Moonset - Scott Tracey

Mal was the “-est” sibling. Oldest. Tallest. Calmest. Biggest. We couldn’t exactly join sports teams when we arrived in a new school, but that didn’t stop him from working out like it was his job. Football and wrestling coaches started salivating the moment Mal walked into a new school, but he always turned them down. Everyone probably would have held him up as the perfect child but for being the spawn of terrorists.

It helped that he was gay. It kept me from having the world’s largest inferiority complex.

“Told you Jenna’d stay out of trouble,” Mal called over his shoulder, casual as can be.

Bailey hesitated in the doorway, dwarfed in a white faux fur jacket she must have insisted on.

Bailey, in contrast to Mal, was the youngest and tiniest.

Jenna lunged forward again, and this time Malcolm caught her fully, grabbing her by the waist and scooping her up off the ground like she weighed nothing. To him, she probably did.

“She’s a Witcher,” Mal said. “Just let it go.”

Virago’s childish, snide expression only lasted a moment.

“Meghan!” Quinn said sharply, speaking to Virago, “Let’s go. Give them some privacy.”

The added tension left with the two adults, so even with the five of us crammed in a two-bed motel room, it didn’t seem as bad as it had before.

“We saw a wraith,” Cole announced happily to Bailey, who didn’t look as thrilled.

“Figures she’s a Meghan,” Jenna muttered, once Mal put her down. “I’ve never met one that wasn’t a raging bitch.”

Bailey shrugged out of her coat, folded it carefully, and set it over the motel room chair. “You guys are okay, right? Miss Virago said that Cole got hurt.”

Cole turned his head and pointed to the side of his jaw. But the only remnant of the cut he’d suffered was a penciled red line. “Quinn used his athame on me; it was cool. All the blood went slurp right back inside!”

Jenna rolled her shoulders, and just like that, her mood changed. “Thank god you’re here,” she said to Bailey, claiming one of the beds. “I’m so bored.”

Malcolm eyed the pair of them, then walked over to me while Cole went back to playing with the television remote. “A wraith? We knew something happened, but they wouldn’t tell us anything.”

“A wraith,” I confirmed. “We’re lucky to be alive. Or … here, I guess.” The wraith hadn’t been there to kill us; it had come to collect us. The wraith said it had come to rescue us. What was the plan? Bring us to Cullen Bridger?

But I couldn’t tell Malcolm that. Not with four other pairs of eager ears in the room.

Information had to be compartmentalized. I trusted the four of them more than anyone in this world, but I also knew them. Knew Cole’s tendency to blab, Jenna’s ways of making trouble, and even how Bailey got attached to things she shouldn’t.

It was dangerous for them to know everything all the time.

“So what happened? I heard Quinn’s a badass blah blah blah,” Malcolm said.

I shook my head. “It was the curse.”

The room instantly quieted.

The truth was that none of us knew what the curse was. Only that it was chained around all of our necks, an invisible albatross that protected us.

It hadn’t been enough to just be the children of Moonset. We had to be freaks, too. Before they surrendered, our parents had done things to us. Something beyond simple magic. When we were threatened, or when we were separated for too long, Bad Things started to happen.

I’d never seen it in action (that I could remember) until the other day.

I recited the story for Mal, well aware that everyone else was listening just as intently. Jenna and Cole were there, and yet they were still hanging on every word. I explained it the way I understood it in hindsight—the way Quinn had used Cole to antagonize the wraith, knowing full well that one of us would jump to his defense. Quinn had apologized, but as much as I wanted to be mad, he had saved us.

“What’d it feel like?” Jenna asked, once I was done. We’d made a point of not talking for the last two days. At least not about anything important.

I had to think for a few minutes. “Heavy. It felt heavy. Like there was this thing around me all the time, but I just couldn’t feel it before.”

“Can you still feel it now?” Mal asked.

I shook my head. “But I remember it. You know how you go to the dentist, and even a few days later, you remember how it felt? It’s like that. Kind of claustrophobic, knowing that there’s a room full of dark magic around me all the time.”

“You’re sure it’s dark?” Jenna asked pensively.

I shrugged. “What else would it be?”

She stared up at the ceiling, but didn’t share whatever she was thinking. Jenna could read my thoughts at a glance, but the connection wasn’t two sided. Most of the time I had no idea what was going through her head. Especially now.

“I’m glad you guys are okay,” Mal said, but I could hear something in his tone, like the rumblings of train tracks before the inevitable collision. Bailey bit down on her lip, and Cole stared through his sneakers. “But what the hell were you thinking, Jenna? You’re lucky no one died.”

“They were going to take us away regardless,” Jenna said dismissively. “Does it really matter?”

“What if Bailey got caught in the crossfire? Or Cole? He was throwing himself right in the thick of it.”

Jenna pushed herself up. “That’s what you’re there for, Mal. Ride in and be the white knight,” she said sweetly. “How else can you feel superior to us mere mortals?”

Somehow nearly dying at the hands of a wraith had become about Malcolm and Jenna’s long-

standing issues. As everything did, given enough time.

I did my best to cut it off at the pass. I really did. “I think what Mal’s trying to say—”

Jenna didn’t let me finish. “I know what he’s trying to say. So how about you actually let him say it.”

“How about you drop the rebel badass act for five minutes?” Mal fired back. “You’re not the one that has to pick up the pieces. Do you have any idea what this has been like for Bailey the last couple of days? She liked that school.”

Bailey’s stained cheeks and pursed lips were her only response. She stared straight ahead, like she was trying to ignore it all. More likely, she was trying to keep from crying.

Jenna’s eyes flicked across the room, long enough to see for herself, and she sighed. “Look

—”

“No, you look,” Mal snapped. “It’s not like they can just split us up and send us to wherever we want. One of us goes, we all do. The curse, remember?” None of us were exactly certain how that worked, either. They could move us separately, ten or twenty miles apart on the journey, and things were fine. But if anyone tried to separate us, like take one and leave the rest, it was bad. Dark clouds and explosions bad.

“At least we won’t have to take midterms,” Cole said brightly.

“Unless they make us start homeschooling,” I pointed out.

“I heard they’ve got a detention center somewhere,” Mal added, “for kids that can’t keep it together. They call it the Priory, but it’s more like jail. No contact with anyone. ”

“They wouldn’t really do that, would they?” Bailey asked softly.

“Sooner or later they will,” Mal said, “especially when they have to keep moving us to a new school.”

“For the last time, they were going to move us anyway,” Jenna shouted, hands grabbing at the duvet and squeezing for all she was worth. “They knew the wraith was coming and they sat on their hands waiting. Probably hoping it would have killed us.”

“Actually, Quinn said they were waiting on you. They knew we were up to something,” Cole, ever helpful, pointed out.

“Waiting for you to make us all look bad again,” Mal added.

Jenna wouldn’t make eye contact. “Look, the spells just got a little out of hand. I didn’t mean for it to get that in-tense.”

But Malcolm wasn’t buying it. “You can’t just throw out a half-assed apology and think that makes everything all right again!”

“Hey, come on,” I jumped in, turning on Mal. “Calm down.”

But Jenna didn’t need anyone to take her side. “Then what do you want from me? Sorry I’m not perfect like you, afraid to learn any magic because, God forbid, you find a spell to grow a personality!”

Within thirty seconds, Jenna and Mal were shouting over one another, and even Bailey and

Cole were jumping into the fray. I couldn’t even hear what one of them was saying, let alone all four of them.

“ENOUGH!” I shouted at the top of my lungs.

Four pairs of eyes turned on me, instantly quiet.

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” I pointed out, “and I don’t want to spend the rest of the day with a headache.”

“You can’t keep letting her off the hook, Justin,” Mal chided. “It’s getting out of hand.”

“I know that. There’s no one in this room who doesn’t know that.” I took a deep breath, exhaling slowly before I continued. “But ganging up on her isn’t helping.”

“So what?” he challenged, “We all back away and stick our heads in the sand? We did that the last time, and the time before that.”

“I didn’t notice an intervention the time Malcolm got us thrown out,” Jenna chimed in spitefully.

“But I suppose the golden boy gets a pass, right?”

That started the furor up all over again. Mal started to go red in the face, and even Bailey and Cole were jumping in, getting angry and animated in turn. Jenna was the only one who looked composed, but then again, she was used to this.

“Hey! Hey!” But no matter how loud I yelled, I couldn’t make a dent in the chaos. I’d have to do something else.

“Cen fal la,” I whispered, eyeing the wall sconce on the far side of the room. It wasn’t a sanctioned spell, but a hodgepodge of words I’d glued together when I was still in grade school. It had only one real effect.

The light bulbs in the sconce popped—loud enough to cut through the noise—one after another, a tiny fizzle of sparks accompanying each tiny explosion.

“Jesus, Justin,” Mal cried, swatting at the back of his head. He wasn’t close enough to actually get burned, but that didn’t stop him from overreacting. “What the hell?”

“Mal, can you guys give us a minute?” I asked. Maybe I would have a better chance at getting through to Jenna if it was just one on one.

There was some grumbling, and some dirty looks, but eventually Mal and the kids went outside. Either to one of the other motel rooms the Witchers had rented—because they could shove three of us into one room, but god forbid any of them have to share—or to go harass the vending machines.

“I’m not the only one you should be mad at,” Jenna started immediately. “We almost died there. That thing started wagging his chains all over the place, and I thought for sure that we …

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