Secrets The Walkers Keep: A New Adult Urban Fantasy (Casters of Magic Series Book 1)

by J. Morgan Michaels

  He paid little attention to me as he played with something in the carpet. “What is that?” I pushed him away and picked up a small sewing needle. “Seriously? Where did you even find this?”

  You talk to your cat like he’ll respond way too often.

  I pricked my finger with the needle and pinched it to let the blood drip out slowly onto the plate that locked the book. Nothing happened.

  That didn’t make me feel stupid at all.

  I brought my finger to my mouth and sucked the last bit of blood off it and used the sleeve from my other arm to wipe the blood off the book’s lock. As it spread around, I heard a clicking sound and four buckles popped out from below the plate, loosening the four straps. I eagerly tugged at the lock, and it pulled off easily, but anticlimactically so, because the book was nearly empty.

  “Are you freakin’ kidding me?”

  On the first page, one line of text in my mother’s familiar handwriting said: “Test not the force of a Caster’s power, but the reach of their heart.”

  Seriously, Mom? I thought as I continued to flip through it, hoping to find something else written. All that trouble for one line of text. The only other things in the book at all were a few pictures stuffed in the back.

  One of them was of a little girl, maybe three or four, sitting on my aunt’s deck, with a big hat blocking her face from the bright sunlight. It could have been Charley or Sydney; they looked so much alike when they were babies. I turned it over and the year written in the corner meant it had to be Charley.

  Damn it.

  Another sweat formed, despite the last not even being gone yet, and I was tumbled into another vision.

  “What do you want, Camille?” my mother asked in a scathing tone. Her sister was in the doorway with a toddler-sized Charley asleep against her chest. They were both wet from the rain that poured down relentlessly outside. My mother had an abnormally large stomach, something all the Walker women faced when they got pregnant. With Charley there, it meant my mother was pregnant with Finn.

  “So you’re still mad at me?” Camille asked, pushing herself into the house.

  “Does it matter? It doesn’t change anything.”

  Camille laid the sleeping and still wet Charley down on the couch and sat next to her. “I’m sorry, Mia. Really. I am. I was just in a bad place and I guess . . .”

  “What do you want, Cam?” my mother rubbed her stomach, “I’ve got a lot of other stuff going on here.”

  Camille squeezed her wet hair and let it drip onto my mother’s floor. “I want you to forgive me.”

  “Okay. Fine. You’re forgiven. Is that all?”

  “You don’t sound like you mean it.”

  “That’s because I don’t mean it, Cam. You slept with my husband while we were still married, and then you lied to me about it for years. Then, only after he walks out on my family do you decide to clear your conscience and tell me about it.” She lowered herself onto her favorite rocking chair with a grunt. “Now your conscience is clear, so you can go and leave me be.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  My mother didn’t respond. It was rare that she’d talk when there was nothing to be said, but her eyebrows were ragged and thin from worry.

  “I need you to take Charley for a while,” Camille said.

  “Wait. What?”

  “I just can’t handle her right now with everything else that’s going on.”

  “You’re seriously trying to leave your child here with me right now? After everything? I . . . you’ve got to be kidding. You will seriously never change.”

  “Please Mia. I wasn’t supposed to be a mother. I’m not good at it.”

  “Then you should have been less good at laying on your back.”

  Camille walked back to the door, leaving Charley on the couch. “She should be with her brothers and sister.”

  I was only about five when the events of that vision unfolded. Back then, I woke up one morning and Charley was sleeping in Sydney’s room. A few days later Finn was born. Charley never left, and that became life as we knew it. The identity of Charley’s father had always been a mystery to all of us, including her.

  “Cat, call Jerry Springer.”

  Chapter 13

  “Wait, so she’s your sister and your cousin? That’s awesome,” Liv said that night when we walked into Equinox. “I had no idea big families were like this. I have a brother, but both my parents were only children. I always thought we were screwed up, but you Walkers are so . . . delightfully twisted.”

  “That’s us, twisted like a Twizzler but usually not as sweet,” I said.

  “Look,” Liv pointed at the stage as we started walking up the stairs. A small crew of men were scurrying around, pulling cords, and turning on lights. “They’re setting up for some live music. I bet it’ll be good.”

  “Hey kids,” Elle said from the bar as we walked into the lounge. She swayed over, Blue Ice in hand, and wrapped her arm around my waist. “We didn’t scare you away?”

  “Not yet,” I whispered into her ear and smiled. Liv rolled her eyes, flopped herself onto one of the couches next to Cooper, and started talking to him.

  Elle was saying something to me, but I was distracted by Cooper, who I watched intently over her shoulder. I didn’t remember noticing the first time we met just how slim and well-proportioned his body was, a feature he hardly kept hidden underneath his tight shirt. His broad shoulders and rounded jaw line made him look like someone who should be in magazines rather than running some little bar in Providence. It was also impossible not to see as he sat next to Liv what an attractive couple they made.

  His eyes moved to mine and I didn’t look away fast enough. “Everything alright?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “Yup. Great,” I said. My face felt crimson with embarrassment, and I knew there was no way he didn’t notice it.

  Did I just check him out?

  Justin, who I elected president of my unofficial fan club, was at the bar when I fled there to get a drink. I started to say something, but he walked away without acknowledging my existence. My subconscious need to have people like me took over for a second and I thought about chasing after him and bartering for his friendship, but before I could, the lights went dim and music began to emanate from the stage.

  I joined the others on the balcony to enjoy the view; not only the great view of the stage, but of the less privileged people, packed together in the main room of the bar like teens at a boy-band concert. By then, the overhead lights had gone out completely, and the only movement or sound came from the dark shadows of the band shuffling into their places on the stage.

  The band started and the crowd roared in anticipation, including all of us on the balcony. Their sound was unique; combining spurts of flute with solid rock and an addicting tempo. The flutist, the only girl in the band, also sang, creating a harmonic, truly original sound with the lead singer.

  “What band is this?” I asked, yelling as loud as I could but barely hearing myself over the music.

  “They’re called Bluish,” Cooper yelled back. “The lead singer is a friend of mine from school.”

  Everyone was in high spirits as the band electrified the room with its sound. They were so captivating that they had already played a half dozen songs before I noticed that my drink was empty. So I ducked back into the lounge for more Blue Ice.

  As soon as I closed the glass door behind me, I could sense something was wrong. An unusual, but distinct smell like burnt paper and starch was in the air. One of the small cocktail tables next to the bar was tipped over and a chair next to it broken. At the end of the bar, where the counter angled and anchored itself into the wall, I saw a clear liquid pooling and slowly flowing out into the room.

  A spilled drink?

  Instinctively, I grabbed a dry towel from one of the cocktail tables to
clean it up with, and continued my cautious stride toward the bar. The closer I got, the more of it I saw, and in turn, the slower I walked. The puddle’s origin came from behind the bar, and slowly washed out onto the floor. I moved closer, and my unwelcome suspicions were confirmed, it was blood. A lot of blood.

  It took everything I had, and more that I didn’t have, to pull myself up on the unsteady stools and peer behind the bar. There was a body. God how I wished it wasn’t a body. Justin was lying on his back, his lifeless eyes rolled up into his head and his limbs bent savagely in different directions, like a doll that had been thrown carelessly on the bed.

  His shirt was pulled up to his chin, revealing his skinny, pale body. And the worst sight yet was the unsteady asterisk carved into his chest, just above his stomach. The small folds of flesh from the wound were serrated and black ash colored. They were so deep that you could see the bone of his ribcage reflected back from deep inside the wound against what little light was coming from the stage in the other room.

  Horrified seems like such a mild word compared to how I felt. I didn’t know whether to yell or run, pass out or throw up. I jumped off the stool and around the bar, splashing into the blood on the floor. I took hold of his wrist to check his pulse, and even though I had never seen a dead body outside of a casket, or checked anyone’s pulse for that matter, I knew he was dead. Who can survive when the contents of their skeleton are exposed and all of their blood has spilled out around them?

  From inside my shirt, I felt my necklace start to grow cold. The air around us was chilling, and a wind blowing directly from the necklace wafted over both of us. I pulled it from my shirt and watched the stone closely as the colors began moving freely again, uninhibited by my movements or my observation.

  My hand was growing numb and when I exhaled, my breath frosted, and floated in front of me. The colors started moving faster, shifting erratically like hyperactive organisms under a microscope. They would clump together and move around each other for a moment, only to break apart, shift, and start all over again. The mellow glow followed and danced delicately behind them, a dance that moved to the hollow beat of weather-torn wind chimes in a rough winter blizzard.

  “What happened?” a voice beside me asked.

  I turned around and there was Justin . . . again. His body was still immobile on the floor, the position you’d expect any dead person to stay in, but his fully formed ghost was also standing next to me. His ghost looked so alive that if it weren’t for his corporeal body beside me, I wouldn’t have even been able to tell he was dead.

  “Justin? How . . .” I didn’t know what to even ask.

  The music downstairs was still so loud I could barely hear anything Justin said. But it didn’t matter. As the cold of the necklace ran through me, the powers of it made it so I could feel everything Justin felt. The necklace was tethering me to him, passing all the thoughts and emotions from his ghost back through it.

  His confusion was overwhelming, especially as it magnified my own. It flowed into me with smatterings of fear and anger and tears started to form in the corner of my eyes.

  “What happened?” he asked, looking around.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just found you . . . I’m sorry.”

  The feeling of someone else’s emotions overriding your own was purely uncanny. And the dislike I always thought Justin had for me became blatantly clear with our connection. He didn’t care about me, why I was there, or what I was doing. He just felt so damn confused about his death, and I was nothing more than a spectator.

  “Where is he?” he asked, looking around again.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The man without a face.”

  “What?”

  “The man without a face,” he yelled while looking at his dead body. “He did this. He came out of nowhere and did this. The man without a face.”

  “What does that mean? He didn’t have a face?”

  Justin’s confusion melted into more anger: anger at me, anger at a man without a face, anger at a life that he had just been robbed of. It intensified, sending shockwaves through the necklace and into my arm. The sensation was so acute that I started shaking.

  Then images I had never seen started appearing in my head. Justin as a happy child. Justin’s first kiss. The first time Justin met Cooper. In under a minute, a lifetime’s worth of memories flashed through my mind. It was so fast it was impossible to process, and I felt like I could implode at any moment just from the weight of them.

  I yelled, pulled the necklace from my neck, and threw it across the room. It clanked against the wall and fell to the floor. When I looked back, Justin’s ghost was gone. I was still crouched next to his body, shrouded in disbelief at what had just happened, but our connection had been severed.

  “Oh my god,” Elle yelled from behind me. “What did you do? Hat? What did you do?”

  “It wasn’t me,” I yelled back, pulling myself up out of the pool of blood, “I found him like this.”

  “Justin!” Elle screamed to him, pushing past me to fall to the ground and shake him. “Come on baby, wake up.”

  “Elle . . . he’s dead.”

  “Shut up! Just shut up,” she yelled back to me, crying hysterically and holding Justin’s head in her lap. “Not like this. No. Not like this. Come on Justin, wake up.” Her screams rose to a volume that rivaled the band’s, loud enough to signal the others to come rushing in from the balcony.

  “What’s going on?” Cooper asked calmly. He looked down at Justin, then at me covered in his blood, before shaking his head.

  “I found him like this!” I said.

  Cooper turned to Liv and nodded at me. She walked toward me, and her heels sloshed through the blood. Without a word, she grabbed my chin gently but firmly with her thumb and first two fingers. Her eyes locked on mine, and they squinted, shifted, and widened in repetitive succession.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Shhh. This will be easier if you just relax,” she whispered without breaking eye contact.

  Pressure started building in my temples and I could almost hear Liv rummaging around in my head, like someone who’s cleaning out the attic while you’re asleep in the room below it. It was unsettling, and violating, and completely out of my control.

  “Stop fighting me,” Liv said, except she didn’t say it out loud. I could hear her voice inside my head. “Just let me see what happened.”

  The pressure increased until I winced. I couldn’t tell what she was looking at, but it was like she was reaching out at me with her mind to tear open my consciousness and explore my thoughts. A few minutes more of silence and she finally broke eye contact and turned to Cooper. “It wasn’t him,” she said.

  “I told you it wasn’t me,” I said, pushing her hand away and shooting dirty looks at all of them.

  “We had to be sure,” Cooper said.

  The giant with the shaved head who guarded the door came up the stairs and Cooper turned to him with little expression and asked, “What do we do with him?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” the giant said.

  “What does that mean?” I yelled.

  “Don’t worry yourself over it,” Cooper said, turning to whisper something to the giant.

  “This is ridiculous. Beyond ridiculous. What’s a word that’s beyond ridiculous? That’s what this is. I can’t believe we’re standing over a dead man’s body and you’re telling me you’re going to ‘take care of it.’ We have to call the police, or an ambulance, or someone.”

  Liv pulled me into the private bathroom off the main room and started stripping me of my bloody clothes. “We can’t stay here,” she said. She ran paper towels under warm water and washed some of the blood off my arms. I was too shaken up to care, or notice, that she was seeing and touching my naked body.

  “What did he mean
when he said he’d take care of it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “Liv, this is serious. We have to call the police.”

  “They can’t do anything with this, Hat. And even if they could, it’s dangerous for them to know who we are. We just have to let Cooper handle it however he handles it.” She wrapped me in a short blanket that usually hung off the back of one of the lounge’s chairs and stuffed my bloody clothes in a plastic bag.

  We came out of the bathroom and most of the Caster crowd was gone. The giant was moving Justin’s body, and Liv handed the bag of my bloody clothes to Cooper. He looked at me, but said nothing more.

  “Do you want this?” Liv asked, holding up my necklace as we walked toward the exit.

  I hesitated. After what the necklace had done, after the way it made me feel when it connected me to Justin’s ghost, I wanted nothing more than to leave it for someone else to find. Maybe then I could pretend I didn’t know what it could do and forget what had happened.

  Instead, I said a quick “Yes” and took it from her.

  We left the club through the back entrance minutes later, saying nothing to anyone. We may have left my bloody clothes, a lifeless body, and the truth behind, but the dark veils of death danced with us even after we were miles away.

  “It’s not right,” I said as Liv’s SUV sped through the city. “He was just murdered in there and they’re acting like nothing happened. What happens when it’s me next, or you? Are they just going to toss our bodies in a car and dump us somewhere?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Chapter 14

  There was nothing to say, and we sat in silence as Liv steered us through the dark side streets of the city. Justin was dead, and the gruesome symbol carved into his chest would forever be carved in my memory. My hand still felt cold from holding the necklace, and my insides felt cold from the emotions his ghost left behind.

  When Liv dropped me off, my street was darker than it should have been. Broken street lights in an area of the city that few want to live in were of very little concern to people who matter enough to get them fixed. They made it impossible to see the shadow-like figure hunched over on the house’s stoop, until I walked past it and it let out a raspy cough.