Moonset

and pretend that none of this was happening. “They made me.”

“People could have died. You invoked Maleficia. You’re no better than them,” Ash said, suddenly harsh. Though I’d put my knife away, she hadn’t. But it didn’t look like she was going to be flinging around magic with hers. More like flinging that knife into his chest. I grabbed her by the shoulder. She tugged against me, but I kept holding on.

“But when they get in your head,” Luca snarled, “you don’t have a choice. Disobedience isn’t an option. They were in control. They killed that man. Not me.”

“You opened the door, Luca! You can’t possibly think you’re innocent.”

“Ash … maybe now’s not the time,” I muttered. Something was going on in the fire. A normal hearth fire was all sorts of healthy oranges and reds and even a little blue. The fire in the fireplace, though, was changing. The blue gained more prominence, and the hissing of the burning wood started growing louder, sounding more like a acetylene torch.

And it was growing darker, giving off less light.

The blues split into tongues of blue and green, each a sickly, unhealthy kind of shade. The room was suddenly cast into something much like moonlight.

And then the fire spoke.

“Child of Moonset,” the fire crackled.

Ash had already started backing away when the fire began to change. She moved to my side, and then her hand was in mine. There wasn’t anything visible in the flames—not like the inhabitants of the Abyss had faces—but there was that same predatory presence. Like the

Devil had personally turned all his attention on just the two of us.

If it came down to a choice, I preferred the preternatural presence outside that made me feel like prey over the monster in the fire pit. Monsters shouldn’t speak.

“I brought them, just as you demanded.” In contrast to us, Luca had actually gotten closer to the fireplace —and the thing inhabiting it.

“Yesssss,” the thing hissed, cracks and pops punctuating its words. The fire grew larger, darker and larger. Each tongue of flame that stretched out seemed to do so with purpose, like hands straining against a cage. One extended out, reaching towards Luca with a caress. He leaned forward, and the fire brushed his skin but didn’t seem to hurt him.

The air was thick with something profane—a presence that was so vast it dwarfed the rest of the room and made the oxygen taste strange and sulfurous. My grip tightened on Ash’s hand, and almost like we were one we both took another step backwards.

“Scion of Daggett.” The fire shifted, sending a veil of sparks up the chute. “Know usssss.”

“No,” I replied.

“So ssseditious. Like your maker.”

“I’m nothing like my father,” I snapped. Ash’s grip tightened.

“Ssstanding there wearing his face,” a second voice—this one more feminine—said, sending up another shower of shimmering sparks. “Human irony.”

“Justin, we need to do something,” Ash whispered.

I nodded, but my focus was on the fire. They’d been summoned into the fire. Maybe there was something to that.

“You brought us here, didn’t you? You were the ones who wanted us to come here. Why?”

My words were all bravado, but I was hoping the things peering through the fire couldn’t know that.

In the aftermath of the fire’s touch, Luca had grown silent, glassy eyed and drooling.

Sleeping, just like the others, only his eyes weren’t closed.

“Yessss. Feel. Let it burn inssside you.”

“They want you angry?” Ash was talking, but it was half to herself. And then, more forcefully, “What do you want with him? With all of them?”

“Moonssset trespassed against us,” the female seethed. “You shall be the tithe that balances the scales.”

“You can’t have him!” Ash called out, extending her knife once again. She stepped forward, leaving me behind. She pointed her knife at Luca, but it was more than that. I recognized the quick flicks of her wrist, the way her hand looped around at the sides.

She was drawing something.

The fireplace erupted, just like it would have if someone had thrown a bucket of gasoline on it. Where there had been only a pair of voices before, suddenly there were dozens. Some seared with rage, others with lust, but most were impatient moans. “OURS!!!”

“I don’t think they liked that very much,” I said, edging forward.

“Their blood bindssss us,” came the voice from the flames. This one was different than the others. Dry. Cold-blooded. “Your blood releasesss.”

My blood? “I won’t free you,” I said.

“You will. So it will come to passsss. Hisss blood is not enough.”

I looked down at Luca, saw the cut down his arm. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before. The cut was old, crusted and clotted, but it still looked serious. “Was Luca telling the truth? Was

Moonset innocent?”

Sparks surged upward, and for a moment they had a face. “Villainsss. Monsterssss.”

I wanted that sinking feeling in my stomach not to exist. I wouldn’t feel disappointment.

Moonset had made their beds a long time ago. There was no sense trying to change the sheets fifteen years later.

“Ssstriking down one of our own as they did,” the fire hissed. “Who were they to pronounce such a fate upon her?”

“Kore,” a second voice moaned. “Sister mine.”

Ash hesitated, looking at me over her shoulder. “I know that name. But Moonset didn’t kill her,” she said, her voice less certain. “Robert Cooper did.”

The fire voices had seemed to forget us. It shrank a little, now little more than three separate tongues each striving upwards in a different direction.

“So shall she be avenged,” the female said.

“And she shall walk into the world, fettered and forgotten, her blood shall sow seeds of vexation,” recited the dry one.

“Kore,” again moaned the third.

Ash was shaking now. I moved to her, the two of us now standing in a line with the benches.

If I reached to my left, I could tuck back a stray lock of Bailey’s hair. Just sleeping. All of them looking so peaceful.

“The female works against ussss.”

Just like that, the fire erupted into motion. It became not just a fire, but also a creature with three fire-born tentacles. One moment we were standing there, the next one of those tentacle arms was flying towards us. “Aere dis, ” I shouted, using one of the spells from Sherrod’s book, but the wind it called didn’t slow the tentacles down. I did the only thing I could think of: I grabbed Ash and pulled the two of us down.

Quick, but not quick enough.

“Agh!”

I had smacked my shoulder against the side of the church bench, but when I looked up at

Ash’s cry, it was to see her hand almost in my face, and the blue-green tentacle wrapped around her wrist. Her athame clattered to the ground, and just as quickly as it had flown our way, the tentacle unwrapped itself and slithered back towards the fire.

I was grabbing her arm a moment later. “Are you okay?”

But a closer inspection revealed only a hint of redness on her skin. No burn.