Moonset

I’m no slouch, if I do say so myself.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that you’ve been using us. I’m not bait, Quinn. None of us are.

And it’s bullshit that you all get to decide otherwise.”

“I understand why you feel that way,” Quinn said carefully.

“Screw that,” I shouted. Now that I was really being honest, and saying all the things I’d been thinking for weeks, it was hard to rein it in. “Don’t placate me because you think it’s what I want to hear. It’s bad enough that they treat us like we’re tainted most of the time. But now they’re telling us that we’re expendable? That it’s cool if a warlock kills us in the line of fire?”

I expected Quinn to tell me to calm down, or to breathe. That’s what adults always said, when they wanted you to shut up. “Go on,” he said instead.

“God, Jenna’s right. You never had any intention of teaching us to defend ourselves, yet you’re throwing us into situations that could get us killed. First, you left us in Kentucky when you knew a wraith was coming—”

“That was Meghan’s call,” he interrupted, but I kept talking anyway.

“—and now you brought us here like you don’t even give a shit what happens to us.”

For as far back as I could remember, I’d been the one to play by the rules. Mal was the model kid—barely got into trouble and way too mature for his age, but I was the one who’d always followed the rules. I cleaned up after Jenna when I had to, but even before that I tried to keep everyone on the same path. The right path.

But what was the point? The Congress was never going to see us as anything other than what we were now: five mistakes that were occasionally useful in drawing out the Congress’s enemies.

“Was this even the first time?” I asked, somehow suddenly shocked. “Or are the places we end up less random than we thought? Do you make sure we go places where we can stir up your enemies?”

“I’m not the Congress,” Quinn said, in the same way he’d have said “I’m not your enemy.”

But I believed one as little as I would have believed the other.

“Your grandparents a r e the Congress,” I pointed out. Illana Bryer, the war hero of

Fallingbrook, and Robert Cooper of Eventide. There hadn’t been a more celebrated match in history. “And blood is thicker than water.”

Quinn leaned against the countertop. “There is a warlock in Carrow Mill,” he confirmed. “But you’re under a better guard than you seem to think.”

I crossed my arms in front of me. “If there are so many Witchers around, how is he still walking around? Why haven’t you caught him yet?”

“Because we can’t find him, obviously,” Quinn said, and the fact that he actually told me rather than left it unsaid caught me off guard. My irritation and anger faltered. “Whoever he is, he’s flying just enough under the radar that we can’t figure out what he’s doing or what he wants.”

“Except us.”

“Except you,” he agreed.

“But there’s only so many witches in town. It can’t be that hard to keep track of what they’re all doing.”

“You’d think that,” Quinn said, “but can you even say with certainty where Jenna is at any given moment? If a witch wants to disappear, they disappear. And people who know they’re being watched don’t tend to do things that are illegal.”

“He killed that man yesterday, didn’t he? The Harbinger?”

“Or the Maleficia did,” Quinn said. “Sometimes, they’re one in the same, and sometimes one acts independently of the other.”

“How is that possible?” I asked. Everything we were taught told us that Maleficia was a force —like the stuff that made a bomb a bomb. “I thought the warlock opened a conduit to the

Abyss, and the Maleficia came out and destroyed everything it came into contact with.”

“If only it was that easy,” Quinn muttered. “Maleficia wants to destroy—it’s like the base desire for destruction. But how it gets expressed depends on the environment. It can adapt to cause the most damage it can, almost like a cancer.”

“So it’s not just a source of power?”

He hesitated. “Yes and no. Some people will tell you that magic is a living force—that’s why we can’t control who gets bound into a coven; because there’s something greater at work. But you can’t reason with magic. Maleficia is the same—it’s corrosive, but not exactly alive. Most of the time, it’s a symbiote. It latches onto a host, and it becomes as smart as that person is or isn’t.”

Most of the time. What was that supposed to mean? He was leaving something out. “But?” I said, prompting him to keep going.

“But that isn’t the sum total of what lives in the Abyss. Some people believe that the Abyss is just a cauldron, brewing up dark magic. There is that, but there’s also more. But we can only guess at what it’s really like. There are stories of creatures … things that live there. Things like the Princes.”

“Hell has Princes?” I sounded as skeptical as Jenna. It wasn’t that I was trying to mock him, but Quinn sounded so serious. The idea that there was some kind of infernal monarchy was crazy.

He sighed. “Children’s stories meant to keep bad kids in line. They say that if you travel down deep enough, you come to the court of the Princes of the Abyss.”

“And those are?”

Things in the house had suddenly gotten too quiet. It was like all the clocks had stopped ticking, the wind had died down, and the pipes and floorboards had gone deaf. Even my question was hushed.

“Once upon a time, there was a war between the forces of the Abyss and the forces of

Chaos. Demons and Faeries. Only the Faeries aren’t like the kind in any Disney movie. They fed on souls and wore the skin of humans like it was an accessory. When the Faeries lost, the

Abyss set a price—they would feed it a soul every seven years. If they failed, a Faerie would take its place.”

“And these souls become the Princes?”

“No,” he said softly. “Every so often, the Fae can’t pull themselves away from their pleasures, and they are taken.Drafted, you could say, against their will. And just like the Maleficia taints those who summon it, the Abyss tainted those Fae. Broke them and reshaped them into something different. We call them Abyssal Princes. No one knows how many there are, or what they want, but even one of them is the kind of monster that the world hasn’t seen in five or six hundred years, back when magic was plentiful. And Maleficia makes them even more powerful.

Because that’s what Maleficia is: power and destruction.”

“It’s a power that Moonset tapped into,” I said. “So why isn’t it destroying more?”

“Because … ” Then he stopped. “We’re not really sure,” Quinn admitted. “If the warlock wanted to just blow a hole in the side of the world, he could. That would make sense. After a while, that’s all they want anyway. But this one is different. All his attacks are small. Weak. It’s like he’s playing with us.”

I got the impression that he wasn’t supposed to be telling me all this. There was a difference between admitting the truth about the Congress’s plans, and then there was admitting the places where the Congress was weak.

A car door slammed outside. Jenna and the others were home, finally.

“I won’t ask you not to say anything,” Quinn said as he pushed himself off the counter. “But just be careful what you say. You are under guard, Justin. Whatever the actual intent was to bring you here, I can promise you that you’re safe.”

I wanted to believe him. I nodded, let him walk away as I waited at the table for the inevitable crowing that would come with Jenna’s arrival.

Safe. From what, I had to wonder. The warlock? Maybe. But was he really the biggest threat to us? What about the Congress? What would they do if it came down to a fight? Would they save us, or would they wait until the warlock was done and then swoop in to save the day?