Free Darkbound (The Legacy of Moonset) by Scott Tracey

symbols in the air, and the pulsing around me grew thicker, stronger, like a blood pressure cuff squeezing my entire body. And then, for a glorious moment, it stopped. Everything halted. The universe took a moment to catch its breath.
    “Oh I like this,” a musical voice whispered, a symphony of pleasure and bubbling laughter before it ultimately soured, “but I don’t like her very much.” Fingers rubbed the back of my head again, pulling tight at the last moment, before the moment passed, the bubble popped, and the squeezing pressure returned.
    “It’ll all be over soon,” Kelly promised.
    “Miss Davenport, step away from the boy!”
    I’d never been so happy to see Illana Bryer in my life.

    It took Illana less than fifteen minutes to not only save me from the substitute, but to also return the school to some semblance of chastised normalcy, track down Jenna and reverse whatever it was that she’d done. In the meantime, she made me wait in the English room. Quinn finally showed up with Nick a few minutes after Illana, both of them looking horribly unperturbed.
    “So is this the part where you move us out in the middle of the night?” I asked, trying to figure out why I had not one but two Witchers guarding my back in the meantime. “Or is there another threat? Another wraith? A unicorn? A Cabbage Patch doll?”
    “You’re not going anywhere,” Quinn said placidly. I would believe him more if the pair of them weren’t lingering by the door like something was about to barge its way in.
    There was something wrong with one of Quinn’s forearms. It was distorted, the skin tone not matching the rest of his arm. The more I studied it, the less real it became until finally Quinn noticed my stare and snorted. “Shut up,” he muttered at Nick, who was grinning furiously, before he scrubbed his hand over the space above the distortion. An illusion faded, revealing an arm brace of some kind. Black and strappy, there was a sheath laid into the interior, a knife blade lined perfectly to nestle against the crook of his arm. He pulled the athame out, holding it up as if this were show-and-tell.
    “Never leave home without it?” he said halfheartedly.
    “That’s MasterCard,” Nick replied immediately.
    “Always?” Quinn tried next.
    “That’s Snape.”
    “Whatever, then. It’s just a precaution,” Quinn said, directing the words to me. “Not that there’s anything to be really worried about, but Illana wants to make sure the situation doesn’t grow any more out of control than it already has.”
    “I think it’s pretty much as bad as it can get,” I pointed out. “Or did you miss the part where one of your merry band of badasses tried out her cougar act a decade too early?”
    “This was just a lust spell,” Quinn said absently. “Though I don’t know how Jenna managed it. She shouldn’t have access to the kinds of spells that could put something like this together. But anyway, this is nothing. People just wanted to sleep with you. I’m sure that’s not out of the realm of normalcy for you. It could have been a lot worse.”
    “There are worse things than hormones,” Nick agreed. “Like that pitiful excuse of an illusion you’ve got going on,” he said, nodding toward Quinn’s arm brace.
    “So, want to tell us what prompted this?” Quinn asked, flicking the lights on and off like a child who needed to find something to do to keep himself from dying of boredom.
    Did he really need me to? Wasn’t it obvious. “Jenna wants new magic. She thinks Eat, Pray, Coven class is her best shot. So she’s buying everything you guys are selling. Because that worked out so well for us last time.”
    Neither one of them said anything. Most witches liked the idea of having a coven to belong to and were jealous of those who did. I’d even heard that there were summer programs for high school students specifically geared towards bringing as many kids together as possible for a few weeks just to see if