Moonset 01: Moonset

by Scott Tracey

  But was he evil in high school? Or was he like me? The thought soothed as much as it terrified. I remembered that night in the hotel room on our way to Carrow Mill, telling Jenna with certainty, “We could never be like them.”

  If it was just a normal grimoire, it wasn’t illegal to have. But it was where the spellbook came from that was the problem. Just because they wouldn’t teach us anything but the most basic magic didn’t mean we weren’t allowed to learn it. They got to decide what scraps to teach us, because we didn’t have any other alternative.

  This might be one. Jenna was right when she said we needed to defend ourselves better. Our protection was up to us because there was no guarantee Quinn or anyone else was going to be around.

  There was a clatter further on in the building. “Oh Dad,” the man muttered. “I’ll be right back.”

  He left, and I glanced at the book. Really stared at it. Do it. Take it. My hand trembled. It was the first spellbook I’d ever actually seen—live and in person. The owner didn’t have a clue what it was. All I knew was that I had to have the book. It belonged to me, or it would have, in a different world.

  But this wasn’t something the man had out on the shelves—it was his father’s. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Just take it. It was like a growing compulsion in me, something hot and hungry that needed to be satiated.

  “Oh Dad, what did you do?” I heard faintly over the sound of a television talking head discussing POWs.

  You wouldn’t be starving for knowledge anymore. If there’s anything bad, you can just get rid of the book. If Sherrod really was bad from the beginning, it’ll be obvious. The call to darkness will be there.

  Almost before realizing I was doing anything, I was heading for the door. The book slid perfectly into my jacket’s inside pocket. I threw a twenty-dollar bill on the counter, and ran out into the cold winter morning and crossed the street, trying to duck down and stay out of sight.

  I stayed slunk down in the passenger seat, my eyes glued to the side mirror and the door of the curio shop (which never opened) when Quinn threw open the driver’s side door and scared the crap out of me. My head nearly hit the roof.

  “You look guilty,” he said.

  My blood froze in my veins, and I could feel the book burning against my chest. I’d checked my reflection once I’d gotten into the car, but you couldn’t even tell it was there.

  “No, I don’t,” I said automatically, speaking almost too fast. Which only made me sound more guilty.

  Quinn just looked at me. He tossed a bag over the back of his seat and climbed into the car. “Okay, then.”

  Whatever weird thing I was on today, he clearly didn’t want any part. “Yeah. Okay.”

  “How about no more caffeine for you? What’d you get, extra shots of espresso?”

  The tension drained out of my body. I mustered up a fake smile. “Two.”

  As we pulled off Main Street, I glanced in the mirror and instantly froze. Meghan Virago was crossing the street, arms linked with Mrs. Crawford. What were they doing together? I knew Meghan hated us, but was she really friends with the teacher? Or had they bonded over my outburst? They were coming from the same direction Quinn had gone. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like they were smiling.

  “So how was the bank?” I asked lightly, while my thoughts ran and tried to come up with explanations. I had to keep it together, to show that everything was okay.

  “Fine,” he said, his words clipped. “Long line.”

  “Ahh,” I said, although I had no idea what I was ahh’ing over. He took the long way back to the house, driving through one residential neighborhood after another. I didn’t enjoy the drive much, barely listening to Quinn chatter about small towns—he’d been born and raised in the big city—and how it was a nice change of pace.

  Now that I’d actually done it—actually stolen the book—I couldn’t believe myself. I wasn’t a thief. You left money, I reasoned, but it still didn’t change the fact. The worst part was that, underneath it all, I felt a rush of satisfaction. For once, I’d been the one to break the rules and get away with it.

  “I said, what do you think about a magic lesson today?” Quinn’s voice was louder, interrupting my train of thought as we passed yet another church, Saint Anna’s, which had a giant steeple poised over the church building.

  “What? Seriously?”

  “Yeah,” Quinn said, leaning back in his seat and resting his head against the back of his seat. “Besides, maybe it’ll do you some good to have something new to focus on for a while.”

  The icy knot in my stomach was only getting stronger. It was like Quinn knew something—like he was just stringing me along and messing with my head. He probably knew everything—the old man in the shop must have called him as soon as I’d left.

  You’re being crazy. He doesn’t know anything. I forced myself to look at him, just a quick glance as I started to shift in my seat. He wasn’t paying any attention to me at all, his attention was solely on the road.

  It wasn’t much longer until we were turning onto our street, and I could see our houses in the distance. “Sounds good,” I said, trying to sound more even and relaxed. Remember, it’s okay to be excited. “I’m always up for learning something new.” Apparently, I was also up for a round of grand-theft spellbook.

  Twenty-One

  “There is no war. There’s only the slaughter.

  Every time we try to regroup, they push us

  even harder than before. There is no opposition.

  We have no leaders. They’ve won before

  we could even strike back.”

  Report from the Field

  Attributed to Clay Ewell

  I was out of the car and walking up into the garage before I panicked. What would Quinn do if he found the book on me? There were Witchers coming and going in our house all the time. Any one of them could be going through my things, right?

  “I’ll be right there,” I said to Quinn as he headed inside. I fumbled with the pocket of my coat, walking towards the garbage can in the corner like I needed to throw something away. Since the holiday season was over, Quinn and the other guardians had gone to town one Sunday pulling down all the decorations that had plagued our house. There were so many boxes that they took up the majority of our garage space.

  Tucked against the wall next to the garbage, for instance, was one of the giant plastic Santas that had a hole at the bottom to stick the pole with the light bulb attached inside. The hole was so big that Cole could probably have squeezed his way inside the Santa, but all I was wanting to do was find a place to hide the book.

  Once the door had closed behind Quinn, I slid the spellbook out of my pocket and into the Santa’s foot hole. The black-painted boots on the exterior made it hard to see that there was anything inside. Unless you were looking for it, or for some reason started moving around all the decorations, no one would know what was inside.

  I dropped my still half-full coffee in the can and went in the house. “Is this going to be some lame ‘show me all the spells you know’ thing?” I asked, unusually loud. My heart was still hammering in my chest, and the small smile I was wearing was more at breaking the rules than about the idea of a magic lesson. But no one else needed to know that.

  “Relax,” Quinn said. “It’s not going to be anything super exciting, but it’s something you’ve never done before.”

  “What are you going through?” I nodded at the papers he was sorting on the table.

  “Just some papers for work.”

  “You work?”

  He looked up, annoyed. “Aside from the fact that I don’t just crawl out of bed looking this fantastic,” he said dryly, “there’s more to my job than wiping your noses and setting curfews. Which your sister insists on ignoring, much to my irritation.”

  “Jenna’s never met a rule she didn’t lik
e to bend to an inch of its life.” I tried not to smirk. There was something else, though. Quinn always did that. Whenever I asked him something, he deflected, either with a quip or a question. “Ever notice you don’t like answering questions?” I tried to subtly read the papers, even though they were upside down.

  “Why would you think that?” he replied, a maddening smile forming.

  “Because half the time you answer with another question.”

  “What makes you think you deserve to know all my secrets, Justin?”

  “Maybe it’s the fact that you know all of ours. A little reciprocation goes a long way.”

  “I doubt I know all your secrets,” he said, and for one solid heartbeat I thought he knew something. It was like he’d struck some sort of tuner—my whole body thrummed out one solid note of panic. “Just the ones in your file,” he finished.

  I exhaled. He didn’t know anything. I was being paranoid.

  “Almost done,” he said, straightening the piles.

  “So they’re important?” I still wasn’t able to read anything except one word. Loose. I don’t know what was loose, or how loose it was.

  “Moderately so.”

  “You never mentioned what it is you do when you’re not … wiping our noses and setting curfews.”

  “You’re right,” he said, sliding a large rubber band around the thicker pile, and a paper clip over the second. “I didn’t.”

  He headed up to his room—the master bedroom—and this time I followed him. We’d never done more than poked our heads into Quinn’s room. It wasn’t like we respected his privacy, exactly; it was more like we had a healthy respect for our own necks. Several of the guardians they’d sent us to live with before had very insane notions about privacy, and so much as stepping foot into their bedrooms was nearly a declaration of war.

  “C’mon, being a Witcher can’t be as boring as you make it out to be. I mean, you don’t do anything but hide out in your room or skulk around the house looking for reasons to yell at us.”

  “You think I skulk?”

  I shrugged. “There’s definitely a skulking-like quality to what you do.”

  He frowned at me, but didn’t shut his door as he crossed the room. His bedroom was only partly what I expected. The bed and the computer desk were normal, but the big workstation desk looked like someone had pulled it out of a woodshop room. There was a stack of folded laundry on the hope chest at the foot of the bed and a dresser on the far wall, but there wasn’t so much as a picture or anything personal anywhere. It was very literally a room where Quinn didn’t do anything but work or sleep.

  He set the two groups of papers on the desk, then slid open a drawer and pulled out his athame.

  “Is that one of the Witcher blades?” People talked about a Witcher athame like it was the Ginsu of magic knives, but no one ever explained exactly why.

  “My personal one, yes,” he answered. “I’ve got a couple of extras just in case. You never know when something’s going to happen and you’re going to need them. First thing they teach you? Always be prepared for the most unlikely situations,” Quinn said, gesturing carefully with the knife. “Do you know why most warlocks get caught within a few weeks of their first invocation to the Abyss?”

  I shook my head.

  “Because in situations like this, power is literally a drug. Maleficia enters their system, and anything is possible. They have the kind of power that can destroy anything in their way. That’s where the high comes in. It would make a junkie out of anyone.”

  I thought I understood what he was getting at. “So be ready for anything, because someone on a high is unpredictable.”

  I expected some sort of acknowledgment or praise, but he just nodded sharply. “I thought I’d show you a little bit about why using an athame is so important.” He looked down at the blade, bending it in the light before he looked up at me. “Especially for someone like you.”

  “Someone like me?” My mood soured. “Because I’m a child of Moonset?”

  He looked at me evenly. “Because you wanted to know how to protect yourself, remember?” Hearing my words thrown back at me, not even an hour after they justified my stealing the spellbook, made me shiver.

  He might take it easy on you, if you just admit what you did. I wanted to trust Quinn, but there were just so many lies and half-truths. He didn’t make himself out to be someone who could be trusted. His loyalty was to the Congress, and the only honesty we’d gotten out of him was what we’d found out already for ourselves.

  No, I couldn’t give up Sherrod’s grimoire. At least not until I’d looked through it.

  “Using an athame is easy,” Quinn continued. “You focus on the spells you’re casting, and you draw them one by one. You have to be very precise, though, because of how particular the language is.”

  But I knew all this already. “And you use a knife because it represents cutting through things,” I repeated the lesson I’d learned in sixth grade. “Athames have to be used to call on spellforms, and used to invoke the darkness, too.”

  Spellforms were primal magic—the most powerful kinds of spells out there. Most magic is about specifics—choosing the target of the spell, saying what is going to happen, and limiting how that power is channeled. That’s why pronunciation was so important—saying a word wrong changed the limits of the spell.

  Sometimes, especially with us, spells had a little more natural “juice.” No matter the limits we put into the spell, the effects were amped up as there was too much power to be channeled into such a tiny effect.

  Spellforms were on the opposite end of the spectrum. They were the most basic words, covering powerful concepts that could cause immense destruction. A spellform for fire was the literal embodiment of fire—and could cause a sweeping firestorm that would destroy hundreds of acres or cause an explosion that would take out a small town.

  In the aftermath of Moonset, the people who were taught spellforms were very strictly monitored. No one I’d ever met had known one, and teaching someone else without permission was a criminal act.

  Quinn nodded slowly, and then began whipping the knife in front of him in a complicated pattern. One, two, three spells took shape before I even had them all counted. They hovered in the air, glowing blue symbols. “If this was a fight, what’d I just do? And how would you counteract it?”

  The first was a version of cor, which was a base form for spells dealing with communication. The tip of it bled to the right, tying into the first stroke of the symbol, eresh, which had something to do with spirits, or illusions. “It’s some kind of telephone spell? Like holograms?”

  “Not quite,” Quinn said, passing the knife over the top of the third symbol. “The third ties them all together.” I knew this one—Geonous, it dealt with travel. Once the spell was complete, the blue turned incandescent, like the filament of a light bulb.

  “And that’s helpful how?” But I looked a little closer, and then I saw it—saw the way the spell’s words worked together, they way they tangled up in each other, a machine of many parts. Astral projection. You could use it to spy on people without anyone knowing—and all the while your body is safe at home. Even worse, the people you spied on would never know.

  “Do you—have you been using this on us?” I asked, the momentary thrill of breaking the rules snuffed out by an overwhelming, poisonous terror. He knew. He knew all along. It was a test and I failed and he brought me back here knowing what I did. He’d seen the book, he knew it had belonged to Sherrod, and rather than confront me, he was playing it casual. Hiding condemnation underneath a lesson.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  “Relax,” Quinn said soothingly, hands raised like a white flag. “It’s not like that.” There was something in his dark eyes I didn’t like, though. Speculation. Awareness. “No one’s spying on you. That’s not it at all.”

  �
�Then what is it?” Panic was making me reckless, speaking and acting without thinking. “Why are you showing this to me?”

  “Just because I can’t teach you to fight,” he said, “doesn’t mean I can’t show you how to keep yourselves safe.”

  “How is spying going to keep me safe?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard the expression ‘work smarter, not harder?’” Quinn dropped the knife, and the phosphorescent image of the spell started to fade. “You may not know as much as you could, and you definitely don’t know everything you should. But like it or not, the five of you are a coven, and you’re stronger together.”

  “What are you talking about?” Quinn wasn’t even making sense anymore. How did a spying spell have anything to do with what we did or didn’t know?

  He raised the athame again, and, quicker this time, slashed three symbols into the air. None were exactly the same, they were reversed, and the middle one was more elevated. Geonous was the only one that was still identical, while cor was more elaborate this time. But all three featured sharp, block-like lines at their edges, creating something like a border at the edges of the spell.

  This isn’t another projection spell, I realized. It’s a ward. Finally, I started to understand. I crept closer to the spell as it shifted from blue to white, trying to memorize the flow of the lines. My hand itched, wanting to trace my own version of the spell and see it flare into existence.

  “No one’s spying on us,” I said slowly. “But they could. Or they’re going to start.” Quinn wasn’t showing me how to spy on someone else; he was trying to show me how to protect ourselves. How to keep other Witchers, or maybe even the Congress, from taking even our small semblances of privacy away from us.

  “That’s crazy talk,” Quinn replied, but his flat tone suggested otherwise. “Either way, this was just a hypothetical situation, and it’s moot anyway. You don’t have your own athame.”