Moonset

(which never opened) when Quinn threw open the driver’s side door and scared the crap out of me. My head nearly hit the roof.

“You look guilty,” he said.

My blood froze in my veins, and I could feel the book burning against my chest. I’d checked my reflection once I’d gotten into the car, but you couldn’t even tell it was there.

“No, I don’t,” I said automatically, speaking almost too fast. Which only made me sound more guilty.

Quinn just looked at me. He tossed a bag over the back of his seat and climbed into the car.

“Okay, then.”

Whatever weird thing I was on today, he clearly didn’t want any part. “Yeah. Okay.”

“How about no more caffeine for you? What’d you get, extra shots of espresso?”

The tension drained out of my body. I mustered up a fake smile. “Two.”

As we pulled off Main Street, I glanced in the mirror and instantly froze. Meghan Virago was crossing the street, arms linked with Mrs. Crawford. What were they doing together? I knew

Meghan hated us, but was she really friends with the teacher? Or had they bonded over my outburst? They were coming from the same direction Quinn had gone. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like they were smiling.

“So how was the bank?” I asked lightly, while my thoughts ran and tried to come up with explanations. I had to keep it together, to show that everything was okay.

“Fine,” he said, his words clipped. “Long line.”

“Ahh,” I said, although I had no idea what I was ahh’ing over. He took the long way back to the house, driving through one residential neighborhood after another. I didn’t enjoy the drive much, barely listening to Quinn chatter about small towns—he’d been born and raised in the big city—and how it was a nice change of pace.

Now that I’d actually done it—actually stolen the book—I couldn’t believe myself. I wasn’t a thief. You left money, I reasoned, but it still didn’t change the fact. The worst part was that, underneath it all, I felt a rush of satisfaction. For once, I’d been the one to break the rules and get away with it.

“I said, what do you think about a magic lesson today?” Quinn’s voice was louder, interrupting my train of thought as we passed yet another church, Saint Anna’s, which had a giant steeple poised over the church building.

“What? Seriously?”

“Yeah,” Quinn said, leaning back in his seat and resting his head against the back of his seat.

“Besides, maybe it’ll do you some good to have something new to focus on for a while.”

The icy knot in my stomach was only getting stronger. It was like Quinn knew something—like he was just stringing me along and messing with my head. He probably knew everything—the old man in the shop must have called him as soon as I’d left.

You’re being crazy. He doesn’t know anything. I forced myself to look at him, just a quick glance as I started to shift in my seat. He wasn’t paying any attention to me at all, his attention was solely on the road.

It wasn’t much longer until we were turning onto our street, and I could see our houses in the distance. “Sounds good,” I said, trying to sound more even and relaxed. Remember, it’s okay to be excited. “I’m always up for learning something new.” Apparently, I was also up for a round of grand-theft spellbook.

Twenty-One

“There is no war. There’s only the slaughter.

Every time we try to regroup, they push us even harder than before. There is no opposition.

We have no leaders. They’ve won before we could even strike back.”

Report from the Field

Attributed to Clay Ewell

I was out of the car and walking up into the garage before I panicked. What would Quinn do if he found the book on me? There were Witchers coming and going in our house all the time.

Any one of them could be going through my things, right?

“I’ll be right there,” I said to Quinn as he headed inside. I fumbled with the pocket of my coat, walking towards the garbage can in the corner like I needed to throw something away. Since the holiday season was over, Quinn and the other guardians had gone to town one Sunday pulling down all the decorations that had plagued our house. There were so many boxes that they took up the majority of our garage space.

Tucked against the wall next to the garbage, for instance, was one of the giant plastic Santas that had a hole at the bottom to stick the pole with the light bulb attached inside. The hole was so big that Cole could probably have squeezed his way inside the Santa, but all I was wanting to do was find a place to hide the book.

Once the door had closed behind Quinn, I slid the spellbook out of my pocket and into the

Santa’s foot hole. The black-painted boots on the exterior made it hard to see that there was anything inside. Unless you were looking for it, or for some reason started moving around all the decorations, no one would know what was inside.

I dropped my still half-full coffee in the can and went in the house. “Is this going to be some lame ‘show me all the spells you know’ thing?” I asked, unusually loud. My heart was still hammering in my chest, and the small smile I was wearing was more at breaking the rules than about the idea of a magic lesson. But no one else needed to know that.

“Relax,” Quinn said. “It’s not going to be anything super exciting, but it’s something you’ve never done before.”

“What are you going through?” I nodded at the papers he was sorting on the table.

“Just some papers for work.”

“You work?”

He looked up, annoyed. “Aside from the fact that I don’t just crawl out of bed looking this fantastic,” he said dryly, “there’s more to my job than wiping your noses and setting curfews.

Which your sister insists on ignoring, much to my irritation.”

“Jenna’s never met a rule she didn’t like to bend to an inch of its life.” I tried not to smirk.

There was something else, though. Quinn always did that. Whenever I asked him something, he deflected, either with a quip or a question. “Ever notice you don’t like answering questions?” I tried to subtly read the papers, even though they were upside down.

“Why would you think that?” he replied, a maddening smile forming.

“Because half the time you answer with another question.”

“What makes you think you deserve to know all my secrets, Justin?”

“Maybe it’s the fact that you know all of ours. A little reciprocation goes a long way.”

“I doubt I know all your secrets,” he said, and for one solid heartbeat I thought he knew something. It was like he’d struck some sort of tuner—my whole body thrummed out one solid note of panic. “Just the ones in your file,” he finished.

I exhaled. He didn’t know anything. I was being paranoid.

“Almost done,” he said, straightening the piles.

“So they’re important?” I still wasn’t able to read anything except one word. Loose. I don’t know what was loose, or how loose it was.

“Moderately so.”