Moonset

“You never mentioned what it is you do when you’re not … wiping our noses and setting curfews.”

“You’re right,” he said, sliding a large rubber band around the thicker pile, and a paper clip over the second. “I didn’t.”

He headed up to his room—the master bedroom—and this time I followed him. We’d never done more than poked our heads into Quinn’s room. It wasn’t like we respected his privacy, exactly; it was more like we had a healthy respect for our own necks. Several of the guardians they’d sent us to live with before had very insane notions about privacy, and so much as stepping foot into their bedrooms was nearly a declaration of war.

“C’mon, being a Witcher can’t be as boring as you make it out to be. I mean, you don’t do anything but hide out in your room or skulk around the house looking for reasons to yell at us.”

“You think I skulk?”

I shrugged. “There’s definitely a skulking-like quality to what you do.”

He frowned at me, but didn’t shut his door as he crossed the room. His bedroom was only partly what I expected. The bed and the computer desk were normal, but the big workstation desk looked like someone had pulled it out of a woodshop room. There was a stack of folded laundry on the hope chest at the foot of the bed and a dresser on the far wall, but there wasn’t so much as a picture or anything personal anywhere. It was very literally a room where Quinn didn’t do anything but work or sleep.

He set the two groups of papers on the desk, then slid open a drawer and pulled out his athame.

“Is that one of the Witcher blades?” People talked about a Witcher athame like it was the

Ginsu of magic knives, but no one ever explained exactly why.

“My personal one, yes,” he answered. “I’ve got a couple of extras just in case. You never know when something’s going to happen and you’re going to need them. First thing they teach you? Always be prepared for the most unlikely situations,” Quinn said, gesturing carefully with the knife. “Do you know why most warlocks get caught within a few weeks of their first invocation to the Abyss?”

I shook my head.

“Because in situations like this, power is literally a drug. Maleficia enters their system, and anything is possible. They have the kind of power that can destroy anything in their way. That’s where the high comes in. It would make a junkie out of anyone.”

I thought I understood what he was getting at. “So be ready for anything, because someone on a high is unpredictable.”

I expected some sort of acknowledgment or praise, but he just nodded sharply. “I thought I’d show you a little bit about why using an athame is so important.” He looked down at the blade, bending it in the light before he looked up at me. “Especially for someone like you.”

“Someone like me?” My mood soured. “Because I’m a child of Moonset?”

He looked at me evenly. “Because you wanted to know how to protect yourself, remember?”

Hearing my words thrown back at me, not even an hour after they justified my stealing the spellbook, made me shiver.

He might take it easy on you, if you just admit what you did. I wanted to trust Quinn, but there were just so many lies and half-truths. He didn’t make himself out to be someone who could be trusted. His loyalty was to the Congress, and the only honesty we’d gotten out of him was what we’d found out already for ourselves.

No, I couldn’t give up Sherrod’s grimoire. At least not until I’d looked through it.

“Using an athame is easy,” Quinn continued. “You focus on the spells you’re casting, and you draw them one by one. You have to be very precise, though, because of how particular the language is.”

But I knew all this already. “And you use a knife because it represents cutting through things,”

I repeated the lesson I’d learned in sixth grade. “Athames have to be used to call on spellforms, and used to invoke the darkness, too.”

Spellforms were primal magic—the most powerful kinds of spells out there. Most magic is about specifics— choosing the target of the spell, saying what is going to happen, and limiting how that power is channeled. That’s why pronunciation was so important—saying a word wrong changed the limits of the spell.

Sometimes, especially with us, spells had a little more natural “juice.” No matter the limits we put into the spell, the effects were amped up as there was too much power to be channeled into such a tiny effect.

Spellforms were on the opposite end of the spectrum. They were the most basic words, covering powerful concepts that could cause immense destruction. A spellform for fire was the literal embodiment of fire—and could cause a sweeping firestorm that would destroy hundreds of acres or cause an explosion that would take out a small town.

In the aftermath of Moonset, the people who were taught spellforms were very strictly monitored. No one I’d ever met had known one, and teaching someone else without permission was a criminal act.

Quinn nodded slowly, and then began whipping the knife in front of him in a complicated pattern. One, two, three spells took shape before I even had them all counted. They hovered in the air, glowing blue symbols. “If this was a fight, what’d I just do? And how would you counteract it?”

The first was a version of cor, which was a base form for spells dealing with communication.

The tip of it bled to the right, tying into the first stroke of the symbol, eresh, which had something to do with spirits, or illusions. “It’s some kind of telephone spell? Like holograms?”

“Not quite,” Quinn said, passing the knife over the top of the third symbol. “The third ties them all together.” I knew this one— Geonous, it dealt with travel. Once the spell was complete, the blue turned incandescent, like the filament of a light bulb.

“And that’s helpful how?” But I looked a little closer, and then I saw it—saw the way the spell’s words worked together, they way they tangled up in each other, a machine of many parts. Astral projection. You could use it to spy on people without anyone knowing—and all the while your body is safe at home. Even worse, the people you spied on would never know.

“Do you—have you been using this on us?” I asked, the momentary thrill of breaking the rules snuffed out by an overwhelming, poisonous terror. He knew. He knew all along. It was a test and I failed and he brought me back here knowing what I did. He’d seen the book, he knew it had belonged to Sherrod, and rather than confront me, he was playing it casual. Hiding condemnation underneath a lesson.

I couldn’t breathe.

“Relax,” Quinn said soothingly, hands raised like a white flag. “It’s not like that.” There was something in his dark eyes I didn’t like, though. Speculation. Awareness. “No one’s spying on you. That’s not it at all.”

“Then what is it?” Panic was making me reckless, speaking and acting without thinking. “Why are you showing this to me?”

“Just because I can’t teach you to fight,” he said, “doesn’t mean I can’t show you how to keep yourselves safe.”

“How is spying going to keep me safe?”

“Haven’t you ever heard the expression ‘work smarter, not harder?’” Quinn dropped the knife, and the phosphorescent image of the spell started to fade. “You may not know as much as you could, and you definitely don’t know everything you should. But like it or not, the five of you are a coven, and you’re stronger together.”

“What are you talking about?” Quinn wasn’t even making sense anymore. How did a spying spell have anything to do with what we did or didn’t know?

He raised the athame again, and, quicker this time, slashed three symbols into the air. None were exactly the same, they were reversed, and the middle one was more elevated. Geonous was the only one that was still identical, while cor was more elaborate this time. But all three featured sharp, block-like lines at their edges, creating something like a border at the edges of the spell.

This isn’t another projection spell, I realized. It’s a ward. Finally, I started to understand. I crept closer to the spell as it shifted from blue to white, trying to memorize the flow of the lines.

My hand itched, wanting to trace my own version of the spell and see it flare into existence.

“No one’s spying on us,” I said slowly. “But they could. Or they’re going to start.” Quinn wasn’t showing me how to spy on someone else; he was trying to show me how to protect ourselves. How to keep other Witchers, or