by Scott Tracey
The Prince cocked his head to the side, then glanced over a shoulder. “Alas, they come. The boring ones.” His mouth opened wider, a piercing vibrato that ripped through me and dragged the three of us from the room. A prism of light swept over my vision as we were ripped out of the world.
We emerged in the curio shop, dim and full of shadows. Afternoon had just barely started at the hospital, but now the world was full-on dark. Normally, when the Prince moved me from place to place, it was instantaneous. This was the first time there was a disconnect. Why?
From somewhere deeper in the building came the sound of canned laughter, a laugh track to an old comedy. The Prince stood next to me, hand on my shoulder. “Be calm,” he whispered in my ear, and calm washed through my body, a pleasant drug that eased my worries.
Without the lights, everything inside the shop seemed more insidious and macabre. Masks on the walls glared with frenzied hunger, statues on the floor seemed to move and jump at will. There were movements out of the corner of my eye, but stillness wherever I turned.
“Now then,” the Prince straightened beside me. He leapt onto one of the display cases and crossed one leg over the other. “You were about to expose your every squirming thought about my dear, departed sister. And of course your role in her murder.”
“It was me. I killed Kore.” Matthew smiled as the confession slid past his lips. He still had that same look of worship on his face, despite being humbled on the ground only seconds ago. “I cast the invocations to the Abyss. I cleared the path so she could escape. I brought her here.” And then his smile grew wider. Hopeful. “She died because of me, and now you’ve come. My reward is at hand.”
The Prince at my shoulder was a silent creature, for so long that the ticking of a dozen grandfather clocks stacked along the walls started to drive me crazy. Each was just a fraction of a section off of the rest, so it was a constant buzzing of ticks. A stopwatch without any end.
“Lies,” the Prince said finally. “You are a stained spirit, a worm indeed. But you are lying. Haven’t I said how much I despise a liar, dear Malcolm?”
He patted me on the shoulder, and the touch sent a thrilling electricity running across my skin. Excitement poured through my every vein. I would listen to his voice forever if I could. He could read to me from Adele Roman’s book, all about my father’s crimes, and I would not mind. “You … don’t?”
He beamed down at me and my heart thudded in my chest. He was pleased. I’d given him the right answer. My heart leapt in my chest and I couldn’t stop smiling.
“Not a question, pet,” he whispered out of the corner of his mouth.
Matthew looked between us, and I saw something unpleasant in his expression. I made a sound, something that must have been worrying enough that my Prince turned away and looked back at the man sprawled over his own floor.
“No,” the Prince continued, “I’m not looking for you. I’m looking for the crawling things in your head. Secrets. Worms oozing all over themselves. Dirty minds. Not like my Malcolm’s. Rigid and sparkling like a diamond. At least it was,” and again, the fury in his voice was a tangible thing. It caused all the lamps and candles in the building to catch and bathe the store in light.
I was protected from the onslaught by the hand on my shoulder. Only the emotions he wanted me to feel dripped from his fingers into my skin, and all others washed over me without leaving a trace of moisture.
Part of me knew I was under his spell as much as any of his victims, but I just didn’t care. I would be under his spell forever if I could. Why would anyone want to exist otherwise? When he touched me, spoke to me, his love consumed me. I never worried to know what he felt for me. It ran through my veins.
Just like a drug, the hateful part of my mind offered, the part that worried and dwelled.
“No,” Matthew insisted, and now I could hear it. The discordant notes when he lied. “It was me. I was responsible. You have to punish me.” Everything a lie but the prayer at the end.
“Curious,” the Prince murmured to me. “Men who seek punishments they haven’t earned.”
“I made this possible,” Matthew interjected, suddenly hostile. His face grew dark and he stabbed a finger forward, pointing to my Prince. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be wallowing at the bottom of the Abyss!”
The Prince’s fingers tangled in my hair and I sighed. “He wants to be punished. He begs for it.” He looked past me towards the other man. “Why?” The Prince released his hold on me, and pushed me forward a bit. “Make him explain, my champion. Humans are so horribly complex.”
With the release of his hold on me, the fog in my head lifted. It took a moment to sift through the last several minutes, to put everything into context. The Prince had never subsumed my will under his own so effortlessly before. Typically the emotions swept over me and influenced me for a moment, but this had been more pervasive.
He could suppress my will entirely if that’s what he wanted. I really would be nothing more than his puppet then.
My stomach roiled, and I spent another moment trying to keep from vomiting everywhere. The Prince might forgive me many things, but vomit on his person would probably not be one of those things.
As I got myself under control, I made an immediate decision. I had to play along. That was the only way.
“He wants to know why you’re lying.” I turned around, trying to orient myself, and walked towards the exit looking for the light switch. Not that candlelight wasn’t effective, but I wanted to be able to actually look the man in the eyes.
“I’m not lying,” the man lied. Without the Prince’s influence over me, I couldn’t hear the lies in the way I had before. But he was just so obvious about it, now that he wasn’t hiding behind his mask of mundanity.
“But see, there’s the problem,” I replied with mock severity. “You want to be punished, so the only way to really punish you is to not do anything at all. To leave you here.” I turned towards the Prince and nodded at the door. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Wait!” The man scrambled to his feet, his desperation so great that his fingers clawed into the wood flooring underneath. “Please! You have to. Or—or I’ll tell everyone. I’ll tell the Congress exactly what I did!”
I smiled. “And they’ll never believe a word of it. Remember? You’re an invalid. That’s the way you wanted it. To be overlooked and forgotten.” It was seriously creepy, trying to talk to someone who was clearly so far gone on their Moonset propaganda that they’d do anything to fulfill their directions.
The Prince looked between us like we were the most fascinating game of tennis he had ever seen. His head constantly flicked from the left to the right as he followed the verbal volley.
Matthew stared up at me, and I could tell he was weighing his options. Was I right? Would the Congress completely ignore him? Or would they throw the book at him just to have a scapegoat.
“Just tell the truth,” I said quietly. “And then you’ll get everything that Bridger promised you.”
The stillness in the curio shop was interrupted by a heaving breath, a whimper of nerves. “I didn’t summon your sister,” he admitted. “I was barely friends with them. Once Cy found his Coven, he didn’t have time for anything or anyone else. They went off to their secret clubhouse and never told anyone what they were up to. Sherrod didn’t come to me until later, until the day before it all started. He said there would be a sign, and I would know what to do. And then the Congress was destroyed, and the witches went to war.”
Went off to their secret clubhouse … “Do you know where they went? The place they always disappeared to during high school, right? Do you know where it is?”
He shook his head and just before he opened his mouth, the Prince’s voice cut through the air with a terse, “Lies.”
“I’m not lying!”
“Do you really think I should leave him b
e, my human?” The Prince turned to me for answers, and I remembered the momentary thrill when that had happened before, when I’d been eager to gain his praise. It made my skin crawl now.
I didn’t want to help the Prince, but it was the only way I knew to save the others. And maybe, if I found out what happened to Kore, I could use that as a way to leverage the Prince into leaving all the children behind. Or else I would have to kill him too. “Tell me where they went.”
The man began blubbering. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Tell me where they went!”
“It was some kind of park!” he finally howled. “I don’t know where. All I knew was that it was isolated. They made it isolated. Cy always had this gold thing he would flip—a dollar coin or something. Whenever I asked, he’d always pull it out and start playing with it.”
No. Not a gold coin at all. A gold token. Just like the one on Charlie’s bathroom counter, the only thing that hadn’t fallen to the floor.
“I think I know where they put her,” I said, surprised at the revelation as much as anyone. I turned to the Prince. “Send me back. Let the witches deal with him. You said it yourself. He’s not the one you’re looking for.”
The Prince made a small pout of a face. “I was going to have fun with him.” A wave of hopefulness and need washed over me, but I tried hard to hold onto my thoughts. To keep myself under control.
Even still, I hesitated. “But … are you sure?”
The Prince stared at me with lantern eyes. They swallowed up my vision, made me smaller and more insignificant.
No, I had to look away. Had to break the connection, whatever it was that the Prince was doing to my head, making my thoughts not as sharp, stealing my mind and replacing it with complacency.
It took an eternity to turn my eyes down, but once I did, warmth spread into my chest. My heart was a gentle roar in my ears, and I realized I was breathing heavily, like there would never be enough air. I’d sweated through my shirt and swallowed down dust in my mouth.
“Let the Witchers deal with him. Matthew wants you to kill him. Don’t give him what he wants. He’s been standing in the way all this time. He could have told you where Kore was buried weeks ago, but he didn’t. He still wouldn’t have, if we hadn’t pressed him.”
“No, you have to!” Matthew scrambled to his feet, his face darkening from red into a purple rage. “It was promised!”
The Prince weighed his options for only a moment before he turned back to me. “I want answers, my Malcolm.” And then the creature screamed, and Matthew and I were ripped back out of the world and deposited back into an almost-empty hospital room.
Empty except for the handful of Witchers who weren’t expecting intruders. Nick and Kelly were both standing near the door, talking to guards from the hallway.
Something was different this time around. Maybe it was the Prince’s renewed fury, or maybe his irritation with me for wanting Matthew left unharmed. But the travel between spaces was rough on my body, a deep muscle ache flaring to life from my neck all the way down to my toes. My ears rung with the sound of his scream, and even my teeth ached.
“Bad guy,” I said urgently, right before I dropped to my knees. Nick was at my side in an instant, helping me back up to my feet. My head swam and my blood sped through my veins like whitewater rapids. The other three Witchers had surrounded Matthew Dugard, though they waited until a nod from Nick before they began hauling him up.
Nick held me steady when my legs kept dropping out from under me. “What the hell happened? The alarms go off, and we find Luca’s been sautéed, the room’s trashed, and there’s no sign of you.”
“Who else?” I said glumly. “The Prince showed up after Matthew put his hands on me. He … wanted the Prince to kill him. I think that’s the only reason why he’s still alive. The Prince barely does what I ask, but he definitely won’t want to do something if he’s been manipulated into it.”
“Sounds like you know the Abyssal pretty well.” There was a dangerous tone in Nick’s voice. One that made me stop and look at him, stoic faced and all.
“I’m not on his side or anything,” I pointed out, irritated that I even had to do that. “But he won’t take the curse off of Justin if I don’t get him the answers he’s after.”
“But it’s still helping one of them, Mal. Just because you’re doing it for the right reasons doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t mean you can trust it.”
“I don’t trust him. Do you think I’m some kind of idiot?”
Nick spent a long time staring at me. “I think you’re the only one who calls it ‘him.’ There’s a reason we call it the Abyssal. Because when you think of it like a prince, you forget that he’s a monster.”
I took a step back, eyes wide. “I don’t … I’m not … ”
“We have to get him out of here, Mal.” Nick gave me an apologetic look and took charge of the other Witchers. They surrounded Matthew and pulled him to his feet. Once he was up, they started to escort him from the room, one of them reciting a steady stream of spells that had the same kind of cadence as the Miranda rights.
Kelly stayed by the door when the rest of them left. I walked up to her, my head a messy jumble of thoughts. Maybe I was giving the Prince—no, the Abyssal—too much influence in my head. Maybe that was why he found it so easy to manipulate me.
“Is there any word on Luca? Did the fire get put out in time?”
Kelly had her fist over her mouth, touching her thumb to her upper lip in a steady rhythm. It took her a second to recognize that someone was talking to her, and another moment to turn my way. “Oh, hey, what?”
“Luca,” I repeated. “Any news?”
Her worried expression intensified. “Too early to tell. The fire definitely did some damage, but we won’t know more until later. You put it out, right?” I nodded. “You did good. There were some resistance spells cast into the bed. It must have been pretty hard to make it go out, huh?” I didn’t say anything and she continued. “They’re afraid to try any healing spells on Luca, in case there’s more on him. They could end up doing more damage than the fire. And by the time the spells would fade, any help the healing spells can do will be almost nonexistent.”
“So even if he wakes up, his legs are … ” But I couldn’t finish the thought.
Kelly exhaled, low and slow. “Pretty much.”
I nodded. “Can you find Illana? Tell her I’m gonna be … do—”
“Mal!” Kelly was at my side in a moment, catching my weight and helping me brace against the wall. I tried to right myself, to make my feet do what they were supposed to, but there was a delay somewhere in my body.
She helped me into a chair, and I collapsed gratefully into it. Whatever energy surge had hit me after tapping into the darkbond magic, there was a time limit on it, obviously.
“Just … stay here. I’ll get Illana.”
She left me in the room, and all I could smell was the faint smell of burnt cotton and flesh. Cole’s words came back to me there at the end. “This is the best alternative. There has to be a fire.”
I chewed on my thumbnail while I waited for Illana, worrying.
twenty-nine
It’s a thing that Covens do. Go off by themselves. So no one ever wondered where Moonset disappeared to every day, not until after.
There are those who still wonder.
Simon Meers
Case Report on The Moonset Legacy
“And he said you’re all to be tested?”
Illana found an empty doctor’s office for us to use, and we sat on either end of a rather large leather couch. Despite the fact that we were two floors away, I still kept catching traces of smoke and char in the air. It was hard to tell if it was actually there, or just the memory of the scent burned into my head.
She was in the elevator when Kelly and I appro
ached, silent and severe. Today she wore a dark-green business suit. I got in, Kelly stayed behind, and Illana took me upstairs in order to debrief me.
I lowered my hands very carefully into my lap and studied the fingers. “I never believed in destiny, you know. I mean, I knew I was going to be tied to the others for the rest of my life, but I never believed it meant anything.”
“Fate is just a guide, a choice, like any other.” Illana smiled at me, a little soft and a little tired. “I think out of all of them, you might understand the best. Headstrong, like me. But you know when to run and when to stand tall.”
I nodded. The cuff of my jeans was faded and torn at the bottom. I dragged my fingers along it, tugged at the loose threads. “I know you think Moonset had a grand design for us. And I know there’s magic in my head that would agree with you. But these tests. These games, or whatever they’re supposed to be. I don’t think that was Moonset at all.”
“What makes you say that?”
It was hard to put it into words. The spells in my head were ephemeral things—only real for a moment, and then vaporized as if they’d never existed. “The curse protects us. It forces us to stay together. It forces us to rely on each other. But this magic they left us. The magic they left me, it doesn’t fit. If they wanted us weaponized, we would all have access to it. It would be hard-wired into all of us. But it doesn’t work like that. The spells burn out as soon as I use them.”
“You think it’s more self-defense,” Illana asked, her voice musing as she let the words roll over her lips and through her mind.
“Maybe. Or maybe they knew the kind of world we’d grow up in. That we’d know there were going to be times where we’d need something more to protect us. So rather than give us something easily abused, they gave us … this.”
She mused over that as she reached for the coffee table and that damned teacup she dragged everywhere with her. There’d been no offer of drinks for me.
“It doesn’t work, just so you know.”
She raised her eyebrows.
