Scott Tracey - Moonset

• Название: Moonset
• Автор: Scott Tracey
• Жанр: Фэнтези

Moonset, a coven of such promise . . . Until they turned to the darkness.

After the terrorist witch coven known as Moonset was destroyed fifteen years ago—during a secret war against the witch Congress—five children were left behind, saddled with a legacy of darkness. Sixteen-year-old Justin Daggett, son of a powerful Moonset warlock, has been raised alongside the other orphans by the witch Congress, who fear the children will one day continue the destruction their parents started.

A deadly assault by a wraith, claiming to work for Moonset’s most dangerous disciple, Cullen Bridger, forces the five teens to be evacuated to Carrow Mill. But when dark magic wreaks havoc in their new hometown, Justin and his siblings are immediately suspected. Justin sets out to discover if someone is trying to frame the Moonset orphans . . . or if Bridger has finally come out of hiding to reclaim the legacy of Moonset. He learns there are secrets in Carrow Mill connected to Moonset’s origins, and keeping the orphans safe isn’t the only reason the Congress relocated them . . .

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“See?” He flipped the cover open, turning to a random page. Each one was lined with painstaking rows of chicken scratch. Magic was a language, and most languages had a written equivalent, but written spells were still spells. Great care had to be taken that the words were so evenly divided up that the spell was still readable, but it took some work.

It was like the drawing guides in school when kids first learn how to write their letters. Each line is taken separately, one at a time. Spellbooks did the same. The added bonus was that normal people never realized what, exactly, they held in their hands.

Right in front of me, the curio shop guy was showing me a spellbook filled with what looked like dozens of new spells. I didn’t trust myself to hold it, but I stared at the words, translating in my head.

“Crazy looking, right? But I guess I can see how Dad saw something in this book, y’know?

It’s just a bunch of doodles, but it almost looks like a real language. See? There’s spaces between the words.” He pointed to a particular page where there were indeed spaces, but I didn’t feel like explaining that those weren’t separate words, but simply beats between syllables.

“Yeah,” I said, only half-convincingly. I forced myself to look away—there was something that looked like a beacon spell—to find your way to something that wasn’t there anymore. “That’s crazy.” I turned away, forcing myself to stare at one of the paintings—one of a woman seated primly on a bench surrounded by a garden exploding into spring.

Sherrod Daggett’s spellbook. Just the idea of it was crazy. If the Congress had known something like this existed, they would have snatched it up and destroyed it in a heartbeat. If they knew I had seen it—and hadn’t reported it—there was no telling what they’d do. If they found me with it, that might be enough to force their hands. A fatal move to be sure.

He was a traitor—a warlock and a terrorist. All true. Sherrod Daggett was everything the books said and worse. But people who met him—even those who hated him with a passion—

still spoke of him with reverence. Like even in Hell, he still knew who was talking behind his back.

But was he evil in high school? Or was he like me? The thought soothed as much as it terrified. I remembered that night in the hotel room on our way to Carrow Mill, telling Jenna with certainty, “We could never be like them.”

If it was just a normal grimoire, it wasn’t illegal to have. But it was where the spellbook came from that was the problem. Just because they wouldn’t teach us anything but the most basic magic didn’t mean we weren’t allowed to learn it. They got to decide what scraps to teach us, because we didn’t have any other alternative.

This might be one. Jenna was right when she said we needed to defend ourselves better.

Our protection was up to us because there was no guarantee Quinn or anyone else was going to be around.

There was a clatter further on in the building. “Oh Dad,” the man muttered. “I’ll be right back.”

He left, and I glanced at the book. Really stared at it. Do it. Take it. My hand trembled. It was the first spellbook I’d ever actually seen—live and in person. The owner didn’t have a clue what it was. All I knew was that I had to have the book. It belonged to me, or it would have, in a different world.

But this wasn’t something the man had out on the shelves—it was his father’s. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Just take it. It was like a growing compulsion in me, something hot and hungry that needed to be satiated.

“Oh Dad, what did you do?” I heard faintly over the sound of a television talking head discussing POWs.

You wouldn’t be starving for knowledge anymore. If there’s anything bad, you can just get rid of the book. If Sherrod really was bad from the beginning, it’ll be obvious. The call to darkness will be there.

Almost before realizing I was doing anything, I was heading for the door. The book slid perfectly into my jacket’s inside pocket. I threw a twenty-dollar bill on the counter, and ran out into the cold winter morning and crossed the street, trying to duck down and stay out of sight.

I stayed slunk down in the passenger seat, my eyes glued to the side mirror and the door of the curio shop (which never opened) when Quinn threw open the driver’s side door and scared the crap out of me. My head nearly hit the roof.

“You look guilty,” he said.

My blood froze in my veins, and I could feel the book burning against my chest. I’d checked my reflection once I’d gotten into the car, but you couldn’t even tell it was there.

“No, I don’t,” I said automatically, speaking almost too fast. Which only made me sound more guilty.

Quinn just looked at me. He tossed a bag over the back of his seat and climbed into the car.

“Okay, then.”

Whatever weird thing I was on today, he clearly didn’t want any part. “Yeah. Okay.”

“How about no more caffeine for you? What’d you get, extra shots of espresso?”

The tension drained out of my body. I mustered up a fake smile. “Two.”

As we pulled off Main Street, I glanced in the mirror and instantly froze. Meghan Virago was crossing the street, arms linked with Mrs. Crawford. What were they doing together? I knew

Meghan hated us, but was she really friends with the teacher? Or had they bonded over my outburst? They were coming from the same direction Quinn had gone. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like they were smiling.

“So how was the bank?” I asked lightly, while my thoughts ran and tried to come up with explanations. I had to keep it together, to show that everything was okay.

“Fine,” he said, his words clipped. “Long line.”

“Ahh,” I said, although I had no idea what I was ahh’ing over. He took the long way back to the house, driving through one residential neighborhood after another. I didn’t enjoy the drive much, barely listening to Quinn chatter about small towns—he’d been born and raised in the big city—and how it was a nice change of pace.

Now that I’d actually done it—actually stolen the book—I couldn’t believe myself. I wasn’t a thief. You left money, I reasoned, but it still didn’t change the fact. The worst part was that, underneath it all, I felt a rush of satisfaction. For once, I’d been the one to break the rules and get away with it.

“I said, what do you think about a magic lesson today?” Quinn’s voice was louder, interrupting my train of thought as we passed yet another church, Saint Anna’s, which had a giant steeple poised over the church building.

“What? Seriously?”

“Yeah,” Quinn said, leaning back in his seat and resting his head against the back of his seat.

“Besides, maybe it’ll do you some good to have something new to focus on for a while.”

The icy knot in my stomach was only getting stronger. It was like Quinn knew something—like he was just stringing me along and messing with my head. He probably knew everything—the old man in the shop must have called him as soon as I’d left.

You’re being crazy. He doesn’t know anything. I forced myself to look at him, just a quick glance as I started to shift in my seat. He wasn’t paying any attention to me at all, his attention was solely on the road.

It wasn’t much longer until we were turning onto our street, and I could see our houses in the distance. “Sounds good,” I said, trying to sound more even and relaxed. Remember, it’s okay to be excited. “I’m always up for learning something new.” Apparently, I was also up for a round of grand-theft spellbook.

Twenty-One

“There is no war. There’s only the slaughter.

Every time we try to regroup, they push us even harder than before. There is no opposition.

We have no leaders. They’ve won before we could even strike back.”

Report from the Field

Attributed to Clay Ewell

I was out of the car and walking up into the garage before I panicked. What would Quinn do if he found the book on me? There were Witchers coming and going in our house all the time.

Any one of them could be going through my things, right?

“I’ll be right there,” I said to Quinn as he headed inside. I fumbled with the pocket of my coat, walking towards the garbage can in the corner like I needed to throw something away. Since the holiday season was over, Quinn and the other guardians had gone to town one Sunday pulling down all the decorations that had plagued our house. There were so many boxes that they took up the majority of our garage space.

Tucked against the wall next to the garbage, for instance, was one of the giant plastic Santas that had a hole at the bottom to stick the pole with the light bulb attached inside. The hole was so big that Cole could probably have squeezed his way inside the Santa, but all I was wanting to do was find a place to hide the book.

Once the door had closed behind Quinn, I slid the spellbook out of my pocket and into the

Santa’s foot hole. The black-painted boots on the exterior made it hard to see that there was anything inside. Unless you were looking for it, or for some reason started moving around all the decorations, no one would know what was inside.

I dropped my still half-full coffee in the can and went in the house. “Is this going to be some lame ‘show me all the spells you know’ thing?” I asked, unusually loud. My heart was still hammering in my chest, and the small smile I was wearing was more at breaking the rules than about the idea of a magic lesson. But no one else needed to know that.

“Relax,” Quinn said. “It’s not going to be anything super exciting, but it’s something you’ve never done before.”

“What are you going through?” I nodded at the papers he was sorting on the table.

“Just some papers for work.”

“You work?”

He looked up, annoyed. “Aside from the fact that I don’t just crawl out of bed looking this fantastic,” he said dryly, “there’s more to my job than wiping your noses and setting curfews.

Which your sister insists on ignoring, much to my irritation.”

“Jenna’s never met a rule she didn’t like to bend to an inch of its life.” I tried not to smirk.

There was something else, though. Quinn always did that. Whenever I asked him something, he deflected, either with a quip or a question. “Ever notice you don’t like answering questions?” I tried to subtly read the papers, even though they were upside down.

“Why would you think that?” he replied, a maddening smile forming.

“Because half the time you answer with another question.”

“What makes you think you deserve to know all my secrets, Justin?”

“Maybe it’s the fact that you know all of ours. A little reciprocation goes a long way.”

“I doubt I know all your secrets,” he said, and for one solid heartbeat I thought he knew something. It was like he’d struck some sort of tuner—my whole body thrummed out one solid note of panic. “Just the ones in your file,” he finished.

I exhaled. He didn’t know anything. I was being paranoid.

“Almost done,” he said, straightening the piles.

“So they’re important?” I still wasn’t able to read anything except one word. Loose. I don’t know what was loose, or how loose it was.

“Moderately so.”

“You never mentioned what it is you do when you’re not … wiping our noses and setting curfews.”

“You’re right,” he said, sliding a large rubber band around the thicker pile, and a paper clip over the second. “I didn’t.”

He headed up to his room—the master bedroom—and this time I followed him. We’d never done more than poked our heads into Quinn’s room. It wasn’t like we respected his privacy, exactly; it was more like we had a healthy respect for our own necks. Several of the guardians they’d sent us to live with before had very insane notions about privacy, and so much as stepping foot into their bedrooms was nearly a declaration of war.

“C’mon, being a Witcher can’t be as boring as you make it out to be. I mean, you don’t do anything but hide out in your room or skulk around the house looking for reasons to yell at us.”

“You think I skulk?”

I shrugged. “There’s definitely a skulking-like quality to what you do.”

He frowned at me, but didn’t shut his door as he crossed the room. His bedroom was only partly what I expected. The bed and the computer desk were normal, but the big workstation desk looked like someone had pulled it out of a woodshop room. There was a stack of folded laundry on the hope chest at the foot of the bed and a dresser on the far wall, but there wasn’t so much as a picture or anything personal anywhere. It was very literally a room where Quinn didn’t do anything but work or sleep.

He set the two groups of papers on the desk, then slid open a drawer and pulled out his athame.

“Is that one of the Witcher blades?” People talked about a Witcher athame like it was the

Ginsu of magic knives, but no one ever explained exactly why.

“My personal one, yes,” he answered. “I’ve got a couple of extras just in case. You never know when something’s going to happen and you’re going to need them. First thing they teach you? Always be prepared for the most unlikely situations,” Quinn said, gesturing carefully with the knife. “Do you know why most warlocks get caught within a few weeks of their first invocation to the Abyss?”

I shook my head.

“Because in situations like this, power is literally a drug. Maleficia enters their system, and anything is possible. They have the kind of power that can destroy anything in their way. That’s where the high comes in. It would make a junkie out of anyone.”

I thought I understood what he was getting at. “So be ready for anything, because someone on a high is unpredictable.”

I expected some sort of acknowledgment or praise, but he just nodded sharply. “I thought I’d show you a little bit about why using an athame is so important.” He looked down at the blade, bending it in the light before he looked up at me. “Especially for someone like you.”

“Someone like me?” My mood soured. “Because I’m a child of Moonset?”

He looked at me evenly. “Because you wanted to know how to protect yourself, remember?”

Hearing my words thrown back at me, not even an hour after they justified my stealing the spellbook, made me shiver.

He might take it easy on you, if you just admit what you did. I wanted to trust Quinn, but there were just so many lies and half-truths. He didn’t make himself out to be someone who could be trusted. His loyalty was to the Congress, and the only honesty we’d gotten out of him was what we’d found out already for ourselves.