Moonset - Scott Tracey

Cole to a stop with me. Jenna had her head cocked to the side, and she was still. So very still.

But she was right. There was something. A hissing. Faint.

“What is that?” she asked, lowering her voice. Cole’s nose was wrinkled up, but he stayed between us.

“Stop stalling,” Virago said briskly, turning to glare us down again.

It sounded familiar, like the hiss a of a snake, only softer—but I just couldn’t place it. The hall had grown still around us, without even the sounds of the riot leaking in. Like we were the only six people for miles.

The sound was getting louder, or rather it was coming from several directions at once now.

“Gas leak?” I asked.

Jenna considered that, then shook her head. “I swear I’ve heard that somewhere before.”

“When you said there was stuff coming,” Cole piped up suddenly, turning back to Quinn. “Did you mean someone? Or some thing?”

Quinn hesitated just long enough for Cole’s eyes to whiten all around.

Miss Virago snapped. “Enough of this! This day is enough of an embarrassment already.”

“Jamie Sim told me that there’s monsters who hide in mirrors and glass, and if you look at them, they can steal your thoughts,” Cole fretted. “And the ones that look like dead wood, who can make your life just puddle out of you like blood. And the ones—”

“Relax,” Quinn said, even as Jenna ruffled Cole’s hair. “You’ve got an armed escort, remember?”

Quinn, maybe. But the redheaded Virago looked like she’d push us in front of any incoming threat just to be rid of us. Again, not something we’re unfamiliar with.

The hissing got a little louder, broken up by tiny tinkling noises. Something struck my shoe and I looked down, only to follow it back towards the source.

“Jenna,” I said quietly, “look at the walls.”

The entire front half of the building was built out of brick, the original school from sometime back in the forties. That’s where the hissing sound was coming from. More accurately, from the bricks themselves.

Jenna’s forehead knitted up in confusion and she took a step forward. “What … ?”

The mortar between the bricks was crumbling down into sand, spilling out from between the stones like a broken hourglass. In places, larger chunks were breaking free, no bigger than pebbles, and bouncing off the tiled floor where they struck.

Something swept over me, a feeling, or a warning, and I grabbed Cole and pulled him closer.

“Honestly, there’s nothing to be scared of,” Miss Virago said, her mouth barely able to express such an incredible amount of contempt. “You’re all being ridiculous.”

The front of the school exploded inward, just to prove her wrong.

Bricks were falling. Bricks and … something else cracking and splattering against the tile floor.

Crack. Whoomf. Crack. Crack. Whoomf. I opened my eyes, choking back a cough. The dust was already passing, swept away by a rapid surge of rancid air from outside.

There was a hole in the school. The long wall of brick was exposed like a renovation gone wrong, jagged spots where stones had simply fallen away, and others where they were snapped in half. A few bricks littered the ground, but most had smashed apart like snowballs, a pile of terra cotta ash the only evidence of what they’d been.

I pulled myself up on hands and knees, and crawled the short distance to Jenna and Cole.

We’d been thrown back by the blast, but except for a few moments of disorientation, I was fine. Jenna and Cole were already starting to stir as well, but there was a nasty gash on Cole’s jaw, and his face was paler than normal.

The principal and his escort weren’t so lucky. They caught almost the full force of the blast, having been much closer than we were. Both of them were slumped and still on the far side of the hole.

“Justin,” Jenna said in a warning.

I looked up, and that’s when I saw it. The creature that had caused the explosion.

The thing that climbed into the school—and it was clearly inhuman—moved with unnatural grace. No matter where it stepped, on sharp edges or exposed wiring, its balance was never threatened. It crept through the wreckage, moving like a spider. Erratic and quick, skittering like this was just a game. It was tall, gaunt, wrapped in strips of cloth and weighted down by dozens of chains wrapping from wrist to torso and neck to ankle.

“What is that?” Cole asked, his voice rising into a high-pitched squeak.

The thing looked at him, exposed a mouth of black, crumbling teeth, and smiled.

The chains should have made it obvious. The way its flesh was rotted and rictus and wrong should have made it obvious. A pallor like spoiled milk, creaking bones, and the chains. Chains that rattled and vibrated so loud my jaw started to hurt, and all other sounds were drowned out underneath it.

The thing was a wraith. And we were so incredibly fucked.

Wraiths were ghosts in need of anger management. Their deaths had twisted them, sharpened them into predators, and they were so consumed by memories of the living that they would ravage anything, kill anyone, in order to claw their way back. Though they all had a certain anorexic zombie quality to them, the last thing they were was frail.

Case in point: the gaping hole where the front of the school had been.

Quinn was already on his feet. “Pyr toom,” he snapped, holding his hand out. The air above his palm caught fire, collected and writhed against the sides.

“Siths torak,” the creature hissed. It had a voice like bones breaking, full of crackles and sibilant like a tire leaking air. The spell—and it had to be a spell—swept forward, the air rippling as a sudden displacement of heat blew out the fireball like a birthday candle.

At its core, magic was a language. Spells were verbal, the right combination of consonants and vowels could summon up a projectile of fire, but just as easily extinguish it. But magic had a cadence and common tonal qualities to it—even if you only knew a few spells, you could recognize the language being spoken.

The clicks and dips in the spell the wraith used were something foreign, like a dialect I’d never heard before.

Virago had taken the hardest hit, slumped over against one of the walls, but even she was managing to get back onto her feet.

“Lex divok,” Quinn spat, thrusting his open palm forward. The creature went flying back suddenly, hit by a wave of invisible force. It tumbled head over foot, an animated skeleton trying to somersault. Every time one of the chains slapped against the tile, I winced, feeling the vibration of it tearing through my skin.

The moment the creature landed, sprawled in a broken heap of limbs and iron at the farthest end of the hall, Quinn looked up to the ceiling. “Lexic vok,” he shouted, bringing his fist down.

The ceiling, the walls, all of it came tumbling down in a shuddering mass above the wraith, drowning it underneath a tonnage of bricks, stone, and at least fifty years of accumulated dirt.

The collapse lasted for at least a minute before it started to die off. Unlike the wraith’s explosion, Quinn’s was perfectly controlled, a circular hole that was both sharp and precise.

“Still happy you sat around doing nothing?” Quinn demanded, helping Virago to her feet.

“Orders were orders,” she muttered, a tangle of hair in her face.

“We have to get them out of here, now,” Quinn said. “Can you walk?”

“I—I think so,” she said, pulling away from him to test her balance.

“Go,” he said. “Chris and I can hold it off.”

From the far end of the hall, a reverberating crunch interrupted. The wraith was already vertical, standing above a pair of dark-shaped lumps that I didn’t recognize at first.

“Oh, God,” Jenna whispered.

The creature’s hand was a canvas of red, and something crimson and splintered dropped from his grip. The principal, now missing his esophagus, which lay about a foot and a half to his right, stared at the ceiling unblinking. The man in a suit—Chris—was just as much of a bloody mess, though he was still gurgling. Until he, too, shuddered and stopped.

A black tongue licked at decayed lips as the wraith looked at the five of us. “Moonset,” the thing whispered, fighting a smile. “Mine.”

The sound of the chains, which were now moving on their own like prehensile limbs, drowned out anything else the wraith whispered.

I saw Quinn’s mouth move, felt the spell shudder into existence around him, but there was nothing but the chains. Hideous ringing, clanging sounds a thousand times more intense than they should have been. The sound was worse now, piercing through me, and at my side I saw

Cole and Jenna struggling, too.

Cole was the first to drop, falling to his knees with hands pressed against his ears. His face flushed as he screamed, howled, but I couldn’t hear it. Jenna dropped next, and then me, until the three of us were huddled together. Jenna and I grabbed Cole, shielding him as best we could and trying to help cover his ears with one of our own.

“Vex dunn,” I shouted. “Vexic dunn. Vexa dunn.” I screamed out every variation of the only muffling spell that I knew, but though the magic ignited around me, the chains penetrated through.

There was movement—lots of it—around us, but it was everything we could do to stay together. I felt, rather than heard, Jenna continuing to shout spells into existence, but nothing did any good.

My muscles screamed, and I tried to shift only to find they wouldn’t respond. It was like being hit with a stun gun, my body was no longer my own, tucked and frozen in place like an abandoned marionette.

They’re going to die. And it’s all my fault. Keeping Cole and the others safe was my job, my only job. And I’d failed. I should have done something, should have been smarter, or stronger.

I’m sorry, I mouthed.

The silence was so sudden it hurt. Agony replaced by an empty void so vast I thought it might drive me mad. A pounding sound that resolved itself into my heartbeat, a rattle that became my breath.

Quinn towered above the three of us, a little bloodier for the trouble, and had a knife in his hands.

The echo of what he’d done still hung in the air, creating a poster bed-sized space of safety where sound was normal and even.

“Keep them safe,” Quinn shouted at the redhead before he started his advance on the wraith.

The wraith held out his hand, whispered a word, and a wave of gray rushed out from him. It caught up to Quinn and Virago before either of them could deflect or cast a counterspell, and I couldn’t help but watch in terror. They were all that was standing between us and the wraith.

Quinn aged in seconds, his body shifting, changing, stooping forty years in less time than it took me to realize what I was seeing. His skin became sallow, his posture hunched, his hair went platinum, then full on white, then wisps. Pock marks and liver spots lined his skin. Virago had her back to us, but I could see the color draining from her hair until it was a sterling silver.