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

by J. Morgan Michaels

  “Please?” I begged, covering my face with my hands. “I’ll give you one hundred dollars in cash, right now, if we can talk about anything else.”

  “Get real. This is the best thing we’ve had to talk about in months and you’ve never had a hundred dollars on you in your life.” She slapped my hands away from my face. “I’m not letting you leave until you tell me how that kiss was. And I drove, so unless you plan to walk home, start being chatty, Cathy.”

  I took a couple of deep, annoyed breaths. “Fine. It was great. Okay? Probably better than great. But don’t go analyzing it. I still have no idea how I feel about it, and I’m really, really not looking to figure it out right now.”

  “Sure, sure. But can I just say one more thing before you go all ‘Hat Walker’ about this, like you always do, and avoid it, and pretend we never had this conversation?”

  I nodded reluctantly.

  “Okay. How do I say this? So, you know how sometimes you see someone with lettuce in their teeth?”

  I ran my tongue over my teeth.

  “No, no,” she said. “But you know what I mean, right? You see they have lettuce in their teeth, everyone else sees they have lettuce in their teeth . . . but they don’t see they have lettuce in their teeth?”

  “I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Okay, okay. I’m landing this plane, I swear. The point is, no one ever says anything, you know, except for me maybe, because they figure that person will eventually look in a mirror and figure it out for themselves.” Her voice was getting louder. “Do you get what I’m saying now?”

  I’m sure she thought the extensive hand movements and extra emphasis on certain words was helping her analogy, but it wasn’t. “No,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes and scoffed, “Hat . . . you have a gay man in your teeth.”

  Chapter 19

  “I’m making breakfast,” Liv said when I arrived at her house the next weekend. She tugged on the faded pink apron she was wearing and smiled at me. “Come in.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Chocolate chip pancakes seemed fitting with the crappy weather,” she said, as I followed her into the house. “But I got fruit too, if you’re feeling healthy.”

  “I love this painting,” I said as I passed a portrait of Cape Code on the wall in her kitchen, complete with a classic New England lighthouse glowing in the distance at dusk.

  “Mmmm,” Liv said, having just taken a bite out of a huge strawberry. “I painted it. Touch it.”

  “Really?” I asked. I didn’t know much about art, but I did know you weren’t supposed to touch it.

  “Uh huh. Touch it.”

  My hand slowly moved over the grainy, textured paint on the canvas and magic flowed from the painting into my fingers, taking me through a wave of new sensations. I hadn’t left Liv’s living room; I was still there looking at a motionless painting on her wall, but all my other senses went wild, helping me experience things a simple painting alone couldn’t have.

  My stomach fluttered for a second as my ears filled with the sounds of squawking seagulls overhead, and waves crashing in the distance. My feet sunk into the sand, and the faint scent of seaweed at high-tide and suntan lotion brushed past my nose. A cool breeze tickled my skin as it carried salt from the ocean through the air, almost enough that I could taste it on my tongue.

  “Wow . . . ,” I said, removing my hand from the canvas. “How’d you do that?”

  “I figured out a few years ago that with a combination of some enchanted paints and a special brush, I could do a lot more than just paint a picture.”

  “Incredible,” I said, touching it again.

  “There are so many cool things that magic can do.” She moved back to the stove and flipped a batch of pancakes on the griddle. “Will you hand me that butter?”

  Watching her cook, I couldn’t keep my mind from wandering. Before me was this beautiful and talented woman, and she was making me food. I was standing in a place that a million guys would kill to stand, yet the only person’s lips I could picture against mine were Max’s—and that wasn’t a thought I was comfortable with. I could admit that there was some kind of attraction there, but one I didn’t understand and one I was trying to pretend I didn’t want to pursue. But I knew pursuing it would change my life forever, and it had already changed so much.

  “What?” Liv asked as I came up behind her. She was scooping up the last of the pancakes and putting them on a flower-printed plate near the stove. She turned toward me, and I leaned in to kiss her.

  She put the spatula down and wrapped her arms around my neck, and we kissed like that for a few moments. Her lips were so soft and I tried to relax and enjoy that, but it all felt forced and stiff. I started to get angry at myself for not wanting her the way I wanted to want her. It felt so unfair to be given what you’ve always asked for, only to realize that it still wasn’t right.

  Liv pulled away when she noticed me twitch, placed her hand gently on my cheek and said, “You still think too much. Come here.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me into the living room with her.

  Does she actually know what I was thinking?

  There was a brief moment of panic in my gut when I thought she’d want to continue what I started in the kitchen. In a new world where my relationship with my family was different, and I had so few people I loved and trusted, I worried that going any further with her would be a line we couldn’t uncross later.

  “Just relax,” she said, pulling her feet up on the couch. “Sit up here with me.”

  Facing each other on the couch, she grabbed my hands and held them in hers. “Close your eyes. Take a deep breath and relax,” she said.

  An image of her emerged from the darkness in my mind and started walking toward me. A soft glow illuminated her face and she was the only thing I could see. “Can you hear me?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said aloud.

  “You don’t have to speak; I can hear your thoughts up here,” she said within my head. Looking down I could see myself there with her as she grabbed my hand and led me into the darkness. “It’s okay,” she said, pulling me closer to her, “you’re safe.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked. A few more steps and a torch light appeared next to her. She picked it up off the wall it hung from and moved to light another nearby torch with it. As she did, a dozen other torches, placed in a circle around the room, lit themselves, illuminating everything.

  Out of the darkness came a library, with shelves stuffed with books, stacked higher than the light would reach. It had no doors and no windows, but it did have a lingering smell of old leather and musty paper. “This is so weird. Where are we?” I asked.

  “Deep inside your mind.”

  “Who knew my mind would be so . . . dusty?”

  “Magic’s funny like that. It doesn’t always show us things as they really are. A lot of the time, things will appear how you want to see them, or how you need to see them.”

  “And here I thought you were just a mind reader.”

  “I catch people’s thoughts now and then, whenever they’re close and they’re being a little too loud with them, but I think that’s just a side effect of my real power. I can connect with someone’s mind in ways even they can’t. My dad used to call it ‘mind walking’. It’s a really intimate place, a person’s head. I don’t do this with just anyone, or all that often with those I do, but I was here briefly without you that night at the club, and I wanted to show you what it’s like to be here yourself.”

  I let go of her hand and picked up a book off one of the shelves. Inside was an image of me, my siblings, and a few cousins, all playing in the yard outside my mother’s house. I remembered that day clearly; my mom had gone to visit Gloria at the hospital after some kind of kayaking mishap the night before and left us with my fath
er. I was only about five at the time and had fallen out of the half-completed tree house, breaking my arm in three places. My father, unsure if I had actually broken it, told me to “sleep on it and see if it feels better in the morning.” Kids heal fast, and the next morning it did feel better, but my arm was completely mangled—having set itself in an unhealthy and unnatural position. My mom was furious, but not as mad as me—the one who had to go to the doctor’s office and let him re-break my arm. The picture I was looking at in the book looked like it was from right after I’d gotten home. Everyone was signing my cast, except for Victor, who was trying to draw a penis on it with a pink marker.

  “They’re like photo albums of my life,” I said to Liv, showing her the next picture. It was of Damon moving his stuff into my bedroom. That was after my father left, the second time. His mom and dad had gotten a divorce too, and he moved into our house with his sisters. As expected of any child in the same situation, I remembered being sad when my father left. But I also remembered how much fun it was having Damon living with me, and how nice it felt to have a big brother who preferred making forts out of sheets and staying up past bedtime over pushing me down stairs and locking me in closets like Victor.

  “Haha . . . look at this one!” Liv said, holding up another book. It was me at my college graduation. I was whiter than fresh snow and was carrying more bags under my eyes than any airline would have allowed on board. My cousins and I had partied a little too hard the night before, and I wondered if Liv would find a picture of that night, because I hardly remembered it, and would have loved to have seen it for myself. “Whose horse is this?”

  “Oh,” I said, tilting the book so I could see it better. “My mom’s. That’s her with her brother Kevin. They used to spend a lot of time with that horse before Kevin died.”

  Seeing your life in front of you like that is a bizarre experience. Some things I remembered, others I didn’t, and even more that I wished I didn’t. When I opened another book and saw a picture of St. Albert’s on the first page, I closed it quickly and returned it to the shelf.

  “Who’s this?” Liv asked, holding up another page in her book.

  “That’s my cousin dressed as a girl for Halloween. If I remember correctly, the week before that was taken he’d cut his sister’s hair while she was sleeping and my aunt decided that would be his punishment.” He didn’t look very happy at all, especially when, in the next picture, his sister Paige was applying a fresh coat of lipstick.

  The next book to catch my eye was bigger than any other in the library of my mind. It was wedged in the shelf between a book that had three interlocking “O”s or zeroes on the binding. It was made entirely of red leather and it creaked as I pulled it free. The cover was adorned with gold-colored stenciling and words too worn to understand. It was so heavy, I could barely lift it.

  Liv leaned over to look at it with me, and as I opened it, the library around us started to shift. Even though we weren’t physically there, I could feel sweat start to form on my spine. Noises and lights swirled around us until we landed in a place of weightlessness together. A vision unfolded within the book, showing us something I couldn’t have remembered because I had never seen it. It was another dead body.

  With lips seven shades of blue, her face was so pale that it made the body almost look fake. Her eyes were closed, but it was unmistakably my mother, my dead mother, lying on the floor of her house. Standing over her body was a man I had seen before. The man without a face.

  “Murder,” someone said, but I couldn’t tell who. Liv’s eyes were wide and her jaw dropped slightly as she looked at me. “Murder,” the voice said again.

  The book slammed shut and the noise of it echoed off the walls of the library like metal hitting metal. Back and forth the sound roared, growing louder with each hit. The floor bent and tilted. Books fell from the shelves and doused torches rattled together as they rolled around on the floor. The ground was shaking, causing the bookshelves to crash together from the force of it all.

  There was no up or down anymore. Everything contorted around us, as the fingers of that sound kneaded our constructed reality like sourdough. The books created from my memories decomposed into heaps of indecipherable sludge, and with one final, earthquake-like rumble, the illusion shattered and threw us both from the depths of my mind.

  “I’m so sorry, Hat” Liv yelled, holding her head like we were still surrounded by the deafening echoes. “Nothing like that’s ever happened before. It’s like one of your visions took over in there. I didn’t realize that could happen. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.” I shot up and paced the room, hoping that if I shook my head vigorously enough I could toss out the sight of my mother’s dead body from it.

  She didn’t get murdered. She couldn’t have been murdered. Not her too.

  A spinning dizziness robbed me of all my balance. Breathing heavily, I tried to sit and missed the couch, landing harshly on the floor. The whole thing was one, large emotional punch in the gut. Murder. What a terrible word to know.

  With heavy tears, I told Liv about everything that had been happening to me since we met. The Opalescence. Kevin. Seeing Justin’s ghost and the vision I had of the man without the face stealing the mask we saw him wearing over my mother’s body. Gloria and her explanation of why I shouldn’t have had powers. All of it. I couldn’t hold back. I didn’t want to. I needed someone to know everything, someone I could trust with everything. And I needed that person to tell me that what we just saw wasn’t true.

  Murder. Every cell in my body began to burn up, like scalding water had been splashed against my skin. Anger, grief, sadness; those were all just words and they couldn’t do justice to what I was feeling, nor could they carry any significance next to the unendurable word. Murder.

  It was awhile before I had the strength to ask Liv the one question I couldn’t handle the answer to. “Do you think what that vision showed us is true?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said.

  Chapter 20

  The weeks that followed that vision were filled with torturous nights of sleep. In my dreams, I’d see myself standing on the edge of a cliff, looking over a rocky beach. My mother would pass in the distance, walking barefoot along the enormous rocks and looking away from me at the violent ocean. When I opened my mouth to call out to her, the word murder, in a dark, lurking whisper would come out. I knew I was sleeping, and I could even feel my body sprawled atop my lumpy bed in the conscious world, but I was powerless to wake up from it. Soon she would walk out of sight, but the whispers would continue in a voice that wasn’t mine. They’d grow louder each time they spit out that word until they were so loud they overtook the sounds of the waves crashing against the rocks.

  When the voice became too much to bear, I would jump off the cliff to escape it, but just before I hit the rocks my eyes would open, and I’d be awake again. Over and over that sequence played out, with the same non-ending each time. Eventually I would stop trying to sleep, but the voice would walk with me the entire day, never letting me forget it was there waiting for me whenever I closed my eyes. I was like a mouse running around blindfolded in a maze, hoping I’d find the exit before I died of starvation.

  Nothing with my newfound knowledge about my mother’s death was normal and there’s an unfair twist when murder is involved. You don’t just have to deal with the pain of saying goodbye, you have to struggle with the daunting question of why. Was she murdered for the Opalescence?

  That damn necklace was such a conspicuous question mark of its own, and I hated feeling burdened by it. Why had she left it to me if her whole intention was to keep me out of that world?

  I wanted to approach Gloria with those questions, but I couldn’t be certain of how it would turn out. If she did know that was why my mother was murdered, then it could explain why she was turning into the antithesis of everything I had known her to be. If she didn’t
, she’d use it as one more reason I needed to make everything about myself a secret. And how could I be the one to tell her that her best friend and sister had been murdered?

  The sound of a large crash below my feet was followed by applause all around the restaurant. “Manhattan!” Ms. Monica shouted from the door of the kitchen after I dropped the plate. “That’s the third one tonight. They comin’ out your pay.” She retreated to the kitchen and I followed her with a tray full of broken plates.

  The kitchen was a messy, odd-shaped room that was set up so you had to yell for everything. When you walked in or out, you had to yell “In” or “Out,” preferably matching whichever direction you were actually going. If you needed more bread made, you had to yell “Bread,” and so on. I think the whole point of that system was to get people to pay attention, or to make it less noticeable when Ms. Monica yelled at you about something trivial, like dust collecting on the top of an unused tea caddy.

  Either way, you developed an immunity to it all, especially in the kitchen. You’d be waiting to load your food up on a tray, yelling for a “side of veg!” as all the cooks ignored you. “Side of veg, please!” you’d beg.

  The space between the servers and the cooks had an invisible layer of soundproof glass, but only when you needed something from them. Then, five minutes later, when your food was getting cold, and the horribly outdated kale and orange slice garnish you had to put on the plate was withering away under the heat lamps, the head chef would look over, yell an obscenity, and shoo you back to the dining room . . . still without your side of veg.

  “Manhattan! Time ta lean is time ta clean,” Ms. Monica said, breezing past me a few hours later. I loathed that expression, even more than “bang for your buck”, which to me always sounded like a hick’s haiku.

  It was my turn in purgatory and it was slow—slow enough that I had to wonder if Ms. Monica was keeping me there just for her cruel amusement. I had to be costing her at least ten times the wage of a normal sever, so it didn’t make good business sense for her to keep me—not that I ever mistook her for someone who had any business sense, let alone good business sense.