by Scott Tracey
Without them, there was no defense.”
Moonset: A Dark Legacy
Monday started out strange. I kept staring at Quinn over breakfast. Jenna’s theory made sense —it fit the weirdness that had been going on ever since we’d gotten here. Quinn’s phone call, talking about how we’d figure out why we were really here.
They’d brought us here to be bait. To smoke out a warlock. Was it Cullen Bridger? Was he closer than anyone thought?
“Magic classes start today,” Quinn said, interrupting the silence. Jenna still hadn’t come down yet, and everyone else was eating at home. Thank god, I didn’t think I could stand an overly sugared Cole bouncing around the room.
“About time,” I replied noncommittally.
Quinn narrowed his eyes at me. “There were a lot of things to consider,” he said, almost chiding. “How are you holding up after last night?”
“Justin’s fine,” Jenna said, “but who cares about that. You said they finally agreed to teach us?”
“I said magic class starts today,” Quinn said, getting up to refill his coffee.
But Jenna’s good mood wasn’t deflated by his response, even though we both knew what it meant. More classes about the theory of magic, probably. Not so much in the spells department. As usual.
“So lots of theory, then. Got it.” Jenna blowing off the chance to learn new magic? I knew why—at the moment we were both more concerned with what was going on here—but she was taking it a little far. I glared at her across the table, then nodded towards Quinn’s back.
Don’t be so obvious, I tried to telegraph.
She rolled her eyes at me. “So what’s the Congress’s master plan?” Quinn stilled at the coffee pot until Jenna continued. “The next time a wraith or some other monster comes crashing through the wall, we should nag them with the theory behind what makes a good illusion? If we could do better illusions, we might get out of town without destroying the whole school next time.”
“There’s not going to be a next time,” Quinn said. It’s not like I believed him, or like I even would have believed him a week ago, but now the lie was so blatant and obnoxious that it soured my stomach. I got up and dumped the rest of my breakfast in the trash.
“Not hungry?” he asked, only sounding half interested.
“Performance anxiety,” Jenna stage whispered.
I huffed in irritation, but it wasn’t at Jenna.
I spent the day swamped in review materials, as the school geared up for midterms. It helped a lot, because it laid out in neat little columns all the things I already knew right next to all the things I didn’t.
It was kind of like the rest of my life, only there were no worksheets that could tell me how a warlock was being allowed to run around Carrow Mill, and why they’d brought us here if they knew that. The guardians watching us had always been abusively careful in making sure we never came close to anyone who had been a Moonset sympathizer before, and now we’d not only met one, but there was a warlock in town, which was infinitely worse.
“Hey,” Ash said, appearing in the halls just as I was looking for my Independent Study classroom. Independent Study was what all our magic classes were filed under—easier for us to blend in, I supposed.
“Hey, how are you?” I asked.
“I’m okay,” she said with a nod, and while she looked a little on the exhausted side, the same strength I’d seen last night was there. What happened to the Harbinger hadn’t been eating her up. “Where are you off to?”
“Independent Study,” I lied with a grimace. “So much fun, right?”
Ash made a face. “Better than Pre-Calculus. I’ll see you later,” she said, brushing my arm as she passed. I watched her go, still trying to wrap my head around the mystery of the girl. Up until now, she’d been like a force of nature, inexplicable and ever-changing. But something was different, and it had been ever since last night.
It wasn’t the Harbinger’s death, I didn’t think. It had been something else. Had I said something? Done something?
A boy came up at my side. “You know Ash?” I turned to my left and had to do a double take.
For a second, it was almost like looking at Mal. A younger, less-perfect version of Mal, but Mal nonetheless.
It was the eyes, I decided. They had the same hazel-green eyes. And maybe something of the height, once this kid finished growing. He was younger than me, but it was hard to say whether he was a freshman or a sophomore.
“Sort of,” I said, half to him, and half to myself. Who was this kid? By the time I went to ask him his name, he was already rushing down the hall, weighed down by an extremely full backpack. He disappeared into a classroom at the end of the hall.
I paced the hallway, waiting on the others. Where are they? The clock ticked down, but there was no sign of Jenna or Mal, Cole or Bailey. They should be here—we always had
Independent Study together, but I was seriously independent at the moment.
I followed the hall to the end, somehow not surprised that the Mal-lookalike was in the same room as my magic lesson. What’s going on here? Is this some kind of prank? There were other kids in the room, a couple that I didn’t recognize, and one that I did—Maddy. Maddy was a witch?
One of the first things that had come after Moonset was the understanding that magic had to adapt. Every student needed to be taught, and a central organization needed to make sure that happened. “No witch left behind” became a serious movement. Magic met bureaucracy and since then magic has been considered a privilege, not a right. Magic was taught in classrooms, and the curriculum was controlled.
“Come along, Mr. Daggett,” a woman called as she swept up the steps at the hallway’s end.
She had raven-dark hair and an ankle-length skirt, and I recognized her. The woman in the crowd, the one who’d glared at me. In the daylight, she looked even more severe. Definitely an
Illana Bryer clone. “I’ll not hold up my class so you can loiter in the hallways,“ she said in a crisp
British accent.
I was rooted in place, unable to move even if I wanted to. “I’m waiting on my sister and the others. They should be here any second,” I promised.
She laid a hand on the door frame. “Not unless they plan to skip their own lesson. I dare say I barely have the grace to handle even one of your little brood in my classroom. All five?” She shook her head and tsked. “I think not.” “Wait … what?” They were splitting us up? That had never happened before. Who was going to keep Cole from trying spells he couldn’t handle or console Bailey if she didn’t get the pronunciation right the first time?
She walked into the room and I was left stuttering. It was only the sound of the bell that spurred me into action and into the classroom … and the last person to see the giant drawing that dominated the chalkboard at the front of the room. Someone had taken the time to get all the details just exactly right—the circle was shaded in perfectly, no gaps forgotten.
The woman had stopped just inside of the door, once she saw what dominated the room. At the sound of my footsteps behind her, she spun around, her skirt spinning almost like a top. “Do you think this is funny?” she hissed.
“What is it, Mrs. Crawford?” Maddy asked, eyeing the two of us.
“It’s Moonset’s symbol,” the blonde jock next to her said. “So you didn’t draw it for the lesson, Mrs. C?”
“No, I most certainly did not,” the woman muttered, still staring me down. “It seems our new student has a sense of humor. A sick one, but can we really be surprised?” “This is the first time I’ve even been in this room,” I protested.
“It was here when we got here,” the jock admitted, nodding to him and Maddy.
“So he came in earlier, and left us a little welcoming present,” the teacher said, her breathing growing shallow even as her face reddened. “That’s all it means, Kevin.”
“I didn’t do this!” I said. “That thing was scratched into my locker last week before I even
got here. You can ask the principal’s office. They had to fix it.”
Of course Maddy, who had proved she doesn’t like me, didn’t seem convinced. But it was the voice at the back of the room that defended me. “It was here this morning before school started,” the kid from the hallway—the one with Malcolm’s eyes—said. “Someone must have done it over the weekend or after school on Friday.”
“I will not be mocked in my own classroom,” Mrs. Crawford said.
“It’s probably someone who just wanted to stir up some drama,” Kevin said. He shrugged off his backpack and went up to the board, doing the thing that everyone else had avoided so far.
Erasing it. “There,” he said, once it was done. “Problem solved.”
“The problem is not solved,” Mrs. Crawford snapped.
I wasn’t going to help this situation any. Instead, I walked over to the back of the room and dropped my bag next to the kid who’d spoken up in my defense. “I’m Justin.”
He licked his lips and looked down. “Luca,” he said nervously. His eyes lifted towards mine.
“Luca Denton.”
Denton? Denton was Mal’s last name. “How—” But I wasn’t given a chance to finish.
“Cyrus Denton had a brother, of course. And that brother had a son,” said Mrs. Campbell, acting like she hadn’t been losing her cool only a few minutes ago. “Isn’t it obvious? The Denton boys have always had a certain look. Easy pickings in a crowd.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, still trying to wrap my head around it. “We were told there wasn’t any family. That we didn’t have—”
“You don’t,” she said shortly. “Luca’s father, all the other Dentons, even the ones that weren’t
Denton by name turned their back on Cyrus. There might be some Daggetts or Owens lurking out there somewhere, but they’ll never come looking for you.”
“That’s not the same thing as not having a family,” I said. I don’t know why, but finding out that there was even more that the Congress had lied to us about got under my skin. They told us we were orphans. That there was no one! We grew up thinking Moonset had existed in a vacuum, and all the while there were blood relatives with their heads down, pretending that they’d never heard of us before.
“Malcolm’s father chose to become a warlock. The word itself means ‘traitor’—blood is just one of the many things he betrayed,” Crawford said.
The rest of the room was quiet. My skin was burning. It wasn’t enough that the teacher clearly despised every second I was invading her classroom, but the way she talked was somehow even worse than Miss Virago. The redheaded Congress operative was contemptuous and dismissive, but Crawford acted like she actually hated me, and the fact that she had to speak to me at all was completely unacceptable.
“Very well,” she said suddenly. “Let’s have a little lesson for Mister Daggett, since he’s so oblivious to the history he comes from. Kevin, what separates a witch who rebels from the
Congress with a warlock?”
The jock sat up in his chair. “A warlock creates a connection to the Abyss, and invokes the black arts. It’s what makes them so dangerous.”
Christians believed in Hell. Witches believed in the Abyss. The only difference was that we could actually prove ours existed. The Abyss was some sort of portal, or world, or dimension that was basically a giant, living pit, and that pit was full of dark power. It was called Maleficia, and it was a devastating alternative to magic.
If magic was a language and a voice, Maleficia was a glass-shattering shriek. You didn’t cast spells with Maleficia, you released its power from the Abyss—and it sowed chaos and destruction wherever it spread. Even the tiniest invocation of the black arts could create devastating weapons that would continue for hours.
“Maleficia was the power that gave Moonset the edge in the war,” I said, interrupting. Mrs.
Crawford thought to shame me by reminding me what our parents had done, but all of us had come to terms with it a long time ago. “They would strike in secret, unleash their black arts, and by the time the Congress could mount a defense, they were too busy trying to contain the
Maleficia to fight back.”
“You will speak when called upon, Mr. Daggett,” Mrs. Crawford snapped. “Continue, Kevin.”
“Well, he’s right,” Kevin said uncomfortably. “A warlock is someone who becomes connected to the Abyss, and it makes them irrational. Insane. It’s the reason most people believe that
Moonset was beaten in the end. Because their minds were compromised.”
“You can’t tell someone is a warlock just by looking at them,” Maddy chimed in. “Which is why—” she cut off abruptly, but not before she glanced my way.
So it’s not entirely a secret. Things were starting to become a little more clear. “You want it to be me who drew that on the board,” I said slowly, “because you don’t want to think about who else it could have been.” Better the Moonset bastard than the warlock that was walking free around Carrow Mill.
“That is enough, Mr. Daggett.”
“How long has he been active? Why haven’t they caught him yet?” I demanded. “I mean, we are talking about a warlock here in town, right?”
The room went so quiet I could almost hear the steam coming out of Mrs. Crawford’s ears.
“We are not discussing this,” she hissed. “If you disrupt my classroom one more time, you will be removed from it.”
I sat back in my chair, my thoughts racing. So the witches in town knew. But what were any of them doing? Why hadn’t the Witchers caught and executed the warlock yet? And it still didn’t explain what he wanted with us. Why bring us to Carrow Mill?
I tuned the class out for several minutes, only picking back up when I heard the word
“Maleficia” crop up again.
“Talk to me about the Black Scare,” Mrs. Crawford said, looking down at Maddy.
“The Black Scare was a period during the fifties when witches grew paranoid over the idea that any of their neighbors or friends could secretly be experimenting with the dark arts.
Invoking Maleficia.”
“How many years?” Her question was like a whip crack the moment Maddy had stopped to take a breath. The girl fumbled, her mouth opening and closing several times but the answer would just not come out.
“Two and a half years,” Kevin piped up. “From ’54 to just before Christmas of ’56.”
“Our illustrious wide receiver with the save,” the teacher commented. “But I would expect nothing less of you, Kevin. Your grandfather played a part in quelling that very hysteria, didn’t he?”
“He did,” the guy nodded.
“So continue on, Kevin. Tell us what you know about those years.”
“It started as a political ploy between rival covens. Accusing someone of invoking the black arts permanently scarred their reputation.”
Behind the podium, she nodded. “So what happened?”
“It continued to spread until it became a class issue. Covens started banding together, accusing Solitaries that were in positions of power or authority. Positions they wanted for themselves. Tensions between the Covens and the Solitaries continued to get worse, and it became a hysteria.”
There had always two kinds of witches—the covens that made the majority of the rules, and those who were solitary—who didn’t have a coven of their own. Since the coven bond could not be forced, or faked, it was looked at by some as a kind of divine providence. Coven witches were stronger, could access more complicated magicks, could pool their powers in ways that a group of solitaries could not. Mrs. Crawford held up her hand to stop him. “A handful of men and women stirred up a firestorm of paranoia and panic. We saw the same thing happen only a few years later with the Red Scare and Communism. What lessons can we glean from the past?” She swept across the room as she spoke, her words as animated as her body. “Luca?”
He lifted his head from the desk, lines creased into his skin. Were his eyes red, o
r was that just a trick of the light? It was hard to tell. There was enough of a pause that it seemed like he hadn’t heard anything but his name, but eventually he answered. “We hate too easily?”
“Are you kidding? “ Maddy didn’t wait to be called on, nor could she hold her tongue. “It’s not hate to want to be vigilant. Maybe if people had been more concerned with rooting out evil instead of wringing their hands about violating witch’s rights, Moonset never would have happened.” Her eyes found mine. “They would have been put down like dogs, right from the start.”
Maddy’s opinion didn’t surprise me. People talked about killing Moonset the same way they talked about killing Hitler. Sacrificing one to save thousands. It was hard to say whether or not they were wrong, since the only advantage I could come up with to Moonset’s existence was that it led to my own.
“But who gets to decide who lives and who dies?” I found myself speaking up.
“There’s a reason that the Congress is overseen by some of the Great Covens,” she said stiffly in reply. “It’s harder for a coven to succumb to the lure of Maleficia.” But when they did, the result was so much worse. See: Moonset.
The taint of Maleficia took over after a while, and warlocks became essentially brainwashed puppets with the Abyss’s agenda as their only direction. Supposedly, the Coven bond made witches resistant to Maleficia’s influence.
“So you believe in an oligarchy? A police state ruled by the Covens? You’re not in a coven.
That makes you a second-class citizen.”
“He’s right. That would make him better than us.” Kevin had turned in his seat, but he lacked
Maddy’s malice.
Mrs. Crawford swept in front of Maddy’s desk. Her smile was disturbing. “We’re having such excellent debates today.” The pit in my stomach dug a little deeper. “Maddy, Mr. Daggett,” she continued. “Let’s have you both come to the front.”
Mrs. Crawford pulled a second podium from its place against the wall and dragged it forward. “Maddy, you can stand over here,” she said, putting Maddy on the side of the room closer to where she’d been sitting. “And you can take my podium,” she said to me. I stepped behind it, resting my hands on the sides.