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Luca had aged twenty years in just a day. His skin was sallow, hanging off of his bones. He’d already been skinny, but now he looked almost emaciated, his eyes sunken in and huge. “They said that you must come together. I had to prepare the way.”
“Who said?”
His head rotated towards me, like a creepy doll’s head. “The ones in the fire.” Our eyes didn’t meet, he was looking somewhere above me. At something above me.
“Luca? Were they the ones who taught you how to invoke the darkness?” Ash’s voice was thick but gentle. She braced herself against the back of one of the pews. Whatever happened to her, she’d recovered somewhat.
He started laughing then. It wasn’t the crazy laugh, but something that was half guffaw and half throat-clearing. “I’m not crazy,” he announced, as if we would believe him. “I just … can’t think while they’re here. But now you’re here. They’ll let me go, now that you’re here.” “Right,” I said to him. “I’m here now. All five of us are here. That’s what you were trying to do, right?”
His eyes dropped again, his head shifted. He was looking at Bailey and Cole, limp and empty on their bench. No, he was looking at Bailey. “He didn’t tell me. Not anything.” His head shot up.
“I didn’t know. I promise.”
“You didn’t know what, Luca?”
Their were tears in his eyes. “They get inside your head. Crawl around like serpents. Leak out your sockets and nibble on your feelings. They won’t leave. Won’t leave. Don’t even know they’re there unless they take a little bite.” He flinched, his whole body convulsing in one single spasm, and then his head was craning to the left. There was a shimmer in the air around him, like the air was bending around something that sunk into the fireplace. It was gone almost as quickly as it had appeared.
“Will they leave now? Now that you’ve brought us here, Luca?” I kept using his name, I wasn’t sure why, but I felt like it was important.
Just like that, the boy snapped. I don’t know what it was I said, or what he heard in my words. His eyes were suddenly hot and his face flushed red. “You don’t know me! They told me to bring you here, and I did! They told me the truth! No one tells the truth anymore!”
Ash stepped up, touching my shoulder and stepping to my right and holding out her arms.
Drawing his attention away, I realized. Whatever it was I’d said, maybe he wouldn’t see it in
Ash. He knew her, after all.
“Just talk to us, Luca,” she said. “Say whatever it is you need to say.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” But with Ash, his voice wasn’t angry. It was just tired. “ Now you have time for me. Now you know I’m alive.” He flinched, and then again, like something in his head was causing him pain. Again, there was that moment of bending air, like a mirage that wasn’t fully formed.
“They’re coming,” he said woodenly.
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I couldn’t stop myself from asking. “Who’s coming?”
“The Abyssals.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing?” Ash asked, her face pale. “Trying to open a door for them to come through? Is that what tonight was about? Bringing them out?”
He looked at us like we were crazy. “They’re not coming here. ”
My mouth had gone dry. “Then where?”
He shifted to the side, and his left arm pointed towards the fire. “There. They want to remember what warmth feels like. It’s so cold there.”
“I remember,” I whispered. Ash shot me a surprised look, but I didn’t explain. Not only was now not the time, but I didn’t think I could talk about that night. Just thinking about touching the
Abyss and remembering how it felt like it was devouring everything that was good and happy inside me.
He flinched again and started rolling his neck. I couldn’t hear the sounds, but he sighed in relief after a few rotations. “It … gets easier when they leave,” he said, as if that made any difference.
“And they … talk to you?” I asked.
Luca started to stand, stretching as he did. “Sometimes. Sometimes it’s not … words, exactly. Sometimes it’s like they’re rooting around in my brain, and I can feel their fingers digging through all my memories.”
“How did this happen, Luca? How could you do this?” Ash sounded afraid, even if it didn’t show on her face.
“I didn’t have much of a choice,” he snapped. “I didn’t know the spells were opening a pathway. I’m not an idiot.” His look said he dared Ash to challenge him. “I thought it was something forgotten. Something Moonset hadn’t destroyed. He didn’t know what he was selling me, but I saw it for what it was. I was going to show everyone that I was more than this.”
His coloring had even improved. It was like whatever had been ravaging him a few minutes ago was ebbing away more and more the longer we were here. “And you thought you could finally step out of our shadows,” Ash finished for him, understanding dawning on her face.
“It wasn’t like that. I just thought … I could stand out. Stop being the one everyone forgets about. My parents. You. Maddy. Even them,” he said, glancing at my brothers and sisters.
“They looked at me and saw him.” He reached forward and grabbed Malcolm by the hair, pulling his head forward.
“Hey!” I stepped forward, holding out the athame.
Unfortunately, this was the wrong approach. The next thing I knew there was a knife in Luca’s hand too, and it was pointing at Mal. There was no way I could cross the room and push him out of the way before he attacked—maybe killed—my brother.
The curse. But Luca must have known about it, too, because he dropped the knife. “She’ll do anything I want,” he said, nodding to Bailey. “She knows I’d never hurt her. And she’ll scramble their brains and leave them nothing but vegetables if I tell her to.”
“Okay,” I said, dropping my hand. “I’m sorry. You’re in control.”
“Do you want to know why you’re here, Daggett? Haven’t you wondered? Why Carrow Mill?”
“Because you wanted us here,” I said. “You wanted us here, and we came.”
“No,” he said, with a smile that suggested darkness. “This is where it all started. It’s where the blood was spilt, and everything changed.”
But in this case, he was dead wrong. “Moonset started here,” I said evenly. “My father and the others were students here. I know.”
He didn’t like that. He took a step back, releasing Mal and pointing his athame at me. “You knew? You knew? And still you’re kissing up to Fallingbrook like they’re going to save you?”
“What’s Fallingbrook have to do with this?”
“Fallingbrook killed your parents. How can you even think about trusting them?”
“Luca, I know this,” I said, tucking the knife in my back pocket and returning my hands to the surrender position. “Everyone does. We’re taught it in school, remember? We talked about it my first day.”
“You know the lie,” he said, the knife cutting imaginary lines in the air. “But you don’t know the truth.”
“What truth?” I said, growing impatient. “My parents embraced the black arts, turned to terrorism, and started a war. Everyone knows this story.”
“Because that’s what Fallingbrook tells them to believe,” he crowed. “They don’t know the truth. History’s written by the victors, Justin. Moonset wasn’t a cult. They didn’t start out as terrorists.”
“What are you talking about?” Ash’s voice was trembling.
Luca shook his head, all traces of his earlier weakness were now completely gone. In fact, he looked better than I’d ever seen him. A new kind of life surged in him, replacing his earlier weakness with vigor. In the halls at school, even with Bailey, there was always a kind of greasy, slouching going on with him. For the first time, he was standing straight, and he’d never more resembled his cousin.
“Covens form for a reason. Moonset was no different. They weren’t monsters. They were heroes. Destiny brought them here … to turn back the tide. And they were feared, after all the good they did. The Congress turned on them. Tried to destroy them from the inside. They couldn’t make heroes out of them. That would threaten the Congress’s power. So they tried to destroy Moonset … and created an enemy they couldn’t defeat.”
“That’s not true,” I said. Everyone knew what Moonset had stood for.
“It is,” he said. “They told me. Moonset never embraced the darkness. They weren’t warlocks.”
“Stop lying, Luca!” Ash turned to me. “He’s just trying to trick you. Toying with your emotions.
You can’t believe him.”
“I know,” I said, but my voice was quiet. Couldn’t I? What if the story had been wrong all these years? What if Moonset weren’t the villains everyone thought they were? What if there was another side to the story?
“They’ll be here soon,” he said, stepping away from the fireplace, and away from the church benches. “They can show you the truth.”
Ash’s voice broke in, warningly. “Justin … the fireplace.”
The bricks inside the fireplace had started glowing. Spellscripts had been written all around the fireplace, and they were moving, streaming from brick to brick like some sort of ticker tape.
Row after row, glowing scarlet against the bricks.
“To the … downward … silence … habits … ” The symbols were moving too fast for me to decipher, washing out the closer they got to the fire, and then reappearing on the other side.
The wind had picked up; the tarp against the back corner of the house started whipping against the wood siding.
“They made me do it,” Luca suddenly whispered, losing some of that shine and bravado, and reminding me of the kid I’d met on my first day. The one who wanted nothing more than to lay his head down on his book bag 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.
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