Shadows of Ourselves (The Charmers Series Book 1)

by Apollo Blake

  “Sorry,” he rasped, “I just—”

  I licked my lips. “Sorry, nothing. I liked it. But here’s the deal, I—”

  “Deal? I wasn’t aware we were making a transaction.”

  I ignored him. “I don’t do. . .this” —I gestured at the tiny space between us— “I don’t do soft and slow and cute.” I met his dark gaze. “You’re not going to break me, and you can’t have me, outside of tonight. So just stop trying to comfort me and fucking distract me.”

  For a minute, he was silent, watching my face. I thought he would pull away.

  “I can be a distraction,” he said, and then his lips were on mine again.

  This time, it was what I wanted. He’d shed all illusions of tenderness.

  He bit at my lower lip, and his hand released my arm only so he could snake his around my back and pull me to him so I was nearly sitting on his lap. The hand that had rested on my face moved up to tangle in my hair, and I felt my entire body flush with heat.

  After a minute of his mouth claiming mine, rough and fast and tasting of whiskey and salt, he pulled back until just our foreheads touched, and the tips of our noses.

  I tried to think of something to say, some snide remark to toss into the silence—but all I could do was gasp for breath and wish he’d close the distance between us again. When he did, it was all I could do not to fall apart; his kiss was rougher this time. His lips were hot and hard on mine, the pressure of him bleeding into me. My lips parted, and I felt his teeth again, teasing the tender skin and pulling it back—

  His arms wrapped around me and slipped beneath my shirt, exploring my skin. Hunter’s hand stopped when his fingertips traced the raised edge of a tiny round burn scar.

  “What is this?” he asked, and I froze.

  This was. . . . Not something I liked to talk about, to say the least.

  Most people don’t ask about your scars. Especially scars like mine, ones that look like you might have done them yourself. But this wasn’t one of the few on my inner forearms from when I was younger; it was the one on the small of my back.

  What is this? A leftover bite mark from Mommy Dearest.

  Melissa was an enigma to me. Her moods swung in and out of orbit like planets in a solar system I didn’t know how to navigate, always changing at the drop of a dime.

  She could go from sweet to vindictive in a heartbeat, and it meant that when I was at home I was constantly on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Most of the time I locked myself in my room. There had been more than one night where I slept (or stayed awake just staring at the wall, trying not to think) with a dresser shoved against my door to keep her out while she raged and screamed from the other side, spitting drunken insults.

  There were nights, after I turned sixteen, where I fought back.

  There had been one night, years ago, when I hit her back. Slapped her right across her damn face.

  That night I ran out, barefoot. I fled, and I spent the night in a city playground, thanking every god whose name I could remember that it was summer. In the morning when I crept home she was in bed, asleep among a pile of empty bottles and smelling like death. We never spoke of what I’d done, but the next time she crept up behind me, barely coherent, and put out her cigarette on the exposed small of my back just above the towel wrapped around my waist, her cruel smile had been gloating.

  See, it had said. I can always hurt you more than you hurt me, little boy.

  “It’s nothing,” I whispered, coming unstuck.

  She didn’t get to ruin this.

  “You didn’t do it yourself,” he said. Not a question. “What is it?”

  “It’s none of your fucking business.” I pulled away from him.

  Hunter held me against his body, not letting me go, but not forcing me back into the embrace, either. Just keeping me close.

  There was violence in his dark eyes. “Fine,” he said.

  “Fine.” I echoed.

  He kissed me again, and there was anger in it, and the anger made it better. I wanted his fingers to leave bruises on my hips.

  I gasped into his mouth, arched against him, and something snapped inside of me. It was like a door slamming open, and I was flooded with a feeling I couldn’t even start to name.

  My entire body hummed with a sharp, frantic energy.

  Yes, I thought. Yes, this. Whatever this is, give me more.

  I felt something else rise up too, something that called out to the power brewing inside of me. Something answering the call I’d sent out.

  I felt the burn of it down to my core, and then there was nothing on my mind but Hunter as he lowered me onto my back and I sank down on the bed underneath him. He leaned over me, lips skimming mine and then moving lower, to press against my throat. Heat boiled below the surface of my skin like live wires were shooting off inside of me everywhere he touched.

  Nerve endings: frayed.

  Calm: destroyed.

  Distraction: more than fucking successful, ladies and gentlemen.

  Hunter raised his hand, twisted it in the air, and the overhead light went out as if he’d flipped a switch. He lowered himself back over me and the world shattered.

  All that was left were pleasure and power, flooding through the dark.

  FOUR

  LINGERING

  Sometimes in the morning I forgot who I was. When I blinked open my still sleep-crusted eyes and peered into the shafts of morning light filtering through my bedroom window—I forgot that my mother was probably already drinking, I forgot how hollow I always felt, I forgot the pain of a lie pressing against my skull. Just for a moment.

  I’d lie there and watch dust motes floating through the air, let myself bask in the light and the warmth of the morning, teeming with possibility yet to be soiled or wasted.

  I didn’t forget today. But I didn’t remember right away, either. I was too busy recalling my dreams.

  In the deepest of sleeps, lying beside another boy, I’d journeyed to another world. A place where there were no trees, no growth at all—only desert, as far as I’d been able to see. And something deep inside of me told me that it stretched across this ugly planet forever. I walked. There didn’t seem like much else to do, and I couldn’t tell if I was dreaming or if I was just dead or if I was something in the middle. The sand beneath my feet wasn’t normal; the deeper it went the more solid it became, the more it resembled ordinary sand, but the top layer was something else—tiny glistening white threads that were more like smoke or mist than they were sand. My feet sunk in up to the ankles, and in the distance I watched as the wind pulled this top layer of watery, wispy sand up into the air and made it dance in brilliant pearlescent patterns across the deepening orange sky. And there were things alive here, not that I could see, but I could feel them, great behemoths twisting and curling and gliding around beneath the surface. Their movements made the ground bulge and shake, but they never broke the surface, so my fear of them began to fade away. In fact, I was glad for their company.

  Days passed. I don’t know how many, I couldn’t count. But I felt no hunger, and only the barest of thirsts, as if I’d gone without water for half an hour, as opposed to these countless years. The twin suns above me—one emitting a deep red light, the other a brilliant white—never set, but they did dim, allowing the orange sky to turn deep brown in some lazy approximation of a night.

  Eventually I came to small, shallow pool.

  I think it may have been the only water on the entire planet, this pond of murky greenish water, full of silt and tiny darting creatures like tadpoles, the size of my fist. A light glowed from within them as they swam. It was beautiful, constantly changing in shade and colour. I couldn’t tell where the shore ended and the water began, exactly, just watching the sand bleed into it. But eventually I was wading in.

  My clothes remained dry as I sank beneath the surface. There was a face there, one I knew as well as my own.

  It was Riley, deep beneath the surface, her purple hair floating up to
ward me. She opened her eyes and tilted her head at me curiously, and then she was falling away. Everything was sucked down into pure blackness, and I was left drifting in it.

  I blinked open my eyes and got a glimpse of the watery, pink and blue sunrise painting its way across the sky outside.

  Smoke rose from several chimneys, and beads of moisture had welled up around the sides of the window from the cold. I dragged in a deep breath, puzzling over the dream. It had been calm and slow. . .sluggish, even—but it left me with a sense of dread and alarm, as if something grotesque lingered just beneath the surface of it.

  Then the events of the day before came back to me.

  Well, fuck.

  No wonder I’d dreamt up something out of a college freshman's first acid trip. Part of me wondered if yesterday was a dream, too.

  But no; here was Hunter, breathing softly beside me.

  As winter crept over the world, the warmth of the mornings I loved was swallowed up by the frost and gloom. It was warm here though, lying in bed next to him. I resented that warmth. It made me want to stay, just a bit. Avoid the shitty weather and pretend the guy I kind of wanted to have another go at (the white sheets tangled around his bare torso made me think some distinctly unholy things) wasn’t into some seriously dangerous shit.

  I stared at him for a minute while he slept and considered the possibilities. There weren’t as many as usual this morning.

  I couldn’t stay.

  I knew that. I knew it always—it wouldn’t make a difference if it were an entirely average human boy sleeping beside me, with his arms snaking through the blankets, winding beneath my back. . .I didn’t do relationships.

  But I definitely didn’t do relationships with guys who weren’t human. Guys who burned bright and fast and got chased by monsters. Bad news on legs. I thought of what the world had looked like yesterday—clients and routine and chasing any small means of escape I could find—and what it had turned into overnight—magik and monsters, shadows chasing me through the city while I was pulled along by a boy who made me feel very light when he looked at me, like I could float away if someone didn’t bolt me to the ground.

  I didn’t know what I wanted. I had no idea what I was looking for in life—who I was, or who I wanted to become.

  I knew I didn’t want to die or have my life more fucked up than it already was because I couldn’t keep my dick in my pants, or because I gave my heart to someone who was bound to leave me. I knew I wasn’t looking for a life of magikal crime, that was for damn sure.

  I’d seen too many relationships fall apart because of lies and distance and so many questions two people could become afraid to ask each other. Hell, I looked for those relationships. Exploited the lies with my power to keep a roof over my head. I couldn’t just drag someone else into that and expect anything to work out—especially not a one-night stand with a fucking boy wizard. I had no desires to join the cast of magik Die Hard.

  I still couldn’t get over the fact that I nearly died last night because of Hunter’s mere proximity to me. I’d sensed the dangerous truths running beneath the things he didn’t say—about why this other Charmer he’d worked for wanted him dead.

  Hunter was in bigger trouble than he was letting on; I’d known that and still slept with him. Why?

  Why did I never think things through?

  Blaming it on the whiskey, Sky. We are blaming it on the whiskey.

  I inhaled one last time, trying to memorize the scent of his cologne, and then slipped from the bed as silently as possible. In the bathroom I pulled on yesterday’s clothes, but I kept Hunter’s T-shirt—it was plain black and it smelled clean, and I liked how baggy it was on me.

  I could stand to get drunk, right about now, if I was being honest.

  But what I really wanted to do was crawl back into bed—any bed, really—and just sleep. Press myself between the blankets like a dried petal pressed into the pages of one of my sketchbooks.

  There was something seductive about the silence and the dark—with everything I’d learned last night what I really wanted to do was forget it all.

  Instead I took one last look at Hunter, his angular face peaceful in sleep, and then turned to leave. When I walked out the door, I hoped the Charmer world would stay put firmly behind me, where it belonged. I thought again about the Hounds and felt a chill pass through me. I didn’t want anything more to do with Magik than I already had.

  Outside, the cold bit at my exposed skin. I stood on the sidewalk in front of Brunswick Square and looked up and down King Street.

  There were a few cars parked alongside the curb, and over the sound of the birds chirping in the barren trees that stood on the edge of the road, the usual sounds of morning traffic filled the air.

  It wasn’t unusual for it to be this cold during the middle of November, but it still caught me off guard. Maybe we would get our first snowfall today. Time was moving faster than I’d anticipated, and it startled me—like I’d been frozen, standing still, and only now started to wake up and move. I looked down the hill, past the boardwalk, at the light glinting off the dark water in the open harbour.

  The world was chugging along around me, everyone acting like everything was the same. I was the only one who saw the difference.

  At this time my mom would either be just passing out, or still up drinking. Did she know about any of this? I had to believe she would have told me. My dad, then, maybe. . . .

  I’m not thinking about this.

  My father fucked off when I was around four years old, and I barely remembered at him. I told people he’d been a one-night stand, because the reality was—at least according to Melissa, that my gift had scared him off.

  Now part of me had to wonder, just a bit.

  I hadn’t brought my keys with me last night, so I’d have to call Mom to come down and unlock the door. As I crossed the street and started to walk down Canterbury, I dug my phone out of my pocket. My foot caught on a crack in the pavement and I dropped the cell—it plummeted to the concrete.

  Except it never hit. I reached for it, and at the last second it slammed to a stop mid-air. Power cracked around me, rushed through my slim frame.

  I was doing this.

  The phone floated back up until it was hovering just in front of my face, and I snatched it out of the air. Looking around, I saw that the only people around were a couple of late season construction workers up the street, and they were turned toward each other smoking cigarettes, not even looking in my direction.

  I stared at the phone in my hand. Shook my head. And took the fuck off.

  FIVE

  VISIONS IN BLACK & BLUE

  I spent most of my day in and out of bed. It was lazy, but I figured I deserved it. I’d just learned I wasn’t human. I’d spent the day in lazing around over less.

  Angst. The curse of a generation.

  Mom was mad at me; it turned out what she’d been yelling at me through the door the other night as I left was a reminder of my appointment this morning. But I hadn’t been here to tell this uni student if her boyfriend was cheating on her or not, and Mom had to shuffle the annoyed couple out while I was busy sneaking out of my random hookup’s hotel room.

  I didn’t tell her that, though. She thought I’d been sleeping off a long night of movies on Riley’s couch, and it was going to stay that way.

  If she noticed the new T-shirt and the missing art store haul, she pretended not to.

  Mom was like that, anyway. She didn’t care what I was up to or who I was doing it with, as long as I was here often enough to pay her rent and be someone to torture.

  I had no clue why I was still here. I guess I just needed someone to be miserable with.

  She was drinking, as per usual, but today she’d secluded herself in her cave of a bedroom. Half of me felt really bad about the other night—and the fact that I’d missed an appointment this morning—forcing her to send my clients home disappointed and costing us a cheque we could really use.

&nb
sp; On the other hand, I was about as much of an emotional wreck as she was at the moment, so I kept to myself and sulked. Guess it was easy to see who I got it from.

  My mother was a star athlete once upon a time—hard to believe, considering she now resembled the shape of a marshmallow from all the hard drinking, but back in the day she was built. She was also on her way to the Olympics. But her tennis career ended the same day she took a home pregnancy test and got blessed with the blue smiley face that predicted my birth.

  Now here we were, a clinically depressed sorcerer with weird coping methods, and an alcoholic ex-athlete with too much time on her hands.