Moonset - Scott Tracey

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.”