Shadows of Ourselves (The Charmers Series Book 1)

by Apollo Blake

  An entire life of wasted time. If I lived through this, I was going to do more than survive.

  This is where I had to start. If I was powerful enough to kill Crayton, powerful enough to stop him from gaining Hunter’s powers and tearing this city apart with them, then I had to do it. No one else was going to.

  I looked at my reflection in the mirror. My likelihood was flat, pressed down. A boy in one-dimension. More dark circles under my eyes, blooming against my pale skin like black and purple flowers.

  I wanted to recreate them, smear the paint onto the canvas with my fingertips so it was stark and sharp, the colours clashing instead of blurring.

  I’m about to kill somebody and I’m thinking of painting a representation of my sleep deprivation. Why the fuck am I like this?

  Trash, okay? I looked like fucking trash.

  Fine, I told myself. You wanna do more than survive? Time to start saving some lives.

  By taking one.

  ~

  The first thing I set my mind to when I headed upstairs (aside from escaping Riley’s smothering embraces) was head to the bar to grab a coffee. I’d seen the fancy espresso machine back there, all shiny black plastic and gleaming silver—I had no idea if it was for alcoholic coffee drinks or just for the tired employees, but my brain needed to be drowned in java, asap.

  The white girl with dreads was sitting behind the bar, chin resting in the palm of her hand. She stared down at a glossy magazine with a bored expression, lips pursed.

  Did she always look like it was somebody’s funeral?

  “Hey,” I said.

  Dreadlocks looked up at me with disdain. “What is this? Are you albino?”

  She’s paler than me. “I have brown eyes.”

  “Is your mom albino?”

  “My mom’s an alcoholic. With brown eyes.”

  “Got it.”

  “Kay.”

  She glared at me, and I considered stealing someone’s lighter and setting her hair on fire, all while that careless, condescending grin was plastered on my face. If I weren’t so focused on caffeine and death, I might have told her to quit with the racism-as-fugly-performance-art thing and cut her damn hair already.

  Riley’s mom, Lillian, had dreadlocks, and they were nothing like this. They were neat, clean and kind of really beautiful. This white girl? She looked like a poorly groomed poodle.

  And yet Lillian would get shit for hers, people mumbling about her behind her back at work or while she shopped, while this chick probably got compliments for how ‘multicultural’ she was.

  The world is gross.

  “I need a coffee.” I said. “Can you—”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake, get it yourself Twinkie.”

  Huh. Guess I’m not the only one handing out nicknames. Dreadlocks grabbed her magazine and walked to the opposite end of the bar.

  I went back. Nobody else seemed to notice or care that I was behind the bar, so I figured out the espresso machine (easy) tried to find something that passed for a coffee mug (hard) (I ended up with some kind of ceramic bowl thing with no handle) and took my brew without bothering to turn the thing off. I would be back. Probably several times.

  I headed toward the others—Penn, Jackson, and Riley all stood in a little cluster near one of the couches. It was time to hear Jackson’s plan.

  ~

  There wasn’t enough caffeine in my system to deal with this.

  The universe was cutting me zero slack today. At least a warning would have been nice.

  “Reincarnation?” I looked to Penn. “How did you even manage to get on this guy’s radar? Like, were did he even get your fucking resume?”

  I would have to get that story out of her, someday, if we lived through this.

  Jackson sighed. “Not reincarnation itself,” he said. “More like. . .memory storage.”

  After he’d gotten off of the phone with his father—I sort of wished he’d just come here, since I was curious to see what Daddy Incubus looked like—there had been a few minutes of chaotic reunion, me rushing Riley to make sure she was okay, her slapping me upside the head again for getting mixed up in this entire mess. . .but eventually things calmed enough for her to paint me a clear picture of what went down while I was knocked the hell out.

  Penn hadn’t told Riley much about Charmers—or anything—the first time around. Her explanation had boiled down to, essentially ‘there’s some bad things you don’t need to fuck with, ever.’

  That had changed. The frosty silence between my best friend and her cousin was not left unnoticed by me, but right now I didn’t have time to play Dr. Phil with them.

  Jackson’s employees, including Dreadlocks (who it turned out was actually named Lucie) were keeping tabs on Crayton’s activity through a mixture of magik, technology, and gossip. A few of them lounged around the bar with their phones out, while others stood with their eyes closed, focusing their energies and powers on who knows what. Magik cracked in the air, and I felt mine and Hunter’s brimming inside of me like it was responding to theirs, stirring awake after a period of hibernation, the wildest of beasts.

  I was glad he hadn’t severed the bond yet. I was. It meant more strength and more power. But half of me wanted to tie him up and feed him into a wood chipper.

  But whatever his reasons—and my feelings toward them—his annoying indecision was buying us some time. I just hoped he was safe, wherever the hell he was.

  As for me. . .the suspicion that I wouldn’t enjoy what we were about to do became stronger and stronger by the second.

  Past lives. Reincarnation, and stored memories, powers and cathedrals and dark toying with light before strangling it to death.

  Jackson’s theory was not one I liked. Or, understood, if I’m being totally honest with you.

  “I don’t get it—you think that in a past life, I might have come to this cathedral and left behind a chunk of bling with my powers trapped inside of it? How is that even possible?"

  “Because you didn’t trap your powers inside of it.” Jackson looked like he wanted to tug out his own hair. “I feel like I’m explaining thermonuclear fusion to an infant, here. Incubi aren’t demons: we’re Charmers, like you. We’re just a different sort. Our magik, it’s different, it’s about thought and memory and emotion—about sensation and experience. Hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, the cathedral was above ground, before the city of Saint John even existed here. Eventually it was moved beneath the earth for its own protection, but it was built with unique Incubi magik.”

  “The same type of magik that you used to make these memory storage things?”

  “Relics. And yes.” Jackson sat on the couch next to me, leaning back and lighting a cigarette from the pack he’d pulled out. I moved forward and grabbed it from him, claiming it for myself.

  Riley didn’t liked it when I smoked, but I’d earned this.

  I needed something to do with my hands, instead of tugging on my own hair and shoving them in my pockets to keep from slapping everyone around me.

  True to form, Riley nudged me with her elbow. I ignored her glare. She was too busy asking a million and one follow-ups to rag me out. Knowledge over everything else.

  “So this relic magik, you can’t use it anymore?” she asked.

  Jackson frowned at me before reaching for another smoke. “Yeah,” he said. “It was a species of general magik, but it’s died out now. With the help of an Incubus or Succubus, another Charmer could leave a bond to their powers inside a personal object so that, after they died, their reincarnated forms could return to the cathedral and reclaim those powers. It still reacts to those that created relics, but we don’t have the ability to make any new ones.”

  So on the off chance that in one of my past lives—I had past lives!!!—I had come to the cathedral and left my powers there, a bond between them and my soul, I could reclaim them. It would make it a hell of a lot easier to kill Crayton.

  It could also just be a giant waste of our fucking time, thou
gh.

  Still, I was curious. Jackson had called it memory storage—flashes of my past lives would reach through to me as the powers awakened inside of me.

  The idea that those might exist was comforting to me. Past lives.

  So much of painting was trying to leave a mark of myself on this earth before I was a corpse rotting in soil, flesh feeding insects and earth alike. I dipped a brush into my blood and let the lines flow onto the canvas, bleeding my soul onto paper so that when I was gone there would be something of me left. Now, it felt as if oblivion had been wiped off of the horizon so I could see a road where there’d been none before, a way forward out of even the darkness of death.

  It eased some of the guilt that weighed on my shoulders, at the idea of taking life. Not all of it.

  “But why wouldn’t you just keep your powers between lives?” Riley asked, still frowning as I tried and failed to light my smoke with fire magik through the bond, and grabbed Jackson’s lighter instead. “Why lock them away like that?”

  “Yeah,” I said around a mouthful of smoke. “Seems counter-productive, if you ask me.”

  “Which nobody did.” Jackson took back his lighter.

  This time it was Penn who answered Riley, coming back from the bar with a new can of soda—something she only indulged in when highly stressed. “Charmers keep their magik between lives, but not the forms it will take. Specific powers are shaped by their current life, their personality and emotions and surroundings—so in some lives you might have five specialized powers while in another you’ll only develop one. The relic magik works as a link, a way to keep those old specialized powers in place so that you can relearn them one day. Like a memory card, coded to only be compatible with your soul, in whatever life it may be on when the relic is activated. It’s a revolutionary use of magik—the Incubi are still trying to recreate it today.”

  “I object to you knowing more than I do about this,” I said. I took a long drag from the smoke and looked at Jackson. “Remind me why I’m doing this?”

  “Another set of powers, combined with yours and all of Hunter’s—that would make you strong enough to take down Crayton.”

  “As long as you’re distracting his goons.” Not to mention that was only if I was able to harness Hunter’s, and I’d showed promise only with telekinesis so far. I liked the heat and bluntness of it. “And I still can’t access Hunter’s strength and speed. He’s like the Thor to my Papa Smurf.”

  “I like the Smurfs,” Riley said next to me. “I’ve never seen one of them sucking on a cancer stick, though.”

  I shoved her on the shoulder. “I’m one of the X-rated Smurfs. Smurfs meets the Godfather. I’m all vice and badassery.”

  “You’re a nerd.” She ran a hand over her face. “So? When do we leave?”

  Jackson said, “Right now,” at the same time Penn said, “You’re not coming.”

  “Sky’s not going without me. This is what happens when you let an idiot like him run around without my supervision. He ends up getting himself into shit like this. He’s a danger to society.”

  “In my defense,” I interjected, “you couldn’t have known my generally slutty nature would result in this.”

  “I would have if I was there,” she said. “I would have gotten a vibe, and I would have told you to keep it in your pants.”

  “Not if you saw Hunter with his shirt off.”

  Jackson clapped his hands together. “Too much information. And now we really have to go.” He looked at Penn, brow furrowed. “She’ll be perfectly—well, relatively—safe in the cathedral. If it makes you feel any better, you’ll be right there to babysit.”

  The urge to contest flashed on Penn’s face, but she must have known we didn’t have the time. It was all a matter of time.

  “Whatever,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  ~

  Brunswick Square never technically closed at night—all of the shops and restaurants shuttered up at around the same time, but the doors were left open so people and hotel guests could use the indoor pedway system. It helped in the winter, when you could feel your blood thicken to slush and ice the minute you stepped outside. It also helped when you had to get down to the bazaar in the middle of the night. The security guards were around at all hours, and one of them waltzed by us as we came in, gaze following as we shook snow off our hair and rubbed the cold from our limbs.

  We walked through the empty silence of the food court and crammed ourselves into the elevator. The empty chairs disturbed me, like they were full of unseen spirits watching us, waiting to see if we would join their ranks. I waited anxiously for Riley’s reaction to what she was about to see for the first time.

  I had no clue what I’d do if one of the relics reacted to me.

  I’d taken a lot in the past few days, but the whole rebirth thing was something I was trying hard not to think about, because I was pretty sure if I allowed myself to, I would be weeping or rocking on the floor in the dark, trying to wrap my head around so many lives, souls living and dying, living and dying. It broke my brain a bit. Jackson had mentioned the afterlife like it was nothing, and Penn had taken it in stride, which made me think this wasn’t the first time she’d heard of it. Riley and I Freaked The Fuck Out. The Underworld, he’d called it, and reincarnation—that was a lot.

  And here we were, digging ourselves even deeper into it. My fists tightened at my sides. If it means getting new powers, it’s worth it.

  The cold was infectious as we stepped into the tunnel, but the clinking of the golden orbs above us felt soothing, like they were welcoming me home. I could feel the magik in the air, floating around us like dust, like it had spilled over into the landscape.

  God, magik? How do I even describe that surge, the rush and flow of it, like a tide ebbing. It hums through every cell in your body, fusing with all your atoms, taking over everything you are. It was better than anything I’d ever felt before, and I couldn’t help the way my eyes narrowed in pleasure, the deep hum that resonated in the base of my throat as the sensation washed over me.

  “What the hell?” Riley brushed past me, and Penn trailed along an inch behind her like the anxious mother duck she was. “What are those?”

  “Pathfinders.” I said, pleased to be the one explaining things for once.

  “Concentrated power,” Penn elaborated. “To make light. It’s a species of general magik.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her. Since when had Riley’s athletic older cousin become a living encyclopedia of the arcane?

  Jackson brushed past me. “Let’s get moving.”

  I fell into step beside Riley. I wanted to watch her face as she stepped into this world, see the wonder on it. Glowing mushrooms and giant caves, Pathfinders bobbing in the air. It might be the last time she could see it as beautiful before it started to tear away pieces of her freedom, like it had mine. Before she saw the ugly, deathly, grotesque parts. I still couldn’t tell if that weight was worth it to bear, if I should tell Penn to take her back—but deep in my chest I knew it was too late for that. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. Riley was a force of nature, and you can’t tell a tidal wave what to do: it will simply crash over your head and keep its course. Unwavering.

  The light of the Pathfinders danced across her angular features as we stepped out onto the stone plateau, golden shine catching on the edges of her face.

  She stopped. Breathed out, blowing the strands of plum hair in her face away. “Holy shit.”

  Penn nudged her on the back as she stepped out from behind us. “What do you think?”

  Riley stared down at the cavern, shards of stone and strange cries echoing up to where we stood. A range of emotion crossed her features, eyes scrunched in speculation, brain probably already chugging with theory upon theory.

  Finally, she formed words. “I think you’ve gotten really good at hiding things from me.”

  Penn flinched. “Come on,” she said. “We should catch up.”

  She took off
after Jackson, footsteps echoing off the stone. Riley and I stood alone for a minute at the top of the stairs, the web of light and shadows shifting over our heads, waving patterns on her face. She stared at her cousin’s retreating back from the entrance of a new world, expression grim.

  “I didn’t tell you either,” I said. I wasn’t good at gentle prodding.

  Killer resting bitch face, low reserves of social tact. That was me.

  “You’ve known for as long as I have. She’s known for weeks.”

  “She was trying to protect you.”

  “Were you planing to hide it?” Her eyes met mine, no hint of doubt in them. I looked away. “See?”