by Scott Tracey
After everything had finally calmed down, we all fell into usual routines.
Monday, Mal and I ended up in the kitchen first thing in the morning. The shower was running upstairs, but I couldn’t figure out if it was Jenna or Quinn who’d woken before noon. Some days it was a toss-up.
We weren’t starting school until after the first of the year, which meant there were two weeks of relative peace before Jenna’s next campaign started. Every school was a little different—
sometimes, she wanted out immediately; other times she didn’t mind a little patience. Only time would tell which one Carrow Mill would be.
“Nick says there’s a gym somewhere in town; I was thinking about checking it out. You want to go?” Mal asked from his spot at the table. I sat across the room from him on one of the barstools set alongside the counter like a breakfast nook. He’d pulled a bowl of grapes out of the fridge and kept playing games, tossing them in the air and catching them in his mouth.
Every time he missed, he looked at me pointedly, like I was the one that was supposed to dig under the oven for the lost grape.
There was coffee brewing, but it wasn’t brewing nearly fast enough.
I shook my head. “It’s too early for working out.”
Mal snorted. There was no such thing in his world. He drummed a steady rhythm against the counter. Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat. “So what’s he like? The new guardian?”
What was Quinn like? I still didn’t know. “Hard to say. What about yours?”
“Nick’s all right,” Mal admitted. “I think he’s got a thing going on with Cole’s guardian. Kelly, right?”
I nodded.
“But they’ve gotta keep it quiet. Can’t be fraternizing with your co-workers, and all that. But anyway, he said you guys getting Quinn is pretty lucky. Apparently, he’s a big deal.”
“He didn’t freak out about the wraith,” I admitted. “Not like Virago.”
“Yeah, but Nick made it sound like he’s a big deal. More than just ‘I killed a wraith and I liked it.’”
“Who?” Quinn asked, striding into the kitchen.
“You,” Mal admitted shamelessly, popping another grape into his mouth.
“Then I need coffee,” Quinn grunted. “Don’t you guys have anything better to do than gossip about the well-mannered gentleman down the hall?”
“The same well-mannered gentleman torturing Jenna with the Christmas house?” Mal asked, raising an eyebrow. “I heard she came home from shopping and you put a mini tree in her room.”
Quinn’s face was impassive, save for a crinkle at the corners of his eyes. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“Anyway, Justin made the coffee,” Mal warned.
Quinn winced in reply, dropping the hand that had been reaching for the coffee pot.
“Screw you guys, I make good coffee!” I protested.
“No,” Mal said patiently, “you make a perfect vessel for your milk and sugar. That’s not coffee.”
Quinn grunted a quiet agreement.
“Justin and I were heading into town. You can tag along,” Mal offered, suppressing a grin.
“Maybe even help little Justin find a girlfriend this time.”
I punched him in the arm, but the problem was that Mal’s arms were the size of tree trunks and about as hard. I walked away wincing.
“Justin’s never had a girlfriend?”
Great, now even Quinn was getting in on it.
“I’ve had girlfriends,” I protested. I … had. It was just difficult.
“None of them pass the Jenna test,” Mal admitted.
Quinn looked confused. “The Jenna test? What? She has to approve?”
“She has a tendency to destroy the kinds of girls who also happen to like Justin.”
“That was one time!” I argued. There’d been a girl when we lived near the Chesapeake Bay.
Her name was Amanda, and she was a cheerleader. That was her first strike. The second was that she was blonde. And the third was that she dared to be more than a stereotype: an airhead that wouldn’t understand when Jenna was mocking her.
Amanda stood up to her at first, but Jenna played dirty, and by the time we left at the end of the month, Amanda wouldn’t even meet my eyes in the hallway.
“There’s a diner,” Quinn said abruptly, changing the subject. “I’m in the mood for breakfast.”
He glanced at me. “One thing I will miss about D.C.? Starbucks.”
“There’s a coffee shop on Main Street,” Mal said, stretching up and out of his chair.
“And there’s a coffee pot right there,” Quinn said, pointing. “Doesn’t mean anything. I happen to like paying nine dollars for a coffee.”
Half an hour later, Mal and I walked into Shortway’s Diner while Quinn stayed outside taking a phone call.
“You feel bad about leaving Cole behind?” Mal asked as he pushed the door open and we were greeted by a blast of humid air. The diner was straight out of the fifties. Black and white checkered floor tiles, red booths, waitresses in poodle skirts.
“He’ll go bother Jenna, it’ll be fine,” I said with a grin.
“If she doesn’t kill him first,” Mal said.
I laughed. “It’s a rite of passage that big sisters torment their little brothers.”
“Jenna never tormented you.”
I leveled a stare at Mal. “Really?” I asked, voice flat.
He scoffed. “You’ve always been too sensitive.” We walked up to the counter and sat down at the bar rather than wait for a table. “Hey, check it out,” he said, nudging me and pointing back at the entrance.
Through the glass door that led outside, and the picture windows on either side, there was a man stumbling through the parking lot. He wore a jumpsuit like a mechanic, stained from something more than just dirt—thick, dripping streaks that were splashed across his middle. His long hair hung down limp and scraggly around a face that hadn’t seen a razor in weeks, and a shower in twice that.
I couldn’t decide if he looked more like a serial killer or a homeless person. All those stains could be blood …
“Shit, stop staring,” Mal said, nudging me. I focused, realizing that the man was looking through the glass now, and striding purposefully towards the door.
“What’d you have to stare at him for?” Mal whispered furiously.
“Me? You were the one who pointed him out!”
“I can’t take you anywhere,” Mal said, spinning away from me on his barstool, leaving me to look at his back. Brothers are overrated, I thought, and not for the first time in my life, though usually it was Cole who was driving me insane.
The jingling chime over the door rattled through an awkward lull in diner conversation, somehow louder than it should have been. I didn’t even dare look up into the mirror behind the bar to see if it was really the man from outside coming to find out why people were staring at him.
“I’m starving,” I said, a little louder than I intended. “Do you think they have those giant omelets that come with the side of pancakes?”
“This isn’t IHOP,” Mal said, shifting only slightly in my direction. He broke off sharply, but I didn’t have to ask why. I could feel it—a presence far to my right, at the tail end of the bar where a waitress ran the cash register. He was a dark blob in the corner of my eye, but it was definitely him.
After that, neither of us said anything. The waitress asked the man something, but her voice was too raspy and low to make it out. He didn’t say anything at all, but I could feel him there.
Like the quieter he got, the more present he became, until it was all I could think about.
I chanced a look up, trying for casual and my reflection showing panic instead. My eyes slid to the mirror’s right, and I saw the man, all right.
I saw him staring at the two of us.
“Mal,” I said out of the corner of my mouth. “Mal,” I repeated, when he didn’t respond. Then I hit him with my elbow.
“You’re him,” the man sai
d, and it was hard to tell if the jumble of words spilling out of his mouth was an alcoholic slur or something else. “The dark light in the sky. The sun.”
“The sun?” Mal rose off the barstool.
But the man ignored him. “Oh, I’ve been hearing the signs. The voices whispering in my head, chirping little voices, tick-tock, tock-tick, wait for him. The sun that will usher in the never-ending eclipse. The daughter.”
“Time to go,” I said tightly, scrambling up off my own seat and backing up into Mal. The sun?
The daughter? Of course. “He’s one of them,” I said to Mal significantly. I looked back at the man. “You’re a Harbinger, aren’t you?”
When Moonset had revealed themselves, their impassioned speeches had reached the ears of the weak and hurting. A cult of followers, people who literally worshipped them, swelled their ranks. They became known as the Harbingers—the ones who spread the word. In lessons, we were taught that Moonset preyed on the broken, feeding into their delusions and their weaknesses. Breaking them, and reshaping something more loyal out of the pieces. And so the cult of Moonset was born.
“You’ve got the wrong people,” I said slowly. I shot Mal a dirty look; this was all his fault. If he hadn’t started staring in the first place, I’d be halfway to my breakfast by now.
“You don’t know us,” Mal said, like talking to the mentally disturbed was something he did all the time.
“I always knew they’d bring you back, Daggett. Many things I was, but never a fool. They tried to put worms inside,” he tapped at his head, “to steal all your secrets, but I wouldn’t let them. Ground them up and fed them to the angels.”
“That’s … good,” I said, still trying to keep as much distance between us as possible, for the smell, if nothing else. I was definitely right about the not showering thing—the man smelled like a rest stop urinal.
My first instinct was that the man was totally crazy, but I wasn’t stupid. I had to wonder if there were tiny grains of truth underneath the crazy haystack. If this man was a believer, if he knew my parents …
“You can’t be here,” Mal said, interrupting my thoughts. “C’mon, Jus, we shouldn’t even be talking to him.”
We weren’t allowed to have contact with cultists, for obvious reasons, so I wasn’t sure how this mistake was even happening right now. Didn’t they do security checks before they brought us somewhere? What if he tried to kidnap us just like the wraith had?
“Just because many lost faith doesn’t mean we all did,” the man said, his voice tobacco thick.
He pointed his finger at Mal, his hand trembling. “The Denton boy. Of course you’re thick as thieves, just like your daddies.”
“We’re nothing like them,” Mal said tightly. I wondered when his tune had changed from don’t engage with the crazy. Mal normally wasn’t known for having a hair-trigger reaction to our parents. He was usually the one who let it affect him the least.
“It’s one of the signs,” the man insisted. “Can you hear it? They whisper and plot, and they’ll grind up my bones to make their bread. They promised!”
Whatever sign the man was seeing, or hearing as the case may be, it didn’t look like a good one. No Exit, maybe. Or Beware of Avalanche. We were starting to attract an audience, as people found their morning chat far less interesting than the crazy, ranting homeless man at the counter. I cleared my throat. “Look, we’re not—”
“—that’s enough.” It was almost a mirage, the way Quinn suddenly popped up like a bodyguard. Or an enforcer. He had his hand around the mechanic’s forearm before I even realized he’d moved, and it slowly started to drop. “Justin, Malcolm, go wait outside.”
“Quinn?”
His dark eyes flashed. “I said wait outside, Justin.”
“Come on,” Mal said, still focused on the mechanic, grabbing my shoulder.
“Witcher, witcher, witcher,” the man singsonged.
“Hello, Johnny,” Quinn said with a sad smile. “It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?”
“Do they know? I bet they can feel it in the air, can’t they?” The mechanic closed his eyes, looking euphoric, as if the very air was the greatest smell ever. He took on a pleading tone.
“Just tell me they know. Please.”
I turned back, and heard Quinn mutter something, but I couldn’t decipher it. The tingle in the air confirmed it was magic. The man was caught off guard; his jaw worked but no sound came out.
“C’mon,” Mal urged, pulling me away. I wasn’t sure, but it looked like Quinn had used some kind of silence spell on the Harbinger.
Since most magic required a voice, anything that affected the ability to speak was a highly coveted ability. But as far as I knew, as far as any of us knew, there was no such spell. They drilled it into our heads year after year. You can’t steal someone’s voice, you can’t drown it out, you can’t take it away.
If they were lying about that, then what else had they lied about?
“What the hell is going on?” I breathed, once we were outside. Mal opened his mouth, then abruptly closed it and shook his head. He had a hand in his hair, his expression unreadable.
That threw me. Mal had seventeen different early morning grunts for “hello.” I knew them all.
But I couldn’t tell what he was thinking—maybe for the first time ever.
No one else in the diner seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. Quinn had his hand on the other man’s shoulder, and whatever conversation they were having, it wasn’t going so well.
Mechanic was shrinking in place. Another man walked in from the back, taking off a white apron and joining them. Quinn nodded to him, saying something emphatic while gesturing with his hand.
“What was all that?” I demanded. It wasn’t like I expected Malcolm to have the answers, but
I had to ask someone. Now the two men were facing the mechanic, and the new guy had his arms crossed in front of him.
I still couldn’t tell what Mal was thinking, but his attention was on the exchange inside as much as mine was. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”
Six
“Humility is for people who cower before storms instead of causing them. Power is there to be taken. If you can’t stand the heat, then get away from the person with the fire.”
Diana Bellamont (C: Moonset)
Unknown Date
I didn’t get a chance to tell Jenna about the Harbinger, or about pretty much anything, because the minute the three of us walked in the front door, she was lying in wait with Cole at her side.
We were lucky Quinn even let us stop at a drive-thru on the way home for something. None for Mal, of course—he looked at the greasy bag with a horrified expression. I could imagine just what he was thinking: exactly how many hours on the treadmill or how many sit-ups it would take to burn off my instant breakfast.
I didn’t care, though.
But generic fast food coffee and soggy bagel sandwiches were no fortification against Jenna on a mission. “Good, you’re finally back,” she began, a speech that I was sure she’d practiced more than once. “Now that we’re all settled in, I think we need to talk about training.”
“We do?” Quinn asked, sounding almost amused. He moved past us into the kitchen and leaned against one of the counters, a paper coffee cup held lightly in his hand.
“We do,” she said firmly. “We were almost killed, Quinn. Because we couldn’t defend ourselves. The only reason that we’re standing here right now is because you were there. So what happens the next time, when you’re not?”
“Lucky for you, I’m right down the hall.”
Mal opened his mouth, but I held out my hand. I wanted to see where Jenna was going with this. She almost sounded reasonable. Maybe the wraith had been a wake-up call.
Jenna’s lips compressed, and she shifted her stance. I don’t think that was the answer she was looking for. “But even you couldn’t beat it. You had to use one of us to stop it, and even then, you got luck
y. Next time, you might not be that lucky.”
Quinn’s smile was wide. “You’ll find I’m a very lucky guy. Relax, you’re in good hands.”
“And that’s it? We should just trust you?” Her earlier composure was starting to slip, and the acerbic cut of her normal tone crept in around the edges.
“That’s it,” Quinn said magnanimously. “I’m on your side, kids.”
“We’re not kids,” Cole muttered, speaking for the first time.
“So we’ve got your assurance for what … three months? What happens after that, when we never see you again?” Jenna asked pointedly. “When it comes to us, no one’s on our side. At least not for long. And you can’t guarantee that the next one will be competent.”
It didn’t seem like Quinn let very much get to him. This was no different. “So what are you expecting? That you’re going to demand to be taught some spells that will arguably be useful in self-defense? Spells that a girl with your track record could easily abuse in a plethora of creative ways. Now why would I do that?”
“Jenna has a point, though,” I interjected. This was about thirty seconds from getting ugly—
anyone could see that Quinn wasn’t about to give Jenna what she wanted, and that was always dangerous . “Isn’t there some kind of appeal system? I mean, no offense to Jenna, but she abuses the spells she knows anyway, and we don’t get taught something without at least a dozen people signing off on it first.”
It was more than a little annoying that I’d agree with Jenna on that. There was so much fear and nervousness that we were the Second Coming, that everything we were to be taught was checked and double-checked. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Congress had entire think tanks established just to predict what kinds of chaos Jenna could do with a spell that turned glass opaque or one that could change an article of clothing into a primary color.
After all, this was the girl who had cobbled together a couple of eavesdropping spells, a rumor-spreading spell, and one that made the caster seem incredibly trustworthy, and somehow turned that into a riot.
“Jenna’s not going to change—” I started.
“—and you’re always going to be there to cover her ass,” Quinn interrupted. “I get it. But you guys have to realize that everyone else is doing the same thing. Every time Jenna abuses what power she does have, it makes them question your progress all over again. There are some people advocating that you stop training entirely.”