Scott Tracey - Moonset

“She used magic. ” The “it wasn’t my fault” should have been more clear than it was.

“Do you think anyone’s going to tell that part of the story? No, they’re going to remember the son of Sherrod Daggett spewing hate speech and threats. In a week, no one will even remember that the teacher was fired for abusing her power. They’ll say she lost control of her classroom and put the other students in danger.”

“But that’s not what happened!” How was logic failing me all of a sudden? I’d always been the levelheaded one, the one who could cut through the heightened emotions and reach some kind of common ground.

“That’s all anyone will care to remember,” Quinn replied. “It makes a better story than the truth.”

“I should have expected something,” I said after a moment. “I saw the way she looked at me last night.”

“Last night?” Quinn’s voice was suddenly sharp.

“She was there. Outside … y’know,” I waved my hand around, rather than say the words.

“She was glaring at me, like I was something she’d stepped in. Or like she blamed me.”

“But she was in the crowd,” he persisted. “Before you got there? Why didn’t you tell me that sooner?”

“Why would it matter?” I asked as we turned onto our street. “There were a lot of people standing outside last night. You guys interrogated them all, remember?”

“Not all of them,” Quinn murmured. “You’re sure it was her?”

I nodded.

We pulled into the driveway, and Quinn turned off the engine. There was a moment where I thought he was going to confide in me—tell me what was really going on in Carrow Mill. But as usual, the truth was skipped when gruff ignorance would suffice.

“You have to be better than even they expect you to be. If you can’t prove them wrong about who you are, they’ll eat you alive.”

He opened his door and went into the house, leaving me in the passenger seat. “I don’t even know who I am,” I said slowly, to absolutely no one.

It took me a while to make it inside. Part of me still didn’t trust Quinn. But his advice was sound.

It always was. But he still hadn’t told us the truth about anything. His allegiance was to his grandmother and the Congress, no matter what advice he gave.

That wasn’t enough.

He was in the kitchen looking over a small stack of papers. Were they about me? I might actually get expelled before Jenna this time. I picked up the manila folder he’d dropped on the table before I lost my nerve. I walked over to the coffee maker, and the jar of pens and markers next to it. Quinn didn’t say anything, but I could feel him watching.

As carefully as possible, I began to draw the Moonset symbol in permanent marker on the file folder. First the circle, then outlining the crescent moon and coloring in the rest. Then the tentacles, one at the top, one at the bottom, and two on either side.

“There’s a warlock in Carrow Mill,” I said as calmly as I could, even though it felt like some kind of betrayal to confide in Quinn without checking in with the others. Jenna would be furious, of course, and Cole and Bailey could hold a grudge almost as long. “I thought he was stalking us with this symbol, but he’s been using it longer than that, hasn’t he?”

Quinn’s eyes locked on the drawing, but the rest of him was frozen.

“He’s been spreading this symbol around town, and somehow, you figured out it was a request. He wanted us brought here, and the Congress thought it made brilliant sense. You thought you could draw him out. So you brought us here, and you’ve been waiting for him to make his move.” I picked up the folder and waved it in his face. “Stop me when I’m wrong.”

“You’re not wrong,” he said. “But I’m not supposed to talk about that with you. My grandparents would have my head.” He considered that for a moment. “Maybe literally.”

“You’ve been putting us all in danger ever since we got here. It’s not like you’re with us every hour of every day—what if something happened? What if he came after us when we were out at the mall that day, or at school?”

“Do you really think we just brought you here and left you unsupervised?” Quinn asked, smirking a little. “Justin, there are more Witchers in the five miles surrounding Carrow Mill than almost anywhere else in the world right now. Not one, but two of the Great Covens have relocated here. My grandmother basically wrote the book on how to deal with warlocks. And

I’m no slouch, if I do say so myself.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that you’ve been using us. I’m not bait, Quinn. None of us are.

And it’s bullshit that you all get to decide otherwise.”

“I understand why you feel that way,” Quinn said carefully.

“Screw that,” I shouted. Now that I was really being honest, and saying all the things I’d been thinking for weeks, it was hard to rein it in. “Don’t placate me because you think it’s what I want to hear. It’s bad enough that they treat us like we’re tainted most of the time. But now they’re telling us that we’re expendable? That it’s cool if a warlock kills us in the line of fire?”

I expected Quinn to tell me to calm down, or to breathe. That’s what adults always said, when they wanted you to shut up. “Go on,” he said instead.

“God, Jenna’s right. You never had any intention of teaching us to defend ourselves, yet you’re throwing us into situations that could get us killed. First, you left us in Kentucky when you knew a wraith was coming—”

“That was Meghan’s call,” he interrupted, but I kept talking anyway.

“—and now you brought us here like you don’t even give a shit what happens to us.”

For as far back as I could remember, I’d been the one to play by the rules. Mal was the model kid—barely got into trouble and way too mature for his age, but I was the one who’d always followed the rules. I cleaned up after Jenna when I had to, but even before that I tried to keep everyone on the same path. The right path.

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.”