Moonset (8 page)

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.”

Eight

“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.

The lock hadn’t even engaged when Jenna started whispering spells under her breath. Of the five of us, she had the best memory, and the litany of muffling spells rolled off her tongue. It didn’t escape my attention that the last time we’d used these spells, we’d been under attack. And now, it seemed like we were again.

“Grab me a sports drink” was code. Utterly innocent, it had been Cole’s idea. In the event that we needed to get together, but we didn’t want to raise suspicion, we would ask the others to pick up a sports drink. Cole liked all those spy movies about double agents and infiltrations. Maybe it wasn’t much of a surprise that he thought of something so paranoid.

“What’s wrong?” Mal asked, kicking off his shoes and sitting next to Bailey on the bed. Either he was too tall, or her bed was too short, because his legs hung off the end.

Once Jenna gave me the nod that she was finished, I repeated what I knew. Cole tried to jump in a few times to embellish—“And then he got all snarly talking about how we deserved it!”—before I got through the whole, brief piece.

“That’s it?” Mal asked, once I dropped my hands.

“That’s it,” I confirmed. “But if there’s a specific reason why we’re here, we should probably know what it is, right? Especially if it’s going to be dangerous for us.”

“Maybe they’re not thrilled with security?” Jenna mused. “The wraith found us somehow. Could be that they’ll find us again just as easily. It’s not like people make any real effort to hide us. Social media’s a bitch.”

“That’s why we’re supposed to fly under the radar,” Mal said tightly. “Stay away from things that are going to draw a lot of unwanted attention.”

On a certain level, no one made much of an effort to conceal us. In every town we moved to, all the witches knew who we were. Our names never changed, and the fact that there were five of us moving together was always a rather obvious sign.

But the truth was that magic had a lot to do with it. I didn’t know the particulars—none of us did—but there were wards and bindings in place to keep us hidden. The spells weren’t on
us
because no one knew if that kind of magic would stir up the curse or not. It targeted the attempts to find us. When someone set out to look for the children of Moonset, they triggered the spells, which worked like viruses. Information was corrupted, spells were deflected to the wrong hemisphere. So far, until Kentucky, no one had ever managed to find us.

The truth was that we’d never had to worry about it before. But now we did.
I
did. “They brought us here for a reason, and it’s not just to give us a place to start over. And then that guy that Mal and I saw at the diner, the crazy one?”

“The Harbinger,” Mal nodded.

“So what are you thinking?” Jenna asked. She didn’t look like she was taking any of this very seriously, her attention more on her nails than any of us, but that was just the way she was.

“We figure out what’s really going on. Why they brought us here. What they want.”

Cole scribbled on a piece of paper, having been still for too long. “Why don’t we just ask him?”

“He’d just lie to us,” Jenna responded with a snort. “And then he’d know that we know.”

“Are you sure we can’t trust them?” Bailey asked, with a weary attempt at hope. We all knew that there were only a small number of people we could trust, and they were in this room right now. Adults lied. Adults held grudges. They held you back and treated you like garbage, and taught other people to treat you like garbage.

“Quinn said he agreed that we should be able to defend ourselves,” I admitted, “but it didn’t sound like who he was talking to did. I think it’s stupid if we don’t confront him, though. He seems at least a little sympathetic.”

“I agree,” Jenna said casually. “And I think Justin’s the person for the job.”

Four sets of eyes turned on me.

Well, eff. “Fine, I’ll go,” I said, succumbing to peer pressure. “But we still need to keep an eye out. There’s a reason why they brought us here, and I think it has more to do with Carrow Mill than with us.”

“I heard you on the phone earlier.”

If I thought my announcement would disrupt the flurry of chopping going on in the kitchen, I was mistaken. Quinn had a variety of vegetables spread out in front of him, and an oversized kitchen knife in his hand. I kept a healthy distance, even though I was pretty sure he could still kill me at a distance.

“I’m not new at this,” Quinn responded after a moment, his movements continuing to be precise and even. “I know when someone walks into the house.”

That caught me off guard a little. I expected him to lie, to deny it. “You knew I was there?”

Quinn didn’t reply. He moved to the next pile, a pile of green peppers. With one hand on the handle and the other on the dull end of the blade, he rocked his arms back and forth, dicing through them confidently.

“If you knew, then why were you saying all that stuff? Why didn’t you just tell us what’s going on?”

It was like talking to a brick wall. Quinn continued slicing and dicing, and with every thwack against the cutting board, I got more and more angry.

“Do you think this is funny? What’s going on, Quinn? Why are we really here? What aren’t you guys telling us? I know it’s got to be something big.”

“I’ve seen a wraith before. I probably wasn’t much older than you,” he looked up, waving the knife in my direction for a moment before he went back to what he was doing. “Took two full covens to take it down. Wraiths are nasty creatures. You can’t kill something that’s already dead.”

What the hell was with story time? “What’s your point?”

“That wraith was nothing. I was nearly a match for it all by my lonesome,” he said, without any hint of arrogance. Just another fact. “What’d it do? Destroy a few walls? Knock us around a bit?”

“Killed two people,” I pointed out.

“Two,” Quinn agreed. “Not two hundred. It destroyed a building, not a village. Wraiths can control the dead, summon up an army of spirits, and kill you just as soon as breathe on you. This one didn’t. It was only interested in one thing.”

“Collecting us. We know this already.”

“Collecting you. But did you ever think about the big picture? How did the wraith know where to find you? How did it know when, exactly, it should strike? There were a dozen Witchers in town that day, and all but three of them were busy trying to clean up your messes. There wasn’t a better time to move.”

I tried to see what he was saying, putting the pieces together in my head. “Someone told?” I knew we weren’t the most popular kids in the world, but the idea that someone would turn us in like that? For as much as the Congress acted like we were this huge burden, they were always protecting us, keeping us safe. If that wasn’t the case anymore, then what were we supposed to do? If there was a mole in the Congress, and they were feeding information to Cullen Bridger, then how would we be safe anywhere?

“Someone told,” he confirmed. “And now there are more eyes on you. Some concerned, some afraid. But all of them are going to want something from you. Do you know what kind of weapon you could be, Justin? A warlock like Bridger could bring you along and use you like a shield, and everything in his path would be decimated. The same goes for any of you. Even the members of the Congress that fear you recognize that.”

“But why are we
here
? You made it sound like there was something more specific than a mole, or the fact that we can be weaponized.”

Quinn swore suddenly, and the brisk-necked chopping came to a stop as he dropped the knife. A thick line of red ran along the pad of his thumb. The knife clattered towards the edge of the counter and dropped to the ground just as Quinn jumped back a step, narrowly missing toe damage as well.

“Are you okay?” A lifetime of bandaging wounds kicked into gear as I went to the sink and grabbed a handful of paper towels and a wet cloth. I handed him a stack of towels and used the rest to wipe off the counter while he cleaned himself. Then, after handing him the wet cloth to hold over the cut, I went looking for everything else I’d need.

It took awhile to find what I was looking for—the cleaning supplies were in the basement, for some reason, and the bandages in a first-aid kit under the bathroom sink.

I handed him one while I used the other on the counter. We didn’t speak until the only traces of red left were the diced tomatoes. “You have people watching out for you,” Quinn finally interjected. “I know it may not always seem like that, but there are. You’re in good hands.”

I scrubbed even harder at the counter, wondering if the finish would last. I didn’t respond until I was done, and the damp paper towels were in the garbage. “Is he going to be coming after us again? Do we need to be on our guard?”

The smile on Quinn’s face didn’t cross into his eyes. “You should always be on your guard, Justin.”

I started putting everything away, then looked at the bottle in one hand, and the box in the other. It was disturbing how many of my nights ended in bandages and bleach.