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

by J. Morgan Michaels

  “It wasn’t exactly intentional,” I said, groaning again.

  “Damn it, Hat. You’re so selfish. Did you think to stop and ask yourself who was going clean up your mess after you got yourself killed?”

  “I didn’t care. I don’t care. I don’t want this life anymore. I didn’t ask for it and I just want to walk away and try to salvage whatever is left of myself before it’s too late.”

  “I should have just let you die back there if you’re just going to give up.”

  “You should have!” I screamed.

  Liv kept talking but I wasn’t listening. There was nothing she could say that would help me. I was too far down the hole of pain and misery that I had fallen into, and neither she nor I would find a way to get me out. I meant what I said, too. In that moment, I wished she hadn’t saved me and that the motorcycle would have sped me off into the afterlife. It might have been my only path to peace.

  * * * * *

  The sun was rising by the time I found the strength to drag myself outside and into a cab. I stumbled into my apartment, eyes only half open, and grabbed some ice for my crippled ribs. Beyond that, I couldn’t do more than lay on my back in the middle of the floor with the ice pack on top of them. I was slipping in and out of consciousness when someone starting banging on my door.

  “What?” I yelled.

  More banging.

  “Just come in!”

  The door opened to reveal a distraught Max on the other side. “Are you alright?” he asked, rushing in and over to me.

  I groaned as I tried to sit up. “Yeah, I’m fine, why?”

  “Why?” He took a step back and blinked his eyes rapidly. “I’ve been trying to call you since last night. You didn’t show up for dinner, and I was worried something happened to you.”

  I sat up and held the ice against my aching body. “Well, now you know that I’m fine.”

  He saw the bruise on my nose from the car attack and gently reached out to touch it, his face crinkling with both fear and surprise.

  “Stop,” I said, pushing his hand away. It hurt.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t understand. Why are you acting like this? I haven’t seen you in weeks, you stopped returning my texts, and we were supposed to meet up for dinner last night and you didn’t show up. Now I come here and see you’re clearly hurt, and you’re not going to tell me what happened?” Max sat down in my chair, leaned forward on his knees, and rubbed his hands together roughly.

  “When did we talk about meeting last night for dinner?” I asked.

  “A few weeks ago. Remember? For my birthday. You said you had some surprise planned and told me to meet you for dinner at our favorite place.”

  “I’m sorry I missed your birthday.” Talking hurt more than I expected, and I keeled over to hold my ribs in pain.

  “I don’t care about my stupid birthday, Hat. Tell me what happened to you.”

  “I’ve just had a lot to deal with lately.”

  “Clearly. Now tell me what happened. Why are you holding your ribs like that?”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t, what?” He waited for me to answer, and when I didn’t he asked, “Are you really not going to tell me?”

  I shook my head.

  “So what am I doing here?” he barked while standing up.

  “I don’t know, you’re the one who just showed up.” I pushed my head back against the wall and dodged eye contact with him.

  “Don’t I have a right to be worried about you? Look at yourself. You look half-dead. Why are you acting like there is something wrong with me for being worried about you?”

  Max looked half-dead too, distress spreading across his handsome face. A part of me wanted to tell him everything, to beg for his help, and hope that his help could make a difference. But the other part of me, the broken part that was still sinking in that hole, just wanted him to leave me alone in my suffering.

  “You know what, Hat? When I first met you, I thought it was kind of cute how you would run away scared, and how you didn’t have any idea what the hell you wanted out of your life,” his voice was a little shaky, “but I’m over it now. It’s time to grow up and stop running scared from everything. I thought we had something amazing here. Don’t we? Don’t you know how much I love you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And do you love me? You’ve never said you do, and I thought you did, but right now, the way you’re treating me, it’s making me think you don’t.”

  “What do you want from me right now?”

  “I don’t know, a little honesty maybe? Stop shutting me out.”

  “You’re probably a lot better off just staying away from me.”

  He came over and sat next to me on the floor, putting his strong arm around me. “No, I won’t be. This is part of being an adult. You laugh, and you love, and you get hurt, and you ask people who love you for help to get you through it all. Let me do that for you.”

  I spat out a few combined expletives and pushed him off me. I pulled myself up using a nearby table, but it was when I started to walk to the kitchen that I noticed I was limping on the leg that had gotten trapped under the motorcycle.

  “Hat . . . ?”

  “What?” I shouted, holding a new cold pack against my ribs. “Back off, okay? You don’t need to get upset about this. It’s my life, not yours. Why do you even care?”

  Fuck, why did you just say that?

  “Are you serious? How many other ways do I have to say it to you? I love you.” The toughest guy I’d ever met was starting to tear up.

  I sat down at my hand-me-down kitchen table and rubbed my neck. “This isn’t about love, Max, or you. Just let it go.”

  “No, it is about love and it doesn’t come around every goddamn day. I’ve been with other guys before, lots of other guys, but I’ve never felt this way about anyone. I felt it the first time I met you and watched you tumble all over yourself at the gym. And I’ve felt it every single moment since then. You have to feel it too. I know you feel it too. That is love. Don’t act like it doesn’t matter, or that I’m nobody to you. Please.”

  Love felt like an illusion, like a blanket we wrap ourselves up in so we can pretend we’re warm on the outside when we are nothing but cold on the inside. Max was the warmest blanket I could ever hope for, but I didn’t want to infect him with the coldness I carried inside me. So, I unwrapped myself from it.

  “I can’t do this with . . .”

  “Fine. I don’t know what’s making you pull away, but I know it’s not because you don’t love me. I hope you grow up someday and figure out what the hell you’re doing and what you really want, but I’m not waiting around for that to happen.”

  Max walked through the door and slammed it behind him. It slammed so hard that it knocked over a picture from my dresser in its wake.

  It was one of my family, gathered at my mother’s house for some everyday event. Everyone looked happy, like we used to be, like I used to be with them. I hobbled over to it and propped it back up in its normal spot and felt a brief moment of hope that it could be like that again. But it was all too brief, because a cold sweat started to form, and I was carried into a vision.

  The first thing I saw was my mother’s dining room table, the center of our family’s world when we were growing up. It was built from dark walnut wood, and was worn from hosting countless Walker dinners. Meals were served there, games were played there, and tears were shed there. Through it all, that table remained a constant in our lives, a fixed point in time.

  “Stop teasing your brother,” Sydney yelled from the table. She leaned over in her chair and slapped her son’s butt as he ran by, his baby brother running wobbly behind him. “Zoe, come get your brothers and watch TV with them or something,” she yelled to Z
oe, who sat peacefully at the computer.

  “Mom, no,” she whined as if her mother were tearing her away from her research in molecular biology.

  “Do you know who I saw the other day?” our mom called over from the kitchen as she finished making the last stage of her family-famous lasagna.

  “No,” I called back, not caring if she was talking to me or not. I had a mouth full and was slapping Finn’s hand away from the last piece of garlic bread in the cloth-lined basket at the center of the table. She made the best garlic bread.

  Finn slumped down in his chair, crossed his arms, and gave me the same pouty look he would give when he was six years old and didn’t get his way. I took the piece of bread out of the basket and threw it on his plate, just like I would have done when he was six years old and gave me that face.

  “That guy who used to work at the store down the street, remember? He used to follow you around all the time,” she said to Sydney.

  “And?” Sydney was uninterested.

  “And,” our mother said, “I don’t know, I thought you’d like to know.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Sydney rolled her eyes to Charley, who giggled quietly. Neither of them saw our mother stealthily coming up behind them.

  She glared at them with half serious, half silly eyes. “You’re not too old for me to beat you with this spoon,” she teased, waving the wooden spoon in her hand as she put down the steaming pan of cheesy lasagna.

  “You’re single, you should call him,” Charley said. She darted her fork around our mother’s potholder-covered hand, trying to get a piece of lasagna from the edge of the dish.

  Sydney started fork-fighting Charley for a piece of lasagna. “Nah. Not interested,” she said.

  “What’s the matter? Is it the fact that he has a car, a place to live, or a steady job that’s stopping you?” Charley asked above my laughter at their antics.

  Sydney knew it was true but pretended she didn’t and gave a dumbstruck look. Finn missed the entire joke by trying to eat his lasagna and text message at the same time.

  The front door opened and knocking followed. That’s the way Walkers enter a house, simply implying that they were coming in anyway, but still knocking as a courtesy.

  “Hello!” Paige called in a funny, high-pitched voice from the entryway. She walked into the dining room with Damon and his sisters behind her.

  “Guess what I did last night?” Damon said, pulling up a chair next to me.

  “Or who,” I whispered back. That was back when he was younger and was, let’s say, brazenly promiscuous.

  Damon picked up a fork and made a pass at my plate. “Yeah, who,” he said.

  “Get your own,” I yelled through my mouth full of food and pulling my plate away.

  “Pig.” He jabbed his fork into the arm I was using to protect my plate.

  “Vulture.” I kept my plate out of his reach and ate off it. “So, who’d you do?”

  “This married chick . . . while her husband was there.”

  “What!” A little bit of food flew out of my mouth and everyone stopped talking to look at me. Damon punched my leg under the table and gave me a “be cool” look.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I asked under my cheesy breath.

  “Eh . . . he said he wanted someone to have sex with his wife. I said sure. He wanted to watch, he bought me a shot, and the rest kinda played out from there.” He took advantage of my shock and moved to the other side of me to get better access to my plate.

  “Whore,” I said.

  He bit into a piece of my lasagna and laughed. “Prude.”

  Tears were flowing down my face before the lights and noises had subsided. It was such a simple scene from our lives, one that told the story of how we lived them together. It reminded me sadly of a time in the not-so-distant past when things felt normal. That table was normal. The loud conversations and the quirky, yet unbreakable love we had for each other was normal. Me with my family was normal.

  Liv was right about me being selfish. How would my family have felt if she had let me die that night? They wouldn’t know or understand the reasons that brought me to the brink of self-extinction. And it would be so much worse because it had been so long since I told them how much I loved them.

  I still may not have been ready to live for myself, but I needed to live for them. That vision snapped me out of the desperate haze I was in, and I couldn’t have been more grateful for it, or my family.

  Change isn’t always in our control, it’s at the behest of the Universe and we just are there to deal with it. But choice. Choice is our point of control. It’s our human power. And then and there, I made the choice to not give up.

  Chapter 30

  “It’s never about how bad you fell down,” my mother said to me once. “It’s about how quickly you get up and how much stronger you are because of it.”

  There were so many things I had broken in such a short time. I had fallen down and hard, but I wasn’t willing to stay down. It was time to get back up, to pull my head out of my own ass, and fix everything I had broken. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be paramount if I was going to fix myself.

  “Start at the beginning,” my mother said when I asked her how to handle a relatively insignificant problem I had once. “Then take it one step at a time. If you give it a chance, the Universe makes sure everything comes together when it needs to.”

  Grudgingly parking my lopsided and nearly-totaled car in the parking lot, I showed up at Equinox unannounced that night, hoping to catch Liv. I knew I had to start somewhere, but I took my time going inside, reluctant to jump straight into the confrontation with her that I knew would follow.

  “Hat?” Graham yelled to me before I had gotten to the staircase.

  I had been out ‘sick’ far too frequently, carelessly putting my job on the line. I hadn’t seen Graham much during that time, and I worried that my outburst at the restaurant was going to be the last straw for him.

  “Graham . . . hi, what are you doing here?”

  “Just entertaining some clients,” he said, pointing his thumb behind him to two people I didn’t recognize. “They like it here.”

  I shuffled a bit and flinched from the lingering pain in my side. “Yeah . . . it’s great.”

  Graham scratched the knuckle under his curved pinky finger and tilted his head at me. “Are you alright, buddy?”

  “Yeah. Sorry I missed so much work lately. I’ve had some family drama going on.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “It should be. Thanks. But don’t worry, I’ll definitely be in to work on Monday.”

  He put his hand gently on my shoulder. “Good. You seem to have had a lot of bad luck lately: flat tires, getting sick, family issues. I hope you shake that pretty soon, we’re starting to miss you at work.” He cleared his throat. “And, I talked to Ms. Monica.”

  I closed my eyes tight and wished that when I opened them Graham wouldn’t be there anymore. “Right. Well, you see, I guess I just had a really rough night, and . . .”

  “Don’t, please, that woman is a raving bitch,” Graham laughed. “Frankly, I’m surprised it took this long for someone to lose it on her. I smoothed it over with her, and everything is fine; I was just more worried about you. I guess we all are.”

  “I’m good, really, it was just a bad night. It won’t happen again.”

  He patted me on the shoulder sympathetically and returned to his group.

  “So this is where a Walker has to go in order to see you,” Damon said, standing at a cocktail table by the stairs.

  “Hey, stranger,” I said hugging him, “I didn’t know you came here.” The Universe was telling me, in a very straightforward way, that it would decide which issues I handled and in what order.

  “Yeah . . . we like to mix it up,” he said. “Paige is here somewhere, a
nd Talia said she saw Victor when we first came in,” Damon said.

  “Wow. Walker party,” I said. “I didn’t think anyone knew about this place.”

  “And that’s why you’ve been hanging out here? Talia’s been here before, but this is my first time. I told a few people we were coming, they told a few people . . . you know how that works. I think Paige’s new boyfriend is even going to make an appearance tonight.”

  “Oh yeah? Good. I haven’t met him yet,” I said.

  “I don’t think anyone has. She’s been trying to hide him from us,” he said as Talia came up next to us and handed him a drink.

  “Are we that scary?” I asked.

  “Yes, you are,” Talia said. “There are too many of you, I still don’t know half your names. That guy has no idea what he’s in for.”

  Damon and I both laughed.

  Shit.

  “I missed your mom’s birthday, didn’t I?” I asked, rubbing my forehead.

  Damon nodded. “Yeah, ya did, champ. And then we had a big thing for Sydney when she got that teaching job.”

  Sydney got her teaching degree right before our mom died, and I had no idea she was even looking for a job. I was a bad brother.

  “Why didn’t someone tell me?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Talia said, sipping on her drink. “I’m not your secretary, and I didn’t know about your sister’s job.”

  “You haven’t been that easy to get a hold of, you know,” Damon said tapping me in the arm with his fist. “You don’t hear back after like a hundred text messages and you eventually stop trying.”

  “I know, I know. I’m sorry. Listen, I need to run upstairs for a sec. I’ll be back to say hi to everyone in a few.”

  Victor was standing at the bar, and I passed him on my way to the staircase. He narrowed his eyes at me but didn’t say anything. That was one relationship I wasn’t going to be able to salvage tonight. It wasn’t even a relationship I was sure was worth salvaging. I looked at him briefly but didn’t say anything.

  Time to rip off the Band-Aid. No more distractions.

  I walked slowly up the stairs and peeked into the room before entering it. When Elle saw me through the doorway, she cheered, and the entire room looked at me and smiled; the entire room, that is, except for Liv. She pretended she didn’t see me and walked out to the balcony.