by Scott Tracey
My ears started to buzz, the way they did around electronics. The slight hum to the air, a hint of something about to happen. The air around me stilled. My eyes cleared only to see that everything had stilled. The words I’d heard Jenna using were in the air all around me, a dazzling mix of fireworks and shadow. Rainbows refracted around miniature prisms, darkness collected like fog.
The pattern of it was breathtaking, but it was the frozen rictus of Jenna’s grin that made my heart skip in my throat.
Something was wrong. Jenna, Maddy, the light and the dark. Somehow it was stuck. Time was frozen. Or maybe not frozen, but split right down the middle between moments. And there was the Prince, only now I could see the two trapped in one. Kevin’s body, his insides squashed by trying to contain something that was so compressed that the Prince had been right: there was no room left inside for something as gossamer as a soul.
I touched one of the lights, one of Jenna’s illusions. It rippled in the air like still water. The only sound was my breathing. The terrified staccato rhythm of my heart. Sweat dropping from my hair to the ground beneath me. I was the only sound in this temporally free world I’d created.
The buzzing in my ears came and went, the pitch of it changing by degrees. It was like being a radio, and having the frequency slightly changed. And even that was erased, until I really was the only thing I could hear.
Until the voice in my ear. The voice I’d never heard before and yet would know anywhere.
“Hello, son.”
thirty-two
“We’ve often asked why. Why was it so important for Moonset to have children? I sometimes wonder if they wanted to leave something good behind. Their chance to make amends.”
Illana Bryer
“Each of us is recording one of these, because we’re not sure which of you will hear it.” Cyrus Denton’s voice in my ears, as calm and as even as if we were having Sunday breakfast around the table. “Brandon can pinpoint a lot of things, but not this.” Brandon Sutter. Cole’s dad. Was he some kind of seer? There was no record of that anywhere. But then I remembered Cole’s insistence on the fire.
“Oh well,” he continued as though this was just another insipid conversation. Not like he was reaching across the years from his cage in Hell. Not like he was at least as much of a monster as the Prince himself. “I’m sure you know the stories about the Abyssal. Listen to me, Malcolm. Whatever you do, you must kill it. If you’re hearing this, you’re the one that can access the Codex. You must not tell anyone that it exists. The Congress will destroy you the minute they learn of it.”
The Congress. This was Cyrus towards the end. He must have known that the Congress would rebuild itself, that Moonset would not be successful in their attempt to eradicate the world they came from.
“There are many things we’ve learned over the years. Magicks that would blind you with their beauty. The Codex is our fail-safe for you. It is of the oldest kinds of magic, the kind that came before all others. There is little that can stand against it. But be careful, you may already know that the power is finite. Each spell will only work once.”
This needs to stop. I can’t be hearing this. It didn’t matter what he said. Because no, no, this was exactly what I needed to avoid. It was easy to be the son of Cyrus Denton when he wasn’t real. When he was a monster at the end of the picture book. Not a voice in my head. Not the kind of memory with hooks and barbs. Not something that would stick to my thoughts like tar.
I screamed, but there was nothing to do for it. His voice was a recording in my head and I could tear myself apart, but it would continue until it was done. Until he was done with me.
“If you hear this, you’ve met one. We always knew another Abyssal Prince would come. These creatures don’t die the way all things do. Their bodies fall, but their spirits do not depart. And should one escape, this town is a beacon that will draw it in. It will want the sibling it lost. Only he knows how to bring his sister back to life. One Abyssal can be stopped. But two … I do not know that the world could recover.
“Kill it, and bury it here. The merry-go-round is made of iron, and that will be enough to contain it. Forever.”
There were other sounds. Background noises. Voices. Cyrus’s voice changed. I heard him exhale, so real in my ear I almost thought I could feel it against my skin. “Malcolm, I just—”
But I would never find out what he’d meant to say next. The sound cut out with a jarring whine of feedback in my ears. I writhed around, the sound so loud it felt like my brain was liquefying. More than that, though, I was desperate to restore the connection. To find out what he’d been about to say.
Time started up again around me, knocking me to my knees with the force of it. Things in my head were upended, a computer with too many things to process. I could still feel the halo of magic spiraling around me. Only now it was like there was something else at play, seeking out particular entries.
There was movement around me. Explosions. But with the slurry in my head, coating everything in a thick, slow molasses, I couldn’t summon up even the smallest amount of focus. It was like the night of the farmhouse, when the four of us had been seated in church pews, mindless puppets waiting for Luca to invoke the Maleficia and bridge the way for the Abyssals to possess us.
I’d been there, that night. But also not. It wasn’t easy, like being asleep or not being aware. I was aware. We all were. Aware, and trapped inside our bodies unable to control anything, do anything. It was a waking coma, knowing every moment that the cage you were in was perfect, and you were never getting out. And no one would ever know you were still there, because you couldn’t do anything.
When I had nightmares, they were about that night. About what it felt like when the Abyssals and Luca had wrapped us up tight and barely left an air hole in the box.
I screamed, and this time it had the power to do what it couldn’t before. Every infraction, every argument, every conflict boiled up in my chest until I opened my mouth and roared. It was nothing more than all of my frustrations, fears, and rages given a voice, but three sets of eyes turned towards me.
The three of them, two humans and an infernal faerie, stared at me like I was the one who’d lost my mind. Spells tumbled down due to lack of concentration, fireworks fizzled out, and illusions turned to mirages turned to shimmers.
I looked to the carousel and wanted to see it move. The spells in my head scurried to obey. I could picture the spell in my head as it slithered and danced along my teeth like jungle vines and flew from my mouth. The carousel, the entire structure, began sliding toward me with all the speed of a Big Wheel tricycle. But as it gained momentum it picked up speed, until it rolled through what had once been the battlefield with the Prince.
The others scurried backwards and out of the way, but as it approached I hopped on and wove my way through the army of horses, grabbing onto the poles to keep my balance. I wasn’t the only one. On the other side, the Prince was also slipping through the aisles, but he jumped and bounced from the horses’ saddles. His balance never faltered.
We both approached the other side. The ground beneath the carousel was hollow and deep, a pit that a normal-sized person couldn’t have climbed out of. At the bottom there was a gray and blue sheet spread out, and a girl no older than seventeen on top of it.
She was casually pretty, blond hair swept away from her face. Despite the fact that she’d been dead for at least twenty years, it looked like less than twenty minutes had passed. There was no decomposure. No rot. She was as healthy looking as she must have been on the day she died.
Except that her skin was tinged the faintest, yet most inhuman blue.
Was that the Prince’s influence? Or was it simply the lack of oxygen in her blood? Did she even have blood anymore?
“Oh my God,” Jenna breathed, as she and Maddy appeared after running the long way around.
“Kore,” the P
rince breathed. A curl of relief wrapped around me, the kind that settled in the bones.
“Mal!” Jenna’s warning tone ended in a shriek when the body in the grave twitched.
Maddy fell backwards, with not even a hint of her normal poise. “She’s still alive?”
The Prince looked both sullen and amused at the same time. “Do you think a single mortal death can snuff something that was forged in the chaos of Creation? Always, we endure.”
We were closer than he must have realized. His need to be closer to the sister he’d lost brought him right up next to me. And when he looked up at me, there was such joy in Kevin’s eyes. He thought I would fail. He’d expected it.
“You have been a valiant champion, my Malcolm,” the Prince started, but before he could say anything more, I grabbed him by the front of Kevin’s hoodie.
My heart clutched, but even as the nerves in my body spiked, I smiled. Cocked my head to the side. “Do you hear that?” He stared at me, giving away nothing. But I saw his eyes flicker, just for a moment. “That little thread of fear, tangling up in my heart and growing.” I shook my head, smiled. “You made a mistake, Kevin. You thought I was afraid that I would grow up to be just like my father. That’s not it at all. Not quite.
“I’m not afraid of becoming my father someday,” I said. Even though I was separated from the others, I could still feel the swarm of symbols in my head, the rush of thousands of pages flipping along the Coven bond.
“I’m afraid, because I already am.”
A grave big enough for one was big enough for two. There was nothing I wanted more right now than to put him down where his sister was. Forever.
I opened my mouth, summoning the spell that would stop him. The one that Moonset had set aside for just this very purpose. That was the point of the conversation with Cyrus, and the confusion afterwards. Subconsciously extracting the proper spells, the ones that would stop him. Three of them bounced through the back of my mind, flaring like tension headaches waiting to be born.
The Prince screamed before I could get the spell out, and the world rocked apart around me.
We were torn out of reality and stitched back in somewhere else. The transport was rough and hard on my body, and I slammed down against the ground after what had to have been a ten-foot fall. The tiles around us cracked and spider-
webbed, in some places ripped out of the floor entirely.
The fall had the bad luck of separating me from my hold on the Prince. I looked up from the tile to see him stumbling backwards, all his preternatural grace gone in the face of his fear.
He knew. Maybe the spells I’d used before had clued him in, or maybe he saw it in my eyes. I don’t know. But he ran from me like he knew I was going to kill him. And worse, like he knew that I could.
The hospital lobby was still boarded up after the attack, windows covered by sheets of plywood and everything else moved into corners from where it had been. The hospital? Why would he bring us to the hospital. And then I looked up and swore.
The Prince had systemically stolen the hearts of half the student body. As the infections got dangerous, the Congress had been locking the kids up for their own good, turning the entire hospital into a mental ward to keep them docile.
“Throw off your shackles, my children,” the Prince screamed from the far side of the room, never taking his eyes from me. There was something more to his voice, a reverberation in the air that I couldn’t explain until I realized it was coming from the speakers. He spoke, and his words echoed throughout the building.
“Your Prince has finally come for you,” he continued. “Break the chains that bind you. Come to me. Be free, children. Be my hands. Be mine.”
He brought us to the hospital because he had a readymade army just waiting in the wings.
“Kill anyone who threatens me,” the Prince screamed, wide eyed as he stumbled into a stairwell and slammed the door shut behind him.
A psychotic army he’d just set against me.
Perfect.
thirty-three
Upon their surrender, Moonset offered up the location of the compound where we found
the children. What was once a finishing school for southern girls a century ago was filled with plans, schematics, hit lists, and incendiary devices.
And five babies, sleeping sound.
Moonset: A Dark Legacy
Chaos descended upon the hospital quickly, a wave of psychotic rage tangible in the air. There were lights and electricity for another thirty seconds before the building went dark. Screams and other sounds of fury rumbled through the floor. I had no idea what was happening inside. Had everyone gone feral? Were the Witchers holding them back? I had no clue what I was stepping into.
“Why are you doing this? You know me. You know what it is I want. That hasn’t changed.” His voice continued to haunt me while I planned my next move. “I haven’t changed. I am the same as I was that first day.”
“Lesson number one about humans, then,” I muttered under my breath, wiping my face down with my shirt. “Monsters might stay the same, but people change every second.”
“Yes, you did,” Kevin replied over the speaker system. “Changed. Who taught you hoard starfire? I hoped I was wrong, that the way you banished me was a fluke. You’ve been keeping secrets, Malcolm. I do not like it.”
Starfire? The power inside me, the one that doesn’t have a name. It was woven into the darkbond. But the Prince, who was more perceptive than most, couldn’t see it. And he’d acted like he knew so much about what Moonset had done to us! It had been a lie all along.
I crept down the hall and past the gift shop. There was another stairway towards the back, and it wouldn’t come out right by the elevators. If anyone was going to be waiting for me, I was sure they would be there. But if I could sneak up through a side hallway, maybe I could get away without catching any of his darkbound minions in a bad mood.
But where did I even start? Where would the Prince go? There had to be hundreds of rooms in the hospital, and he could be hiding anywhere. And it wasn’t like I knew the kind of magic that could track him down.
But maybe one of the others did.
The more I reached for the Coven bond, the easier it was to find, becoming like a second awareness in my head. There was something comforting about it, feeling four pulses of light all around me, knowing that they were still alive without a shadow of a doubt. That they were okay.
Malcolm? Malcolm, can you hear me? Jenna in my head. Mal, you’d better still be okay, I swear to God I will kill you myself if you’re not.
I tried to send something back, some confirmation that I was okay, only to hear silence in my head. Maybe if I hadn’t blown off all the Coven bond classes, I would know how to communicate with them now. I kept trying for a few seconds before I finally broke and texted her.
This was just great. Here I was, trying to kill something older than the dinosaurs and I could barely use enough magic to light up the stairwell so that I could see.
My fingers slipped over the keys when I heard gunfire coming from the floor above. I froze and crept towards the wall and out of the way, just in case. Who thought that guns were a smart idea to bring into the hospital? Did the Witchers even use guns?
Above me, the fired shots grew louder when I snuck into the pitch-black stairwell. I grabbed for the handrail before the light disappeared and took a few deep breaths. Acclimating myself. But I didn’t have long. A shaft of light appeared a few floors above me as someone opened the stairwell door. The sound of the next shot recoiled into the stairwell and intensified it a thousand times over. I staggered back towards my own door, barely able to hear anything.
But when I got back out into the hall and ducked around the corner, nothing happened. My ears continued to ring for a few minutes, and the only bright side was that I missed the specifics of Kevin over the loudspeaker. I could he
ar him talking, but couldn’t make out the words.
Finally, the ringing quieted, and I crept back the way I’d come.
With all the noise, I lost my connection to the Coven bond. Connecting a second time was more of a struggle. Every time I reached for it, I found myself recoiling again, anticipating more shots ripping through the hospital, and maybe me.
The stairwell door flew open before I could grab it. I fell back as bodies flew past me. They didn’t pay any attention to me. All of them were rough and ragged, dressed in hospital gowns over pants and shirts. All of them teenagers. Kids I knew on sight.
“You cannot stop me. And you cannot stop your children, can you? The way your spells fall past them. My words are all they hear now.” Kevin laughed over the loudspeaker. He’d stopped talking to me. Now he was talking to someone else, and the rest of us were in on the call. One of the adults, maybe? One of the Witchers?
“I told you they belong to me. Only my magic speaks to them.” His voice sharpened and grew louder. “The adults don’t trust you. But you are my children, and you are strong. They seek to lock you up, afraid of what they see in your eyes. I want you to show them. Let your passions catch flame and show them who you are!”
The Prince wasn’t just mobilizing a personal guard, he was deploying an army. “What are you doing?” I didn’t have to raise my voice, but I did anyway. “Why are you doing this?”
“They continue to resist. I won’t let them hurt my children.”
“They’re not your children,” I broke in hotly. “Children shouldn’t be sent to war!”
“Your parents certainly didn’t think so,” the Prince said slyly. Hearing Cyrus’s voice might have thrown me off balance, but there were a solid dozen years of walls in place. The Prince seemed to think he could use my parents against me, but I wasn’t the one who crumbled under their pressure.
