Darkbound (The Legacy of Moonset) (18 page)

“The … the Prince,” I said, licking my lips and struggling against the faintness in my voice.
I kicked him and he thought it was funny. The funniest joke I never told.
“Tell me what happened.”

“Don’t you already know?” His was a sly look, marked with all the knowledge I found myself wanting no matter what. My fist clenched at my side, and it was a surprise.

“He never told,” Charlie confided. “He liked it better that way. All those dark secrets, locked up inside to keep him company.”

“You’re lying,” I said, my eyes narrowed. “You were close. Everyone knows that. If he told anyone, he would have told you.”

“But why would I tell
you
? He’d hate the sight of you. Last thing my brother and I had in common. We both hate the sight of the things we spawned.”

“You’re a psychotic little fuck.”

Charlie coughed again, a hack into a loose fist that left it dripping with a lifetime of bad decisions. “It’s got something you want, doesn’t it?” He smiled around grimy teeth. “That’s how they do it. You’ll do anything for it, just like he would. Monsters make you crave something so bad you’d sell out your own brother. He didn’t care what he had to do—he was getting what he wanted. You’ll do the same. Ain’t that right, boy? You don’t care about anything except what that little Prince has been whispering in your ear.”

This time, when I kicked him, I knew exactly what I was doing.

t
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Missing: Savannah Rowe, 17. Last seen by her sister Alice at Carrow Mill High on April 14th. She was wearing blue jeans and a black leather jacket. Please call the CM police department if sighted.

Police blotter
April 16–April 23

“You’re supposed to be the levelheaded one,” Illana said half an hour later in Charlie’s living room. Some measure of order had been restored to the room. The furniture was righted, though the collective destruction had been shifted into corners and out of the way. The front yard was occupied by a half-dozen Witchers, most of them barely out of their beer pong days.

I ignored the disapproval in her voice. No one had been particularly pleased to find Charlie hunched over, clutching his stomach and groaning about assault charges. Then again, they weren’t surprised either.

“He’s not going to tell you anything.” I took up a seat on the arm of the couch, resting my feet on the coffee table. Adele clucked at me in disappointment, but the look faded when I offered her a simple smile. Like it or not, she was a girl, and girls liked it when I smiled. It was a weapon I didn’t use often enough.

“That’s not the same thing as ‘he doesn’t know anything.’” Illana turned her own version of a smile on me: tight, shrewd lips and a hint of calculating steel in her eyes. “I’ve been told I’m a bit more influential than a teenage boy with a tendency to roughhouse.”

“But only slightly,” Adele offered helpfully from the love seat she’d claimed. The chair was so big that it swallowed her up, giving her a certain Alice in Wonderland vibe where the furniture was too big for the person using it.

“So they say.” But the moment for levity faded quickly, and Illana clasped her hands in front of her, rocking them back and forth briefly as she eyed the broken shell of a man sitting across from her. I hadn’t realized at first that each of us had taken a different side: Illana across from Charlie, and Adele and I on either side of them. Adele’s eyes twinkled at me from across the coffee table, as if realizing the same thing I had.

“I told the shit-st—” Charlie swallowed down the profanity, and then swallowed again for good measure. “I told the
boy
that I don’t know anything. Cyrus never told me nothing.”

“Now that’s not true,” Illana said, unleashing the rarest weapon in her arsenal. Kindness. “You and he were close. Isn’t that right, Adele?”

“That’s right,” the woman agreed, her feet dangling off the floor.

“Almost like brothers.” It took me a moment to understand the strange note in Illana’s voice. She was
teasing.
There were all sorts of weird things happening today.

“We hated each other,” Charlie spat. “Never hated no one more.”

“Double negative.” Adele grinned at Illana. I almost ex-pected her to conjure up a box of cookies, spilling a fistful of crumbs into her lap. “He
could
hate someone more.”

“Tell me when you decided to hate him.” Illana leaned forward, and her blue eyes were suddenly strong and bright. I could feel something like magic in the air, making the air hum, though no one spoke a spell. “Was it when you slept with his girlfriend? When you stole her away?” The woman canted her head. “When she
died
? When you married her sister? I know Cyrus is tangled up in there somewhere. Just tell me which thread to pull.”

I … what? In just a handful of words, Illana had created a dozen different things about Cyrus Denton, images about how he fit into Carrow Mill, how he fit into his family. And just like that … I could feel him becoming more real.

That was exactly what I didn’t want. I didn’t care what they were like when they were teenagers. I certainly didn’t care that Charlie might have stolen my father’s girlfriend, or that she died. That he’d married her
sister.
The woman who must have been Luca’s mother.

Jesus, what was wrong with these people? Was this the effect of Moonset, or was their family drama to blame? Did Cyrus fall in line with Sherrod Daggett because of what his brother did to him? Betrayed and hurt by blood, he reached out for a family that had been created for him, allowed them to close ranks around him, and give him a new purpose.

Had Sherrod used that information to manipulate my father? Did my father even ever need manipulating?

The thoughts kept racing through my head like trains set for collision. Each one narrowly missed striking the next, but eventually they would collide and the fireworks would be intense.

“You use an awful lot of words just to say you’re a bitch,” Charlie said sourly.

I was up off the couch in an instant, though it was hard to say whether I was defending the honor of a woman I didn’t particularly like or just taking the chance to hit Charlie for a third time and make it really count.

Illana made a tut-tut-tutting sound and waggled a finger. “It’s a compliment, Malcolm. Small men call a woman a bitch because they’re afraid to say that she scares them.”

Then you’re definitely that.
But at least I was smart enough not to say it out loud. She smirked, probably reading the thought right off my face.

“Tell me what really happened, Charles. Tell me, and we all go away. Otherwise, I will drown every part of your world. I will have people in your home, at your job, waiting in your bar every night. Even that restaurant you go to on Thursdays. We will be everywhere, and we won’t stop. Because this stopped being your town, and your home, the minute your son took up his uncle’s mantle.”

For a second, Charlie wavered, and I blinked in surprise. It was going to happen. Illana would break through his walls. He would split apart at the seams and admit that he’d treated his son badly but it wasn’t deserved. That he was scared, but the good man underneath wanted to help. That he knew something crucial.

But it was only a moment. And there was still too much liquid courage in his veins, giving Charlie a backbone of Scotch and stubbornness. Whatever he’d been once upon a time, years trapped in his skin had rotted Charlie Denton through.

“It keep
you
up at night? Knowing that you and Robert pulled the trigger and Moonset was the cost?
You
caused this, lady. All of you, smug little Covens. Whoring yourselves out to each other, protecting your legacies.”

Illana gracefully rose to her feet. “Cyrus turned to the blackest of magicks to escape his family. You did that. Not us.”

Charlie surged up, but that was exactly what Illana wanted. Something small was in her hand, but at his first movement she flung her wrist, and a telescopic baton sprung to life. With three swift, economical strikes she clubbed the back of one knee, deflected an arm, and then slapped it across his windpipe and held it there, bracing it between both hands.

“Now you’re going to tell me everything I want to know,” she said calmly, somehow managing to overpower the drunk despite her age, “or I’m going to give your nephew his first lesson in how to beat a confession out of someone. I’m confident we’ll all learn a thing or two. I can be quite creative.”

She didn’t have to make good on the threat. Charlie talked. A lot.

Charlie told us all about how the senior class came under the Prince’s spell, and how Sherrod and Cyrus were the first to notice. But when they went to the authorities, looking for help, they were written off and ignored. Moonset was newly formed, and they didn’t have the clout to make anyone take them seriously.

Moonset became Cyrus’s world. And it wasn’t Charlie’s fault, he claimed, that he was there to pick up the pieces. Then there was a three-day blackout, and Cyrus didn’t come home. Two days into it, when he finally showed up battered and bloody, it was to announce that an Abyssal Prince had come to town, and now it was dead.

But in all the chaos, Charlie lost the love of his life when she ran from the darkness in Carrow Mill. Savannah took off on the first bus out of town and never looked back. Heartbroken, Charlie married her younger sister a few years later, but it was never the same.

Charlie never knew anything more than that. He’d always believed the stories that Robert Cooper had saved the day.

Or so he claimed.

“He spins an interesting story,” Adele said when we met outside after. Two Witchers stayed behind to keep an eye on Charlie, while the rest prepared to leave.

“You think he’s lying?” Illana asked, slipping on a pair of sunglasses. The afternoon sun wasn’t too bad, but she looked a bit more pale than she had earlier.

“I’ve always found that life is hardly an orderly pursuit. People are the ones who trim threads, who make tangles into knots and shave away all the things that don’t fit. They want things to make sense, and I think Charlie makes quite a bit of sense.”

“He’s lying,” I said with conviction.

“Oh?” Now Illana was amused. “Please, share your expertise with the rest of the class.”

I knew she was mocking me, but I didn’t give a crap. “Notice how helpful he was? What are the odds he had a change of heart? He’s a dick, he’d happily tell you a story peppered full of lies just to mess with you. He doesn’t care if anyone gets hurt. He just likes misery.”

“I agree with the boy,” Adele said happily. “I think I’ll stick around, see what else I can jog loose from the man. I think there’s more to the girl’s disappearance than he’s saying. I think we might have found the Abyssal’s host after all.”

Illana tapped on her lower lip. “Get in the car, Malcolm. I’ve been meaning to pay a visit to an old friend of your father’s. I think having you around might prove useful in this instance.”

Illana drove the same way she did everything else: with a cool demeanor, incredible poise, and a soft undercurrent of terror that she was going to kill everyone in her path. She drove into the center of town and parked near the curio shop.

“Why’d you want to bring me along?” I asked, once the car was stopped. Illana didn’t seem in any rush to get out, and I followed her lead.

She held up a hand, displaying all five fingers towards me, wagging one with each point. “He’s a witch I’ve never heard of. Born and raised in Carrow Mill. He stays under the radar and I dislike that. He was a friend of your father’s. You might shake something loose without knowing it.”

“But I’ve already met him,” I said absently. “Never even looked at me like I was familiar.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” she said, though there was a faraway look in her eyes. “You look more like your cousin than your father. He might not have realized.”

I followed her inside, ducking my head down as we passed through the front door. The curio shop was about what I remembered. Ten acres worth of garbage packed into a half acre’s worth of space. Dogs played poker next to cats in togas, and there was a buffalo head hanging on the wall with a trio of silver necklaces hanging from its snout. A ceremonial-looking knife was stabbed into a small end table etched with elephants so that the knife passed right through one of the elephant’s eyes. Chessboards were filled with something on every square: crystals, keys, and even a Hershey’s Kiss.

“Hi there, can I help you?” A red-haired man popped up from behind the counter like a jack-in-the-box. The only way the effect could have been stronger was if the welcoming chime had actually played “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

“Matthew Dugard?” Everything Illana was screamed “Police.” Tasteful pantsuit, hair pulled from her face, serious tone, and severe expression.

“Yes,” the man said slowly, letting the word stretch out for a span of seconds. “Can I help you?”

“You knew my friend’s father,” she said, indicating a hand towards me. Like I would really be friends with a woman like Illana Bryer. A woman old enough to be my mother’s mother. Or maybe my mother’s grandmother.

Mr. Dugard looked towards me, but there was no recognition in his eye when he shrugged. “Could have.”

“You went to school with him,” Illana prompted. Normally she wasn’t one for dragging things out. She liked to cut right to the heart of the matter.

“I went to school with a lot of people. School’s big enough for more than one at a time.” His tone was pleasant, easy. Whoever he was, he wasn’t intimidated by her. That alone was enough to make me think that Charlie was wrong, and this man had barely even known my father. Unless he wasn’t a witch at all: that might still be a possibility.

Illana didn’t seem to agree. “Town full of Witchers and you don’t know who he is? That seems odd.”

At the word, the man stilled, like she’d said something foul. Satanist instead of Witcher, maybe. More than the fake smile, the phony cheer, this was a real reaction. Something he couldn’t mask behind a shopkeeper’s veneer.

“The Denton boy,” the man said, studying me closer. “Right, yes. You were in here a couple months ago.”

So he
did
know who we were. “Your dad went a little nuts last time.”

The man shrugged. “My dad spent four years tormenting and being tormented by Sherrod Daggett. His doppelganger walks in the door, what’s he supposed to think? Senility’s a bitch, but sometimes remembering is worse.”

“I’m afraid you’re a new one to me,” Illana said, her voice as soft as pillows. I didn’t trust it for a minute. Neither did Matthew. He stiffened up behind the counter, and then made a show of relaxing his body, spreading his arms. Communicating without words that he had nothing to hide. “Exactly how is it you live in this city and I don’t know you. I know
all
of the witches.”

The man sighed, ran a hand through his frizzled red hair, and turned his head to the side. He pointed to the plastic device curled up inside his ear—a hearing aid. I hadn’t noticed the last time I was here. “Not a lot of call for partially deaf witches,” he said. I expected him to sound bitter about it, but he wasn’t. To him it wasn’t anything traumatic, just a fact of life.