Darkbound (The Legacy of Moonset) (24 page)

“School’s canceled tomorrow. Too many absences. I think they’re hoping that if everyone stays home, it’ll limit how many outbursts there are.”

“Okay.” I climbed onto the bed next to her, still baffled that we were the last two remaining. “Maddy and Kevin?” I asked suddenly. “What’s going on with them?”

“Both normal. At least as of today. Why?”

“See if they want to come over tomorrow.”

“What are you thinking?”

I wasn’t thinking anything. But I wanted some extra hands on deck in case Quinn decided he didn’t like what I was going to propose in the morning. Too many Witchers might provoke the Prince into another fight he couldn’t possibly lose.

Of course, that morning conversation never came. Jenna and I woke up to the same roar of fire engines surging down the street at a little past six in the morning. I climbed off the bed and over to the window, stretching out my arms as I walked, trying to work out some of the kinks.

The fading red tails of the fire trucks were quickly followed by a pair of white police cars, a black sheriff’s car, an ambulance, another police car, and then another ambulance.

“Someone brought a parade to town and didn’t tell us?” Jenna snarked, but both of us hurried downstairs immediately. Quinn was in the kitchen, wrapping up a sheath across his forearm, dressed in the all-black paramilitary uniform of the Witchers.

He didn’t look pleased. “The Abyssal’s turning the volume up to eleven. Nick will be here. I need to get downtown. There’s already been two fires started, and a fifteen-year-old stole a van and drove it through the front of the bank.”

He wants all the adults distracted.
I knew without being told that this was the Abyssal’s plan all along. Now that I had some kind of idea about where Kore was buried, and who had been responsible all along, that must have meant the Prince knew too. We were connected in some way, even still. And he didn’t want interference when it came to the end.

I was okay with that.

“Fine,” I said flippantly. “Have they shut down the roads yet?”

Quinn shook his head, and then strapped a second knife around his calf. It still amused me that Witchers didn’t need guns, but they still used all the same tricks to conceal them.

Once he was gone, and Nick outside to see him off, I nodded to Jenna. “Call Maddy and Kevin, and plan to get dirty.”

“You know where we’re heading?”

I nodded. “Unhappiest place on Earth.”

t
h
i
r
t
y

“Robert Cooper is the worst kind of snake:
the kind that pretends he is anything but.
I can’t wait to meet him again. I want to
watch him slither before I slit his throat.”

Cyrus Denton
From notes recovered from
the Moonset compound

With Nick in charge, the house became a central hub of comings and goings. The furniture was removed from the dining room and a map of Carrow Mill was tacked onto one of the walls, with a growing mass of red dots for every incident. Within an hour, the city was lost in a haze of crimson. Witchers pushed their pins into the wall, studying the growing chaos, and left wearier than they’d entered.

The teenagers of Carrow Mill, almost to a man, had lost their minds.

None of the younger witches had been affected, aside from Justin. Cole had played at it, and Bailey locked herself away just in case, but the rest of us were untouched. I wasn’t sure why the Prince had done me the favor. Or if it even
was
a favor.

Everyone was so busy around us that they didn’t even notice when we walked right out the garage door. The air outside was a thing of sirens and smoke in the air. The city was still quarantined, and every sound and smell justified it now.

The streets could have stood in for a zombie apocalypse. There were cars overturned, six-car pileups. Once, on the way to Maddy’s, we had to back up and circle through an entire development to find a working road.

Kevin and Maddy waited inside the house, but came out before we’d even pulled into the driveway. On the far end of the street, a trio of dark shapes pulled themselves out of the shadows like the first wave of zombies in a movie.

Now, with the four of us, we were ready for what was probably the stupidest call I’d ever made in my life. Four teenagers against a killer and a demon.

“So you think Moonset’s super secret lair has been in the Enchanted Forest all along?” Maddy was of course skeptical.

“Remember how you said that kids used to break in, but there wasn’t much to see?” I said, raising my voice against the howl of sirens as two cop cars sped past us in the other lane. Once they were gone, I took my foot off the brake and started rolling forward again. “I think there might be more to see than you think.”

“There’s no magic there,” Maddy said waspishly. I think she was more annoyed about the fact that she was a local, and she’d never thought to look there herself. How dare anyone else figure out something before her. “Everyone would know.”

“Moonset dabbled in a lot of different kinds of magic,” Jenna said. “Who knows what’s there. It could be masked from humans and witches both. Or it could be that only the six of them could get past their wards.”

“I still think we need some of the Witchers. We can’t go up against that thing by ourselves,” Maddy added.

Jenna was all confidence, and I didn’t like it. She’d pinned her hair back and thrown a black skull cap on, like we were some sort of teenage crew planning a heist. “Malcolm banished it once. He can do it again.”

I didn’t have the nerve to tell her how wrong she was.

The rust-covered, battered, and practically decrepit gate surrounding the entrance to the Enchanted Forest was probably imposing once. It was, in places, almost ten feet high, and the tips were the kinds of spikes that looked naked without a skull to skewer. But over the years, the gates had bent, bowed, or in places been shoved out of alignment, and then someone came along and put up chain-link fencing. Only five feet high, but still new and in good repair. And in front of both gates were a variety of actual chains with an overcompensatingly large shackle and faceplate.

There was even a wooden sign above the gate, although it dangled from only one of the lines that had held it up before, and the only part that was still legible was the
chant
of Enchanted.

“How long has this place been closed?” I asked.

Maddy walked right up to the lock and shrugged. “Dunno. Back when my parents were kids? Maybe earlier than that. It was open for almost a hundred years, I guess. People wanted
real
amusement parks with
real
roller coasters. Not some spinning teacups and giant pumpkins.”

She had the locks opened in a matter of seconds. Even Jenna was impressed.

It was obvious that the park had been closed forever, and the forest had started its reclamation. Concrete slabs that had probably once been impressive and orderly were now broken and overturned and had cracks shot through with darkened greenery. The ticket office to our right was now a hollow shell with only two and a half walls, and a trio of pine trees growing up through the middle.

Everywhere we looked it was a blend of old and new, a real-life version of those TV shows about a world after people were gone. Garbage spread in all directions, there were remnants of chairs and ladders scattered on the ground, and evidence of ancient graffiti on every available surface.

“What’s the plan?” Jenna asked. “How are we taking this thing down?”

Oh Jesus. She thought I’d brought them here for some sort of epic beatdown. Of course that was the conclusion she’d come to. It was exactly what she and Justin were hard-wired to do. Run
towards
the danger. Stop the bad guy. Justin had done his part stopping Luca, and now it was her turn. It didn’t matter that three dozen Witchers couldn’t defeat the Abyssal. What were two-fifths of a rag-tag coven and a pair of idealistic Solitaires going to do?

“We’re not taking down anything,” I said. “If it shows up, don’t go after it.”

Her lips pressed inwards, but she huffed out an attempt at agreement. “Okay, fine.”

“I mean it, Jenna. He got Justin to fillet himself for no good reason, and when I pissed him off, he talked a kid into severing his femoral artery. He did that by
talking.
”

We crept around something that looked remarkably like a tar pit, but had probably been a pond or a fountain. There was a wheelchair half-submerged in the muck, and a decrepit clown statue missing half its head. The mud was settled and thick, but it looked more like the middle of some spring showers instead of deep winter.

“I don’t think there’s anything here.” Kevin had pulled up short by the ruined fountain, and when I turned back, Maddy had stopped with him. Neither one looked like they were willing to take so much as another step. But Jenna was still at my side.

“There’s probably a spell somewhere,” Jenna said, abruptly taking charge. “You go take the left side, I’ll take over here.”

Jenna on a power trip was something I should have been prepared for. But we’d been getting along decently well in recent days, so I thought maybe I’d lucked out, and she’d turned over a completely new leaf.

I walked back the way we’d come, around our stalled companions, and circled around the far side of the tar pond. Here there were trees from outside the park that had become heavy and overgrown, dipping down into the park space like streamers. A rusted, broken-down snack truck sat against one the fences, almost completely obscured by the trees.

I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking for.
After a moment, I shouted that very thought over my shoulder.

“Look for spells,” Jenna called back helpfully. “Anything out of place. Maybe something carved into the ground, or on an object or something.”

That was certainly helpful. I crouched down on the ground, try looking under the snack truck. I could already smell something foul and sickly sweet from here, and if Jenna thought I was going to climb through the truck, she was out of her mind. There was no telling what kind of nastiness was in there, percolating over the last thirty years. I had no intention of finding mutant ice cream that had evolved itself a brain because someone forgot to turn the freezer on.

There was nothing else nearby that screamed
magic
to me. Just a lot of weeds, renegade grass growing up between the slabs of concrete, and general din and decay. I covered my eyes with a hand and looked for Jenna, but she’d disappeared back inside the ticket office.

She was definitely braver than I was.

So much braver that she emerged from inside the office, up to where the roof would have been if the building hadn’t already started falling down. Jenna braced both her hands on the side of the wall, and looked over the surrounding area. Then with a triumphant laugh, she vanished out of sight. For a second, I thought I’d heard the laugh wrong, and she’d tumbled down twelve feet to the ground, but before I could even make it halfway to the ticket office, she emerged with a “Whoo!” and ran back towards the pond.

Jenna was a girl on a mission, and she hopped right up to the edge of the pond where the fences still blocked the way. “Mal, help me move that.”

“Are you okay?” I asked, ignoring her and checking her for injuries. Other than a few layers of dust caked to her clothes, she looked unhurt.

“
Help me with that,
” she repeated through her teeth. I guess it was too much to hope that her good mood would have lasted until we were done.

Since I had literally no idea what the
that
was that she wanted me to help move, all I did was to cup my hands low and give her a boost when she tried to climb up over the fence. She perched at the top long enough for me to return my attention to the pond to figure out what in the hell she was after. But just in case something bad was about to happen, I grabbed the top bar and vaulted myself over and behind her.

If one of us was going to get in the mud, it was only fair if we both did. Even though the idea of ruining my running shoes made me want to just turn around entirely. But it wasn’t the pond she was interested in. It was the clown head. The creepy, broken clown head.

“I have … no idea where you’re going with this.” Still, this was almost worth it just to watch Jenna spend precious seconds trying to find the best spot to step in to keep her shoes as mud-free as possible.

I wiped my sleeve across my forehead, surprised at the trail of moisture it absorbed. I was sweating, and not only that it was
hot
over here. Not like a warm thaw in the middle of a harsh winter. Like actual heat. I could strip down to just a pair of shorts and it would still be too hot.

“That’s what … I’m trying … to tell you,” she grunted, reaching one side of the clown head. Of course she took the side that was clean and free of gunk. I got the muddy hepatitis side. “Come on. Help me pull this out.”

We counted down from three together, and at one we both started to pull. The clown head was heavy, bogged down underneath an unknown amount of mud, and had probably settled in there three decades ago. It barely moved an inch except for right there at the end.

We counted down again, and this time, we found some leverage. The clown head was mired in the muck, but once we started, it began to rise inch by inch. We managed to roll it over onto its face and out of the pond, darting out from under it at the last second before it rolled over our shoes.

“Now what?” I wiped at my face again with the back of my hand, but I was more careful now that my hands were spackled with mud.

“Over the fence,” Jenna directed as I groaned.

Together, we heaved the thing up over our heads and tossed it onto the concrete. I turned to the pond, trying to figure out whatever it was that Jenna had seen that made the clown so interesting. Only when I turned back around, she’d hopped the gate again and had gone back to Kevin and Maddy.

I followed suit, confused as I watched her reach down and yank up a handful of weeds, tearing them all along one of the cracks and making it stand out against the faded gray stone.

“It’s the Moonset symbol,” Jenna said, gesturing with her hand. “Dark pond, a fiberglass head broken in half for the crescent, and then these.” I stepped back to see what she’d seen.

The Moonset symbol was something we’d learned about after coming to Carrow Mill. The symbol that defined Moonset, that they left behind after every one of their crimes. Luca haunted us with it: carving into lockers, infecting our phones, even burning it into doorways. It was a message to the Congress demanding our presence, and a warning to us of what was to come.

The symbol itself was fairly simple. A circle shaded in darkness except for a crescent moon of white at the side, and rays like the sun extending from all around it. Six of them, one for each of the six members of Moonset.

“You think it’s the spell?” I squinted, feeling like the day was suddenly a whole lot brighter. The temperature hadn’t eased up since leaving the pond. In fact, it was nearly sweltering now.

Kevin tugged on his hoodie a couple of times, like getting some extra air flow was going to solve the problem. Maddy, on the other hand, adapted quickly. After seeing how Jenna and I had stripped out of our layers, she did the same. She had on a dark-red camisole that was almost identical to Jenna’s in every way but color. And before anyone could interject, she started walking forward, past the pond that barred her way.

“Seems like it,” she said to me, shrugging.

Now that I was looking for it, I saw the trailing black and green breaks between the concrete, and the way they arced around the pond like waves. Just like the rays in Moonset’s symbol.

“Now we know they were here,” Jenna said. There was a waver in her voice that didn’t match the hard light in her eyes. Our parents had walked this same path. It was something to think about. If Moonset really had set up shop here, there had to be something in the park that would pinpoint exactly what they’d done with Kore.

The problem was that the Enchanted Forest was no small park. For as many attractions as were still standing—there was still a Haunted House of Mirrors though it looked to be sadly lacking mirrors—there were empty spaces where the earth had overtaken what had once been there.