Scott Tracey - Moonset

“I’m taking the master bedroom,” Jenna’s voice floated down from the second floor. We were claiming bedrooms already? I tore up the stairs, only to find that Quinn had beat me, too. He was standing in front of what I assumed was the back bedroom, shaking his head at Jenna.

“You can fight over one of the others,” he said. “I don’t care who goes where.” He cocked his head to the side. “But you might prefer the one down the hall.”

She rolled her eyes, a hand on her hip. “And why would I want that one?”

I worked it out faster than she did and started to laugh, remembering the two giant trees outside the house. Both of them turned to look at me. “The trees,” I said to her. “He heard about Birmingham.” Jenna had managed to make two of the trees grow enough that she could sneak in and out easily, climbing the limbs almost like a ladder.

“Oh, this is going to be fantastic,” Jenna grumbled, spinning around and striding into her new room. She was too classy to slam the door, but there was a definite emphasis to the way the lock clicked into place a few seconds later.

“No one knows why a coven bond forms. Sherrod, Diana, Cyrus, and Emily—they were the beginning. Within days, Brandon Sutter had moved to town, and the bus carrying the runaway Haley Spencer broke down just outside the city limits. Then they were six.

Complete.”

Moonset: A Dark Legacy

The next few days were a mess of activity: clothes shopping, bickering, new cell phones, more bickering, toiletries, at least one sob session, and school supplies. Usually when we left a place, we were allowed to keep some things, but with the way we left Byron, we’d had to leave it all behind.

It wasn’t that difficult for me, because there was nothing I’d had that I’d been particularly attached to, but the girls and Cole were a little harder hit.

“My PS3,” he’d wailed.

Kelly, Bailey’s guardian, had gone with her and Jenna for an entire day. “Outlet shopping,”

Jenna said with only a touch of her usual acerbic flair.

After everything had finally calmed down, we all fell into usual routines.

Monday, Mal and I ended up in the kitchen first thing in the morning. The shower was running upstairs, but I couldn’t figure out if it was Jenna or Quinn who’d woken before noon. Some days it was a toss-up.

We weren’t starting school until after the first of the year, which meant there were two weeks of relative peace before Jenna’s next campaign started. Every school was a little different—

sometimes, she wanted out immediately; other times she didn’t mind a little patience. Only time would tell which one Carrow Mill would be.

“Nick says there’s a gym somewhere in town; I was thinking about checking it out. You want to go?” Mal asked from his spot at the table. I sat across the room from him on one of the barstools set alongside the counter like a breakfast nook. He’d pulled a bowl of grapes out of the fridge and kept playing games, tossing them in the air and catching them in his mouth.

Every time he missed, he looked at me pointedly, like I was the one that was supposed to dig under the oven for the lost grape.

There was coffee brewing, but it wasn’t brewing nearly fast enough.

I shook my head. “It’s too early for working out.”

Mal snorted. There was no such thing in his world. He drummed a steady rhythm against the counter. Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat. “So what’s he like? The new guardian?”

What was Quinn like? I still didn’t know. “Hard to say. What about yours?”

“Nick’s all right,” Mal admitted. “I think he’s got a thing going on with Cole’s guardian. Kelly, right?”

I nodded.

“But they’ve gotta keep it quiet. Can’t be fraternizing with your co-workers, and all that. But anyway, he said you guys getting Quinn is pretty lucky. Apparently, he’s a big deal.”

“He didn’t freak out about the wraith,” I admitted. “Not like Virago.”

“Yeah, but Nick made it sound like he’s a big deal. More than just ‘I killed a wraith and I liked it.’”

“Who?” Quinn asked, striding into the kitchen.

“You,” Mal admitted shamelessly, popping another grape into his mouth.

“Then I need coffee,” Quinn grunted. “Don’t you guys have anything better to do than gossip about the well-mannered gentleman down the hall?”

“The same well-mannered gentleman torturing Jenna with the Christmas house?” Mal asked, raising an eyebrow. “I heard she came home from shopping and you put a mini tree in her room.”

Quinn’s face was impassive, save for a crinkle at the corners of his eyes. “I have no idea what you mean.”

“Anyway, Justin made the coffee,” Mal warned.

Quinn winced in reply, dropping the hand that had been reaching for the coffee pot.

“Screw you guys, I make good coffee!” I protested.

“No,” Mal said patiently, “you make a perfect vessel for your milk and sugar. That’s not coffee.”

Quinn grunted a quiet agreement.

“Justin and I were heading into town. You can tag along,” Mal offered, suppressing a grin.

“Maybe even help little Justin find a girlfriend this time.”

I punched him in the arm, but the problem was that Mal’s arms were the size of tree trunks and about as hard. I walked away wincing.

“Justin’s never had a girlfriend?”

Great, now even Quinn was getting in on it.

“I’ve had girlfriends,” I protested. I … had. It was just difficult.

“None of them pass the Jenna test,” Mal admitted.

Quinn looked confused. “The Jenna test? What? She has to approve?”

“She has a tendency to destroy the kinds of girls who also happen to like Justin.”

“That was one time!” I argued. There’d been a girl when we lived near the Chesapeake Bay.

Her name was Amanda, and she was a cheerleader. That was her first strike. The second was that she was blonde. And the third was that she dared to be more than a stereotype: an airhead that wouldn’t understand when Jenna was mocking her.

Amanda stood up to her at first, but Jenna played dirty, and by the time we left at the end of the month, Amanda wouldn’t even meet my eyes in the hallway.

“There’s a diner,” Quinn said abruptly, changing the subject. “I’m in the mood for breakfast.”

He glanced at me. “One thing I will miss about D.C.? Starbucks.”

“There’s a coffee shop on Main Street,” Mal said, stretching up and out of his chair.

“And there’s a coffee pot right there,” Quinn said, pointing. “Doesn’t mean anything. I happen to like paying nine dollars for a coffee.”

Half an hour later, Mal and I walked into Shortway’s Diner while Quinn stayed outside taking a phone call.

“You feel bad about leaving Cole behind?” Mal asked as he pushed the door open and we were greeted by a blast of humid air. The diner was straight out of the fifties. Black and white checkered floor tiles, red booths, waitresses in poodle skirts.

“He’ll go bother Jenna, it’ll be fine,” I said with a grin.

“If she doesn’t kill him first,” Mal said.

I laughed. “It’s a rite of passage that big sisters torment their little brothers.”

“Jenna never tormented you .”

I leveled a stare at Mal. “Really?” I asked, voice flat.

He scoffed. “You’ve always been too sensitive.” We walked up to the counter and sat down at the bar rather than wait for a table. “Hey, check it out,” he said, nudging me and pointing back at the entrance.

Through the glass door that led outside, and the picture windows on either side, there was a man stumbling through the parking lot. He wore a jumpsuit like a mechanic, stained from something more than just dirt—thick, dripping streaks that were splashed across his middle. His long hair hung down limp and scraggly around a face that hadn’t seen a razor in weeks, and a shower in twice that.

I couldn’t decide if he looked more like a serial killer or a homeless person. All those stains could be blood …

“Shit, stop staring,” Mal said, nudging me. I focused, realizing that the man was looking through the glass now, and striding purposefully towards the door.

“What’d you have to stare at him for?” Mal whispered furiously.

“Me? You were the one who pointed him out!”

“I can’t take you anywhere,” Mal said, spinning away from me on his barstool, leaving me to look at his back. Brothers are overrated , I thought, and not for the first time in my life, though usually it was Cole who was driving me insane.

The jingling chime over the door rattled through an awkward lull in diner conversation, somehow louder than it should have been. I didn’t even dare look up into the mirror behind the bar to see if it was really the man from outside coming to find out why people were staring at him.

“I’m starving,” I said, a little louder than I intended. “Do you think they have those giant omelets that come with the side of pancakes?”

“This isn’t IHOP,” Mal said, shifting only slightly in my direction. He broke off sharply, but I didn’t have to ask why. I could feel it—a presence far to my right, at the tail end of the bar where a waitress ran the cash register. He was a dark blob in the corner of my eye, but it was definitely him.

After that, neither of us said anything. The waitress asked the man something, but her voice was too raspy and low to make it out. He didn’t say anything at all, but I could feel him there.

Like the quieter he got, the more present he became, until it was all I could think about.

I chanced a look up, trying for casual and my reflection showing panic instead. My eyes slid to the mirror’s right, and I saw the man, all right.

I saw him staring at the two of us.

“Mal,” I said out of the corner of my mouth. “Mal,” I repeated, when he didn’t respond. Then I hit him with my elbow.

“You’re him,” the man said, and it was hard to tell if the jumble of words spilling out of his mouth was an alcoholic slur or something else. “The dark light in the sky. The sun.”

“The sun?” Mal rose off the barstool.

But the man ignored him. “Oh, I’ve been hearing the signs. The voices whispering in my head, chirping little voices, tick-tock, tock-tick, wait for him . The sun that will usher in the never-ending eclipse. The daughter.”

“Time to go,” I said tightly, scrambling up off my own seat and backing up into Mal. The sun?

The daughter? Of course. “He’s one of them ,” I said to Mal significantly. I looked back at the man. “You’re a Harbinger, aren’t you?”

When Moonset had revealed themselves, their impassioned speeches had reached the ears of the weak and hurting. A cult of followers, people who literally worshipped them, swelled their ranks. They became known as the Harbingers—the ones who spread the word. In lessons, we were taught that Moonset preyed on the broken, feeding into their delusions and their weaknesses. Breaking them, and reshaping something more loyal out of the pieces. And so the cult of Moonset was born.

“You’ve got the wrong people,” I said slowly. I shot Mal a dirty look; this was all his fault. If he hadn’t started staring in the first place, I’d be halfway to my breakfast by now.

“You don’t know us,” Mal said, like talking to the mentally disturbed was something he did all the time.

“I always knew they’d bring you back, Daggett. Many things I was, but never a fool. They tried to put worms inside,” he tapped at his head, “to steal all your secrets, but I wouldn’t let them. Ground them up and fed them to the angels.”