Darkbound

by Scott Tracey

  I grabbed and dragged him towards me, clamping a hand over his mouth. “Are you freaking kidding me?” I hissed down at him. Cole squirmed, but even at his slipperiest, I was more than a match for him. I dragged him with me down the hall until he let his body go slack, forcing me to drag his weight. He thought that would be enough to make me drop him. Instead I shrugged, scooped him up, and dropped him over my shoulder in a fireman carry.

  “Put me down, you jerk!” Cole punched at my back, getting one good shot in on my kidney before I reached the end of the hall. Teachers came out of their classroom at the disturbance, more than one looked like they wanted to intervene between Cole and me, but no one did.

  Worse, a few of the teachers looked like they were only moments away from joining in all the noise themselves.

  Maddy followed us into one of the back hallways, where the school had been expanded in the last twenty years. The tile was different, slapped down quickly sometime in between throwing up nondescript plasterboard walls and popcorn-spackled ceiling tiles. I dropped Cole once the crowd thinned out around us, and was surprised when Maddy appeared at my side. “Where is she?”

  There are bad liars, and then there’s Cole. He telegraphed every lie by doing the exact opposite of how he thought liars acted. Most people avoid eye contact, but Cole didn’t look away, even tried not to blink. He never fidgeted or acted nervous, he actually became like a frozen mannequin, like if he stayed completely still everything he said, no matter how implausible, would pass inspection.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, followed up by a too sincere, “Jenna didn’t do anything.”

  “How did you know I was talking about Jenna?”

  “I mean—what? What are you talking about?” The more flustered he got, the more the facade started to crack. He started blinking rapidly, swallowing over and over again, even though his mouth was probably dry as dust. “Come on, Mal. It’s just a joke.”

  “Jenna made the whole school fall in love with me,” I said tightly. “That’s not a joke. It’s the precursor to justified homicide.”

  He squirmed back, holding up a finger. “They’re not ‘in love’ with you. Love spells are against the law. But spells that help people realize their healthy attraction to the male form, well there aren’t any rules about that.”

  That wasn’t Cole talking, it was Jenna’s words coming out of his mouth. Crap, she’d already started forming her defense. That meant Maddy and I were probably right, and this was all about getting us kicked out of school. “Why’s she doing this, Cole? Didn’t Quinn say that we weren’t going anywhere no matter what?”

  Cole didn’t have an answer for that. He shrugged, looked away, avidly interested in what everyone else was doing. “Hey, how come you’re not interested?” he said suddenly, focusing on Maddy.

  “I—you—” Maddy’s face went slack, the need to come up with a suitable response chasing literally every thought from her mind.

  “It’s doesn’t work on anyone who’s already in love with someone else.” I smacked Cole on the head like he should have figured that out already. Maddy’s mouth tightened, but the look she shot me a moment later was relieved. And yet suspicious.

  That was a conversation for another time, though.

  “It doesn’t?” Cole frowned. He had the same look when he found out Santa wasn’t real (Bailey had known for two years by that point). He was just too trusting sometimes.

  “How’d she do it? How do I turn it off?”

  “I—you can’t?” Cole did his best to look helpless and innocent.

  I grunted and turned away. “Can you call somebody?” I asked Maddy.

  Her lips twitched. “You need me to call an adult before someone bad-touches you?”

  A bad touch was the least of my worries right now. Now that we had a modicum of privacy, the extent of what just happened really started to sink in. The way everyone had stared. The crammed feeling of the hall when everyone stopped to see what was going on. All the eyes turned on me, watching, judging.

  Everything grew hazy for a moment as the room started to spin. I reached out to steady myself, grabbed Cole’s shoulder and held on. The dizziness passed, but the moment wasn’t lost on him. “Are you okay?” He looked up at me with wide eyes. “Jenna said you wouldn’t be hurt. She said it was just a joke, I swear.”

  My stomach gnawed on itself, as if to remind me what was really to blame. “I’ll be fine once Jenna unravels whatever it was that she did,” I said, not feeling entirely guilty about letting Cole think her spell was hurting me. It was better than the alternative.

  ten

  Magic can do many things, but it cannot create something from nothing. Love spells are notorious, but impossible. The best you can hope for is an attraction, an obsession, a debilitating need that surpasses all other needs. It isn’t love, though.

  Magic and Subjugation:

  Emotional Influence in the Modern Witch

  My locker had been molested by an invasion of puff paint and glitter. Pink and red, mostly, heaped in oozing quantities as one poster had been pressed over top of another, the puff paint barely having a chance to dry and instead acted like a gluey substance, holding them all together like a serial killer’s mosaic of victims.

  “Malcolm,” a voice called out from down the hall, “there you are. Come with me, please?” Kelly appeared, face pinched in irritation.

  “Thank god,” I exhaled, feeling the tension already pooling out of me. “Where have you guys been all day? I’ve been calling Quinn since this morning. Do you have any idea what it’s like—”

  “I know exactly what it’s like,” she said crisply, leading me down the hall. The other students gave a wide berth, maybe it was something in her expression, or maybe she’d done some magic I wasn’t aware of. Either way, we made it through the halls in record time.

  She led us all the way back to classroom we used for Coven class. As we walked into the classroom, conversation stopped between a teacher and the two students who were still lingering by her desk.

  “Get out,” Kelly commanded, turning to look pointedly towards the door.

  It was the chilling tone more than the demand that hustled them out of the room, I thought. Even the teacher didn’t stop long enough to reclaim her purse, she went for the door with single-minded purpose. She didn’t look back, didn’t stop to wonder why a stranger was leading a student into the room only to clear it. She was even so thoughtful as to close the door behind her.

  With that taken care of, Kelly spun around, pointing to one of the chairs. “Sit.” But I was not a student, and I definitely wasn’t going to be cowed by some grad school wannabe who thought she was going to put me in my place. I walked up to the teacher’s desk, cleared a spot near the front and sat down at the front of it.

  “I don’t know who you think you are, but this isn’t my fault. If you think I did this, clearly you’re an idiot. I hate this kind of stuff. So go find Jenna, get her to undo whatever it was that she did, and leave me alone.”

  “Do you really think it’s that simple?” Kelly asked, eyes dark. The lights in the room were off, the only light coming in from outside. “This school is nearly in a panic. One wrong move could set the whole thing ablaze. You remember what that’s like, don’t you, Malcolm?”

  “I—” This wasn’t my fault! Why was she freaking out like this?

  “You think you’re so special,” she continued, “such a rebel. The witch who wants to be a real boy.” She walked slowly towards me, each step a sharp snap of her heels against the tile floors. This wasn’t where I thought the afternoon would take me, not by a long shot.

  “I didn’t ask for this. Any of it. You people dragged me here. If I could leave, I would.” Frustration welled up in me, I could feel myself close to breaking. “They don’t need me, and I’d be better off without them. I could actually stay in scho
ol long enough to make friends, maybe have a life. Maybe I could have been class president, who knows? I never have the chance because Jenna hates everything.”

  “It’s so hard to be you,” she agreed, her voice low now. Husky.

  Oh. Oh no. Oh this was the opposite of what I’d wanted after all.

  Kelly reached the end of the aisle, only inches from me. She placed her hands down on my knees, and as much as I wanted to, I resisted the urge to shove myself backwards and away from her.

  “I can help you.” Her eyes were earnest, she really believed that she was doing the right thing, but then crazy people always did. She slipped out of her shoes, shedding any illusion of height. “I’m sure you’ve been very confused, Malcolm. It’s okay. I’m here now. I can make you understand.”

  “This isn’t you,” I said, wondering how I could talk my way out of this. On a top-ten list of typical adolescent fantasies, getting hit on by the smoking-hot teacher didn’t really work for me. At least not this smoking-hot teacher. Maybe if it was the football coach, but he was in his thirties, so maybe not. “You don’t have to do this,” I added desperately. “It’s the spell. It’s whatever Jenna did. This isn’t you.”

  “And this isn’t you.” She traced her fingers in the air, and I felt a throbbing against my skin, like a second heartbeat trying to force its way into my body. It was foreign, uncomfortable, and made me want to run as far and as fast as I could. “But it will be soon. Don’t worry,” she cooed. “I can make it all go away. All the misery. All the confusion. Then we can be happy. You’ll see. I’m doing this for us.”

  She continued tracing symbols in the air, and the pulsing around me grew thicker, stronger, like a blood pressure cuff squeezing my entire body. And then, for a glorious moment, it stopped. Everything halted. The universe took a moment to catch its breath.

  “Oh I like this,” a musical voice whispered, a symphony of pleasure and bubbling laughter before it ultimately soured, “but I don’t like her very much.” Fingers rubbed the back of my head again, pulling tight at the last moment, before the moment passed, the bubble popped, and the squeezing pressure returned.

  “It’ll all be over soon,” Kelly promised.

  “Miss Davenport, step away from the boy!”

  I’d never been so happy to see Illana Bryer in my life.

  It took Illana less than fifteen minutes to not only save me from the substitute, but to also return the school to some semblance of chastised normalcy, track down Jenna and reverse whatever it was that she’d done. In the meantime, she made me wait in the English room. Quinn finally showed up with Nick a few minutes after Illana, both of them looking horribly unperturbed.

  “So is this the part where you move us out in the middle of the night?” I asked, trying to figure out why I had not one but two Witchers guarding my back in the meantime. “Or is there another threat? Another wraith? A unicorn? A Cabbage Patch doll?”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Quinn said placidly. I would believe him more if the pair of them weren’t lingering by the door like something was about to barge its way in.

  There was something wrong with one of Quinn’s forearms. It was distorted, the skin tone not matching the rest of his arm. The more I studied it, the less real it became until finally Quinn noticed my stare and snorted. “Shut up,” he muttered at Nick, who was grinning furiously, before he scrubbed his hand over the space above the distortion. An illusion faded, revealing an arm brace of some kind. Black and strappy, there was a sheath laid into the interior, a knife blade lined perfectly to nestle against the crook of his arm. He pulled the athame out, holding it up as if this were show-and-tell.

  “Never leave home without it?” he said halfheartedly.

  “That’s MasterCard,” Nick replied immediately.

  “Always?” Quinn tried next.

  “That’s Snape.”

  “Whatever, then. It’s just a precaution,” Quinn said, directing the words to me. “Not that there’s anything to be really worried about, but Illana wants to make sure the situation doesn’t grow any more out of control than it already has.”

  “I think it’s pretty much as bad as it can get,” I pointed out. “Or did you miss the part where one of your merry band of badasses tried out her cougar act a decade too early?”

  “This was just a lust spell,” Quinn said absently. “Though I don’t know how Jenna managed it. She shouldn’t have access to the kinds of spells that could put something like this together. But anyway, this is nothing. People just wanted to sleep with you. I’m sure that’s not out of the realm of normalcy for you. It could have been a lot worse.”

  “There are worse things than hormones,” Nick agreed. “Like that pitiful excuse of an illusion you’ve got going on,” he said, nodding toward Quinn’s arm brace.

  “So, want to tell us what prompted this?” Quinn asked, flicking the lights on and off like a child who needed to find something to do to keep himself from dying of boredom.

  Did he really need me to? Wasn’t it obvious. “Jenna wants new magic. She thinks Eat, Pray, Coven class is her best shot. So she’s buying everything you guys are selling. Because that worked out so well for us last time.”

  Neither one of them said anything. Most witches liked the idea of having a coven to belong to and were jealous of those who did. I’d even heard that there were summer programs for high school students specifically geared towards bringing as many kids together as possible for a few weeks just to see if any covens would form.

  Illana’s return a few minutes later was perfectly timed, as the awkward silence between the three of us only intensified.

  “You’ll be happy to know that your effect on the rest of the student body is at an end.” Illana breezed back into the room, nodding sharply at Quinn as she passed him. Quinn and Nick disappeared out into the class, closing the door just as the bell rang, signaling the final break between classes before the end of the day.

  “It’s a bit premature, I’m sorry to say, but it looks like I will be taking over instruction of your lessons now. Kelly feels awful, of course, but we both thought it best if she took a few days to regain her footing. It’s a shame. She’s particularly well versed in aiding new covens control their bond. It’s one of the reasons she was brought here to you.”

  “Yeah, you guys have been regular humanitarians, looking out for our best interests. Funny how none of that came up the first two months we were here.” I rolled my eyes. “She’s … what? Twenty-three at the most. How much of an expert could she really be?”

  “A double major in Psychology and Criminal Justice, as well as six years spent with the Witchers. The girl may be young, but I would think that you of all people wouldn’t judge her so harshly based on her appearance.”

  I felt a flush of shame creep up my chest and into my face. “I didn’t mean it like that,” I muttered.

  “Of course you did,” Illana said blandly. “Some children grow up too fast because they have no other choice. Sometimes that pressure creates a diamond.” Illana stared down my challenge, her look conveying regret and disappointment all at once. I never understood exactly what Justin feared from her—she had the ability to make him piss his pants on command. But being on the receiving end of her disappointment … I understood it a little better at least.

  “She didn’t teach us anything worthwhile,” I said under my breath, like that was the problem all along. That I was absolved. And maybe I should be, especially after what happened that afternoon.

  “You didn’t want to learn,” Illana countered. “And don’t think I haven’t noticed how you’ve yet to stop in at the hospital. I asked you to do something, did I not? Was I in any way unclear?”

  And that was it. The breaking point. “Do you think I was just going to do it because you told me? I hate this. All of it. I don’t care why Luca got involved in the black arts. I don’t care that you did u
s a favor by not smothering us in our cribs. I. Don’t. Care.”

  “Do you really think it’s that easy?” Illana was controlled, calm. Surprisingly, she didn’t seem angry at my outburst, or even offended. But her chiding disappointment was more than enough. “You may not see much value in your life, Malcolm, but that doesn’t mean yours is the opinion that matters most.” The strange words, and the strange touch against my head came back at once. I brushed my fingers against the nape of my neck, felt something slide against my skin. Ash on my fingers. There was ash in my hair. What the hell?

  “I’m done with all this creepy monster shit,” I snapped. “Do you understand me? Comprende?”

  “Your uncle once thought he could speak to me this way.” I swear Illana almost smiled. It was like watching a shark feel joy. “He never made that mistake again.”

  By that point I was yelling, but I still didn’t care. “Get it through your head, lady. I’m not Justin. I don’t jump just because you tell me to.” An idea was slowly forming in my head. “You want my help? You find a way to break the Coven bond and get me the hell away from all of this. Get me the hell out of this town and away from all of you people, and I’ll do everything you ask.”

  “Is that all?” Illana’s voice was frost on glass. “Would you like the moon on a bauble, for an encore? You ask for the impossible, as you rightly know. The Coven bond survives even death. I can do nothing.” There was something that flashed across her face, a look like remorse. “Even if we could, there is still Moonset’s manipulations to contend with. Understandably, no one wishes to reignite whatever darkness they tied you up into.”

  There was a hiccupping sound from the door. I looked away from Illana to see Bailey standing in front of the others, different shades of the same hurt and disappointment on each of their faces.

  eleven

  Charlie Denton took

  Moonset harder than anyone.