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.
“Cyrus Denton had a brother, of course. And that brother had a son,” said Mrs. Campbell, acting like she hadn’t been losing her cool only a few minutes ago. “Isn’t it obvious? The Denton boys have always had a certain look. Easy pickings in a crowd.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, still trying to wrap my head around it. “We were told there wasn’t any family. That we didn’t have—”
“You don’t,” she said shortly. “Luca’s father, all the other Dentons, even the ones that weren’t
Denton by name turned their back on Cyrus. There might be some Daggetts or Owens lurking out there somewhere, but they’ll never come looking for you.”
“That’s not the same thing as not having a family,” I said. I don’t know why, but finding out that there was even more that the Congress had lied to us about got under my skin. They told us we were orphans. That there was no one! We grew up thinking Moonset had existed in a vacuum, and all the while there were blood relatives with their heads down, pretending that they’d never heard of us before.
“Malcolm’s father chose to become a warlock. The word itself means ‘traitor’—blood is just one of the many things he betrayed,” Crawford said.
The rest of the room was quiet. My skin was burning. It wasn’t enough that the teacher clearly despised every second I was invading her classroom, but the way she talked was somehow even worse than Miss Virago. The redheaded Congress operative was contemptuous and dismissive, but Crawford acted like she actually hated me, and the fact that she had to speak to me at all was completely unacceptable.
“Very well,” she said suddenly. “Let’s have a little lesson for Mister Daggett, since he’s so oblivious to the history he comes from. Kevin, what separates a witch who rebels from the
Congress with a warlock?”
The jock sat up in his chair. “A warlock creates a connection to the Abyss, and invokes the black arts. It’s what makes them so dangerous.”
Christians believed in Hell. Witches believed in the Abyss. The only difference was that we could actually prove ours existed. The Abyss was some sort of portal, or world, or dimension that was basically a giant, living pit, and that pit was full of dark power. It was called Maleficia, and it was a devastating alternative to magic.
If magic was a language and a voice, Maleficia was a glass-shattering shriek. You didn’t cast spells with Maleficia, you released its power from the Abyss—and it sowed chaos and destruction wherever it spread. Even the tiniest invocation of the black arts could create devastating weapons that would continue for hours.
“Maleficia was the power that gave Moonset the edge in the war,” I said, interrupting. Mrs.
Crawford thought to shame me by reminding me what our parents had done, but all of us had come to terms with it a long time ago. “They would strike in secret, unleash their black arts, and by the time the Congress could mount a defense, they were too busy trying to contain the
Maleficia to fight back.”
“You will speak when called upon, Mr. Daggett,” Mrs. Crawford snapped. “Continue, Kevin.”
“Well, he’s right,” Kevin said uncomfortably. “A warlock is someone who becomes connected to the Abyss, and it makes them irrational. Insane. It’s the reason most people believe that
Moonset was beaten in the end. Because their minds were compromised.”
“You can’t tell someone is a warlock just by looking at them,” Maddy chimed in. “Which is why—” she cut off abruptly, but not before she glanced my way.
So it’s not entirely a secret. Things were starting to become a little more clear. “You want it to be me who drew that on the board,” I said slowly, “because you don’t want to think about who else it could have been.” Better the Moonset bastard than the warlock that was walking free around Carrow Mill.
“That is enough, Mr. Daggett.”
“How long has he been active? Why haven’t they caught him yet?” I demanded. “I mean, we are talking about a warlock here in town, right?”
The room went so quiet I could almost hear the steam coming out of Mrs. Crawford’s ears.
“We are not discussing this,” she hissed. “If you disrupt my classroom one more time, you will be removed from it.”
I sat back in my chair, my thoughts racing. So the witches in town knew. But what were any of them doing? Why hadn’t the Witchers caught and executed the warlock yet? And it still didn’t explain what he wanted with us. Why bring us to Carrow Mill?
I tuned the class out for several minutes, only picking back up when I heard the word
“Maleficia” crop up again.
“Talk to me about the Black Scare,” Mrs. Crawford said, looking down at Maddy.
“The Black Scare was a period during the fifties when witches grew paranoid over the idea that any of their neighbors or friends could secretly be experimenting with the dark arts.
Invoking Maleficia.”
“How many years?” Her question was like a whip crack the moment Maddy had stopped to take a breath. The girl fumbled, her mouth opening and closing several times but the answer would just not come out.
“Two and a half years,” Kevin piped up. “From ’54 to just before Christmas of ’56.”
“Our illustrious wide receiver with the save,” the teacher commented. “But I would expect nothing less of you, Kevin. Your grandfather played a part in quelling that very hysteria, didn’t he?”