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

by J. Morgan Michaels

  “Jesus, Auntie,” I yelled, jumping and trying to hold on to the only thing covering me, the blanket.

  Gloria unwrapped the bundle of scarves her face was hidden beneath. “Sorry Hat, but we need to talk,” she said. “Where are your clothes?”

  “It’s late and I’ve had a really rough night. Can we do this tomorrow?” I started to walk down the driveway toward my apartment. If she agreed, I’d avoid her for as many days as possible, hoping she’d forget what she wanted to talk to me about in the first place.

  Gloria followed me down my driveway and her feet dragged along the cracked pavement. Even in the darkness I could see her eyes burn with worry. “No,” she said.

  Super. So we’re doing this now.

  I fumbled through the dark to find my spare key, buying time before we had to start the inevitable conversation. “Let’s go inside,” I said. I started a pot of coffee and went into the bathroom to find clothes to put on.

  “I’m really worried about you, Hat,” Gloria yelled to me. “You can’t keep hanging out at that club.”

  “How do you even know where I’ve been hanging out? Are you stalking me now?” I asked as I came out of the bathroom and tried to pull my sweatshirt down past my head.

  “It doesn’t matter how I know, just that I know. Those kids there, they act like this is all a big game or that magic is just some toy to play with, and it’s not. I don’t want you to pay for that carelessness,” she said.

  I poured us two cups of coffee and after shaking a nearly-empty container of milk to listen for chunks, I placed it next to the cups on the table. “A Caster was murdered tonight,” I finally said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “How could you possibly know that if they didn’t call the police?”

  “It doesn’t matter how I know, just that I know.”

  For someone I loved so much, and had always had such high respect for, Gloria was certainly pissing me off. “Huh. Well. What it must be like to know everything. Well, did you know that when I found Justin . . . that’s the guy that got murdered . . . when I found him, his ghost started talking to me?”

  “No, I didn’t. What did he say?”

  “I’m not really sure. Something about a man without a face. But you’re missing the point. I had a fucking ghost talking to me tonight.”

  “And you’re still missing my point, Hat. Someone got murdered at that club and that is exactly why I don’t want you there. Something’s going on out there, something big, and whatever it is, it’s coming quickly, and I don’t want you to get caught up in it when it gets here.”

  In that moment, I was getting caught up in something else. A cold sweat misted down my back and pulled me rougher and faster than ever into a new vision.

  “Hurry up,” a voice said. The room I was looking at was dark, lit only by the glow of a dim flashlight. There were three, maybe four, men scurrying around the dark room, but I couldn’t make out any of their faces.

  “I don’t see it,” another voice said.

  “It has to be somewhere in here,” the first voice said. “I didn’t just take out those two guards so we could look through her collection of pottery. I want that mask.” They spoke in such a hushed tone that I could barely make out the words.

  “I’ve got it!” a new voice said, dumping a box of someone’s prized possessions out on the ground. He handed the first man a golden mask, which was the only thing in the room I could see clearly. It was petite, almost feminine, with small holes for eyes and a few solid gold beads sporadically decorating it. From the forehead, eccentric gold panels sprouted out and formed a headdress above the mask. It looked like it was two pieces with the headdress floating above the mask as if they were unattached.

  “Yes!” the first voice said. “That’s it. Give it to me.” He reached for the mask and pulled it over his face before I could see what he looked like. “Hidden in plain sight,” he continued, “with the Mask of Apate.”

  With his simple words, the mask began to glow brighter than the only flashlight in the room. He removed his hands, but the mask stayed attached to his face, casting clouds of dust up from the ground until nothing could be seen anymore.

  When the dust cleared, so had the mask’s form and that man’s identity. His face was blank. You could still see the contours of it, his nose poking out and his eye sockets sunken, but it was like it was all covered with thin white fabric. He was a breathing blank canvas, and with each movement of his face, wayward charcoal shading would darken those contours as if he was being drawn upon. Then the shading would fade away as quickly as it came, taking with it any defining feature; a sketch erased by its creator.

  His hair was full, straight and piercingly white, almost ultraviolet. It framed the mask from forehead to chin, and because I couldn’t see him before the mask took over his face, I had no way to know if his hair was naturally like that or if it too was an effect of that mask. Whoever he was, the powers of that mask were keeping his secrets well.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “What was that?” Gloria asked me when my breathing finally returned to normal.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “What I need from you right now is a promise, Hat. You have to promise that you’ll keep yourself safe by staying away from that club. I’m sorry for all the secrets, but it’s the only way.”

  “Oh? You want to talk more about secrets? Sure. Just how many more little family secrets do I have to look forward to?” I asked.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that I feel like every other day I find out something more you all kept from me, and I’m sick of it.”

  “Like what?” Gloria asked, shaking her head.

  “Like my dad and Camille.”

  She coughed into her coffee as she went to take another sip. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Does Charley know? Does anyone else?”

  “I’m not saying that I know what you’re talking about . . . because I don’t. But if I did, I would say that no one except your mother and Camille knows about that. I’m not even sure your dad knows about it.”

  My father was a man who had many talents—like being evasive, unpredictable, and sometimes invisible, but being perceptive was never one of them. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he had several kids he didn’t know about. Usually, I felt like a kid he didn’t know about.

  “I would think you, of all of his kids, could appreciate your mother not wanting to inflict his paternity on anyone else,” Gloria said.

  “Maybe before I could have, but now I just feel like it’s one more thing on a long list of secrets I really wish I didn’t know. I can’t believe you two would keep that from Charley either. Doesn’t she have a right to know who her damn father is, even if he is a jerk?”

  I reached up and rubbed my temples. They had begun throbbing with growing intensity as the conversation went on. All I could think about was that if they did explode, at least it would mean I wouldn’t have to deal with my family anymore.

  “I’m going to tell her,” I said.

  “Hat, no, you can’t.”

  “Why? Because secrets hold this family together? I don’t think that’s working as well as you think it is.”

  “Hat . . .”

  “Or are you worried that if I tell that secret, I won’t be able to hold any of them in.”

  “No, I’m worried that you won’t be able to handle the secrets you don’t know about yet.”

  * * * * *

  The next morning, my phone buzzed itself off the nightstand, waking me up from the first straight hour of sleep I had gotten all night.

  “Where are you?” a text message from Sydney asked.

  Shit.

  I was supposed to be at my cousin’s football game. He was in some all-star championship somethi
ng-or-other game that was advertised as a big deal. I still didn’t like the idea of throwing myself into a crowd of Walkers, but it was unquestionably better than sitting around thinking about what had happened the night before. I jumped out of bed and threw on the first clothes I saw.

  Cheering roared from the bleachers as I approached the game. My cousin maneuvered around the field in his bright white and grass-stained jersey, dodging the smaller children from the other team as he ran with the ball.

  He was the youngest of my first cousins and the last still in high school, but on the bench with his team was another cousin’s kid, just a year or two behind him in school. They were victims of what we called the “Walker Effect,” where generations naturally overlap and blend together so much that you can’t tell where one starts or the other ends. Gloria and her mother, my grandmother, were having kids right around the same time, so Gloria’s oldest son was actually a little older than my youngest aunt. Confusing, right? Anyone who wasn’t in a big family like ours, which was pretty much everyone, thought so too.

  It was always easy to find the Walkers in a crowd. While no one would have stopped us if we wanted to sit in the bleachers with the normal people, we tended to form a pack off to the side in the grass. And that’s where I found them, in a sea of folding chairs, coolers, and unnecessarily large blow horns.

  The other families, the smaller families, hated us when we went to those games. We were large, loud, and completely unapologetic about it. We’d been attending various sporting events at that field for as long as I could remember, yet we always remained that family, the one everyone knew but pretended not to.

  “Hi, family,” I said as I sat next to Sydney.

  “Glad you could make it,” Sydney said, throwing me a soda, or more accurately, throwing a soda at me.

  “Aww, Syd, don’t be mean, I had a crazy night.” I kissed her on the cheek.

  “Whatever, Hat. We haven’t seen you in forever.” She was right, it was the first time I had seen any of them since the service. I was a bad brother.

  “Uncle!” a cute little voice yelled. Sydney’s youngest jumped into my lap and we had a long, in-depth conversation about the salamander he’d found on a nearby rock. He might have been the only Walker who wasn’t annoyed with me, so I took full advantage of his attention.

  “Where’s Charley?” I asked, hoping for some thawing of the cold shoulder I was getting.

  Sydney kept her eyes on the game. “Don’t know.”

  Alright then. If you’re going to be a bitch, I’m going to leave. I stood up and put my nephew back on the ground with his salamander and his very dirty face.

  “Wait,” Sydney yelled. She reached into her bag and pulled out a manila envelope. She handed it to me, and its official logo reflected the sunlight; it was from our mother’s lawyer, with the same emblem as the envelope the necklace was in.

  “I need you to sign these papers before you leave,” she said, throwing a pen at me.

  “Why do these papers have Charley’s name on them?” Victor asked as he emerged from the crowd, his head buried in a similar legal packet. “What’s up, Fattie?” he asked, bumping into me as he passed and poking my stomach with his pen. “Looks like you’re getting chunky again, kid.”

  Victor had a way of bringing a sour flavor to my life. The guilt from disliking someone I loved was irksome, but usually tempered by how good I felt whenever he wasn’t around. I had gotten used to him not being around. I missed him not being around. Even his name had an acidic taste about it, Victor.

  Sydney stood up and massaged her neck. “What’s the problem, Victor?”

  “Charley,” Victor said. “Why’s her name on these papers?”

  “Because Mom left the house to all of us,” Sydney said.

  “What do you mean all of us? There’s only four of us,” Victor said. The ends of his slightly crooked teeth were peeking below his lip as he scowled at her.

  “Vic, come on, she’s lived with us from the time she was three; she’s practically a sister,” Sydney said.

  Victor chucked the packet onto an open chair. “She’s not our sister and this is bullshit,” he said.

  My eye started twitching and I fantasized about a giant, cartoon-like anvil falling from the sky and smashing Victor into the ground. After what I had been through, after seeing someone murdered, his pettiness around our mother’s house was trivial and infuriating.

  “It’s Mom’s house,” Sydney said. “She can leave it to whoever she wants.”

  “It was her house,” Victor said, before taking Sydney’s seat and turning his attention back to the game.

  Such an insensitive prick. Victor had only ever been good at two things: mooching from other people and being absolutely nowhere to be found when anyone needed him. So I did what I was good at—I walked away.

  “Hat, wait!” Sydney called after me. “Are you seriously going to take off already?”

  “I’m sorry, Syd, but I just can’t handle this,” I waved goodbye to the pack of Walkers, “not right now.”

  “You know, you’re not the only one who lost her.”

  “I know,” I leaned in and gave her a gentle hug, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Be here, with us. We need to stick together to get through this. You know that’s what Mom would say to you too.”

  “Or she’d say ‘stop being such a damn bitch and just sit down and watch the game,’” Victor said, chomping on a sandwich he’d undoubtedly stolen from someone else’s cooler.

  “Vic, stop,” Sydney said as I started to walk away again. “Hat, wait, I need you to sign those papers.”

  I tossed the packet over my shoulder, leaving them to soak in the damp grass.

  Chapter 15

  “Another one,” someone said, as they dropped a box off in the copy room. Something had gone wrong with a client’s legal case, and the lawyers needed someone special like me to go through hundreds of boxes and find a few missing documents.

  At that point, I was already twenty boxes in and still hadn’t found it. There were so many boxes stacked in the room that I could no longer see the exit. It was comforting to be surrounded with mountains of paper, with no fire extinguisher, and an exit you can’t readily get to.

  “Hat, are you in here?” Graham asked from behind the boxes.

  “Yup, I’m here,” I said, raising my hand so he could see it above the mess.

  Graham navigated through the box maze to get to me. “How’s it going?” he asked.

  I closed the box I was working on and opened another one. “Going as fast as I can,” I said.

  “No buddy, I know you are. I was just checking to see how it was going. I’m trying to see if there is anyone else that I can pull in to help you.”

  “It’s fine Graham,” I said. “I don’t have any plans tonight anyway, so I might as well spend it here.”

  Graham frowned and sat down on a box. “Everything okay?” he asked.

  I stopped shuffling through the papers long enough to look up at him. “Everything’s fine. Why?”

  “You haven’t really been yourself for a while now, and I was just wondering if there is something I can do to help.”

  The edge of a stack of papers gave me a paper cut and then slipped onto the floor as I jerked my hand back. “It’s nothing, really. I’m sorry if I seem distracted, I just have had a lot on my mind.”

  “Hey,” he held down the lid on the box I was trying to open, “I’m not asking as a boss who’s trying to increase your productivity. I’m asking as your friend who’s trying to make sure you’re okay. You can trust me, you know that, right?”

  “Yeah. I know. It’s really nothing though,” I said, pulling the box’s top open. “I better get back to all this or I’ll never finish.”

  It was already almost 7:00 p.m. when I got to the fiftieth box. I trie
d to tell myself I was making progress, but for every box I went through, the paralegals dropped off three more. The boxes and I were packed so tight in the copy room that I couldn’t even see the screen on my phone when it rang.

  “Yes,” I said, pushing the Bluetooth headset in my ear.

  “Sorry . . . I’m looking for Manhattan Walker?” a man’s voice said.

  Digging through the piles, I found my phone and read “Unknown Caller” on the display.

  Fuck. If this is a bill collector, I’m going to kill someone. No exceptions. No apologies.

  “Yeah, this is Hat.”

  “Right. This is Demarco Sterling, your mother’s attorney.”

  I let out a sigh of relief.

  “Listen, I’m sorry to bother you, but did you happen to sign those papers for your mother’s house?” he asked. The visual of a large pile of unopened mail on my desk, including the envelope from his office, came into my head.

  “I haven’t yet. I’m sorry.”

  “Right. I know things are hard right now, and I certainly don’t want to be the one to rush you, but your brother, Victor, keeps calling me and asking if they’ve been signed so we can start the process of selling the house.”

  Of course he is.

  Mr. “The World Owes Me Something” was waiting for his payday. Harassing the lawyer of our dead mother was probably a lot easier than getting a job.

  “Sorry, Mr. Sterling. I’ll sign them first thing tomorrow.”

  “Again, I’m sorry to bother you with this during what I’m sure is a difficult time,” he sounded sincere, “but I need to also inform you that Victor has requested a copy of all your mother’s legal papers, including her will. He wants to contest your cousin’s portion of the inheritance.”

  What an asshole.

  “Can he do that?” I asked.

  “He certainly can try, but I’m the one that drew up those papers with your mother after her last divorce. They’re solid, and there’s nothing there to contest.”