Moonset 01: Moonset

by Scott Tracey

  “They said, ‘They’re here.’” I looked to Quinn, who grimaced but didn’t immediately reply. “What’s here? Is something coming?”

  “You’re here, Justin,” he said, his tone growing softer. “The five children of Moonset.”

  “Do you remember anything else?” Quinn asked, staring down at me.

  “They were talking to someone,” I said slowly, thinking back to the voices and the cold that had slipped inside me. Just remembering it was enough to make me start shivering again. “It was a conversation.”

  “Did you get a name?” Quinn pushed. “Hear his voice? Anything?”

  “Hey, lay off him. He’s not-—” Jenna said, before cutting off abruptly. “Did you let this happen? Did you know something was going to happen to Justin?”

  “Oh, do be serious,” Illana muttered with irritation. “How would Quinn have known that Justin would leave the house? Don’t be foolish. He thought the two of you smarter than you obviously were.”

  “Why did you leave, Justin?” Quinn asked, leaning in. “I told Jenna you needed to stay inside. This is exactly the kind of thing we’ve been trying to protect you from.”

  “Great job there,” Jenna said. “A rousing success.”

  We only need one. “I thought the warlock wanted us here?”

  “He does.” Quinn narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

  Because they don’t need all of us. I looked over his shoulder, at the woman who’d moved us here like a bold chess move. I couldn’t speak freely in front of Illana. Even if I really trusted Quinn, I still didn’t trust his grandmother. She looked like she could garrote any one of us and not lose a night’s sleep over it.

  “Because I’m still alive. I thought you said Maleficia liked to destroy things.” I looked down at my body. “It looks like I’m still in one piece.”

  Quinn shifted, a guilty look in his eyes. “That’s be-cause—”

  “Quinn!” I couldn’t see Illana anymore, but the whip crack demand in her voice left no doubt. She didn’t want him answering.

  “The warlock tried to kill him tonight,” Quinn said, getting heated. “They need to know.”

  “I’m not so certain that they did,” Illana replied. “It’s entirely possible that they wanted something else from him.”

  I couldn’t feel a lot, but there was a sudden pressure on my leg. Right by where Jenna was standing. “I don’t like what you’re implying about my brother,” she said tightly.

  Implying? It took my brain a second to put things in perspective. What else would a warlock want from me? Recruitment. Moonset 2.0. A new generation of darkness. But had Illana implied it? Or was Jenna jumping ahead like she always did, reading people too well and determining the undercurrent?

  Illana huffed out a breath. “Relax, child. It isn’t like this is a formal accusation.”

  “Then there’s no reason to continue keeping secrets from them,” Quinn announced. “If you’re convinced they’re not part of the problem, then they need to know.”

  I heard a sigh, and then caught a glimpse of Illana and her flowing skirt heading for the stairs. “Then do as you think is best, Quinn,” she said. “I’m going to look in on the other children. I dare to hope they are better mannered.”

  “Everyone’s okay?” I asked, my voice still a groan. Quinn nodded.

  Tingles started running up my hands. Just little bursts, running down my fingers, then up the wrist, and then again at the elbow. Everything in between was still numb and senseless.

  Once Illana was gone, the front door slamming ominously behind her, Quinn started helping me back upstairs. Except when he tried to sit me up, my body was still foreign and wasted. I can still feel shame at least, as the rash of heat crept up my body. My face was about a thousand degrees.

  Quinn had to carry me up the stairs, and even though he tried to make light of the situation, no one laughed. I kept my eyes closed, not wanting to see either of their looks of pity. I was supposed to take care of them. Not the other way around.

  He set me down on the living room couch. Jenna hovered at the edge of the room. I looked around Quinn and listened. “Are we the only ones here?”

  He looked curious, but nodded.

  I settled my hands into my lap. I still couldn’t bend my fingers properly, but at least I could move my arms around. “Is anyone listening?”

  Quinn stared at me for a moment, chewing on his lower lip.

  “What’s going on, Justin?”

  “One second, Jenna,” Quinn said. He pulled the athame out of a holster that I hadn’t noticed before, tucked against the side of his jeans. As quickly as he had earlier, he slashed at the air. But this time, it wasn’t the simple astral ward he’d showed me. It was spell after spell, almost a dozen of them. He waited until the blue fire burned white before turning back to me.

  “’We only need one,’” I said shakily. “You wanted to know what the Harbinger said to me that night.”

  “Justin!” Jenna’s alarm was more shocked than acerbic, which only proved how traumatized she’d been tonight.

  “We have to tell someone,” I said, slumping down in my seat. “And we need answers.”

  “And you think he’s going to give them?”

  I would have nodded, but I wasn’t sure I would be able to lift my head back up if it dropped. “Check his wards. He’s not making this conversation private for his health.” I didn’t have to see the symbols burning in the air to know what they were. I thought I had some understanding of what drove Quinn now. If we could help him stop the warlock, he might not break faith with the Congress, but he would skirt the line as much as possible.

  “Why do you think the warlock doesn’t want you here?” Quinn asked. “Downstairs, you sounded confused.”

  “Not the warlock,” I said, “something else. There weren’t just two voices I heard. There were a lot. I knew they were talking to someone, but he didn’t say anything back. It wasn’t a conversation.”

  Jenna’s eyes widened. “They were instructions.”

  I would have nodded if I could. “They’ve kept saying, ‘They only need one.’ One of us. One of Moonset’s children.” I turned my head as much as I could and looked at Quinn. “Why only one? Everyone knows we’re a package deal. We can’t be split up. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  The curse that was bound up between all of us meant we couldn’t be ripped away from one another, but the voices sounded like that was exactly what they wanted. It can’t be that easy. If it was, all we would have to do is wait, and the curse would eliminate the warlock and whoever was pulling his strings.

  “The Coven bond protects you,” Quinn said slowly, “but that protection comes with a cost.”

  Jenna crossed her arms in front of her. “What kind of cost?”

  He held up one finger. “It’s easier for the Abyss to gain a foothold into a solitary witch because there’s only one mind to contend with.” He then held up both hands, and linked his fingers together. “A coven, on the other hand, has a bond that links them. It’s harder to infect a Coven witch, because a group is stronger than just one.”

  Jenna and I looked at each other.

  “But there are weaknesses, too,” he continued. “If the Abyss can single out just one witch, and overcome him even despite the Coven bond, it gains an advantage in taking the rest of the Coven. With each member it claims, that control gets stronger until the Coven succumbs entirely.”

  “So you think that’s what happened tonight? The warlock sent some Maleficia out to try and take control of one of us?” Jenna asked.

  “It would certainly fit,” he said. “But we still don’t know what, exactly, the warlock wants. The Congress hoped that bringing you here would at least make that much clear. If we knew what he wanted, we could plan to stop him. But ever since you arrived, he’s been erratic. Confused. We think the Malefi
cia may have broken him. And now it seeks a new host.”

  “One of us,” I whispered.

  “All of us,” Jenna clarified.

  I meant to ask more, to find out more about what the Congress had in store for us, but I could barely keep my eyes open.

  “Sleep,” Quinn said. “We’ll wait, and figure this out in the morning.”

  Only there wasn’t anything to figure out in the morning. In fact, the rest of my suspension was a blur of books and boredom. Quinn warned me that I’d be sore for a day or two, lethargic and worn down because of the Maleficia attack. But he still expected his stupid essays.

  Last night’s attack led to some changes, one of which was that while the other four were still allowed to go to school (there’d been some debate on whether or not it was safe), they had to arrive and leave together. In addition, all of us had to be home and indoors before nightfall, when the Maleficia was believed to be strongest. In the event of another attack, the Witchers wanted to make sure we were as protected as well as possible.

  Which meant that my day was filled with constant interruptions as groups of Witchers in twos and threes walked through the house, examining weak points and bolstering the house wards. Maleficia wasn’t supposed to be able to cross a house’s threshold, but they didn’t want to take any chances.

  I stayed on the couch, because half the time I could barely keep my eyes open and I didn’t think sleeping at the kitchen table would end well. Gravity was a bitch, and the floors were hardwood.

  I finished the first paper about the Coven Wars by the skin of my teeth, but as soon as I emailed the document to him, he came downstairs with another stack of books and my next assignment. If possible, these books were even dustier than the first ones. “I want you to write a report on how a warlock is brought to trial. How is a charge of invoking the black arts proven? Talk about the trial, the investigations, and everything up until a guilty verdict. And then you can talk about how the process has changed in the last twenty years.”

  I was waiting for a word count, but Quinn didn’t say anything further. “How long?” I’d max out on a thousand words before even covering half of what he was asking for.

  “As long as it takes,” he said. “Be succinct. You should be able to wrap it up in … five or six thousand words.”

  Quinn wanted the Never-ending Paper. Five thousand words was huge—that would take me at least a month! But I was too drained to argue. But surprisingly, the books he’d given me weren’t nearly as dry as the ones for the first assignment. Maybe the writing style was more modern, or maybe it was because the subject matter hit closer to home.

  Coven trials were cruel, devastating processes that always ended badly. In comparison, the Salem witch trials and the witch hysteria that gripped the world were passive, calm affairs.

  Now trials were public affairs, open to any witch who wished to attend. An emphasis was placed on “innocent until proven guilty” and other modern conceits—with one main exception. Moonset, the book explained, had been tried “in absentia” and thus their sentence had been carried out almost immediately upon capture.

  It made sense, though. If there had been a trial, it would have been a circus. Sherrod Daggett was charismatic and enticing. Putting him on the stand would have only done harm by giving him yet another platform.

  The last day of my suspension, I felt a little better. I only slept about half of the day, and while I was still tired, I wasn’t as bone-weary as I’d been the day before. I worked on the paper at the kitchen table, spreading the research out.

  Tucked in the middle of Quinn’s stack of books, I found one book that wasn’t dusty and unused. It was a copy of Moonset: A Dark Legacy—the definitive encyclopedia of the lives of our parents, from beginning to execution. It was full of personal letters, interviews, and trial transcripts that covered every aspect of their lives.

  All of us had read the book cover to cover. Well, all except Bailey, I think. Jenna, Mal, and I had read it when we were still in middle school, sneaking copies out of our guardians’ houses. We wanted to know more about who our parents had been. As soon as we were done, we all wished we’d never read it.

  “How goes the slave labor?” Jenna asked as she came inside, dropping her school bag on the papers filled with notes I had spread all over the kitchen table.

  “Not as bad as I thought.” I stretched, using the motion to shove her bag forward, away from my things. Yawning, I pulled the loose sheets back into a pile and stuck it next to the laptop I was working on. “How was school?”

  “Monotonous. Until further notice—meaning until they hire a new sucker to take over the magic class—we’re all reading biographies of important historical witches. What’s the point of having magic if you can’t ever use it?” Sherrod’s spellbook was still in the garage. I couldn’t get it now, not with all the Witchers sniffing around the house. And I certainly couldn’t trust Jenna to take care of it. She’d take it for herself and abuse the hell out of everything she learned. I had to get rid of it somehow. The Maleficia attack hadn’t happened until I brought the book home. I needed to get rid of it.

  But what if there’s something useful in there? What if you could use Sherrod’s magic for good? Wouldn’t it be worth it?

  I shook my head, trying to shake the thoughts free. That was what had gotten me into this mess in the first place. Second guessing myself, and wanting to believe that there was something that our legacy could do to redeem itself.

  “Justin? You okay?” Jenna had been more concerned lately, ever since the attack. Concern for others wasn’t a good look on her.

  “I wish people would stop asking me that,” I said in annoyance. The sooner Jenna stopped acting like I was a fragile flower, the better. “Where are the others, anyway?”

  “Mal went to the gym. Cole and Bailey are hanging out with the runt of the litter.”

  “Who?”

  She rolled her eyes and huffed. “Luca. You realize it loses the humor when I have to keep explaining things to you.”

  “How was I supposed to know he’s the runt of the litter. That’s not even accurate. There’s no litter!”

  “You must be feeling better. You’re back to being tedious.”

  I yawned. The words on the computer screen were starting to blur. I was halfway through a section talking about how Covens were charged as a single entity. If one Coven member was believed to be a warlock, they were all guilty of his crimes.

  Did that happen with Moonset? Were some of them just caught up in Sherrod’s crimes? The Moonset biography didn’t seem to think so. It made a point of singling out all six of the members and breaking down each of their crimes.

  “Have fun with that,” Jenna announced. “It’s back to school for you tomorrow. Who wants to bet the science wing blows up before noon?”

  Twenty-Three

  “The tide turned when two of the remaining

  ‘Great Covens’ aligned and commandeered control of the resistance. Illana Bryer, a new grandmother, transformed into the most capable general any of the Covens had ever seen. Within a month, she’d beaten back Moonset on three separate fronts, and given the resistance the momentum it desperately needed.”

  Moonset: A Dark Legacy

  The science wing didn’t blow up. Neither did the main hallway, the gymnasium, or the auditorium. Everything was actually normal my first day back. The only change was that my last period was now a study hall spent in the library, since I couldn’t be trusted around the other witch kids. Quinn told me to keep working on his research paper, that for now it was the best use of my time.

  I was so busy trying to catch up on what I’d missed and preparing for midterms that I barely got to talk to anyone all day. I only caught sight of Ash once in the halls, but the bell rang before I could track her down.

  The weekend passed by so slowly I thought for a minute that time was
going backwards. It wasn’t until Monday that our house had quieted down enough to sneak the spellbook out in the morning, tucking it into my book bag.

  In lieu of any better ideas, I hid it in a locker at school. I asked for a hall pass to use the restroom, that way the halls would be mostly empty when I hid it. Only about seven hundred kids attended the high school, but there were enough lockers to support twice that. All the unused lockers had locks on them, but lucky for me that was one of the few spells I knew.

  The unlocking spell only worked on certain locks—specifically the kind that kept school lockers closed. Each of the lockers in the school was numbered. Locker 666 would have been too obvious—that would have been Jenna’s choice for sure. I chose 999 instead, hiding the book in the bottom corner of the locker, and replacing the lock when I was done. With the book hidden, I felt like I could breathe again.

  On some level, I think all of us were waiting for the other shoe to drop—for the warlock to make his next move. Only he didn’t. For a week, Carrow Mill was completely normal.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” Ash said, appearing at my locker before the first bell on Friday.

  “Not avoiding. Drowning. Missing most of last week totally threw me off.” I closed my locker door, and by unspoken agreement we started walking towards the stairs.

  “Well, that’s what happens when you get suspended,” she said lightly.

  “Maybe I’m just a rebel.”

  Ash laughed. “Mr. French Vanilla is suddenly feeling rebellious?”

  “Hey, I ordered a turtle mocha all on my own.”

  Her eyes widened, and she fanned herself. “Stop, please. We’re in public. You’ll embarrass me.”

  A week’s worth of waiting on the warlock’s next move had me feeling stir-crazy and reckless all at once. “Do you like movies? Like, watching movies? Maybe, I mean, tonight? With me?” Oh God, what is happening to me? My mouth couldn’t trip over the words fast enough. I took a breath. She’s smiling, that’s a good sign, right? Or maybe she’s going to laugh? “I mean, would you want to go to the movies with me? Sometime?”