by Scott Tracey
I opened my mouth and the symbol crawled out, and all I could think of and see was the knife poised above Quinn’s head, and the absolute lack of fear in his expression. And even as my mouth struggled to shape the words that would bring the symbol to life and activate its power, I felt the page in my mind ripped out and turning to ash, the knowledge used up and burned away.
Quinn’s eyes locked on mine, and my tongue pressed the magic from my body, the symbol tearing through me with the kind of pain that only came after a really good workout. I spoke the word and the ground quaked beneath us, shaking the hospital from the basement all the way up to the roof. The clouds hammered against each other in the sky. The raging wind quelled. All around the Prince the air darkened, black and fragmented. Shards of onyx covered him over like a coffin, all sharp angles and solid shadows that compressed upon themselves, breaking down and shrinking piece by piece until there was nothing but a crystal the size of a golf ball where the Prince had once stood.
And then even that vanished down into nothing.
twenty-one
I’ve never seen someone so cold as the day that Cy broke up with Savannah. They’d been together for years. It ended the spring that Moonset formed.
Sara Bexington (S)
Personal Interview
“Tell me again what you did.”
Quinn looked exhausted, as did all the other Witchers. Hell, even Jenna looked exhausted, but I felt like I could run a marathon. Despite whatever it was that I’d done, my body had recovered quickly. Insanely quick. I knew this wasn’t the way magic normally worked, but what I’d done on the roof—that hadn’t been magic. At least not the kind of magic we were used to.
The Prince had pointed out that we considered magic a language, but that humans also thought it was the only language. That any other language was evil. So when Quinn asked me to tell him what had happened, I lied.
“I don’t think it was me. I told him he couldn’t kill you all, and I guess he must have listened.” It irritated me that I had to put the onus on the Prince, that I had to give him credit for a mercy he didn’t feel. He would have killed them all and then walked me along what remained of the parking lot, bragging about each kill. Showing them off like their bodies were trophies he’d collected just for me.
Quinn didn’t believe me. That’s because he wasn’t an idiot.
“The Prince did that,” he said flatly. “Folded himself up in a crystal cage and disappeared. For no reason. He was winning!” I’d never seen him so close to actual anger before. Quinn never lost his temper, but it looked like he was about to.
Jenna didn’t know what happened either, but for once she had my back. “That’s what he said.” She crossed her arms in front of her and stared down Quinn. “Is there anything else?”
He looked between us, and of course there was something else. There were lots of things else. But Quinn didn’t ask any more questions, he didn’t push things any further than necessary. “You should have run when you had the chance,” he said gruffly. He looked weirdly uncomfortable and kept looking at Jenna and ducking his head down. Never at me.
Quinn stood up and headed for the door, pausing just before he crossed the threshold. “You can see Justin in a few minutes, once we get the wards down from the upper floors.”
“If you warded the hospital, then how did he walk right in?” Jenna asked, because she might have had a change of heart where I was concerned, but she was still Jenna. “What was the point, then?”
Quinn shook his head, but he still wouldn’t look at me. “The point was to keep all the patients safe. Justin and Luca were inside; we needed to be sure they wouldn’t be harmed.”
Luca. That’s right, he was here too. “You go see Justin,” I told Jenna. “I’ll be by in a few minutes.”
Luca’s floor was now entirely empty except for the pair of guards on either end of the hallway. None of them batted an eye as I walked past—all the locked and secured doors had been propped open with doorstops, shoes, really anything that could be found to make them stay open.
There was no change in Luca’s condition. I didn’t stay long, as the sound of breathing machines was enough to unsettle any good mood I’d managed to maintain after the day and night I’d had. But I had to wonder—the Prince was up and moving around, and Luca slept. When the Abyssals had come for us the first time, they said we were supposed to be the restitution for what Moonset had done—that through possessing us, Moonset’s debt for killing Kore would be paid.
Each of the spirits needed a host. So who was hosting the Prince? Was it literal, like was he walking around inside someone’s body. Or could it be something more complicated, and as long as Luca slept, the Prince had free rein over the rest of the world?
The easiest thing to do would be to find a way to wake Luca up, and see if it made a difference. He’d been the one to summon the creatures in the first place, so he probably knew as much about them as anyone.
“Has your dad been back lately?” I asked, my voice so quiet the machines drowned it out. Even if he was awake, he probably couldn’t hear me. I liked it that way, though, to be honest. There might have been a few words I could have eked out while Luca lay on the bed with his eyes closed, but an actual conversation … I wasn’t ready for all that.
There were more guards outside of Justin’s room. It was hard to say if it was because they were more worried about protecting him or more concerned about what a crazy Moonset kid could get himself into. I recognized a few of them from the battle outside. Most had washed up in the meantime, changed into clothes that weren’t singed and ripped and bloody. A few, though, were new. Reinforcements who hadn’t spent the early morning hours fighting for their lives.
I didn’t say anything to them either. The idea of acknowledging them annoyed me, in some way. Like they would suddenly become captors instead of guards. It was stupid, and I couldn’t figure out why I was suddenly so bothered, but the hospital was crawling with Witchers and the Prince had nearly killed them all.
Jenna stood in the doorway when I approached. One of the Witchers told us to hang back and let Justin sleep. That the doctors said only one visitor at a time, and only for a few minutes. We compromised and looked in on him, neither of us saying anything for the longest time.
Justin was all pale skin and limp hair, even blacker than usual against the ivory hospital sheets. Deep lavender circles had swept over his sunken eyes and his hands were a mess of bruises even I could see from here. Each hand was also wrapped in a thick cuff that swallowed up his wrist as well as part of his forearms.
“They’re afraid he’s still going to hurt himself,” Jenna said, her voice atypically flat and empty. “I thought he was better. I thought all they were worried about was the surgery. And now that he was done, everything was going to be okay.”
I knew she wanted to be Bailey in that moment, naive and willing to believe in any story. “I think he’s going to be like that until we find a way to stop the Prince.”
“Didn’t you? Stop him? I know what you told Quinn,” she dropped her voice down to a murmur, “but I saw what you did. I don’t even know what that was.” But it was clear that she wanted to find out, exactly as I knew she would.
But even if I could figure out what it was that I’d tapped into, or even what it was that I’d done, there was no way I’d share it with Jenna. The spell, or whatever, that I’d used had saved everyone, at least for right now. Just before I’d lost the connection to whatever power that was, I’d felt the page burn away, the knowledge vanish.
I think whatever I’d tapped into was a limited resource. The things there could only be used once, and I certainly wasn’t equipped to decide if it was okay. But I also wouldn’t trust Jenna with it, especially after seeing what it could do. There was every chance she would squander any real power she was given, and while my stomach still clenched at the idea of doing magic, I’d seen just
how much it had done today.
Besides, once I had some real sleep, I had something more important to focus on. The Prince was gone, not defeated. And he’d attacked Justin for one reason and one reason only: for my cooperation. The first step towards that was to start finding out what really happened in Carrow Mill twenty years ago—and to discover exactly what kind of legacy our parents had left here.
This was a town with a higher-than-average concentration of witches per capita. Someone had to know something.
Jenna and I slept outside Justin’s room, waiting for him to wake up. Neither of us was quite ready to leave, and we’d both clung to the hope that he’d wake up any minute, and we’d be there, and that would help us come to terms with it all somehow.
But Justin didn’t wake up, and someone needed to check on the kids. I volunteered, since even the idea of separating Jenna from her hospital chair seemed designed to send her into a panic attack. Her hands made claw marks in the wooden arms when I talked about Cole and Bailey, how they were sitting at home and waiting for updates. Her breathing had increased, and I even saw a sheen of sweat on her forehead.
“I’ll go,” I said, deftly plucking the decision from her hands. There was no moment of grateful appreciation, and it was better that way. I liked Jenna better when we kept each other at arm’s length. “Call me if anything changes.”
Someone had to drive me home, because I’d actually parked in the parking lot. The whole area had been cordoned off, with someone having whipped up a construction crew in the handful of hours since the fight. I don’t know what story they spun to make the town forget that a hospital had been evacuated and a monster had used some of their loved ones as a meat-puppet army, but it was a good one, because when we drove through town it was business as usual everywhere we went.
Illana was there when I walked in, as I’d expected. But the startling thing was that she had Cole and Bailey spellbound, seated at her feet like grandchildren on Christmas morning.
“Shh,” Cole said immediately, annoyed at what little interruption my arrival had caused. Both of them were almost a decade too old for bedtime stories, and to that point, it was still daylight out. Regardless, they hung on her every word.
Illana raised a heavily penciled eyebrow in my direction, but never stopped weaving her story.
“And they called him the ‘heart stealer’ because he was beloved in a way that only the Princes can be. Now the town of Hamelin never quite forgot what happened, even if the truth was ground away like a pebble in the ocean, worn down to sand after hundreds of years. But they still remember the salient points of the story. There was a man who came to the town of Hamelin, whose music was ribald, though it was more his personality that was pied than his clothing.”
Almost in stereo, Bailey and I both turned to Cole, and he didn’t disappoint. “How could he wear pie, though? They didn’t have pie in the Dark Ages. Everyone knows that.” He was confident at first, certain in this one truth, but after a moment that certainty wavered, and he added, “Don’t they?”
“Pied meant that he wore a coat of many colors,” Illana murmured with a soft smile, which put Cole at ease even as I swallowed down a momentary flush of relief and Bailey hid her smile behind her hand. Cole would always be Cole, and for that I was incredibly thankful. “But what our own records suggest is that the man was foreign in a way no one else is ever really foreign. He grasped the language with ease, yet he lacked social cues. He could play a complicated melody on any instrument you handed him, yet he did not understand the human way of life.
“And so he became close to the people of Hamelin, and they fell under his spell. He did them favors at first, even protected them from threats that they could have fought off themselves. With every favor, he deferred all talk of payment until one day, he spoke to the town elders, and he revealed what he was truly after. He wanted the children. All of the children.”
“Wanted them for what?” Bailey, always the pragmatist. “They were his friends, weren’t they?”
“The Princes feed on souls, but only certain types of souls. There was a Prince named Kore, and she fed on passions, on souls who had something they loved more than anything else in the world, and she could only take them when that passion had died in them, and they were broken, vacant creatures. The Prince in Hamelin, though, he was particularly seditious. For it was love that he sought. Love above all other things. And sometimes, when love is forced or artificial, it becomes a dark thing. A snarling tangle between bestial urges: to hurt, to control, and even sometimes to kill.”
The pair of them were quiet for a very long time, and then Bailey said, with complete clarity, “That’s what happened to Justin. He was crazy for Ash before, and now he’s just … crazy for her.”
She has to know how I feel! Justin’s shout echoed through my head.
“So what happened to the Prince when the town told him no?” Cole asked. “They did tell him no, right?”
Illana smiled the same humoring smile she had every time Cole spoke. Illana wasn’t a people person, so where the hell did the story-time lady come from? She wasn’t their actual grandmother, and this wasn’t a bedtime story.
“They told him no,” she confirmed. “And he went away in a terrible rage. But by then it was already too late, because the children were already infected. Word spread to the nearest coven, who contacted the Congress, which at that point was headquartered in Italy. And within the month, a dozen of the strongest covens rode for Hamelin. But it was all for naught. The Prince faced off against the strongest witches available, and held his own long enough for the power of his song to steal away the last child. And once they were all infected, he collected them all and spirited them away to an unknown place.”
“And now he’s here?” Cole asked.
“And now he’s here,” Illana repeated, in a far more confident voice. “Magic isn’t the way to defeat a creature of the Abyss. Not one that thinks and moves and breathes. Maleficia can be overwhelmed and destroyed. Creatures, though, are something else entirely.”
“So how did Moonset kill one?” Bailey asked, and I flinched, realizing even Bailey saw there was more to the story.
Illana spread her hands wide, the blank curiosity that was painted across her face exaggerated to the point where I had to roll my eyes. “I suppose that’s what your brother intends to find out.”
“I want to help,” Cole said, flinging himself around to stare at me. Bailey chimed in a moment later, offering up her own desire to help. I glared daggers into Illana, because the last thing I needed was the pair of them getting underfoot.
“I think this is something Malcolm must do on his own,” the woman confided, as if it was a very great secret. I don’t know what kind of spell she’d cast on the two of them to make them revert to the childish personas who sat on the floor and listened to stories, but all of this was too far. “But there is something that is integral that you must do. A part of the story I haven’t shared yet.”
They turned back to her eagerly, their pleas to Malcolm forgotten for the moment.
“As I told you, love in the wrong hands can become a most terrible weapon. Your dear brother is proof enough of that. And if the Prince plans to replicate his old plans, Justin is only the first. There will be others. Many others. And we must contain them as quickly as possible, before they hurt themselves, or anyone else. Imagine the kind of harm we could cause, if we let ourselves be slack in our vigilance.”
“Why don’t you just lock them all up before they get bad?” Bailey asked. “I can help.” Off the sharp look I turned towards her, she wilted, and shook her head. “I just meant, I could talk to them. Get them to a pep rally at school or something, and then you lock them up until it’s safe for them again.”
“Because we don’t use coercion on children,” Illana said. The two of them believed her and I snorted. The Congress did nothing but use coercion. We were livi
ng proof. “It would be easier, certainly, but if we break the laws for this, then the next time the justification becomes easier and easier, until the laws hold no meaning. We will protect the children as much as we can, but we will not strip their freedoms from them. Not until we have no other choice.”
Being given a task, even one as serious as the one Illana had thrown them, set the two of them into a frenzy. Bailey and Cole started arguing one moment, trading ideas back and forth the next, electrified by their chance to be useful. To be part of something.
I watched them with shock and an itch on the back of my neck that wouldn’t quit. “What did you do to them?” I demanded the moment the pair left the room. Because the whole thing had been surreal in a bad way, and I had no doubt that for all Illana’s protests against coercion, that was exactly what she’d just done.
“What needed doing. They would get underfoot, and at least now they will worry for their own safety. They are children, not warriors.” Illana’s face twisted unhappily. “Not yet.”
“Not ever,” I snapped. “Not if I can help it.”
“But you can’t,” she said, wrapping calm around her as a shroud. “I know you think of them as having something that was stripped from you, the innocence you were never allowed to have. But they are still your greatest weakness. I would have thought your recent trials would have proved that. You can’t shield them forever.”
This was not a conversation for me. It was a conversation for Justin, or maybe Jenna in his stead. “I’m not the one in charge,” I said, loathing in my tone. I wasn’t sure which one of us it was for, but I let it ride. “You want them to trust you? Stop manipulating the people they care about.”
Illana got up carefully, her spine stiff the entire way, and glided into the kitchen. A moment later, I heard a methodical sound, the thwack of a knife against wood. I followed her to the edge of the kitchen tile, but stayed on the outside like a vampire.
