Shadows of Ourselves (The Charmers Series Book 1)

by Apollo Blake

  We walked for nearly fifteen minutes, and there seemed to be no end to the place. It was eerie, how the columns and shadows stretched into the distance.

  I’d love to take some photos of this place—reference to paint it from, all navy blue and teal, harsh shadow—but I doubted any painting I ever completed could capture the vast silence. Something about it was familiar, like I’d felt my own throat flood with it time after time. There was a flash of a pair of violet eyes that tore through my mind and died away, and I wrinkled my brow.

  “Are you feeling anything yet?” Riley asked.

  I stopped, tried to sense something. Anything. Tried to call back the image, but couldn’t.

  No good.

  There was magik in the air here. The place was brimming with it, overflowing. It teased me, tendrils of power reaching out, but they were elusive. Like I was plucking the wrong strings.

  “I’m feeling a lot of things,” I said. “Bored, frustrated, and hungry are all emotions that come to mind.”

  I’d scarfed down a pack of chips from the vending machine back at the club, along with more coffee, but that was all I’d eaten today. An Applebee’s would impress me more than this place, right now.

  Penny sighed and rubbed her temples. Jackson paced.

  He pointed, “Let’s go down this way.”

  We followed him around a fat column, along a tiny bridge that ran over a black stream flowing off to god knows where, and into another massive room full of the columns, stretching down into the unseen distance just like the last one. Identical.

  An image tore through my mind—a black-gloved fist flying down at my face, a blast of weak sunlight—then it was gone.

  I stumbled, catching myself on one of the columns. A silver pendant with a blue sapphire in it stared back at me.

  “Okay?” Riley asked.

  I waved her away.

  She rested a hand on my shoulder, and I was too tired to shrug away from her touch.

  “You see something?” Jackson questioned. “The visions linger in the air here, like magik and talents. Whatever you just witnessed, it’s something that happened to you in a past life.”

  I breathed deeply. Tried not to think.

  The afterlife conversation hung over my head like a sword ready to fall at any second. I didn’t want anymore weirdness to deal with, but I had to figure this the hell out.

  “Tell me more about this whole reincarnation thing,” I panted. The vision had left me numb and choked. “What’s the system, the numbers, the details? Who sorts all of it out? Is it God? Or, like. . .gods? How does it work?”

  Jackson crossed his arms, leaned against a pillar. Incubi fed off of dreams and sex—that fit, considering he was a dream boat. His lean frame was deceiving; I could see his muscles straining beneath his shirt. He looked every bit like a boy-next-door type heartthrob, but he was something so much more dangerous than that. Everything this world showed was a deception, a calm surface hiding a tempest of blood and shadows. The way his eyes lingered on Riley’s hips unnerved me. He was not dragging my best friend into his weird existence, let alone in a romantic fashion.

  “The world recycles everything, including souls. Reapers like Lucie ferry them to the other side, help them loosen the tethers that tie them to the living world.”

  “Souls can dwell in the Underworld for years, even centuries, before being reborn,” Penn chimed in. “One soul might have already lived ten lives while another is on their third.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” Jackson stepped forward, easing himself back into the conversation. “It depends on a lot of factors—how long you live, how many babies are being born. . .can’t just toss a soul back into the physical realm with no body. That’s how rogue spirits come about, and those, those are nasty.”

  “Yeah,” Riley said, “I can see how that would be super problematic.”

  I straightened up and leaned against the column. I felt drowsy, like I was swaying on my feet, sleepwalking.

  “Some of these are so weird,” Riley was saying. She’d come up beside me and reached past me for the sapphire and silver pendant.

  “Don’t!” Jackson reached for her, but it was too late.

  Riley screeched and dropped it by the chain, and I caught it without thinking, keeping it in place an inch above the ground without touching it. The magik faltered, and the pendant fell a second later, but at least the stone hadn’t cracked.

  “Are you alright?”

  Riley was shaking her hand up and down like she’d burned herself on a stove burner. “It shocked me! Fucking static.”

  Jackson picked the mask up and set it back inside of the cubicle, then took Riley’s hand and examined it for a second. He cupped her palm gently, turning her fingers this way and that as he examined them. Penn buzzed around nervously in the background.

  “You’re fine,” he told her a second later, dropping her hand. “Some of these have odd reactions to mortals. It would be best if you didn’t touch them.”

  “Got that.” She glared at the pendant.

  I wanted to get out of here. Wanted to step back into the sunlight. Even the ruined remains I was expecting to find at Althea’s shop, if I saw it again, would be a welcome change from this thick darkness. Hunter and Ursa said she would be okay, but I had my doubts.

  More than anything though, I wanted to follow the tilting of my head, the tug suddenly pulling my heart halfway out of my chest.

  My feet were moving before I made the conscious decision to walk.

  “This way,” I mumbled. “I feel something.”

  The others fell silent, immediately trailing me. I wove my way through the columns, half asleep, head bobbing with every step. I wanted to collapse. I wanted to leap into the air and fly. I was myself and not, every breath full of magik, the burning, electric energy of it making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

  I knew I’d reached it before I stopped, but when I did, what I saw only confirmed what I’d already known. This was my cubicle. This was my relic.

  A paintbrush.

  It lay there on the stone, so open, so unprotected, that it sent shivers through me. Suddenly it felt like I was looking at the holy grail, at Pandora’s box—one I didn’t want to open but was powerless to stop myself from peeking at anyway.

  How could someone—how could I—leave something so beautiful open and unguarded against the heavy weight of time here, alone in the dark?

  The brush was made of tarnished silver, gemstones embedded in the surface, the light emerald of a forest pond, laid out in a formation like vines twisting around the handle. It was stained with paint, but it was so old now it was a colourless grey. I hoped that would wash off.

  “It’s beautiful.” Riley breathed beside me.

  Beautiful. And mine. But also not.

  I reached out to take it—and the vision dragged me down like a chain tied around my ankle.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  HEART OF LEAD

  Hunter:

  I felt it when the power rushed through him. My sight went black and images poured into me, pushing everything else out of the way.

  Sky bleeding, broken, lying crumpled on the floor. Fire burning across a room, painting everything orange and red. Shards of black stone stabbing up through the pavement as smoke rose into the sky.

  When the pictures faded, all I was left with was a light head and a sore body, a heart of lead. But something had happened to Sky. It sizzled through the bond like a live wire. I forced myself to breathe.

  He could be in trouble. And yet the world was still turning.

  Minutes spilled over each other like grains of sand, passing too fast for us to chase them, gather up as many of them as we needed. One way or another, I knew, this was all coming to an end.

  I was powerless to stop it.

  TWENTY-SIX

  RELIVED, REBORN

  In the vision I was myself, but also wasn’t. I was somebody else, somebody I had no name for, and I was loo
king at the world through her eyes.

  I stood on a patch of concrete surrounded by a chain-link fence, grey sky rolling overhead, sweat beading on my dark skin, black hair hung in my eyes, the strands cutting my opponent into thin slices.

  I had breasts. Curves. Dark hair. I was taller. And I was in the middle of a fight.

  My attacker swung at me and I ducked out of the way, dark hair whipping around my head as I knocked out with my foot and caught her in the stomach. She stumbled back, and I straightened up. I wanted to win.

  The cold air bit at my skin, and on the other side of the fence a row of trees was turning colours with the season, into a riot of yellow and orange, dots of red like blood welling up. The leaves rustled in the wind.

  My opponent shot forward again, and I raised my arms to defend myself—

  And promptly snapped back into reality, so fast I almost fell over with the intense shock of it. Riley shoved against me, keeping me propped up, and I blinked rapidly into the dim light of the torches as I tried to come back to myself.

  “I was. . .someone else.” I coughed, trying not to choke. Air felt too heavy to hold down. The paintbrush was cold in my grip, and I didn’t feel tired anymore. I was wide awake. As in, just drank four Red Bulls and then shoved a fork into an electrical socket awake.

  “You were yourself. Just in another life.” Jackson clapped me on the back. “Feel any different?”

  Don’t feel like I have any new powers. All I knew were adrenaline and confusion. “I was a woman,” I said. “I was this, like, kick-boxing South American woman.”

  Riley said, “Bet you had great contour skills.”

  My head swam.

  Jackson nodded absently, eyes still fixed on the paintbrush. “Gender, race, sexuality—those are fluid. They tend to change and morph between lives, always evolving. It’s the soul and species that tend to stay the same. Everything is magik—your body is just the vessel that carries it. And the vessel can change.”

  “Tend to?”

  “Nothing is a given.”

  “What did you see?” Riley asked eagerly. Her brown eyes were a mix of curiosity and concern.

  I thought about where I’d been. Who I’d seen. How to lie about it.

  Omission. Same as Hunter.

  “I was fighting someone.” I said. “Outside. Looked like on old tennis or basketball court. And it was fall.”

  “Very forthcoming,” Jackson said.

  “Well that’s all I got,” I snapped. I shoved my hair out of my eyes and turned away from them both. “Can we get out of here?”

  “Yeah, fine, whatever. You should try to awaken your new abilities sooner rather than later. You can practise back at the club.”

  The club. Where I would find enough liquor to chase away what I’d seen in the vision. Because one thing about it had left me colder than the relived autumn breeze and the sting of blows as I fought—it was who I’d been sparring with.

  A face I recognized—not from a past life, but from this one. I’d been facing off with Dezba the Skinwalker.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  SYLPH

  “Wait.” A single word. How did it manage to piss me off so much?

  “What now?” I turned around halfway ready to smack Penn upside the head. Bitchy? Sure. But I was kind of stressing right now.

  I had to go kill my one-night stands’ dad, and all. Plus, the vision. Plus, I was pretty sure this was what oncoming brain-death felt like. Plus, this place was freaking me out.

  Dezba and Jackson and Althea and Destiny, so many faces on so many playing cards, falling from the sky so each time I caught one it sent me dropping into some new dream of blood and violence and magik.

  Aces and spades and hearts and curses.

  “Do you hear that?”

  I heard nothing.

  “What?” Riley whispered.

  Penn tilted her head and stared off into the dark. I heard water dripping nearby, our own breathing and the shuffling of our feet. Other than that there was just dust and silence. We should get the hell out of here.

  The cathedral felt strange, the relics lined up in uneven, jagged rows around us. Each little opening looked like a gaping maw waiting to swallow us. It was like the inside of a bee hive, except each cone held fractions of souls, of lives that had since ended, and it made me think about things I didn’t want to. Didn’t have time to.

  I could paint this place. The cobwebs and dust and flickering blue fire. The rough texture of the stones, the darkness that hung in the air like a living thing. Maybe it was, maybe there was some strange shadow magik at work here, too.

  Who could tell anymore?

  Jackson and Riley stood between me and Penn, both facing her. I couldn’t see their faces, but from the way I caught them glancing at each other I was fairly sure they didn’t hear whatever it was that had Penn turning away, craning her neck to hear. The cathedral was absolutely silent—a mausoleum.

  A city built for the dead, and we’re the trespassers.

  Every inch of sound echoed, every scuffling footstep and tiny exhalation—bouncing off the walls and being flung back at us. If there was any noise, we’d have noticed by now.

  “I don’t hear anything.” Riley put a hand on Penn’s back. “You’re probably imagining it: It’s freaky down here. Let’s go.”

  That settled that. I turned away.

  “No.”

  Really? I looked back.

  Penn had taken a few steps away from the group and was staring off through the shadows that hung like drapes between the pillars. The torches didn’t do much good down here.

  “Guys, seriously? Come the fuck on.”

  Jackson frowned, pulling his empty hand out of his pocket. “I’m out of Starbursts,” he said as if his lover had died. “I’m out of candy and we’re running late and my assistant is going crazy.”

  “Shut up,” Riley snapped.

  “It’s like. . .whispering. . .someone talking to me.”

  “See? Crazy. But no, really, there are all sorts of things down here,” Jackson explained. “All kinds of freaky critters left over from the old days. Probably best not to mess around. Come on, Penn.”

  Penn was not listening. Keeping her back to us, she walked off a few yards. Riley glanced at me, eyes wide, but all I could do was shrug. She knew her cousin better than I did—I’d never seen Penn lose track of time. She wasn’t the type to get distracted. She was efficient and businesslike.

  This, though? Whispers none of us could hear but her? Straight out of a damn horror movie. I wasn’t feeling it.

  Like there were eyes on my back. I’m too paranoid.

  “I feel like we should get the hell out of here.”

  “Makes two of us,” Jackson mumbled, and then, louder, “Penn!”

  She faced us, pointed back into the dark. “I think it’s coming from this direction!”

  And then she took off running.

  “Fuck!”

  Penn running was not a good thing. She was the fastest person I knew, and obstacles didn’t slow her down; she vaulted over them or slid under them, darting around like some kind of damn superhero.

  Half of my memories of the girl included her flipping over park benches and fire hydrants and lusting over running equipment.

  “Hey!” Riley bolted after her, a streak of purple and brown, and they both vanished around a corner, pounding footsteps echoing.

  Did I mention I hate my life?

  “Christ,” Jackson said.

  I clapped him on the arm and followed the girls. “Come on pervert, let’s go raid this dungeon.”

  “Pervert?”

  “You feed on sex. And dreams. I bet some of them are sex dreams, aren’t they? Pervert.”

  Jackson threw his arms up and then took after them, running faster than I could keep up. A problematic side effect of being so short.

  Shit. I bolted after his vanishing back. Sounds echoed as we ran, Riley calling to Penn, the sharp scraping of my boots on the stone gr
ound, the sound of water dripping nearby, the creak of ancient stone overhead. Jackson shouted and the wordless noise echoed in my ears again and again. The smell of dust and stale air filled my lungs, breath after breath.