Chapter 24
Sydney left with little interest in goodbyes. She had come for a reason, and she had spewed that reason all over me. Was she wrong? No. But she didn’t really know everything else that was going on, did she? And throwing Max in my face like that, that was low—the kind of blow only a sister can execute effectively.
“What happened?” Talia asked me as I got back to my desk.
“Oh, you know, just getting berated for being myself. Nothing new,” I said, turning my attention to my phone.
“Spring Fever Party. Tomorrow night. Meet at The Playground at 7:30 p.m.,” a text message from Cooper said.
March was coming to an end and most of the snow had finally melted away. Saturday morning had already started off warmer than usual, and I knew that the entire city would be rushing around for some much needed winter release. When I got to The Playground, the entire crew was waiting outside, sipping on soda bottles filled with Blue Ice.
“I’m not late,” I yelled as I got out of my car. It was warm enough to finally wear shorts, something we were all taking full advantage of.
“Yeah right,” Liv yelled back to me. “Let’s go already.” She jumped into the back of Cooper’s topless jeep.
“Shotgun,” I called, jumping into the jeep as another car full of Casters took off.
Cooper gave a half smile as he floated past me and climbed into the driver’s side of his jeep without opening the doors. “Fancy a bit of fun?” he asked.
Elle climbed in next to Liv, and Cooper took off fast. By the time we were on the main road, the music in the jeep blaring, I raised my arms high and let the warm wind run through my fingers.
There was a certain high that came from hanging out with them. Their world, our world, was liberating, and it made it so easy for everything else to just fade into the distance.
Liv and Elle, who were usually oil to each other’s water, were dancing close, enjoying the spirit of the day. Each had one hand holding their drink, and one hand clutching the roll bar of the jeep. A short song was on repeat and in full force when we pulled off onto a route toward the shoreline. I left my maturity in the wind and found myself dancing and singing along with the rest of them. The crowd yelled the lyrics again as the song started over, just as we passed a cop waiting in the bushes.
“Shit,” I yelled, leaning forward and watching the cop pull out behind us from the side mirror. “Quick, sit down,” I yelled to the back.
Cooper shifted the jeep roughly and it screeched through the next light. We were easily over the speed limit by twenty miles, and he gave no sign that he was going to slow down. The cop’s lights came on and his siren blared after us. Cooper still didn’t stop.
“You have to pull over,” I yelled to Cooper. Part of me was completely panicked at his disregard for the law, yet the other part of me was electrified by his ‘I’ll do what I like’ attitude.
“Relax. It’s all under control,” Cooper said. He smiled and looked in the rearview mirror. “Elle, love, care to take this one?”
Elle sat and rubbed her palms together. Cooper had turned off onto a side street and the cop followed, gaining speed. Elle grabbed the jeep’s roll bar with both hands and smirked at me as I tried to figure out what she was doing. We made another sharp turn and Cooper dropped his speed to an almost dead stop.
The police car whipped around the corner behind us, sirens louder than ever, but then passed us completely. The cop glanced back at us briefly before hitting his accelerator and curbing around the next corner.
“How did you just get out of that?” I asked.
“You want to see what he saw, baby?” Elle asked in my ear, holding her hand out to me.
When I grabbed her hand, a bright light exploded over my eyes, like the flash from a camera. When I could see again, I looked around the jeep and it had turned into an old, rusted, champagne-colored sedan. The four of us, myself included, looked like little old women, riding carefully along the road with purses in our laps and perfectly chiseled white hair surrounding our wrinkled faces.
Elle released my hand, our likeness returned to normal, and everyone laughed. “I can’t believe you did that,” I said.
“Sure you can,” Cooper said. “Come on then, who’s better than us?” He reached into the back and pulled Elle toward him. “Brilliant babe, simply brilliant,” he said before pulling her into a kiss and ignoring the road in front of him.
The three other grannies and I ended up at a bar on the beach near Newport an hour later. The town was dead, as it typically was in the spring. Cooper said he had a friend who owned a bar where “the waves literally come up and hit the doors,” and he always had a party to celebrate the start of the season.
“It’s just nearest and dearest,” Cooper said when we got out of the jeep. “Nearest and dearest” translated into over two hundred people dancing and drinking around the outside bar. Loud dance music blasted over the speakers, and shots were flowing down large ice towers at the ends of the bar.
As soon as we walked past the bar, an unknown man handed the girls a drink and they continued to the dance floor. “Coming?” Elle asked me, walking backward to keep pace with the Liv.
“No way.” I waved my hand. “I don’t dance.”
She stopped, looked at me with a seductive smile and then pulled my arm toward her. “You do now.” She finished her entire drink in one gulp and slid the glass onto a table without looking. She pulled my hand over her head and onto her shoulder, dancing in front of me as she pulled me further and further into the dancing crowd.
“No, really,” I said.
“You still don’t get it,” Elle said. She grabbed a drink from a man’s hand and downed the entire thing.
“What don’t I get?” I asked over the music.
She leaned in close. “We’re like rock stars, and just because we can’t tell these people why, it doesn’t mean we can’t still act like it.” The dance floor was packed, and the beats of a rhythmic reggaeton song bounced over everyone’s body. Elle fingered her long hair with both hands and swung her exposed sides to the music.
“Loosen up your hips,” she said, putting her hands on each of my hips and forcing them to move. “Yeah, you’re getting better. Now put a little attitude into it,” she snapped her fingers and giggled.
Elle motioned for another man to hand her his drink, and he did so without question. Maybe she was right, maybe we were like rock stars. Cooper certainly thought so too, but it didn’t make me feel any less like a dorky kid at his first middle school dance.
A handful of shots appeared, and we finished them off, tossing the empty plastic cups onto the ground and pushing our way through the crowd to a coveted spot near the DJ. More shots. Elle rocked me around that dance floor, amazing everyone around us with her sexy and perfectly spontaneous moves. Each round of shots seemed to taste more bitter, and I longed for the custom taste of Blue Ice.
She continued to ride me like that for a least another hour, becoming progressively more drunk as she did. “Mmmm,” she cooed at one point after falling into me. “You’re still so innocent. Untainted. I love that about you.” She gently but unsteadily ran her hand down my cheek and I looked into her eyes. They seemed dimmer than before, lacking the boldness and luster that once pulsated from them.
“My turn with him,” Liv said, dancing up behind us and shooing Elle away. “Having fun?” she asked me.
“Yeah, I am. You?”
“It’s nice to be outside.” She wrapped her arms around my neck and we danced slowly together.
“What is it?” I asked as she stared at me.
“Nothing. It just seems like you’ve fallen in pretty well with the group.”
“You didn’t want me to get along with them?”
“No, I did . . . I guess it’s just . . . you know what? Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”
“My turn again,” Elle yelled, pulling Liv off me. Liv continued to stare at me for a while before disappearing completely from the crowd. The women in my life were so complicated. Was she jealous of Elle, or did she just not want me to get so cozy with her friends? I wish I had her powers to be able to tell what she was thinking.
“Careful mate, she’ll dance your shit off,” Cooper said when I collapsed next to him at the bar. “Need a drink?”
“I need two,” I said, wiping some of the sweat off my face with a bar napkin. “She’s a trip . . . I’m exhausted.”
Cooper ordered us a few drinks and we sat quietly and watched everyone.
The Spring Fever Party was in full swing and Elle captured another man on the dance floor and kept going at full speed. The bar’s owner came up and patted Cooper on the shoulder. “My man, Coop. How are you?” he asked.
“I’m excellent. Top notch party, my friend,” Cooper said.
The bar owner reached into his back pocket to pull out a folded envelope. As he handed it to Cooper, I could see the name Oddities in the corner. “Here’s what we talked about,” he said.
“Good. I’ll take care of it,” Cooper said before the man walking away.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Nothing mate,” Cooper said, signaling the bartender again, “just a little business.”
I was still sweating from my time on the dance floor, so I didn’t notice it at first. But when the lights and noises changed, I knew I was being overtaken by my first vision in months. I fought it at first, having no desire to see horrible things like I did the last time. But the more I fought it, the more violent it got—tossing and turning me into submission before landing me in that place of weightlessness.
Black candles, hundreds of them, littered a dank basement room. Elaborate symbols were methodically carved into the wax of each, and their flames roared with unusually dark colors.
In the center of the room, light bended, creating ripples in the air like gas from an exhaust pipe. It quickly became more pronounced, contorting the light and forming a shape. It all happened in less than a second, but when it was over and the ripples were gone, there stood the man without a face, holding an envelope just like the one Cooper had.
The blank canvas of his face crinkled slightly as he breathed under the mask, and his fierce white hair reflected the light of the candles back at me. He unzipped his sweatshirt and exposed his thin frame. Then, he picked up a random candle and, without flinching, extinguished it by thrusting the flame into his bare chest.
“And we begin,” he said to no one. His voice was muffled under the mask and with each word, charcoal-like smudges would appear on and then disappear from his face.
The untamed flames of every candle burned higher than before, and melted wax dripped over their cryptic symbols. The symbols glowed deep from the core of the candles, and then the flames doused themselves. Like creepy jack-o-lanterns, the symbols cast the only light into the room.
“It’s time,” he whispered.
The symbols pulsated with orange light, a majestic color that snaked into every corner of the room. And with each beat the symbols would pull themselves further and further from the physical attachment of the candles, until they drifted independently in the air around him.
Currents of sound followed, like wind thumping against hollow trees. They were slow, intense, and unnerving, and somewhere underneath them speech formed in a slithering whisper.
“You must be patient,” the voice said.
“I have been patient! I’ve been nothing but patient,” the man with no face said. “It’s time to take what is mine.”
The symbols started swarming clockwise around him, unbounded magic at the command of its master. Then three of the symbols met in the air and collided, their misty colors fusing together into an image. Like the reflection from my own mirror, they showed him the Opalescence, me wearing the Opalescence.
“You have already failed once,” the voice told him.
“I didn’t expect that boyfriend of his,” the man with no face said. “You should have just let me use magic in the first place.”
“I meant with his mother. It doesn’t matter. His visions are unpredictable, and that charm you’re using doesn’t guarantee he won’t be able to see who you are. We can’t let him know that yet.”
The man started to say something else, but another symbol in the air passed between him and my point of view. Like it knew I was there, it let off orange sparks of sizzling light, and the man without a face turned to watch as the symbol forcibly pushed me from the past.
My return from the vision was turbulent with my emotions, and I nearly fell off my chair when it ended. The attack in the alley wasn’t random. It wasn’t a robbery. And it wasn’t the last time it was going to happen.
To be hunted, that is a feeling I know. The man who had killed my mother wanted the Opalescence. Fear of what was to come and anger for having to deal with it detonated deep inside me, surging the Opalescence’s power outward and shattering four glasses on the bar.
“What’s wrong then?” Cooper asked, looking around nervously to see who might have noticed my outburst.
“What was in that envelope?” I asked Cooper, my voice uncomfortably low.
“That, mate?” he asked, nodding over his shoulder at the man who was long gone. “Like I said, it was just some business. Nothing for you to get worked up over.”
And yet, I was worked up. The vision was different this time. Maybe I was finally starting to understand how they worked. They were invasive, at best, but they showed me things that were happening around me that I couldn’t have seen otherwise. And they were triggered, by a place, an object, or a person. There was always a catalyst to their entry. This time, something with Cooper’s shady business dealings were the trigger.
“Do you know who he is?” I asked.
Cooper grunted and pulled me away from the crowd and toward the parking lot. “Will you calm down? I haven’t the slightest idea of what you’re talking about. Who?”
“The man without a face. The one that killed Justin.”
“What? Of course not. I would have already handled that if I knew who he was.”
“Then why did I just get a vision of him with an envelope just like that?” I asked.
“I’m certain I have no idea,” Cooper said patting my shoulder again and guiding me into the parking lot. “I’m going to need you to relax.”
“Tell me what’s in it!” I screamed.
“You’re losing it a bit, aren’t you?” Cooper asked. He pulled the envelope out of his pocket, ripped off the top and dumped a stack of papers into my hand. “Here. Go ahead then. There isn’t a thing in there about that man, or anything else you’ll find interesting.”
I flipped anxiously through the pages and it was only a stack of financial statements for a bunch of companies I didn’t recognize. Was it related to the man without a face? I couldn’t tell. But I had gotten that vision for a reason. He was coming for me and I had to do something about it before I was the next person he killed.
I handed the papers back to Cooper and walked away without saying anything else.
“Hat,” Cooper yelled after me. “Where are you going? Hat!”
Chapter 25
My visions were trying to help me navigate through a dense thicket of forced destiny. I didn’t ask for the Opalescence, but having it meant I could be killed. I had been exiled from a normal life that everyone else took for granted, and suddenly I was the naïve prey, being hunted by a man with no face who wanted what I had and had already killed for it once.
Murder.
That word started making its rounds through my mind again, growing louder and louder. I could practically hear the fear bubbling up beneath the surface of my sanity. I was right when I said my mother’s murder was like the cut above Max’s
lip. But like that cut, my wound was delicate and vulnerable to being reopened. It was gaping, and the blissful thoughts of moving on were lost as I wondered if I would be next.
“What are you doing here? Go away!” old man Withers said to me when I entered his store that morning. “There’s nothing for you here.”
“I need your help,” I said, shutting the door.
“And what kind of help is it that you think I can give you, hmm?” he puffed at me. “Go away and leave this old man in peace.”
“Peace isn’t an option anymore,” I said flatly. “Do you know anything about . . .”
“Pfft. I know a lot, and I know all about you, Walker,” he interrupted.
“And?”
“And you Walkers are always more trouble than you’re worth. Hmm. Walkers are a lot like this piece of rope,” he said, holding up a piece of thick, tattered boat rope, “twisted and staunch . . . almost impossible to break, and usually impossible to untangle yourself from.”
“Fine. Think whatever you want about me, about us, I don’t care. What I do care about is the man who has no face. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Withers said, as he started to walk toward the back of his store.
My heart jumped, pounding rapidly and irregularly into my ears. My vision blurred. Rage was weaving itself around my ethics, darkening my morality, and testing the confines of my humanity.
For the first time, I could consciously feel the Opalescence power at my command. I lifted my hand into the air harshly, my palm facing Withers. The door to his office slammed shut from the Opalescence’s power with such force that it rattled his worthless knickknacks and junk right off their shelves and onto the floor.
Withers whipped his head around and glared at me through his round glasses. “Oh, you think you’re powerful, is that it?” He threw the piece of rope on the ground and stormed over to me. “You’re just a scared little boy running around with powers you don’t know enough about, in a world you know nothing about.”
Secrets The Walkers Keep: A New Adult Urban Fantasy (Casters of Magic Series Book 1) Page 20
