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Every time my cell drops service, Jenna thought, and then there was a pause. She chewed on her lower lip, eyes leaving her phone to meet mine. She was worried. Words on the screen appeared as she completed the thought, but it took me a moment to look away. Every time my cell drops service, that picture flashes on the screen.
But why is it showing up now?
Jenna was still, and I wondered at the furious spin of the thoughts I couldn’t see. You had to concentrate on the spell to make your thoughts appear, but you could just as easily concentrate on having them not appear.
Why did they bring us to Carrow Mill, Jenna?
What else did he say about the warlock?
He said something about signs, I thought.
Jenna nodded pointedly at the drawing I’d done. Signs? Like Moonset’s symbol?
Yeah, maybe.
You’re not the only one who’s seen that symbol. And I bet they’ve been showing up for a while.
What are you saying?
Jenna’s screen was blank for so long I thought that the spell had dropped. If there really is a warlock, I don’t think it’s an accident the Congress brought us here. Or that Illana Bryer is relocating.
??
Justin, I think we’re supposed to be bait.
Seventeen
“In the span of a single day, one hundred of the most powerful witches in the world were killed. They were the ones trained to combat warlocks, to use magic as a weapon.
Without them, there was no defense.”
Moonset: A Dark Legacy
Monday started out strange. I kept staring at Quinn over breakfast. Jenna’s theory made sense —it fit the weirdness that had been going on ever since we’d gotten here. Quinn’s phone call, talking about how we’d figure out why we were really here.
They’d brought us here to be bait. To smoke out a warlock. Was it Cullen Bridger? Was he closer than anyone thought?
“Magic classes start today,” Quinn said, interrupting the silence. Jenna still hadn’t come down yet, and everyone else was eating at home. Thank god, I didn’t think I could stand an overly sugared Cole bouncing around the room.
“About time,” I replied noncommittally.
Quinn narrowed his eyes at me. “There were a lot of things to consider,” he said, almost chiding. “How are you holding up after last night?”
“Justin’s fine,” Jenna said, “but who cares about that. You said they finally agreed to teach us?”
“I said magic class starts today,” Quinn said, getting up to refill his coffee.
But Jenna’s good mood wasn’t deflated by his response, even though we both knew what it meant. More classes about the theory of magic, probably. Not so much in the spells department. As usual.
“So lots of theory, then. Got it.” Jenna blowing off the chance to learn new magic? I knew why—at the moment we were both more concerned with what was going on here—but she was taking it a little far. I glared at her across the table, then nodded towards Quinn’s back.
Don’t be so obvious, I tried to telegraph.
She rolled her eyes at me. “So what’s the Congress’s master plan?” Quinn stilled at the coffee pot until Jenna continued. “The next time a wraith or some other monster comes crashing through the wall, we should nag them with the theory behind what makes a good illusion? If we could do better illusions, we might get out of town without destroying the whole school next time.”
“There’s not going to be a next time,” Quinn said. It’s not like I believed him, or like I even would have believed him a week ago, but now the lie was so blatant and obnoxious that it soured my stomach. I got up and dumped the rest of my breakfast in the trash.
“Not hungry?” he asked, only sounding half interested.
“Performance anxiety,” Jenna stage whispered.
I huffed in irritation, but it wasn’t at Jenna.
I spent the day swamped in review materials, as the school geared up for midterms. It helped a lot, because it laid out in neat little columns all the things I already knew right next to all the things I didn’t.
It was kind of like the rest of my life, only there were no worksheets that could tell me how a warlock was being allowed to run around Carrow Mill, and why they’d brought us here if they knew that. The guardians watching us had always been abusively careful in making sure we never came close to anyone who had been a Moonset sympathizer before, and now we’d not only met one, but there was a warlock in town, which was infinitely worse.
“Hey,” Ash said, appearing in the halls just as I was looking for my Independent Study classroom. Independent Study was what all our magic classes were filed under—easier for us to blend in, I supposed.
“Hey, how are you?” I asked.
“I’m okay,” she said with a nod, and while she looked a little on the exhausted side, the same strength I’d seen last night was there. What happened to the Harbinger hadn’t been eating her up. “Where are you off to?”
“Independent Study,” I lied with a grimace. “So much fun, right?”
Ash made a face. “Better than Pre-Calculus. I’ll see you later,” she said, brushing my arm as she passed. I watched her go, still trying to wrap my head around the mystery of the girl. Up until now, she’d been like a force of nature, inexplicable and ever-changing. But something was different, and it had been ever since last night.
It wasn’t the Harbinger’s death, I didn’t think. It had been something else. Had I said something? Done something?
A boy came up at my side. “You know Ash?” I turned to my left and had to do a double take.
For a second, it was almost like looking at Mal. A younger, less-perfect version of Mal, but Mal nonetheless.
It was the eyes, I decided. They had the same hazel-green eyes. And maybe something of the height, once this kid finished growing. He was younger than me, but it was hard to say whether he was a freshman or a sophomore.
“Sort of,” I said, half to him, and half to myself. Who was this kid? By the time I went to ask him his name, he was already rushing down the hall, weighed down by an extremely full backpack. He disappeared into a classroom at the end of the hall.
I paced the hallway, waiting on the others. Where are they? The clock ticked down, but there was no sign of Jenna or Mal, Cole or Bailey. They should be here—we always had
Independent Study together, but I was seriously independent at the moment.
I followed the hall to the end, somehow not surprised that the Mal-lookalike was in the same room as my magic lesson. What’s going on here? Is this some kind of prank? There were other kids in the room, a couple that I didn’t recognize, and one that I did—Maddy. Maddy was a witch?
One of the first things that had come after Moonset was the understanding that magic had to adapt. Every student needed to be taught, and a central organization needed to make sure that happened. “No witch left behind” became a serious movement. Magic met bureaucracy and since then magic has been considered a privilege, not a right. Magic was taught in classrooms, and the curriculum was controlled.
“Come along, Mr. Daggett,” a woman called as she swept up the steps at the hallway’s end.
She had raven-dark hair and an ankle-length skirt, and I recognized her. The woman in the crowd, the one who’d glared at me. In the daylight, she looked even more severe. Definitely an
Illana Bryer clone. “I’ll not hold up my class so you can loiter in the hallways,“ she said in a crisp
British accent.
I was rooted in place, unable to move even if I wanted to. “I’m waiting on my sister and the others. They should be here any second,” I promised.
She laid a hand on the door frame. “Not unless they plan to skip their own lesson. I dare say I barely have the grace to handle even one of your little brood in my classroom. All five?” She shook her head and tsked. “I think not.” “Wait … what?” They were splitting us up? That had never happened before. Who was going to keep Cole from trying spells he couldn’t handle or console Bailey if she didn’t get the pronunciation right the first time?
She walked into the room and I was left stuttering. It was only the sound of the bell that spurred me into action and into the classroom … and the last person to see the giant drawing that dominated the chalkboard at the front of the room. Someone had taken the time to get all the details just exactly right—the circle was shaded in perfectly, no gaps forgotten.
The woman had stopped just inside of the door, once she saw what dominated the room. At the sound of my footsteps behind her, she spun around, her skirt spinning almost like a top. “Do you think this is funny?” she hissed.
“What is it, Mrs. Crawford?” Maddy asked, eyeing the two of us.
“It’s Moonset’s symbol,” the blonde jock next to her said. “So you didn’t draw it for the lesson, Mrs. C?”
“No, I most certainly did not,” the woman muttered, still staring me down. “It seems our new student has a sense of humor. A sick one, but can we really be surprised?” “This is the first time I’ve even been in this room,” I protested.
“It was here when we got here,” the jock admitted, nodding to him and Maddy.
“So he came in earlier, and left us a little welcoming present,” the teacher said, her breathing growing shallow even as her face reddened. “That’s all it means, Kevin.”
“I didn’t do this!” I said. “That thing was scratched into my locker last week before I even got here. You can ask the principal’s office. They had to fix it.”
Of course Maddy, who had proved she doesn’t like me, didn’t seem convinced. But it was the voice at the back of the room that defended me. “It was here this morning before school started,” the kid from the hallway—the one with Malcolm’s eyes—said. “Someone must have done it over the weekend or after school on Friday.”
“I will not be mocked in my own classroom,” Mrs. Crawford said.
“It’s probably someone who just wanted to stir up some drama,” Kevin said. He shrugged off his backpack and went up to the board, doing the thing that everyone else had avoided so far.
Erasing it. “There,” he said, once it was done. “Problem solved.”
“The problem is not solved,” Mrs. Crawford snapped.
I wasn’t going to help this situation any. Instead, I walked over to the back of the room and dropped my bag next to the kid who’d spoken up in my defense. “I’m Justin.”
He licked his lips and looked down. “Luca,” he said nervously. His eyes lifted towards mine.
“Luca Denton.”
Denton? Denton was Mal’s last name. “How—” But I wasn’t given a chance to finish.
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