. “I get that you like this girl and all, but you need to remember the situation we’re in. Odds are we won’t be here come prom night.”
“I’m not Bailey,” I snapped. “I know what I’m getting myself into.”
“Do you?” he asked. “You should have seen your face after the mall the other day. And then at the coffee shop? You’re all blissed out on this girl.”
Where the hell was this coming from? Mal was the one who always had my back, and suddenly he was acting like a dick? “Are you jealous? What the hell, man?”
“Right, because I’d have to be jealous to think it’s a bad idea,” he snorted. “Get over yourself.”
“Then what is this? She’s just a girl.”
Mal laughed to himself. He crossed over to his closet, and began flipping through the clothes on hangers. Looking for something. Like our conversation wasn’t that important.
Something crashed downstairs.
In the aftermath, there was an audible silence. Both of us waited, listening, but there was nothing. “I thought you said Nick wasn’t home?” I whispered.
“I didn’t think he was.”
One of the doors downstairs creaked, a faint sound that we wouldn’t have heard if we hadn’t been straining for it. “It’s probably him, right?” I said.
“Of course.”
But neither one of us called out to check. Together, we crept out of the room and down the stairs. In hindsight, probably not the smartest move. It could have been another wraith. Or something else sent after us. Aside from the faint sound of our feet against the carpet, and hesitant groans in response to careful steps, the house was totally quiet.
As we reached the bottom landing, I tapped Mal on the shoulders and pointed down the hall. Lights were on in the study, the door closed. But when I’d come into the house just a few minutes before, the door had been open and the room dark.
“Can you tell who it is?” Mal asked, glancing between the study to his right, and the path to the front door, to his left.
“You know all the same spells I do,” I said, trying to figure out if anything I knew would be useful here. Etheric maanu would tell me how many people were in the house. That wouldn’t help. Ethera maan could tell how far away they were. But nothing I could use to identify them.
“Yeah, but I don’t pay attention in class,” Mal responded, sounding aggravated. It probably annoyed him that he even had to ask. Magic was always his last resort. “If it was a wraith, it would have just blown up the house, right? Picked us up out of the debris?”
“Maybe,” I hedged.
He squared his shoulders and chose his direction. The study, then. I followed behind, grabbing the only thing handy that I could find. In a perfect world it would have been a baseball bat or a golf club. I had to settle for one of those blue-fringed Swiffer dusters.
I hefted the weight of it in my hands, already regretting the decision. Mal looked over his shoulder at me, smirked, and then pushed open the doors to the study.
The two of us went rushing into the room, me with feathered blue justice in my hands. Mal didn’t need a weapon of his own—he pretty much was the weapon.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Mal snapped.
I had to step around him to realize who he was talking to. Jenna, half crouched behind the study’s desk, stacks of files and papers cleared out of the drawers and scattered across the top. She dropped a hand to her hip, rose even as her eyebrow arched at the Swiffer in my hands like a weapon. “What are you planning to do? Dust me to death?”
“What are you doing here, Jenna?” he repeated.
“Breaking and entering, completely ruining Ni
ck’s attempts at organization, and general crimes against the crown, obviously,” she said blandly. “So either close the door and help, Dumb and Dumber, or go back to talking first downs and engines. Or whatever you boys talk about.”
“You can’t just go through all his stuff,” I said in shock.
“Well, I’d go through Quinn’s stuff, but they’re both over there right now,” she said reasonably. “It’s harder to snoop through someone’s things when they’re in the room.”
Mal sighed, then turned around and closed the door behind us. It was as good as giving Jenna permission to continue. The moment the lock clicked into place, she went back to skimming through the files. “So you decided to break into my house? Why?”
“I’m done letting them make me a victim,” she said, moving from one drawer to the one below it. “They won’t teach us new spells? Then I’ll find them on my own. I’ll teach myself if that’s what it takes. But what happened back there will never happen again.”
“You’re looking for grimoires?” I don’t know what surprised me more. That Jenna would steal another witch’s book of spells, or that she hadn’t already done it before.
Grimoires, or spellbooks, were basically journals that most witches kept all of their magic in. Because there were so many spells, and so many variations, most people needed a written record. It was difficult work—because magic was a language, written spells had power just as much as spoken ones. Spells had to be broken down into the lines, spaced apart like diagrams on how to copy a Chinese symbol.
Mal shook his head. “You can’t do this.”
“I knew you weren’t going to help,” she replied scornfully. “Come on, Justin, you know I’m right. We need to be able to protect ourselves. You’re the one who keeps saying that they brought us here for a reason. If we’re in danger, can we really trust them to make sure Bailey and Cole are safe? Or what about Mal? He refuses to defend himself.”
“I don’t need to use magic to defend myself,” Mal snapped. “And quit trying to spin this into a good idea. It’s pretty much one of the stupidest you’ve ever come up with. Going through the Witchers’ things? Illana Bryer hasn’t even unpacked yet, and you’re already trying to get us in trouble.”
“And what are you doing? Sneaking around looking at weird fires and making the locals think you’re a freak?” Jenna’s lips curled dangerously. “You’re stirring up just as much as I am. But if Saint Malcolm wants to solve a mystery and get a treat from his owners, that’s okay.”
I looked over the mess Jenna had made, and the pair of them bickering with each other. “Put it all back, Jenna.”
“You can’t seriously be siding with him,” she snapped. “You know I’m right.”
I tapped out a rhythm like a heartbeat against the floor. “One minute, or I’m calling Quinn and turning you in.”
She gaped at me. This wasn’t done. It was one thing to side with Jenna, or against her. It was another to side with the adults. Even if Mal disagreed with her, argued that she should have stopped, if we got caught, he’d have her back.
So for her to stare at me like we’d never met before wasn’t entirely unexpected. But she put everything back, if not exactly where she’d found it, then close enough. The tension in the room could have compressed coal into diamonds.
Just before she closed the last drawer, she looked up at me. “I don’t know who you think you are all of a sudden,” she snapped, “but whoever he is, he’s a dick.”
Twelve
“The Covens are not gods, and the Solitaires
are not the working class. We are all fragile,
simple creatures. When faced with tyrants,
what can we do but tear them down?”
Sherrod Daggett (C: Moonset)
Unknown Date
I came downstairs the next morning to some sort of weird, Opposite World version of the Brady Bunch. Mal and Cole were at the table, already half hidden behind huge towers of breakfast foods. Quinn was behind the stove and he was putting together something that could only be qualified as a feast.
There was a tray of cut-up fruit, scrambled eggs, French toast, sausage, and an entire pot of coffee set on a warmer.
“Uhm … someone should go check on me,” I said, pointing back the way I came. “Because I must have cracked my head open in the shower. And this is my coma dream.”
“No coma,” Mal said.
Cole nodded vigorously. “Quinn’s my new god,” he said, shoving another sausage link in his mouth, “except not in a gay way.”
Mal lifted a hand to smack him, but Cole jumped out of his chair first and bounded out of reach. “Okay, okay. Maybe in a gay way, too. Whatever. All I know is that his French toast is kick ass, Jay.”
“Jay?” Mal and I spoke as one.
Cole shrugged. “Whatever. It’s part of your name, right?”
“My name’s Justin,” I said, settling down at the table across from Mal. Quinn was even wearing one of those dorky aprons with a slogan on it. My eyebrows raised. “‘May the forks be with you?’” I read.
He pointed with the spatula. “Shut up and eat.”
“Where’s Bailey?” Jenna half asked, half demanded as she breezed into the kitchen.
“She changed her outfit, so then she said her makeup had to be redone.” Cole sounded mystified, but Jenna took it in stride, and sat down next to me with one leg propped on the chair. Last night’s argument hadn’t been forgotten though, which I realized as she angled her body away from me and towards the kitchen. She plucked out a cube of melon and popped it in her mouth. “Breakfast is yummy, Quinn,” she announced after swallowing.
“So explain this to me again,” Cole said. “They’ve already got schedules and everything for us?”
Quinn turned around, still half watching the things on the griddle. “They’re adjusting your schedules based on what you took in Kentucky. Since midterms are coming up in a few weeks, the school is coordinating your tests with what you were studying down south. So you’re not totally screwed for your exams.”
Groans from around the table. There wasn’t any getting out of test-taking, which sucked but wasn’t surprising.
“Don’t all thank me at once,” Quinn commented. “It took a lot of effort to get your old school to agree to this.”
“Thanks, Quinn,” Jenna said sweetly.
Cole followed it up with, “What about magic lessons? Are they in-school here, or do we have to go somewhere afterwards?” He looked to my left, and I saw the look he exchanged with Jenna. She’d prompted him to ask, I was sure. But why?
“They’ll be last period, but there’s some adjustments that have to be made. So for now you’ll go to a last period study hall.” When there were enough witches in the school, our lessons were factored into a kind of independent study class, right down the hall from where kids were learning about Napoleon and Pythagoras.
What kind of adjustments had to be made? “Maybe they listened to you after all,” I said under my breath, carrying just enough for Jenna to hear me. It was meant to be a conciliatory gesture, to make up for the argument last night, but she ignored me.
Bailey came in a few minutes later, still tugging one of her boots off. She and Jenna both had gone for trendy rather than practical. I couldn’t understand why boots needed heels in the first place, but it was their choice.
“Pass me a yogurt,” Jenna added, as Bailey pulled up a spot at the table. She leaned over the table and tossed one at her, and then sat down next to Cole and studied the table. The meal passed in relative silence, except for the frequent comments about how amazing everything was and demands for things to be passed one way or the other. For just a few minutes, it was like we were some sort of normal family.
I could almost relax and enjoy it. Except I knew that school was going to be its own kind of hell. It always was.
Eventually,
everyone started packing it in, rummaging around to find coats, shoes, and book bags. By the time all five of us were out the door and into the SUV, we had less than twenty minutes until the school day started.
“You know how to get there?” I asked. As the one riding shotgun, I had to play navigator if Malcolm got lost. It didn’t happen that often, but I didn’t want today to be one of those rare days.
“Relax, Justin,” he said absently.
The high school wasn’t in the immediate downtown like most of the schools we went to. We drove through the center of Carrow Mill and down to the far side of town, where the school was located. Mal knew exactly where he was going.
Even eight schools later, there’s some stress about starting somewhere new. What’s everyone wearing in New York? Are they going to treat us like freaks? How long until I get called into the principal’s office? Is my sister going to protest animal dissection for the hell of it?
Nervous energy was responsible for the way Cole kept tapping out a rhythm on his knees, and the way Bailey kept squirming in her seat.
“Everyone knows not to use magic in public, right? And if you slip up, find an adult that can clean up the mess.” Slips always happened—the wrong spell at the wrong time. The witches who worked at the school were trained to cover up those issues—either by altering memories, undoing whatever effects were still ongoing, or providing a good cover story. It was even rougher being a magical teacher than a regular one.
I shifted around, trying to catch all of their eyes while the seatbelt strap cut into my neck. “Cole?”
The tapping stopped. “I’m not going to do anything.” He sounded guilty already. Force of habit.
“We’re all going to be on our best behavior, little brother,” Jenna said, with absolute syrup in her voice. “No need to go turning anyone in to the authorities.”
I looked at the console’s clock. We still had about ten minutes. Plenty of time, I figured, as we pulled into the parking lot of … the most elaborate high school I’d ever seen.