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

by J. Morgan Michaels

  “Hey Coop,” I said as I poured a glass of Blue Ice. “How are you?”

  “I’m alright, but I suppose the bigger question is how you are,” Cooper said.

  “I’m sorry about what I said to you in Newport, about flipping out and everything, and I’m sorry I didn’t say this sooner. Things have just gotten so screwed up.”

  “It’s a tense world we live in, Hat. I told you before there isn’t one of us here that hasn’t lost someone important because of magic, so I can understand how that could mess with your head. However, I suspect that I’m not that one you need to be saying this to.”

  Liv was leaning over the balcony’s banister watching the people below when I came up beside her. “Come to apologize?” she asked before she could see me.

  “Apologize for what?” I asked back. Liv spun around to face me, and only then did she catch the smile on my face. “I know. I’m an asshole.”

  She leaned her elbows against the banister and flipped her hair. “And?”

  “And stupid.”

  She flashed her gritted teeth. “And?”

  “And I’m sorry.”

  In that moment, she looked like the most beautiful being in the entire world. The colored lights from the ceiling were making the profile of her face glow more than her natural blush already did, and it glimmered against the sparkly gloss on her lush lips. She moved toward me hesitantly, her aqua colored eyes looking into mine like two large lakes reflecting the sky of a perfect day.

  “So, are we okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I guess we are, if you are. But you can’t go off the deep end on me again like that.” She leaned in close to my ear. “And just so you know, I have a spell that could give you an unbearable rash for the rest of your life. Seriously. Itchy, red, painful. Don’t fuck with me like that again.” She finally cracked a smile.

  “Aw . . . there’s that beautiful smile.” I nudged her with my body. “Come on, let’s go get a drink.”

  She followed me back into the main room and I stepped behind the bar. “What would you like to drink, my lady?”

  She gave a flat smile and shook her head at me. “Just fill my glass, asshole.”

  Just as I picked up the pitcher of Blue Ice, a sweat-soaked shiver ran roughly up my back, forcing me to drop the pitcher as a weightlessness took over.

  There was a hand. Nothing more. It slowly caressed a wall with tattered, decorative curtains—the same curtains that ran up the walls of Equinox. The hand slowly circled the fabric before it lit on fire, moving away only after the flame engulfed the fabric and ran up the length of the wall.

  Yelling started and I couldn’t see who the hand belonged to. The giant at the bottom of the staircase abandoned his post to hit the fire with an extinguisher, but it was too late. The flames had already spread the length of the wall, and a stampede for the door ensued.

  The mystery hand then touched the cloth that wrapped around the staircase’s banister, lighting it with the same vicious fire that was filling the rest of the room with smoke.

  “What is it?” Liv asked as I came back from the vision. My feet were soaked with Blue Ice and yelling from downstairs startled us both.

  “Oh my god,” Elle yelled. “The club’s on fire.”

  A lot of good that vision did.

  We all ran toward the stairs, but they were already submerged in the flames. People were scattering around the club, frantically trying to escape. I slammed the door shut to stop the bulk of the billowing smoke from reaching us. The windows of the lounge started darkening from the smoke, and I struggled to look for my family in the crowd, praying they’d make it out unharmed.

  “We need to get out of here,” I yelled as the sprinklers started spraying from above us. They weren’t doing anything to calm the fire below us, and the floor was starting to feel hot, too hot to stand on.

  Sirens from approaching fire trucks outside started mixing into the sounds of the crowd. I looked around for validation from someone to tell me that they’d make it to us in time. No one had any false hope to share.

  Flames were overtaking the balcony, and Elle fell to the floor from smoke inhalation. Cooper and a few of the others were crouched over her, coughing, trying to wake her up. The glare from the fire’s intense orange and yellow lights was reflected in Cooper’s eyes as he looked at Elle in worry.

  Empty glasses on the bar were starting to fill up with water from the sprinklers. Liv ran to them and grabbed the largest one. “Get over here,” she said, slamming the glass down on the center table and pulling Cooper and me to either side of her on the couch. Smoke continued to seep out from below the doors, and our coughing became coarse and maddening.

  “This whole room is going to collapse under us,” Cooper yelled.

  “I know. Shut up. I’m trying to remember the spell,” Liv said through the piece of her shirt she held over her mouth. She closed her eyes tight and held her breath. “Give me your hands.” She flipped her sopping wet hair out of her face and held out her hands to us. “Concentrate.”

  The coughing, the sirens, the people screaming below us, all those sounds were deafening and they easily drowned out Liv’s voice. With our hands intertwined, Liv yanked on our arms, pulling the three of us close so our heads were nearly touching. Connected by her powers, our focus drifted from the immediate danger of the fire and gradually fixated on the teetering water glass in front of us.

  “Water’s power fight . . . and save . . . shit. Okay. Water’s power rise and fight . . . spread . . . .shit.”

  “Come on, Liv,” Cooper said.

  “I know. I know. Just give me a second. Water’s power rise and fight . . . spread your wings and save the night, aid us now in this plight, and bring defeat to fire’s light,” Liv yelled at the glass. Nothing happened.

  “A little help here boys,” she said.

  Our connection with the Universe was strong, and stronger as we approached it together. “Water’s power rise and fight, spread your wings and save the night, aid us now in this plight, and bring defeat to fire’s light,” we said in unison and the glass started to shake.

  “Again,” Liv said. “Come on. Focus. We don’t time.”

  In unity, our powers amplified each other’s as we said the words of the spell again. The water in the glass started to glow as a mighty blue energy expanded into it with our spell. The glass vibrated against the table, before tipping itself over. An endless, growing stream of power-infused water poured out and into the air.

  The forceful stream curved as it hit the ceiling, breaking itself off into every possible direction. Taking a near-solid form, the water projected through the windows, shattering them without regard. Like a mammoth-sized octopus with a hundred tentacles, the water attacked the fire below us and around us. It weaved through the black smoke, fighting and smothering the fire at its base until there was nothing left.

  “It’s a good thing that those pipes burst,” I heard a firefighter say outside later, as I desperately waded through the crowd in search of my family. “We wouldn’t have been able to get in.”

  “Damon?” I yelled into the soot-soaked crowd. “Talia?”

  “Everybody’s fine,” Damon said, appearing from behind an obstructively large man in the crowd.

  I jumped at him and landed in a hug. “Thank god you’re okay. What about Talia? Where is she?”

  “She’s fine; she said she was going to call her parents.”

  “What about Paige? Victor?”

  “Everyone’s fine, Hat” Damon said, holding me steady.

  Paige emerged from the crowd with a phone on one ear, and a finger in the other. “No, Mom,” she yelled into the phone. “Everyone is accounted for. We’re all fine. Uh huh. Uh huh. No. Fine. Yes, fine, hold on. Will you talk to her, please?” she said, handing the phone to Damon.

  After a while, the commotion started
to die down, and most everyone left. Soaking wet and still a little shaken, I let myself sink to the curb of the street. The thoughts of all the things that could have happened in that fire, but didn’t, ran through my head. I wasn’t sure if I should feel relieved it didn’t happen, scared that it almost did, or both because at any moment it could happen again.

  Liv sat down next to me, and the two of us gazed up into the hazardous night sky together. The lights from the fire trucks were flooding out the stars, and stale clouds of smoke still hovered over the building.

  “Firemen say they can’t tell what started the fire,” she said.

  I twisted the ends of my sleeves, trying to pry out the dirty water that still soaked them. “I know what started the fire. Or who.”

  “Do you think that’s why he killed Justin, to get that power?” she asked, putting her head onto my wet shoulder.

  “Does it matter? He just tried to mass-murder us.”

  Despite being wet, my phone started ringing. “Hold on,” I said to Liv, “It’s my sister.”

  “I’m okay, Syd,” I said as I answered. She was sobbing hysterically, and I couldn’t make out anything she said. “Syd . . . Syd. It’s okay. Everybody’s okay. We all made it out. No one’s hurt.”

  She got louder, and through her screaming sobs I could finally make out what she was saying. “No! It’s Zoe.”

  “Zoe?” I started to panic. “What about Zoe? Syd? What’s happened?”

  She was almost incoherent by then. “She’s gone.”

  A cold sweat emerged from my skin like shards of glass, yanking me into another vision.

  “The Walkers must know how to use this,” the man without a face said. He held up the Opalescence, still in my setting, in front of his hidden face. “Or what good is it to have it?”

  “I don’t see how taking the girl is supposed to help us,” the voice of a woman my vision wouldn’t show me said. Her voice was muffled, like she was holding her hand in front of her mouth when she spoke.

  “She’s a Walker, right? And you said she was a Caster,” the man without a face said, running his hand through his white hair. “So, we’re going to make her tell us how to use it.”

  The retreat from that vision was violent, as it tossed me around and tried to make sloppy scrambled eggs with my insides.

  “I’ll be right there,” I said to Sydney. I hung up the phone, swallowed hard, and turned to Liv. “He has my niece.”

  Chapter 31

  My car was flying into Sydney’s driveway before I took my next breath. Dashing into the house without knocking, I pulled my sister into my arms. She was still sobbing.

  “What’s going on? What happened?” I asked Charley over Sydney’s shoulder.

  “She was in bed,” Sydney screamed. “She was fine. Everything was fine. And then . . .” she pulled away from me and lit a cigarette, “she wasn’t. I heard her scream. I ran to her room, but she was already gone.” She put out her cigarette and clasped her hands over her red face.

  “The police said they are doing everything they can to find her,” Charley said, “but we don’t know anything yet.”

  “The windows were all locked,” Sydney said, shaking her head. “In her bedroom, the windows were all locked. They still are. I don’t understand how someone could have taken her when I was sitting right here in the living room. How?”

  “Where are the boys?” I asked.

  “Camille has them downstairs,” she said, blowing her nose. “I don’t know what to do, Hat.” Sydney’s face sunk into her chest. “Tell me what to do.”

  “We’re going to find her,” I said, rubbing her shoulders. I had entered the house in such a rush that I didn’t even notice Finn sitting in the corner, biting his nails and watching yet another Walker crisis unfold. “Where’s Victor?” I asked him.

  “Dunno,” he said between his fingers, “we’ve been trying to get a hold of him since we heard about the fire.”

  The door opened in rapid succession as Walkers started to arrive. First Gloria, then Paige, then just about everyone else. They took Sydney into the bathroom to clean her up, but her gut-wrenching wailing bellowed down the hallway behind them.

  Charley hugged me, tucking her head under my chin. I rocked us slowly from side to side as she cried into my chest.

  “You’re all wet . . . and you smell,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. She looked up at me nervously, just for a second. “What is it?” I asked.

  “What if she’s . . . ,” she started crying harder.

  “She’s not,” I said definitively. I knew that I could be wrong about that, but I wouldn’t accept any other answer, from myself or from them. “I know she’s not.” I moved Charley to the couch next to Finn. “Stay here with them. Both of you. Keep everyone together.”

  “Where are you going?” Finn asked.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  On my way out the door, I passed Gloria. She looked at me sideways, but I didn’t bother to stop and tell her what I was going to do. There wasn’t time for an explanation or for her disapproval.

  When I got to my car, Liv was leaning up against it and her car was parked behind me. “What are you doing here?” I asked her.

  “I followed you. I couldn’t just go home after hearing that. What’s going on?”

  “No one knows anything, but everyone’s panicked,” I said. “I wanted to tell them what I knew, but I didn’t know how. And I didn’t think that it would help anyway. It doesn’t matter. I have to find her and get her back before something happens.”

  “Right,” Liv said, handing me the keys to her SUV. “We’ll go to my house.”

  As we sped off my sister’s street, swerving around other cars through the city, Liv took hold of my hand. “You’re shaking,” she said.

  “I know.”

  * * * * *

  “Try another one,” I spat, pacing back and forth in front of Liv and pressing on my temples. My worry and anger had placed my psyche on unstable ground, and being the only person in front of me, she took the brunt of it.

  “Don’t yell at me. I’m doing the best I can,” she said.

  We were at her house, digging through endless stacks of leather bound books and trying any spell that had a chance of finding Zoe. The large steel toolbox that Liv kept all her magical items in was open on the floor, things falling out all around it as she dug into it for something new.

  “I know you are. I’m sorry.”

  She pulled out a small bottle of green paint from inside her toolbox and swished it around. She kept saying “Zoe Walker,” over and over to herself before smashing the bottle violently on the coffee table.

  I jumped a little as the abrupt sound of breaking glass filled the room. “What is that supposed to do?” I asked.

  “Wait for it,” Liv said, keeping her focus on the green ink as it slowly spread across the table.

  Then the ink stopped moving and started to bubble. It turned slime-like as it condensed into itself, swirling until it looked like a whirlpool. Slowly, the broken glass was sucked up into the center until there was nothing left.

  Then a single green bead of slimy ink lifted from the rest and hovered over the table, spinning in the same direction as the whirlpool below it. A sharp snapping sound followed, like bubble wrap being popped, and the bead threw itself against a nearby wall. It was just a tiny bead of ink, but with a powerful impact that shook the paintings right off the wall. More beads formed and pulled themselves up into the air to follow. Thousands of them. The popping noises filled the room as they furiously shot toward the wall.

  The beads started to recombine there on the wall and eventually the ink started to form some sort of picture. Over and over it repeated, until there was no ink left on the table. But when it was done, the resulting picture was blurry and nondescript. The spell quickly defla
ted and the ink dripped down the wall into the carpet below it.

  “Damnit,” Liv said. “I don’t understand why nothing is working. I’m running out of options here.”

  “What the hell good is magic if we can’t even use it to find my niece?”

  “You’re yelling again.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. I just can’t stand that he has her right now and that I’m the only person who can do anything about it, and I’m not doing anything about it.”

  Liv was flipping through another book when she stopped and looked up at me. “What if you could get a vision?”

  That’s a great idea! I was trying not to take out my frustration and fear on her, but with questions like that, she was making it hard.

  “Don’t you think if I could make these stupid visions show up when I wanted to, I would have already?” I asked.

  “No. Stop. Listen,” she said, turning the book she was reading around and showing it to me. “This spell is supposed to work just like your powers. I tried it once a long time ago. I don’t know if it’ll work, or if it even can on you, but it’s something, and something is more than we have right now.”

  I nodded and took the book from her.

  She grabbed a potted plant from beside her couch, turned it upside down, and shook out the plant and all the soil in it. “We need a bowl of fire,” she explained, shaking the plant free from the soil and putting it back in the pot. She grabbed a stack of unopened mail from an end table and tossed it in the make-shift bowl.

  With matches from her toolbox, she lit the contents of the pot on fire. As the flames my mail, she looked at me and said, “You’re up.”

  I held the spellbook in my hands and looked at the fire. Okay, focus Hat. Focus.

  Liv stood and moved behind me, rubbing my shoulders tenderly. “Relax,” she said. “This spell is really specific, so it’s important that you keep your focus on what you’re trying to get a vision about. Think about the love you have for Zoe, not the anger you feel because she’s gone. That’ll help.”