Moonset - Scott Tracey

That was all it took to make Cole start laughing. “Oh yeah!”

Mal glowered, but that was to be expected. A couple of years ago, boredom had set in and

Cole and I came up with a plan. We’d found a stuffed bear that had been left in our hotel room.

We waited until Malcolm fell asleep, and tucked it in the crook of his arm. For an hour we’d mess with him, until he shifted position. Each time snapping a photograph of him with the bear.

Once someone finally told, he’d tried deleting all the pictures. Cole, being the genius he was, had sent copies to his email account. He’d promised to delete them, but he never did. Jenna had too much influence on Cole, and she knew good blackmail when she saw it.

“Cole, if those pictures turn up as posters in the girls’ restrooms again, I’m going to staple you to the ceiling,” Mal threatened, pointing his finger in the much smaller boy’s face. “I’m serious.”

I almost pointed out that the posters hadn’t been nearly as bad as the Facebook group that one of them had started. We never ended up at a school with more than a thousand kids, but after the first week the group had almost five times that many followers. Another week and that number had almost tripled, but by that time Mal found out the password and shut it down.

Now Cole was nearly bent over, he was laughing so hard. “I can’t make any promises,” he said, and then yelped, as Mal lunged for him.

“In only a pair of tighty-whiteys,” Mal added as he started chasing after him.

The horseplay continued on for a few minutes in the yard as Mal went after someone half his size and twice as agile. To Cole’s detriment, though, was the fact that he kept slipping and sliding every time he hit one of the ice patches on the concrete. Malcolm just plowed forward like some sort of unstoppable monster.

“Maybe the one where you suck your thumb?” Cole giggled, dodging under Mal’s arm and running for the backyard.

Not a minute later, Cole came sailing around from the other side of the house, but Mal’s pursuit had stopped being so intense. “Screw this,” he said, coming to a stop. “If I’m going to work up a sweat, I might as well go to the gym.”

He looked at us expectantly, and Cole and I both immediately dropped our heads. “Is Quinn calling me?” I wondered, moving for the front door.

“Yeah, I think he is,” Cole said from just behind me.

Mal snorted, but didn’t push it.

We walked through the front door to hear raised voices. I instinctively wrapped my hand around Cole’s mouth. His first instinct to being told “be quiet!” was to talk all about how quiet he would be.

“… of course they don’t know anything,” Quinn was saying from the kitchen. I left the front door cracked open and eased the two of us into the stairwell, out of his line of sight if he should cross to the hall.

“And I told you that was a mistake,” Quinn continued a moment later. There were no other voices, so he must be on the phone. What was a mistake?

“They don’t know why they’re here yet,” he continued. “But they’re not stupid. They’ll figure it out. Then what are you going to do?” He waited only a moment, but when he spoke again, his voice had changed. “Are you sure?”

Cole was squirming against my arm, looking up at me. I held my finger over my lips, then nodded back towards the front door. Just before we slipped back outside, I heard one last comment.

“No, of course I don’t believe the rumors. But Jenna’s right. They deserve to protect themselves, especially since we’re not.”

Once we got outside, I let go of Cole so that I could carefully ease the door closed again. My heart was pounding. On some level, I think all of us knew that after Byron, things were different. In our own ways, we were all on edge.

But to hear it confirmed like that, to hear things I didn’t understand stated so casually. It just reaffirmed that we couldn’t trust the adults. Any of them.

“C’mon,” I said, before Cole could start in on his thousand questions. “I think we all need to have a talk.”

Eight

“Brandon was always the trickster. They turned the school into their playground: a continuous back and forth war of trickery and pranks.

All the boys participated, of course. And even

Diana, when a good humor struck her.”

Elizabeth Holden-Carmichael

Carrow Mill, New York:

From a written account about Moonset’s development

“What do you think he meant?” Cole asked as we bounded up the stairs. There’d been no sign of Kelly, Cole’s guardian, when we walked in, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t lingering around somewhere.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think another wraith’s going to come after us?”

“I don’t know.” The house was a mirror image of ours, I realized. Instead of the hallway going right, it went left.

“Do you think we’ll have to blow it up with another curse bomb?”

“I don’t know, Cole!” Snapping at him didn’t help anything, but there were already too many questions bubbling up in my head. “Which one’s Bailey’s?” I asked, nodding to the bedroom doors, all of which were closed.

“This one,” Cole said, knocking on the door right next to us.

“Come in,” Bailey called out from inside.

I let Cole go in first, and then I followed, shutting the door behind me. Bailey was on her bed, leaning against the wall with her feet tucked underneath her. Jenna, on the other hand, sat in the window seat, body flush against the glass. She favored us with a momentary look of irritation before she went back to her cloud gazing.

“We have a problem,” I said quietly.

There were only two years that separated Jenna and I from Cole and Bailey, but those two years were the difference between childhood and adult. Mal was older than us, and by unspoken agreement the three of us looked after the other two like they were our kids. We let them be kids, even though we didn’t have the luxury ourselves.

So in a situation like this, normally I wouldn’t go to all of them at once. The three of us would discuss it (or Mal and I would discuss it first before bringing in Jenna) before we told them.

When we were younger, and we didn’t know who Moonset was or what terrorism meant, we’d tried to keep the truth from Bailey and Cole almost as soon as we found out. But the problem with being infamous is that if we didn’t tell them, someone else would.

And did.

“Text Mal,” I said, looking to Bailey, the only one with her phone out. “Ask him to grab me a sports drink on his way back.”

Bailey’s eyebrows lifted, but she did as she was told.

Cole sat at Bailey’s desk, and I stood by the door. By unspoken agreement, none of us said a word. Less than five minutes went by before Mal’s heavy footsteps thudded up the stairs. I opened the door for him, and closed it again after he passed through.

The lock hadn’t even engaged when Jenna started whispering spells under her breath. Of the five of us, she had the best memory, and the litany of muffling spells rolled off her tongue. It didn’t escape my attention that the last time we’d used these spells, we’d been under attack.

And now, it seemed like we were again.

“Grab me a sports drink” was code. Utterly innocent, it had been Cole’s idea. In the event that we needed to get together, but we didn’t want to raise suspicion, we would ask the others to pick up a sports drink. Cole liked all those spy movies about double agents and infiltrations.

Maybe it wasn’t much of a surprise that he thought of something so paranoid.

“What’s wrong?” Mal asked, kicking off his shoes and sitting next to Bailey on the bed. Either he was too tall, or her bed was too short, because his legs hung off the end.

Once Jenna gave me the nod that she was finished, I repeated what I knew. Cole tried to jump in a few times to embellish—“And then he got all snarly talking about how we deserved it!”—before I got through the whole, brief piece.

“That’s it?” Mal asked, once I dropped my hands.

“That’s it,” I confirmed. “But if there’s a specific reason why we’re here, we should probably know what it is, right? Especially if it’s going to be dangerous for us.”

“Maybe they’re not thrilled with security?” Jenna mused. “The wraith found us somehow.

Could be that they’ll find us again just as easily. It’s not like people make any real effort to hide us. Social media’s a bitch.”

“That’s why we’re supposed to fly under the radar,” Mal said tightly. “Stay away from things that are going to draw a lot of unwanted attention.”

On a certain level, no one made much of an effort to conceal us. In every town we moved to, all the witches knew who we were. Our names never changed, and the fact that there were five of us moving together was always a rather obvious sign.

But the truth was that magic had a lot to do with it. I didn’t know the particulars—none of us did—but there were wards and bindings in place to keep us hidden. The spells weren’t on us because no one knew if that kind of magic would stir up the curse or not. It targeted the attempts to find us. When someone set out to look for the children of Moonset, they triggered the spells, which worked like viruses. Information was corrupted, spells were deflected to the wrong hemisphere. So far, until Kentucky, no one had ever managed to find us.

The truth was that we’d never had to worry about it before. But now we did. I did. “They brought us here for a reason, and it’s not just to give us a place to start over. And then that guy that Mal and I saw at the diner, the crazy one?”

“The Harbinger,” Mal nodded.

“So what are you thinking?” Jenna asked. She didn’t look like she was taking any of this very seriously, her attention more on her nails than any of us, but that was just the way she was.

“We figure out what’s really going on. Why they brought us here. What they want.”

Cole scribbled on a piece of paper, having been still for too long. “Why don’t we just ask him?”

“He’d just lie to us,” Jenna responded with a snort. “And then he’d know that we know.”

“Are you sure we can’t trust them?” Bailey asked, with a weary attempt at hope. We all knew that there were only a small number of people we could trust, and they were in this room right now. Adults lied. Adults held grudges. They held you back and treated you like garbage, and taught other people to treat you like garbage.

“Quinn said he agreed that we should be able to defend ourselves,” I admitted, “but it didn’t sound like who he was talking to did. I think it’s stupid if we don’t confront him, though. He seems at least a little sympathetic.”

“I agree,” Jenna said casually. “And I think Justin’s the person for the job.”

Four sets of eyes turned on me.

Well, eff. “Fine, I’ll go,” I said, succumbing to peer pressure. “But we still need to keep an eye out. There’s a reason why they brought us here, and I think it has more to do with Carrow