Scott Tracey - Moonset

I almost dropped the book. He was writing about my mother. And … Jenna’s. The fact that he called them “chicks” was too unbelievable to even process, so I pretended I hadn’t seen it.

I’d never understood how either woman continued to stand by him, knowing that he’d gotten both of them pregnant—one his wife, one his mistress.

Yet they’d both stayed with him, for the sake of their Coven and all their plans. Their wars.

This is your chance to find out what made him tick. The thought didn’t ease my conscience.

Jenna would take the offer of new spells without question, without caring what strings came attached to that power. But I wasn’t so short-sighted. This book was dangerous.

I flipped to the one of the pages lined with spells—

Sherrod was meticulous about breaking everything down for later. It took only a minute or two to translate the written.

It said: “to avoid the thought police.”

I looked over the lines of the spell, pieced them together in my head. Most verbal spells were only a few words long—but to write it out, and do it safely, you had to break each piece down into several lines worth of longhand. There were forms of “connection,” “thought,” and

“channel.”

A telepathy spell? I perked up, more intrigued than I was a moment ago. This didn’t have the staccato rhythm of a traditional spell—was it something Sherrod had invented himself? It sounded as though the spell could open a link between two minds, although I wasn’t sure what the name meant by the “thought police.”

I continued paging through the book, stopping every so often to translate the title of spells.

Sherrod was a fan of obscure names, ones that didn’t always explain what the spell actually did so much as some anecdote of his life I wasn’t privy to. Or maybe he just liked to be pretentious. Some of his spells had the ring of bad poetry. “Crows nesting on my heart.”

“Forever the blanket of silence.” “The empty night sours.”

There were mentions of my mother, and Jenna’s, but it wasn’t a traditional journal. More like random thoughts and observations that he needed to get out, and the spellbook was there.

Before I even realized I was doing it, I started copying some of the spells in my English notebook, tucked between notes I’d taken about the themes of Macbeth . I followed each entry with my guess as to what the spell did.

The problem was in the details. Some of the spells were self-explanatory—Sherrod had written out a whole section of spells that made his school life inconsequential. Spells to enhance memory and eloquence, ones that made him more persuasive—something he didn’t need—and spells to make people receptive to his ideas.

It was the other spells that had caught my interest, though. No one had ever mentioned that

Sherrod was something of a maverick when it came to learning magic. He preferred the spells he created with his own hands, rather than those he’d been taught. The same points were repeated constantly in the journaled sections—magic should constantly be evolving, but it was witches who forced it to stagnate. He thought the practice of handing down spellbooks was deplorable.

There were also whole passages that read like an opus to his ego. Emily continued to elude him, and Diana made it clear she wouldn’t play second fiddle. It was hard to reconcile the teen I was reading about—who clearly wanted both girls—with the man who was technically my father.

The other part that was troubling me was that there was nothing that suggested Sherrod

Daggett was drawn to the darkness. He wasn’t the outcast student, secretly thinking of how he’d get his revenge. There was only an occasional sense of his growing awareness of politics —of the Covens and their role in administrating our world. If anything, he sounded like a revolutionary. He had grand ideas, and thought outside the box.

If I didn’t know who he’d become, I could have almost admired him. At least his ideas—

Sherrod as a teenager sounded like a douchebag. I might be the same age now as he was when he wrote some of these entries, and I didn’t have an ounce of his self-awareness or his activism. And I hoped I wasn’t half the douche he was.

Then, somewhere around the last third of the book, the personal entries stopped. There were no more hints about how torn he was between the girls or how everyone should be involved in their government. The last section of the book was devoted to Coven spells, spells that utilized the bond between the witches. There was no explanation for what had changed—had Moonset changed him right from the start?

The next time I looked up from the book, my room looked different. Bright. I looked out the window, and realized the sun had risen already. I was tired—not exhausted like I’d stayed up all night reading—but the kind of tired that came from studying for too many hours at once. My mind was snapping with ideas and thoughts, but my body was struggling to keep up.

I needed coffee. I tucked the book back under the mattress and put my English notebook back in my bag. A quick review of my room didn’t show anything else out of the ordinary. At least not yet.

Bailey was already in our kitchen when I walked in. She sat at the island, her arms resting on the counter and her head resting on top of her wrists. She barely looked up when I approached.

“Hey, Bay,” I said softly. “You feeling okay?”

She shrugged, and I went to make a fresh pot of coffee while she slouched there. It was too early for anyone else to be up, so it was surprising that Bailey was not only up but had already come back over from her own house.

When Quinn came in a few minutes later, followed by Mal, I reconsidered what I thought of as “too early.”

“Did anyone get any sleep last night?”

Mal studied me, his eyes thoughtful. “Did you?”

“I’m making coffee,” I said, turning back to it while avoiding the question. “If anyone wants.”

“Yes, please,” Quinn said tiredly.

Mal took up the seat next to Bailey, eyes smudged dark just like hers.

“You two look like the walking dead,” I said, trying to pry a smile out of them. Hell, I would have settled for one of them. But Bailey was sleep-deprived and grumpy, and Mal looked a step beyond grumpy. Crabby?

“I stayed on the couch at Bailey’s house,” Mal added. There was something off about his voice. It was flat. Almost robotic? “Someone had to.”

The dig knocked me sideways. Was he saying I hadn’t done enough? I’d done everything I could to keep both Bailey and I safe!

He’s probably just sleep-deprived. Give him some time, and he’ll calm down. A weird squirming feeling in my gut said that this was more than just a rough night talking.

Were Mal and I fighting now? I knew we hadn’t talked much lately, but I had figured he was off doing his own thing. He was so against anything to do with the magic anyway. I just assumed he’d prefer it that way.

“Where’s Cole?” Quinn asked, looking down at Bailey.

It took her a minute to raise her head. “Sleeping,” she said, her expression unusually hostile.

“Hey, enough of that,” I said easily. “Don’t take it out on Quinn. Why don’t you go into the living room and curl up on the couch? Take a little nap or something.”

Without another word, Bailey got up from the kitchen island and headed into the living room.

Mal shrugged and followed her. When they were both gone, I looked in Quinn’s direction. “I guess it’s been a rough night for everyone.”

“Keep an eye on them,” he said, watching the direction they’d disappeared in. “Just in case.”

“Just in case of what?” I could feel last night’s frustration rearing up again. Quinn kept trying to take over, to edge me out of the way. But it wasn’t his job. He wasn’t the one who’d still be here in six months, looking after Bailey and the rest. I had to do it.

He held up his hands. “Just … in case. Let me know if anything’s off.”

“We’re. Fine.” I said, and that was the end of that.

Cole trudged over about an hour later, around the same time that Jenna graced us with her presence. Jenna and I were the only ones in any semblance of a good mood, although mine was more coffee based than anything else.

The five of us watched television in the living room for a few hours, Mal dozing in one of the recliners. Jenna tried on several occasions to start up a conversation with Bailey, but Bay was having none of it.

“So we’re just supposed to stay in the house all day?” Jenna asked, turning towards me after the latest attempt to talk to Bailey failed. What’s with her ? she mouthed.

I had no idea what to tell her about Bailey, so I just looked away. “Yeah, for a couple days maybe. They’ve got extra Witchers coming into the city I guess, and they want us to stay out of the way.”

“I’ve left the house lots of times,” she said thoughtfully. “And I haven’t had half the problems you have. Why’s he so focused on you?”

Ash had summed it up perfectly earlier. If you want to get to the others, you go through

Justin. Maybe that meant he’d read our files. Or he’d been closer than we thought all along.

Someone had brought that spellbook into the house, and with the amount of Witchers in the neighborhood, someone would have noticed a stranger.

Was Bridger hiding in plain sight?

“I’m just extra annoying,” I offered, and Jenna made a noise of agreement.

No one seemed very active. We all just kind of dozed in front of the television. I curled up in one of the arm chairs, Cole sprawled around my feet. It was late afternoon by the time my yawning became uncontrollable, and I went for a coffee refill. Just need more caffeine. I don’t know why I was so insistent on staying up, but I wasn’t going down without a fight.

Jenna followed me into the kitchen. “You should get some sleep. Just an hour or two. You look terrible.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m not even tired.” I think I was a step beyond tired. Exhaustion had passed me by entirely and now I was running on nothing but coffee and stubbornness.

Bailey craned around in her seat. “You should sleep, Justin.”

“I don’t need to sleep,” I insisted.

There was a weird tension in the room. Jenna watched me, looking like she was trying to make up her mind about something. Finally she nodded, then shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “At least take a shower. Five minutes. You look like hell.” She grabbed down a bowl, a box of cereal, and the milk out of the fridge, setting it up on the counter like some sort of self-serve station.

“Would you guys just stop? Seriously.” Part of me was worried about leaving them in the house with Sherrod’s book in my room. Did I give it away somehow? Did they know?

“You stink,” Cole said flatly, from his spot spread out on the floor. A chorus of agreements (or grunts in Mal’s case) followed.

“Fine, I’ll take a shower,” I snapped.

Once I was under the spray, and I could feel the tension of the last twenty-four hours draining out of me, I had to admit that maybe it was a good idea. I was still only in there for about ten minutes, but it was enough time to pull myself together, and figure out what to do next.

I came out of the bathroom, dried and dressed even if I was still a little damp. I got as far as my room before I realized just how quiet the house had gotten.

“Jenna? Bay? What are you guys doing?” I called down the stairs. The house was silent. Still.