by Scott Tracey
“But that’s not what happened!” How was logic failing me all of a sudden? I’d always been the levelheaded one, the one who could cut through the heightened emotions and reach some kind of common ground.
“That’s all anyone will care to remember,” Quinn replied. “It makes a better story than the truth.”
“I should have expected something,” I said after a moment. “I saw the way she looked at me last night.”
“Last night?” Quinn’s voice was suddenly sharp.
“She was there. Outside … y’know,” I waved my hand around, rather than say the words.
“She was glaring at me, like I was something she’d stepped in. Or like she blamed me.”
“But she was in the crowd,” he persisted. “Before you got there? Why didn’t you tell me that sooner?”
“Why would it matter?” I asked as we turned onto our street. “There were a lot of people standing outside last night. You guys interrogated them all, remember?”
“Not all of them,” Quinn murmured. “You’re sure it was her?”
I nodded.
We pulled into the driveway, and Quinn turned off the engine. There was a moment where I thought he was going to confide in me—tell me what was really going on in Carrow Mill. But as usual, the truth was skipped when gruff ignorance would suffice.
“You have to be better than even they expect you to be. If you can’t prove them wrong about who you are, they’ll eat you alive.”
He opened his door and went into the house, leaving me in the passenger seat. “I don’t even know who I am,” I said slowly, to absolutely no one.
It took me a while to make it inside. Part of me still didn’t trust Quinn. But his advice was sound.
It always was. But he still hadn’t told us the truth about anything. His allegiance was to his grandmother and the Congress, no matter what advice he gave.
That wasn’t enough.
He was in the kitchen looking over a small stack of papers. Were they about me? I might actually get expelled before Jenna this time. I picked up the manila folder he’d dropped on the table before I lost my nerve. I walked over to the coffee maker, and the jar of pens and markers next to it. Quinn didn’t say anything, but I could feel him watching.
As carefully as possible, I began to draw the Moonset symbol in permanent marker on the file folder. First the circle, then outlining the crescent moon and coloring in the rest. Then the tentacles, one at the top, one at the bottom, and two on either side.
“There’s a warlock in Carrow Mill,” I said as calmly as I could, even though it felt like some kind of betrayal to confide in Quinn without checking in with the others. Jenna would be furious, of course, and Cole and Bailey could hold a grudge almost as long. “I thought he was stalking us with this symbol, but he’s been using it longer than that, hasn’t he?”
Quinn’s eyes locked on the drawing, but the rest of him was frozen.
“He’s been spreading this symbol around town, and somehow, you figured out it was a request. He wanted us brought here, and the Congress thought it made brilliant sense. You thought you could draw him out. So you brought us here, and you’ve been waiting for him to make his move.” I picked up the folder and waved it in his face. “Stop me when I’m wrong.”
“You’re not wrong,” he said. “But I’m not supposed to talk about that with you. My grandparents would have my head.” He considered that for a moment. “Maybe literally.”
“You’ve been putting us all in danger ever since we got here. It’s not like you’re with us every hour of every day—what if something happened? What if he came after us when we were out at the mall that day, or at school?”
“Do you really think we just brought you here and left you unsupervised?” Quinn asked, smirking a little. “Justin, there are more Witchers in the five miles surrounding Carrow Mill than almost anywhere else in the world right now. Not one, but two of the Great Covens have relocated here. My grandmother basically wrote the book on how to deal with warlocks. And
I’m no slouch, if I do say so myself.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that you’ve been using us. I’m not bait, Quinn. None of us are.
And it’s bullshit that you all get to decide otherwise.”
“I understand why you feel that way,” Quinn said carefully.
“Screw that,” I shouted. Now that I was really being honest, and saying all the things I’d been thinking for weeks, it was hard to rein it in. “Don’t placate me because you think it’s what I want to hear. It’s bad enough that they treat us like we’re tainted most of the time. But now they’re telling us that we’re expendable? That it’s cool if a warlock kills us in the line of fire?”
I expected Quinn to tell me to calm down, or to breathe. That’s what adults always said, when they wanted you to shut up. “Go on,” he said instead.
“God, Jenna’s right. You never had any intention of teaching us to defend ourselves, yet you’re throwing us into situations that could get us killed. First, you left us in Kentucky when you knew a wraith was coming—”
“That was Meghan’s call,” he interrupted, but I kept talking anyway.
“—and now you brought us here like you don’t even give a shit what happens to us.”
For as far back as I could remember, I’d been the one to play by the rules. Mal was the model kid—barely got into trouble and way too mature for his age, but I was the one who’d always followed the rules. I cleaned up after Jenna when I had to, but even before that I tried to keep everyone on the same path. The right path.
But what was the point? The Congress was never going to see us as anything other than what we were now: five mistakes that were occasionally useful in drawing out the Congress’s enemies.
“Was this even the first time?” I asked, somehow suddenly shocked. “Or are the places we end up less random than we thought? Do you make sure we go places where we can stir up your enemies?”
“I’m not the Congress,” Quinn said, in the same way he’d have said “I’m not your enemy.”
But I believed one as little as I would have believed the other.
“Your grandparents a r e the Congress,” I pointed out. Illana Bryer, the war hero of
Fallingbrook, and Robert Cooper of Eventide. There hadn’t been a more celebrated match in history. “And blood is thicker than water.”
Quinn leaned against the countertop. “There is a warlock in Carrow Mill,” he confirmed. “But you’re under a better guard than you seem to think.”
I crossed my arms in front of me. “If there are so many Witchers around, how is he still walking around? Why haven’t you caught him yet?”
“Because we can’t find him, obviously,” Quinn said, and the fact that he actually told me rather than left it unsaid caught me off guard. My irritation and anger faltered. “Whoever he is, he’s flying just enough under the radar that we can’t figure out what he’s doing or what he wants.”
“Except us.”
“Except you,” he agreed.
“But there’s only so many witches in town. It can’t be that hard to keep track of what they’re all doing.”
“You’d think that,” Quinn said, “but can you even say with certainty where Jenna is at any given moment? If a witch wants to disappear, they disappear. And people who know they’re being watched don’t tend to do things that are illegal.”
“He killed that man yesterday, didn’t he? The Harbinger?”
“Or the Maleficia did,” Quinn said. “Sometimes, they’re one in the same, and sometimes one acts independently of the other.”
“How is that possible?” I asked. Everything we were taught told us that Maleficia was a force —like the stuff that made a bomb a bomb. “I thought the warlock opened a conduit to the
Abyss, and the Maleficia came out and destroyed everything it came into contact with.”
“If only it was that easy,” Quinn muttered. “Maleficia wants to destroy—it’s like the base
desire for destruction. But how it gets expressed depends on the environment. It can adapt to cause the most damage it can, almost like a cancer.”
“So it’s not just a source of power?”
He hesitated. “Yes and no. Some people will tell you that magic is a living force—that’s why we can’t control who gets bound into a coven; because there’s something greater at work. But you can’t reason with magic. Maleficia is the same—it’s corrosive, but not exactly alive. Most of the time, it’s a symbiote. It latches onto a host, and it becomes as smart as that person is or isn’t.”
Most of the time. What was that supposed to mean? He was leaving something out. “But?” I said, prompting him to keep going.
“But that isn’t the sum total of what lives in the Abyss. Some people believe that the Abyss is just a cauldron, brewing up dark magic. There is that, but there’s also more. But we can only guess at what it’s really like. There are stories of creatures … things that live there. Things like the Princes.”
“Hell has Princes?” I sounded as skeptical as Jenna. It wasn’t that I was trying to mock him, but Quinn sounded so serious. The idea that there was some kind of infernal monarchy was crazy.
He sighed. “Children’s stories meant to keep bad kids in line. They say that if you travel down deep enough, you come to the court of the Princes of the Abyss.”
“And those are?”
Things in the house had suddenly gotten too quiet. It was like all the clocks had stopped ticking, the wind had died down, and the pipes and floorboards had gone deaf. Even my question was hushed.
“Once upon a time, there was a war between the forces of the Abyss and the forces of
Chaos. Demons and Faeries. Only the Faeries aren’t like the kind in any Disney movie. They fed on souls and wore the skin of humans like it was an accessory. When the Faeries lost, the
Abyss set a price—they would feed it a soul every seven years. If they failed, a Faerie would take its place.”
“And these souls become the Princes?”
“No,” he said softly. “Every so often, the Fae can’t pull themselves away from their pleasures, and they are taken.Drafted, you could say, against their will. And just like the Maleficia taints those who summon it, the Abyss tainted those Fae. Broke them and reshaped them into something different. We call them Abyssal Princes. No one knows how many there are, or what they want, but even one of them is the kind of monster that the world hasn’t seen in five or six hundred years, back when magic was plentiful. And Maleficia makes them even more powerful.
Because that’s what Maleficia is: power and destruction.”
“It’s a power that Moonset tapped into,” I said. “So why isn’t it destroying more?”
“Because … ” Then he stopped. “We’re not really sure,” Quinn admitted. “If the warlock wanted to just blow a hole in the side of the world, he could. That would make sense. After a while, that’s all they want anyway. But this one is different. All his attacks are small. Weak. It’s like he’s playing with us.”
I got the impression that he wasn’t supposed to be telling me all this. There was a difference between admitting the truth about the Congress’s plans, and then there was admitting the places where the Congress was weak.
A car door slammed outside. Jenna and the others were home, finally.
“I won’t ask you not to say anything,” Quinn said as he pushed himself off the counter. “But just be careful what you say. You are under guard, Justin. Whatever the actual intent was to bring you here, I can promise you that you’re safe.”
I wanted to believe him. I nodded, let him walk away as I waited at the table for the inevitable crowing that would come with Jenna’s arrival.
Safe. From what, I had to wonder. The warlock? Maybe. But was he really the biggest threat to us? What about the Congress? What would they do if it came down to a fight? Would they save us, or would they wait until the warlock was done and then swoop in to save the day?
Their track record spoke almost as loudly as Jenna’s did.
Nineteen
“Now is the time for sacrifice. There is blood in the water. And it isn’t ours.”
Sherrod Daggett
From a speech to his disciples
It wasn’t Jenna who came inside, though. Malcolm came in like the head of a parade. Cole was right behind him, and behind them were the boys from magic class, Kevin and Luca. It had barely been an hour since I’d seen them, but I was still caught off guard. Unfamiliar people in our house. We never invited people back to the house.
Luca. Seeing him and Malcolm in the same room was even more disorienting than seeing him at school. Mrs. Crawford had been right, they had the same look. The same eyes, the same hair color, but Luca was much shorter—only a little taller than Cole. My eyes flashed to Mal.
“You … he … ”
“Yeah, we figured that part out already,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder, but I saw the way his eyes skidded over Luca’s head. There was a strange pit in my stomach that lightened when I saw the stiff lines of Malcolm’s shoulders. Knowing he was tense and uncomfortable made me feel better. Part of me didn’t want to admit it, but knowing Mal had blood relatives freaked me out. We were only a family because we had no other options. Mal, who always had one foot out the door anyway, now had options. So to find out that the reunion wasn’t a thing of instant harmony relaxed me.
“They look like brothers,” Cole chimed in, ever helpful. “Even more than we do.”
“That’s because they’re actually related,” Kevin said, hands tucked into his jacket. It didn’t sound like he was trying to be mean, just stating a fact. Kevin seemed like kind of a dick, but at least he was really polite about it. “Sort of.”
“Whatever,” Luca said, scuffing his feet. “I don’t even know why we’re here.” He wouldn’t actually look at any of us, instead focusing his attention on the decorations sparsely spread around the room, as if they were absolutely more fascinating than any of the people. I eyed him, still mulling over what he’d said to me in the office.
“We wanted to see how you were doing,” Kevin said, turning towards me. “Everything got totally out of control in there. Even Maddy felt a little bad about it afterwards.”
Maddy felt bad? She hadn’t bothered to hide the fact that she didn’t like me very much.
“Really?”
Kevin’s lips quirked. “I said a little,” he admitted. “There’s a much bigger part that’s happy that she basically won the debate and proved you were a danger to the rest of us.”
“I thought you were going to deck me for a minute,” I admitted.
“I was,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, what Mrs. C did was messed up, and Maddy didn’t help matters any, but I thought you were going to hurt someone. You were all red-faced and spitting. You looked insane.”
“I wasn’t insane,” I said.
“You looked like it,” Kevin said. Luca made a noise of agreement. “And if it came down to defending the crazy guy or the people I’ve known all my life, well … you know how it was going to end.”
That I did.
“Maddy doesn’t know we’re here,” Luca put in quickly. “She’d probably be really pissed if she did.”
“I thought she was friends with Jenna,” Cole chimed in, hopping up on the kitchen counter.
“Jenna doesn’t have friends,” I said automatically.
Kevin smirked. “I was going to say the same thing about Maddy.”
“None of us have friends,” Cole said, pulling one of his knees up and resting his chin on it. Oh great, maudlin Cole. It didn’t happen very often, but when it did, Cole was even worse than normal. I glanced at Malcolm, but he was too busy ignoring Luca to pay attention to me.
“We move around a lot,” I explained.
“Well, yeah,” Kevin responded. “Makes a lot of sense. It can’t be easy to keep the Moonset kids under the radar, right? And now you’re here, and … ”
“
… and there’s a warlock already here looking for us,” I interrupted. Malcolm and Luca both stiffened, and again the resemblance was too strong to miss. “Do they tell you guys anything?”
Kevin shook his head. “Not much more than you, I bet. We get a lot of ‘Don’t do dark magic’
PSAs, though. And every time he attacks, we have a curfew for about a week after. Like after last night and then the drawing in the classroom today, they’re not taking any chances.”
“Not that it does any good,” Luca pointed out. “They can’t figure out what he’s doing.”
“What happened last night?” Mal asked, grabbing an apple out of the bowl.
Kevin shrugged, looking to me.
I sighed. “The guy we saw in the diner? The crazy one? He killed himself last night. They think the warlock might have had something to do with it.” There hadn’t been any time to talk to Mal and catch him up with what had happened since yesterday. Suddenly, the tension in his shoulders wasn’t just about his cousin being in my house.
It was hard enough trying to keep everything straight, but harder still to remember what I’d told him or what I’d told Jenna. I’d become too good at holding things back, and every tiny oversight was a huge drama.
“Don’t worry,” Cole said, correctly interpreting the sudden shift in tension, “Justin doesn’t tell me anything, either. He doesn’t tell anyone.”
“Cole,” Mal said, his voice a warning.
“What? It’s true. Everyone lies to us lately.”
“That’s enough!” Mal snapped.
“How long are you out for?” Kevin asked, trying to steer the conversation back to something less personal.
“A few days.” I grabbed one of the apples, too, but instead of devouring it the way Mal was, I tossed it nervously back and forth between my hands. Just to give them something to do. Cole huffed and hopped down off the counter. He crossed the room and headed into the hallway, Luca following after a few moments later.