Scott Tracey - Moonset

“Don’t be like that,” Ash said with a smirk, “you know I still love you best.”

“Whatever,” the brunette sniffed. “We’re going to lunch. Are you coming?”

Ash looked up at me, her auburn hair gleaming in the sunlight. “Sorry,” she said to me. “I have plans with my friends.”

“It’s fine,” I said casually. You should ask for her number. Or give her yours. I could feel her friend’s stare even through her sunglasses, and it was putting me on edge. Just ask for her number; otherwise Mal’s never going to let you hear the end of it.

“C’mon, we’re leaving.” Maddy had already started moving away, phone in one hand. She looked at me one last time, cool and contemptuous.

“So wait,” I said. She turned and looked up at me expectantly. “I … uhm.” How in the hell were you supposed to ask a girl for her number? Without looking like a tool.

Ash seemed to read my thoughts. My nerves made her eyes sparkle even more. “Don’t worry, big guy. It’s a small town. I’ll find you again.”

“That’s not what … ”

“Ash!”

“Run on home, practice, and we’ll try again next time.” She flipped around and bounced out the door just behind Maddy, who was texting furiously.

I followed behind Bailey, glancing at a cage full of puppies struggling over a chew toy and falling over themselves. Bailey grabbed the door and held it open. I was about to step through, and then I saw the guy across the street.

He was standing in line at the pretzel kiosk, dressed in khakis and flannel. But the last time I’d seen him, he’d been Quinn’s backup at the diner. I hadn’t thought much about him at the time, assuming he was another Witcher or something. But now he was watching us? There were people watching us when we went out now? I hesitated in the doorway.

“Come on, Justin,” Bailey said, pulling on my arm. “I want to go get some coffee before we have to deal with Jenna.” She saw me staring across the street and turned that way. “What are you looking at?”

I shook my head and faked a grin. “Come on, I found this shop you’ll like,” I said, hoisting my smoothie. That was all it took to distract Bailey, who started telling me all about what kind of dog she wanted to get someday.

At the corner, I glanced back, but he was gone.

The mood in the SUV on the way home was somber. Bailey was still embarrassed and blushing, Jenna wasn’t pointedly not talking to any of us, and the guys didn’t feel the need for small talk. Maybe Cole did, but for once he picked up on the context clues and kept his hyper thought process to himself.

Once we were in the driveway and the tension had exited the car along with us, Cole nudged

Malcolm. “Hey, why’s Justin smiling?”

I looked up. “Huh?”

Malcolm stared at me, even narrowing his eyes a bit. “Why are you smiling?”

“What?” I felt my forehead crinkle in my confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“Justin met a girl, ” Bailey announced with glee. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“You met a girl?” Malcolm’s smirk was obnoxious. Not only was he going to take credit, but he was going to be a dick about the whole thing.

“Maybe if you get laid you won’t be such a pain in the ass,” Cole announced, loud enough that people three streets over probably heard.

I moved to hit him, but Mal got there first, cuffing him on the back of his head. “Seriously?”

“Dude!” Cole started rubbing his head, looking all flustered. “Jenna says that all the time!”

We all turned to find Jenna, but she was already disappearing across the street and into

Bailey and Cole’s house with Bailey in tow.

Malcolm came up beside me. “She’s still pissed off?”

I nodded. Bailey was back and everything was fine, but that didn’t mean that Jenna was going to let it go. “Just give her some space. Maybe Bailey will calm her down. Or maybe she’ll just be pissed for days like usual.”

“Well yeah,” Cole wormed his way in between us, like this was some sort of “guy talk” moment. “She’s totally embarrassed. She caused a scene, and Bailey got upset. Bailey still hasn’t forgiven her for making us move again. Jenna might act like she doesn’t care what most people think, but we’re not most people, right?”

I opened my mouth to argue with Cole out of principle (I mean, I can’t remember the last time the boy got something right), and then I stopped.

“Insight into the devil’s mind,” Malcolm murmured. “Powerful stuff.”

Cole seemed to shrink. “You’re making fun of me again,” he complained.

“Actually, he’s not,” I said, ruffling his hair. “Besides, who cares if Mal makes fun of you? He still sleeps with a teddy bear, remember?”

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.”

“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.