Moonset - Scott Tracey

Mill than with us.”

“I heard you on the phone earlier.”

If I thought my announcement would disrupt the flurry of chopping going on in the kitchen, I was mistaken. Quinn had a variety of vegetables spread out in front of him, and an oversized kitchen knife in his hand. I kept a healthy distance, even though I was pretty sure he could still kill me at a distance.

“I’m not new at this,” Quinn responded after a moment, his movements continuing to be precise and even. “I know when someone walks into the house.”

That caught me off guard a little. I expected him to lie, to deny it. “You knew I was there?”

Quinn didn’t reply. He moved to the next pile, a pile of green peppers. With one hand on the handle and the other on the dull end of the blade, he rocked his arms back and forth, dicing through them confidently.

“If you knew, then why were you saying all that stuff? Why didn’t you just tell us what’s going on?”

It was like talking to a brick wall. Quinn continued slicing and dicing, and with every thwack against the cutting board, I got more and more angry.

“Do you think this is funny? What’s going on, Quinn? Why are we really here? What aren’t you guys telling us? I know it’s got to be something big.”

“I’ve seen a wraith before. I probably wasn’t much older than you,” he looked up, waving the knife in my direction for a moment before he went back to what he was doing. “Took two full covens to take it down. Wraiths are nasty creatures. You can’t kill something that’s already dead.”

What the hell was with story time? “What’s your point?”

“That wraith was nothing. I was nearly a match for it all by my lonesome,” he said, without any hint of arrogance. Just another fact. “What’d it do? Destroy a few walls? Knock us around a bit?”

“Killed two people,” I pointed out.

“Two,” Quinn agreed. “Not two hundred. It destroyed a building, not a village. Wraiths can control the dead, summon up an army of spirits, and kill you just as soon as breathe on you.

This one didn’t. It was only interested in one thing.”

“Collecting us. We know this already.”

“Collecting you. But did you ever think about the big picture? How did the wraith know where to find you? How did it know when, exactly, it should strike? There were a dozen Witchers in town that day, and all but three of them were busy trying to clean up your messes. There wasn’t a better time to move.”

I tried to see what he was saying, putting the pieces together in my head. “Someone told?” I knew we weren’t the most popular kids in the world, but the idea that someone would turn us in like that? For as much as the Congress acted like we were this huge burden, they were always protecting us, keeping us safe. If that wasn’t the case anymore, then what were we supposed to do? If there was a mole in the Congress, and they were feeding information to Cullen

Bridger, then how would we be safe anywhere?

“Someone told,” he confirmed. “And now there are more eyes on you. Some concerned, some afraid. But all of them are going to want something from you. Do you know what kind of weapon you could be, Justin? A warlock like Bridger could bring you along and use you like a shield, and everything in his path would be decimated. The same goes for any of you. Even the members of the Congress that fear you recognize that.”

“But why are we here? You made it sound like there was something more specific than a mole, or the fact that we can be weaponized.”

Quinn swore suddenly, and the brisk-necked chopping came to a stop as he dropped the knife. A thick line of red ran along the pad of his thumb. The knife clattered towards the edge of the counter and dropped to the ground just as Quinn jumped back a step, narrowly missing toe damage as well.

“Are you okay?” A lifetime of bandaging wounds kicked into gear as I went to the sink and grabbed a handful of paper towels and a wet cloth. I handed him a stack of towels and used the rest to wipe off the counter while he cleaned himself. Then, after handing him the wet cloth to hold over the cut, I went looking for everything else I’d need.

It took awhile to find what I was looking for—the cleaning supplies were in the basement, for some reason, and the bandages in a first-aid kit under the bathroom sink.

I handed him one while I used the other on the counter. We didn’t speak until the only traces of red left were the diced tomatoes. “You have people watching out for you,” Quinn finally interjected. “I know it may not always seem like that, but there are. You’re in good hands.”

I scrubbed even harder at the counter, wondering if the finish would last. I didn’t respond until

I was done, and the damp paper towels were in the garbage. “Is he going to be coming after us again? Do we need to be on our guard?”

The smile on Quinn’s face didn’t cross into his eyes. “You should always be on your guard, Justin.”

I started putting everything away, then looked at the bottle in one hand, and the box in the other. It was disturbing how many of my nights ended in bandages and bleach.

Nine

“I knew they were trouble from the very first day. None of that ‘they were quiet children; good children’ namby-pamby nonsense.

Those kids were spoiled, powerful, and reckless. Someone shoulda seen Moonset coming a mile away. But people are idiots.”

Jack Wyatt (S)

Carrow Mill, New York:

From Moonset: A Dark Legacy

“I saw something the other day when I went to the gym,” Mal said a few days later. I was waiting in his kitchen for the coffee to brew when he dropped this little bomb on me. “The kind of thing you were talking about, remember?”

The problem with the coffee maker at home was that it hated me. Every time I tried to use it, the thing grunted and hissed at me like it was some kind of demonic creature. Possessed, no doubt. But Mal had no trouble with his, and so nearly every morning I made the frigid walk across the street for coffee.

I did my best imitation of a Mal morning grunt, one that said, “Really, I’m fascinated. Please, tell me more, and take as long as you need. Use big words.”

He chuckled quietly, then looked pointedly at the T- shirt I’d come over in. “Go grab a jacket or something. We can stop and get coffee after.”

Well, he did use the magic word. I went upstairs, grabbing one of the hooded sweaters that was fitted on Mal, but loose and roomy on me. I didn’t need a jacket to run across the street, and none of us ever really locked the door, so there was never any fear of getting stuck outside. Until Mal decided on a field trip.

I figured wherever we were going would be near either the gym or the coffee shop, since those were the only two places that Mal went with any regularity. “One of the guys at the gym was talking the other day, telling me about this house,” Mal confided as we got into the car. He was behind the wheel, of course, because he was the only one that the adults trusted to drive, and because I was still barely conscious.

“What house?”

“Well, it’s not a house. It was some kind of city building. Like a rec center or something?

Anyway, there was a fire a few weeks ago.”

Mal started taking side streets at random, first zigging then zagging in a vaguely nauseating manner. I kept getting jostled around the passenger seat, and while it helped wake me up a bit more, it did nothing for my mood.

“And why do we care?”

“You’ll see,” he said, glancing at me from the other side of the car. “It’s hard to explain.”

A few blocks later, Mal pulled over to the side of the road. We weren’t that far from the downtown area—I could see the big clock tower that was Carrow Mill’s pride and joy in the distance. I had no idea where we were other than that, though. There were almost as many side streets as houses in this town, making it a veritable maze of suburbia.

“I was curious, so I went looking for it,” Mal continued as he got out. I did the same. “It’s one more creepy thing to add to this town’s résumé, though.”

The building had been gutted by fire, a white finish that in the best spots was now a sooty gray, but the entire second floor had been consumed by flames. It looked like a house, but it was more of a duplex or triplex.

It wasn’t just that there’d been a fire that had basically destroyed the house, though. I saw now why Mal was so interested in it. There was something in the air, a sense of foulness that made the house and everything around it seem a hundred degrees colder.

Mal crossed into the front yard, and I followed, feeling a pressure bearing down on me like we’d crossed an altitude threshold. My ears twinged, threatening to pop at any second.

But there was more. Mal vaulted up the porch steps, stopping at the center unit’s front door.

“I know I’ve seen this before somewhere,” he said. “Do you know what it is?”

There was fire and smoke damage everywhere I looked, but the burns on the door were … different. There was a pattern in the char. It looked like there had been two fires. The one that had swept over the entire building, and caused serious damage to the door, and one even older than that, one that had gouged a pattern into the wood.

At first I couldn’t see it for what it was, but after a moment it snapped together, like eyesight suddenly going from blurry to clear. There was a circle, almost completely shaded in, and waves trailing off of the side, like when Cole was really young and drew his suns with wavy rays instead of straight and all his teachers kept trying to correct him.

It did kind of look like a strange sun, but the rays coming out from the sides were more like tentacles, writhing away from the center. The entire image was scarred deep into the wood, except for the sliver at the center that still hadn’t been touched. Originally, the front door had been painted white, and there was a strip that still gleamed against the darkness next to it—a strip that was shaped like a crescent moon.

I reached out and brushed my fingers against it. The wood was still hot, burning against my fingers. As the feelings of heat and damp registered in my brain, my eyes saw the impossible.

The tentacle moved. It strained forward, shifting clockwise as if it could somehow break free.

The wood was still hot, burning, against my fingers. “What the hell!” I snatched my hand away, backing up several feet. “Did you see that?”

I understood what Mal was talking about now. There was a weird vibe to the building. Almost like déjà vu. But this was something else. There was a memory of words in my head, a memory that I was sure hadn’t been there before. A voice, broken and tattered, that was pressed against the side of my mind from the outside. Like a stamp, or a scar.

“We only need one. ”

“You heard it, right?” Mal wasn’t looking at the door at all, in fact he had his back to it entirely.