Moonset - Scott Tracey

I couldn’t breathe.

“Relax,” Quinn said soothingly, hands raised like a white flag. “It’s not like that.” There was something in his dark eyes I didn’t like, though. Speculation. Awareness. “No one’s spying on you. That’s not it at all.”

“Then what is it?” Panic was making me reckless, speaking and acting without thinking. “Why are you showing this to me?”

“Just because I can’t teach you to fight,” he said, “doesn’t mean I can’t show you how to keep yourselves safe.”

“How is spying going to keep me safe?”

“Haven’t you ever heard the expression ‘work smarter, not harder?’” Quinn dropped the knife, and the phosphorescent image of the spell started to fade. “You may not know as much as you could, and you definitely don’t know everything you should. But like it or not, the five of you are a coven, and you’re stronger together.”

“What are you talking about?” Quinn wasn’t even making sense anymore. How did a spying spell have anything to do with what we did or didn’t know?

He raised the athame again, and, quicker this time, slashed three symbols into the air. None were exactly the same, they were reversed, and the middle one was more elevated. Geonous was the only one that was still identical, while cor was more elaborate this time. But all three featured sharp, block-like lines at their edges, creating something like a border at the edges of the spell.

This isn’t another projection spell, I realized. It’s a ward. Finally, I started to understand. I crept closer to the spell as it shifted from blue to white, trying to memorize the flow of the lines.

My hand itched, wanting to trace my own version of the spell and see it flare into existence.

“No one’s spying on us,” I said slowly. “But they could. Or they’re going to start.” Quinn wasn’t showing me how to spy on someone else; he was trying to show me how to protect ourselves. How to keep other Witchers, or maybe even the Congress, from taking even our small semblances of privacy away from us.

“That’s crazy talk,” Quinn replied, but his flat tone suggested otherwise. “Either way, this was just a hypothetical situation, and it’s moot anyway. You don’t have your own athame.”

I tried not to smile. “Lucky you have some spares.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He dropped his hand again and the spell disappeared. “I’ve got some work to finish, so I’m going to put this away.” He hefted the athame. “I can’t tell you where the spares are hidden, but stay out of the hope chest in my room, all right?”

My forehead knitted up in confusion. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“I’m not telling you anything. I’m certainly not violating about a dozen specific warnings and straddling a couple of laws concerning treason. Teaching you spells that haven’t been approved and arming you with an athame—if something happened, it would be political suicide.”

He left the room, and this time I didn’t follow. I couldn’t get a read on Quinn. Half the time he seemed like he wanted to help, and the rest of the time he seemed like he was only making the situation worse. But if he was telling the truth, and it was illegal to be helping us, then why had he done it?

I thought of the spellbook in the garage and felt even worse. I have to get rid of it, I decided suddenly. As soon as he leaves the next time, I’ll take it and throw it in a fireplace or a trash can or something.

The air still felt warm where Quinn’s spell hung. I stayed close to it, trying to ward off the chill.

I changed my mind. Quinn was such an asshole.

Just before dinner, he came downstairs with a trio of very old, very dusty books.

“Tomorrow’s project—I want a thousand-word essay on the Coven Wars at the turn of the last century and how that impacted modern coven policies.”

“You’re kidding.” I stared at him, and the books he dropped down onto the table, with nothing short of shock. I sneezed, then kept on sneezing. Homework … while I was home? This was absurd.

“Definitely not kidding,” he said.

“I don’t even know anything about the Coven Wars,” I argued, already knowing how this was going to end.

He flashed a smile. “Lucky for you I’ve got all these books. They’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

“What is it you expect me to write about?”

“There’s a wealth of information,” Quinn said. “Talk about how women weren’t allowed to lead a coven for two hundred years. How magical law grew around the coven bond and took it into consideration. How due process was affected by coven-on-coven violence. The Coven

Wars are a fascinating part of our history.”

I looked at just how much history was dusted over the covers of the books. “Obviously.”

Quinn left the room as Jenna appeared, looking from the stack of books to the pasta I was cooking on the stove. “How’s it feel to be incarcerated at such a young age?” she asked.

“Thinking about getting a prison tat? Maybe a butterfly on your shoulder?”

“You’re enjoying this way too much,” I said, for about the thousandth time.

“You could put flames around it,” she grinned. “Make it look a little more badass.”

“I think that’s too much detail for a prison tattoo.”

Jenna shrugged. “Sure, ruin my fun. What are you cooking?”

“Spaghetti and meat sauce.” I pointed to the package of ground beef on the counter.

She squinted. “Shouldn’t you have cooked that first? Noodles will be done before it.”

I grunted. Cooking was hard. And annoying. But Quinn was the proactive sort, and he kept insisting on teaching us how to cook. Neither Jenna or I had any right to be in the kitchen. I was just lucky that I hadn’t caught the pot of water on fire.

“Saw your girlfriend today,” Jenna added a few minutes later, when I was stirring the meat waiting for it to cook.

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” I said automatically.

Jenna shrugged. “Fine. Then I saw the pretentious little rich bitch who’s not good enough for my brother today.” She didn’t miss a beat.

Curiosity won out over playing it cool. Jenna already knew what I thought about Ash.

Pretending otherwise was pointless. “Where was that?”

“She went into that shop with all the weird stuff. You know, across from the coffee shop? It has costume jewelry hanging in the window.” She tinged the word with an appropriate amount of disgust.

“So maybe she was looking for something retro.” Ash had gone to the curio shop? Why?

I looked away, knowing full well Jenna would be turning her glare on me any moment.

“Besides,” I added, “you don’t even know her well enough to say that she’s got money.”

“I know I don’t trust her.”

“You don’t trust anyone,” I countered. “That’s not saying much.”

“That’s why I’m never disappointed,” she replied in satisfaction. At this point, we both knew the conversation would just start going in circles, with Jenna inevitably claiming victory. I’d point out that she was always disappointed about something; she would counter that she was never disappointed in people, unlike the rest of us who kept getting hurt.

After dinner, I took Quinn’s homework up to my room and tried to start making headway on tomorrow’s project. I wasn’t even a chapter in before the technical jargon started, and I had to read each page three times before it started to make sense. Falling asleep was a relief.

I didn’t remember dreaming, but I remembered a lot of thrashing. When I woke up, the covers had come off the bed, and I was all tangled in them. And I was abnormally hot—I could feel the dampness of sweat all over my body, soaking into the sheets.

“You remember this?” Jenna leaned against my dresser, barely visible against the dark. I squinted, trying to figure out what she was talking about. Night had started to fall sometime while I slept. The only thing I kept on my dresser was a picture of the five of us that we’d taken the summer before. It had been tucked up into the side of the mirror, but now it was in her hands.

We’d been in a resort town, the kind that was mostly invisible from fall to spring. Cole had found a shopping cart about two miles from any stores that even had shopping carts. Mal and I had picked him up and stuffed him in the basket. For some reason, we all crowded around and took a picture, laughing around Cole’s flailing indignation.

It was the closest thing to a vacation we’d ever had. Cole had to go to summer school that year after skipping two straight months of English. The rest of us had walked around on eggshells the whole time—he thought every comment was about him. There could have been a book written about it. Summer of My Emo Brother.

“Yeah,” I said, my throat feeling raw, like I’d been screaming.

“I tried talking to Cole today,” she said.

“How’d that go?” The inside of my mouth tasted funny. Like gravel and something sour.

“Not so good. He blew me off.” I saw the flash of pain, but I don’t think Jenna realized she’d let it show. She could be heartless and relentless, but she could be hurt just like the rest of us.

“Has he talked to you lately?”

“Should he?”

Jenna squirmed. “It’s just … he’s been acting weird lately. Funny, y’know? But he won’t talk to me about it. And he talks about everything. ” She was pointedly quiet for a few seconds before she switched gears. “C’mon,” she said, holding out her hand to me. “Something’s going on.”

I took her hand, confused, as she helped me up and out of bed. “What kind of something?” I followed her out of my room and down the stairs.

“Not sure. But Quinn just got a call and flew out the front door. Told me not to leave the house, that it was life or death.”

“Was there another attack?” I was having a hard time pulling myself out of the sleep fog I’d been in. There was something I was missing. Something with teeth.

My stomach sank and I didn’t know why. Jenna went to the front door, peering out one of the windows on either side of it. The porch lights were on at Mal’s house, and at Bailey and Cole’s.

Farther down the street, standing in the street itself and positioned perfectly under one of the streetlights, Quinn and the other two guardians were huddled together. Mal’s guardian Nick, and Kelly, the sorority guardian.

All three of them were clutching their athames, prepared to use them at a moment’s notice. A car turned onto our street and slowed as it approached the trio. Nick opened the driver’s door and Meghan stepped out.

“What’s she doing here?” I don’t know why I was whispering.

Jenna looked at me, an eyebrow raised. “If we knew we wouldn’t be spying, would we?”

Nick was getting in the car now, and he closed the door once he was behind the wheel. Then, like nothing had happened, he continued driving, turning towards down-town.