Darkbound

by Scott Tracey

  “Where were you, when that was all going down this morning? If it was all hands on deck, shouldn’t you have been there?”

  “Dear boy, who do you think played sentinel over your wayward siblings? As if I would trust their safety to anyone else.” Illana moved in broad, sweeping strokes. Everything she did was precise and expended just as much energy as she needed, not a bit more or less. She tossed a kaleidoscope of colors into a pan: reds, yellows, whites, and greens. Others she set off to one side before she turned back and grabbed a whisk from the counter.

  You trust their safety to anyone else all the time. You only turn up when you need something from one of us. “Is your friend still here? The one that wrote the book about Moonset. What’s-her-name. The nosy one.” I knew exactly what her name was. I’d known who she was since I was nine years old.

  “Much to my chagrin,” Illana said, “Adele will remain until this business with the Abyssal is taken care of. I think this news of your parent’s secret victory has undone her good sense. She longs for a chance to get the story right. I think she believes you all will follow in your parents footsteps.”

  “And what do you think?”

  There was a hideously long pause, where the only sounds were the hissing vegetables in the frying pan and the occasional tick of the coffee maker reminding itself it was still on active duty. “You’re going to dig up the old bones, aren’t you?” she asked flatly. “You’re going to help that thing.”

  Her back hid what was happening on the stove, the origin of the sudden pouring, bubbling liquid that I could hear but not see. Illana made it all sound so simple. Monster, evil. People, good. But there weren’t any other options, if there were, I would have been all over them already.

  “Do you have a better idea?” I asked, and finally I’d found an outlet for everything that had been bottling up inside of me. “Can you stop him? Because your grandson carved a spellform into the Prince’s chest cavity and he walked away without a scratch.”

  “Until you made him go away,” Illana said and she turned fully around, still hiding the stove behind her. Her hooded eyes shined with renewed curiosity. Everyone wanted to know what had happened on the roof. I may not have liked Illana much, but at least I trusted her. More than I trusted the others.

  “The curse … ” I said instead. “How much do you know about it?”

  I watched her eyes work as she tried to connect the dots, only to realize there weren’t nearly enough of them on the page. Her hand stilled; she’d been about to bring it up to tap against her lips. The move was so typical, so natural, that I was almost surprised that she resisted. “Something happened. Something new.”

  I nodded. “I think you should start being more careful. The Coven bond isn’t the innocuous power you think it is. Not for us.”

  “Tell me.” So intent was she on the conversation that she hadn’t turned back to the stove in several minutes; the realization caught her a moment later, and she spun back around with the kind of foul-mouthed curse I would have expected from the boy’s locker room.

  I found out what she was doing a few seconds later when she shoved a plate down onto the table in front of me and stabbed a finger towards the chair. “Sit. Eat.”

  My stomach revolted. The concept of food was so glorious that by the time I realized how hungry I was, the plate was nearly licked clean.

  “Malcolm,” Illana said, as gentle as she could be, which was about the same thing as saying gentle like concrete.

  “The curse … the Coven bond. The Prince told me that Moonset stole the secrets of the darkbond from Kore before they killed her.”

  “So they managed a darkbond between the five of you? Interesting. Although I’m afraid I don’t see how they would have found that useful.” A momentary pause, and then Illana continued, “But then, they could sometimes see things in a way the rest of us couldn’t. I’m sure if they incorporated the darkbond, they had a reason.”

  I exhaled. “There’s more. It’s … actually, I have no idea what it is,” I said, scratching the back of my neck. “There’s a lot of layers in our Coven bond, and I think one of them is

  a grimoire.”

  She was quiet for so long I grew nervous, afraid of her reaction. She waved a hand for me to continue, but the severe look on her face didn’t change.

  “He was going to kill them: Quinn and the others. Jenna talked me into trying to help, and we managed to tap into the bond somehow, but when I saw him about to stab Quinn … I panicked. And then there was this book of symbols in my head, flying through my head so fast I could barely pick one of them out. And then it stopped, on this one particular symbol.” And then it crawled out of my mouth, I didn’t say, because I don’t think it was magic at all. I think it was alive somehow. I think I got lucky.

  “And then you banished the Prince.” Illana’s voice was hoarse like she’d been the one talking for so long. I nodded, a rapid jerk of the head. Awkward and uncomfortable.

  “It burned away, after,” I added. “The spell … or whatever. I think it all burns away after.” Illana started to relax visibly, but that was because she didn’t understand. “What I did today, that was weak, compared to some of the others.”

  “And you’re worried about what Jenna or the others will do if they can access that part of the bond.” At first I thought she was asking a question, so I nodded. It took a few minutes to realize that wasn’t what happened at all. That she already knew how I felt and about what worried me. It hadn’t been a question at all to her.

  “None of the others have reported anything like this,” Illana said after several minutes of quiet thought. I’d sat there the whole time suffering through it with the queasiness in my stomach. It was supposed to feel good to confide in someone, to rely on an adult to make things better.

  “That doesn’t mean they won’t,” I said, quiet with certainty.

  “It might be that the Prince’s influence has somehow allowed you to tap into this hidden layer,” she said finally. “I’ve worked with your siblings, run them through many different exercises. If there were anything amiss, I would think something would have come up before now. Especially if it was something so easy you could stumble into it on your first real attempt.”

  I didn’t know what to think. Didn’t know if I believed her or not. “So what am I supposed to do with that?” None of that was a real answer, just a dismissive theory about why Jenna hadn’t broken into the secret magic factory.

  “Nothing for now. Be cautious, and listen to them. If they discover it, let me know immediately. And Malcolm? I don’t think this needs saying, but we never had this conversation. We maintain your lies from this morning. The Prince vanished himself. No other explanation is nearly plausible.”

  “And me? I think I could still tap into that magic, you know.”

  Illana smiled, and it wasn’t the first time I’d ever taken a moment to admire her, but it was the first time I realized that I was right to do so. “I know how much you fear the power inside of you, Malcolm. I think there would be no better caretaker for this power.”

  But if Moonset put this power there, then doesn’t that automatically make it evil and bad, and the kind of thing we should never, ever touch?

  She saw it in my face, and this time her smile turned sad. “Even monsters have moments of clarity, Malcolm. Monsters can have children just like everything else, and want to protect their children, and still be monsters. I admit I’ve always wondered if the curse was all they’d done for you. I suppose now we know the truth.”

  “And what is that?”

  But Illana wouldn’t answer me.

  twenty-two

  We knew Moonset was destined to go places.

  Even then, Sherrod was charismatic. They could have ruled the Congress within a dozen years. They chose to burn it down instead.

  Robert Cooper

  Transcript from
the Moonset trial

  It took two days to track down Adele Roman, the person who knew the most about what Moonset had been like in high school. She was the first person I wanted to talk to—the one who’d know exactly where to start trying to track down what had happened to the Abyssal Prince during Moonset’s senior year.

  Two days where I dealt with my siblings bouncing all over the place, shuttling people back and forth to the hospital to visit Justin who, by all appearances, was the picture of health (minus the stab wound in his gut). The adults were taking things slow, and he was still in restraints when I visited on the second day. Justin was the most wary of his freedom.

  “It’s fine, leave them on,” he said, resisting any suggestion to the contrary.

  There’d been no sight nor sign of the Prince. Maybe it meant he trusted me to get to the bottom of what happened, or he was busy with something else. I wondered if he was really doing all of this for his sister, or if there was more to the story. But then, if Justin hadn’t survived the attack, I wouldn’t have let up until I tracked down his killer. So I could understand it.

  I tried to use my time wisely to track down Adele Roman, but the woman didn’t lay down tracks easily. I asked Quinn and Nick, but they couldn’t find her. I even called the motels and hotels in the town to see if she was at any of them, but no one was registered under that name. I even tried to get word to Illana through the Witchers, but of course she wouldn’t return my calls. Why make anything easy on me.

  Maybe it should have been obvious, but when I finally found Adele on Tuesday morning, she was in the public library, seated behind the librarian’s desk in the far corner, a happy but absent smile on her face.

  If Illana had taken to acting like our new grandmother, Adele Roman was the one who looked the part. She wore comfy-looking sweaters, her hair was just a bit frazzled, and she smiled so much she almost looked deranged. In a good way.

  “I expected you days ago, Mr. Denton,” she said, like it was completely understandable that I’d tracked her down to the local library when she was neither local nor a librarian.

  “No one knew where to find you,” I said, thrown off a bit by the kind tone and the smile. Adults weren’t nice without a reason, not in my experience. They were easier to deal with, easier to handle, when they were up front with their hostilities or their limitations. Illana was easy to get along with, for example.

  “Oh,” she said slowly, “oh, dear. Yes, I guess I can see where you’re coming from. I suppose I should have told someone where I was staying.”

  Was the woman for real? I studied her and then shook my head. No, this was some sort of game. She knew who I was. She knew all of us probably better than we knew ourselves. Maybe she wanted a follow-up to the Moonset book, the story of the sequel.

  “Have a seat, Malcolm. Why don’t we talk?”

  I expected an interrogation, the cost of doing business with a historian who’d made her life’s work a retrospective on my dad’s crimes.

  “Illana asked me to aid you, but I don’t know how much help I can be. I repeated the story that was told to me, only to find out it was fiction. Robert controlled the narrative, but I can’t help but wonder why. This was years before Moonset’s decline, so why did he feel the need to wrest a victory from them?” She spread her hands and sighed. “Moot, I suppose. Without him here to answer for his lies, I can’t even begin to unravel what really happened. That’s exactly why I argued against immediate executions, of course. There was so much we could have learned from them … ”

  She trailed off, and I was struck dumb by how casually she talked about my parents like that. Not that I was offended, but it didn’t even occur to her that the subject was touchy.

  “I suppose there’s nothing to do about it now. Robert is conveniently in the field somewhere, unable to be reached by phone or spell.” She snorted. “‘Unreachable.’ More like hiding out overseas, as if that’s far enough to escape his wife’s wrath.”

  “Well, her wrath should bring him here. His lies are the reason this thing is here now.”

  “Oh, I’m aware. And the Congress will someday soon be made aware as well.”

  I snorted. The idea that Illana would turn against her husband after helping him cover up his lies for twenty years made me laugh.

  Adele gave me a curious eye and a sympathetic smile. “You seem to know a thing or two about complicated relationships. Don’t think that theirs is any simpler. Their marriage was symbolic. The Congress has always been her real husband, though one that doesn’t seem to mind if another man shares her bed.”

  Since I hadn’t sat down at her invitation, Adele climbed to her feet, sliding a small wooden cane out from under the desk. She used it as she walked, gesturing me along with her free hand, though I hadn’t thought her limp all that bad in the hospital. Now it seemed a bit more pronounced.

  She tapped the edge of a metal cart that was tucked against the end of a bookshelf. “Push this for me, if you’d be a dear.”

  I pushed, and Adele shelved, one book at a time. She barely looked down at what was on the cart, simply grabbing volumes one at a time with her good hand and slotting them onto a shelf, sometimes having to step on the tips of her foot to lunge up far enough to slide the book back.

  “I don’t think any truth Robert has would even be worth the paper he printed it on. I’ve looked into some of the records again, and I suppose if you squint at them in the right light, you can see how Moonset’s involvement was greater than written. But it’s far more likely that they themselves stayed out of the spotlight for their own reasons.”

  “But why? They managed to kill something no one else could. They saved their whole class. So why wouldn’t they want anyone to know?” My mind stuttered to a halt and I realized. “Was it … were they already dark by then? Maybe saving the other kids was a side effect of whatever they were really after.” The darkbond. They got the secret of it out of Kore, and they built one into our heads. Was that why they did it?

  “I think there are a lot of things about Moonset we still don’t know,” Adele said carefully, “though I wouldn’t put it past them to have done something good for their own selfish motives. There aren’t any heroes to find in this story, Malcolm.”

  “So where should I start?”

  She pretended to think, but it was obvious she’d already figured out the answers I needed. “Start with your uncle. Charles was a good boy once, misguided, but what boys aren’t at that age? I’ve heard he’s gone a bad way since then.”

  “You could say that again,” I muttered.

  “You could speak with your father’s old friends,” she mused, “but I doubt any of them are still around. At least not the ones worth talking to. You can try the Dugard boy. He was friends with your father up until senior year. They had a falling out a few months before graduation.”

  “Do you have a first name? Or should I go up and down the streets asking if anyone knows the ‘Dugard boy’?”

  Adele smirked and waggled a finger at me for a moment, a little bit of grandmotherly judgment in her eyes. “No need for that kind of tone, young man. His father taught at the high school for years and years. Never was a fan of your dad’s, though.”

  A slow ripple ran through my chest. I remembered an old man who hadn’t been a big fan of Justin’s father, who’d been a teacher at the high school. A man whose son now ran a curio shop of random knick-knacks right down on Main Street.

  He’d known my father?

  We crossed into another row of shelves, and by this point Adele’s limp had become more severe, and her other hand came down on the front end of the cart, which she used as a second support. “Are you okay?” I asked, looking back the way we’d come. We could have this conversation just as easily at the desk. There was no reason for her to hurt herself more than she already had.

  “Nothing you can do for me,” she said with a s
mile. “Be-sides, just because you have a weakness doesn’t mean you have to let it be used against you. You don’t grow up in Fallingbrook without learning to bite down on the pain.”

  Fallingbrook was Illana’s coven. “You … You’re part of Illana’s coven?”

  Her smile was bright and proud despite the pain. “Surprised? I’ve never been half the witch that Illana is, but I have my own uses.”

  My scowl came sudden and quick. “Then she knew where you were the whole time. I know covens can track each other down like that.”

  Her smile never failed, serene and a little pleased. “And if you’re especially talented, you know exactly how to hide from it too. Ana’s dear, but I like my independence, and I don’t like knowing she can peek over my shoulder any time she wants.”

  “You sound like you don’t trust her.”

  A sharp laugh at that. “Sometimes the people you trust are the ones you have to keep at arm’s length, Malcolm.”

  twenty-three

  The war changed no one as much as it changed Cyrus Denton. Just a few years before, he’d been the popular, charismatic leader. But by the

  end he was a grim, emotionless assassin.

  I can’t even say which one he really was.

  Elizabeth Holden-Carmichael

  Carrow Mill, New York—

  From a written account

  about Moonset’s development

  “Explain to me again what we’re doing?” Kevin asked. With Luca on lockdown, and no sign of his dad after I’d scared him off, I needed someone who knew where Luca lived. Uncle Charlie might know something about the Abyssal Prince, and he wouldn’t talk to the other witches. But I had a much better scenario in mind: I’d gotten a reaction out of him at the hospital. Maybe he’d let something slip if I could get under his skin.

  Like what really happened when Kore came to town, or how she arrived in the first place. That was the part of the story that bothered me most. Someone invoked Maleficia and summoned her. When Luca had done the same, everyone knew immediately what was happening. There was evidence of damage all over town. But in all the stories about Robert Cooper’s victory, there wasn’t a single explanation about where the Prince had come from, who had summoned it, and what had ultimately happened to them.