Shadows of Ourselves (The Charmers Series Book 1)

by Apollo Blake

  I was running on empty, so I went to the food court to fill up on some java and think about what I was going to do.

  I’d always hated it in here: It was like a cave. The escalators stood between the food court and the open atrium, sushi and coffee kiosks shoved against their sides, and they blocked any light that got in through the glass ceiling, so while you were over here you were stuck in the dark, beneath the weak glow of the overheads. Thick, square columns stood in several places, their surfaces covered in mirrors to make the space look bigger than it was.

  When it was packed, it was even worse, like being trapped in a box. It drained me

  Normally the place was crowded by eleven am, full of high school students and uptown office workers looking for a quick, cheap bite. But today it was just me, a couple mall employees, and a few old people, spread out reading papers and talking to each other.

  I ignored the ghost town and went to get my caffeine fix, taking my place in the short line at the McDonald’s. After I’d ordered I stood off to the side to wait.

  I was about to pull out my phone and try texting Riley again when something nudged my foot. There was a sound like something dragging along, and when I glanced down there was a snake slithering across the toe of my combat boot.

  I let out a choked little cry and lurched back, nearly falling over.

  A man standing a few feet away gave me a strange look as he eased away. The snake hissed and kept going, barely sparing me a second glance. It was like the one that I’d seen in my vision back at the apartment—sleek onyx with teal markings shining in the low lights. There was something beautiful about its sinuous movements, but I was still shaken. Looking around, I actually wasn’t surprised to see that no one was staring or screaming or running in terror. Just me; the freak slash homo slash disruptive teenager. Burden on society and all that, I’m sure.

  I stared after the serpent. It was slithering along the row of restaurants set against the edge of the food court, and as I watched it made its way into the back hallway.

  “Here you are,” said a voice to the side. I glanced over to find an employee holding my coffee and receipt across the counter.

  I grabbed the hot drink, shoved the slip of paper into my pocket, and took off after the snake.

  The back hallway didn’t have anything in it except an extra elevator and two doors that were both employees only. It didn’t see so much traffic, but this elevator was good when the others were all packed, especially if you wanted to avoid people—which I usually did.

  As I left the glow of the food court behind for the dim corridor, I caught sight of the snake moving inside the open elevator doors. Pulled forward by some sense of urgency I didn’t understand, I stepped in after it. As soon as I was inside, the snake evaporated into a cloud of smoke, drifting into the air as if I’d just blown out a candle.

  I searched the cramped space, but there was nothing else here. It was just an elevator.

  Turning to leave, I saw something that pulled me up short. On the wall near the door, the panel of buttons for each floor was changing. A blue ring of light glowed from the steel at the bottom, like someone was taking a blow-torch to the other side of the panel.

  The light grew blinding and I winced, had to looked away. When it faded and I turned back, the glow was gone, and there was a new button in its place.

  “Okay,” I said. “Because that’s not totally fucking creepy.”

  The elevator did not respond.

  The open doors led back into a world that was safe and sane. But that world wasn’t the one that could offer me answers anymore. Not the ones I needed.

  I took a deep breath and pushed the button. The doors closed, and then the elevator came to life and lurched down into the unknown.

  ELEVEN

  THE BAZAAR

  The elevator opened into a passageway that looked like a cave. The uneven stone walls were damp, and covered in thick patches of flaking moss. Here and there the dense growth shifted from beneath sinuously, and the tips of vines would poke their heads from beneath it like sentient beings looking around to take in the view. Fat mushrooms grew along the path. They weren’t like any I’d ever seen; they were black, and luminous red rings on their surfaces seemed to glow with a molten light from within.

  The smell of wet earth filled my nose, fresh and surprisingly invigorating. Soft golden light glowed from above, like the flames of a campfire lamp.

  The radiance came from what looked like floating glass orbs. They filled the air above my head, bobbing gently, and when they clicked against each other they would give off light chiming sounds like glasses tipping together for a toast. Then they would drift apart again in another direction, heading for another collision. It was eerily beautiful. Beyond them was an endless stretch of blackness, an abyss that swallowed all of the light. But. . .that couldn’t be possible. The mall was above us; I’d just walked through Brunswick Square. Where the hell was I?

  I drew in shallow breaths and forced myself to keep moving. I should go back—a sane person would go back—but fuck, I wasn’t turning around now.

  The path evened out onto a tiny stone square overlooking a steep drop. Ironwork benches were placed evenly around the plaza, but they were all abandoned, and it was disturbingly silent.

  In the giant cavern below me was a place like nothing I had ever seen before.

  A massive stone staircase that looked as if it had been carved naturally out of the rock wall led down into an open plain in the pit of the cave that was easily the length of five or six football fields.

  I couldn’t wrap my head around the sheer size of the giant space hollowed out of the earth, but what I saw in it made my heart nearly jump out of my damn chest.

  In the middle of the cave floor, among several giant shards of stone that jutted up as tall as my apartment building, a tiny shantytown had been erected. It looked like a makeshift market—uneven rows of ramshackle booths and huts and kiosks, and even large tents of rich red and purple velvet, in some cases. Hand-painted wooden signs were hung up, scraps of bright cloth hanging in doorways. Above it all floated an endless sea of the luminescent glass orbs. And the place was crowded, bustling with people. What the hell was this place?

  On the opposite wall of the cavern from the steps I now stood at the top of, the stone was riddled with openings leading to other tunnels, and many of them were the size of houses. Those had light glowing from within them, and symbols and signs and words in languages I couldn’t read had been painted on or affixed to the stone above their entrances. More shops, maybe? Some of them were partially blocked off with heavy curtains and drapes, making my curiosity burn even brighter.

  But it all took a back seat to what I saw next. Built into the far right wall of the cave was a massive gothic cathedral, like a chunk of some long lost European city picked up and dropped here, spires stabbing up into the darkness above.

  There were impressive churches like this up on the surface, but this was something else. Where had it come from? Who had created this place?

  Nope. Those were questions for later.

  I had bigger problems to deal with. Like whatever the hell was going on down in that market.

  I started down the stairs at a brisk pace, heading for the alluring chaos of the market. I settled on going there over the cathedral for the simple fact that I didn’t want to have to pull a magik Indiana Jones if there were like, traps and giant stone balls or whatever. Plus, it gave me horror movie vibes. If I was going to be exploring old temples beneath the surface, I would do it with Hunter at my side, a swat team, some tequila, a grappling hook, and hopefully a can of pepper spray in one hand and a machete or some shit.

  The market did have its own cons, though: interacting with other people, for instance. I could see them down there, weaving through the little shacks and stands. As I got closer the sounds of their calling out to each other, shouting and laughing, started to drift up to me. There were inhuman noises thrown into the mix too; the screeching
of animals and what sounded like the barking of a fox, along with some I had no way to describe.

  I wasn’t sure if I would be safe down here, and honestly, I didn’t care. The compulsion to explore drove me beyond any sense of worry. Even though I knew I should be anxious, any fears I had fell away as I felt the power filling the air around me the further down I got. It was like the magik had seeped into the oxygen down here.

  I felt drunk on the energy. Dizzy with it.

  At the bottom of the stairs I started toward the rows of tiny shops, walking along one edge. A girl passed me, her shoulder bulging awkwardly, and I did a double-take when I saw she had a pair of massive wings stretching behind her, the feathers a dusting of white, grey, and brown. She rolled her hips like she was walking down a runway as she strolled by. She had earbuds in, and a pair of killer Chanel sunglasses. The girl passed me, nonchalant, and I felt my head spinning.

  Damn—were things ever going to stop getting freakier? What was she? A Charmer? Some kind of angel?

  Nope; that was a can of worms I didn’t want to open.

  As I turned to keep exploring, I collided with someone else. Our foreheads knocked together, making my teeth rattle, and I cursed as I stepped back. When things came back into focus, it was a struggle not to gasp out loud.

  I had knocked into a chubby Asian boy, around my age, completely ordinary. . .except for the fact that his eyes were entirely white, a mid-winter blizzard set into two orbs in his face. He was mumbling to himself under his breath, the words coming in short rasps that I couldn’t make out. There was something sharp and guttural to the sounds. He was in a trance or something.

  Messed. The. Fuck. Up.

  I waved a hand back in forth in front of his eyes, but the boy didn’t react. He turned and walked back the way he’d come, lost in some other time or place, and I watched him go.

  “Charming, alright.” I mumbled under my breath.

  “You new here?”

  “Huh?” I followed the voice and saw another girl striding toward me. A woman, really.

  She was a First Nations woman who looked had to be at least twenty-five, with high cheekbones and sharp brows. Wavy black hair and deep bronze skin. Her fashion sense was killer: A varsity jacket made entirely of sheer black material, showing off her slinky blue undershirt and the lithe muscles of her arms.

  The expression on her face dripped superiority as she leered down at me.

  She looked about as human as I did—but looks could be deceiving.

  Her silvery-green eyes shined with open curiosity. “I said, ‘are you new here?’ or are you deaf now, too?”

  A pang of irritation lashed through me. “I know my way around.”

  She snorted. “You do, do you? Because you’re looking around at everything like a mind blown newborn.”

  “The only thing down here that could possibly blow my mind is my own hair,” I said. My hair was a fucking mess right now. “Why do you care?”

  She smiled like a hyena about to take a chomp out of some hapless little zebra. “Just trying to be nice to the new kid.”

  “I’m no freshman.”

  She scoffed.

  “You know what? I think—” I never did get to find out what she thought (shame, right?) because at that moment someone interrupted her from behind me.

  “I think that we need to get going!” Someone looped their arm through mine and then I was being turned away from the angry woman’s surprised face and led off. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” said the stranger at my side. She whispered to me, “Don’t let Dezba get to you—it’s kind of what she’s good at, but still. She’s tricky, that one.”

  “What is she?”

  The stranger chuckled. “You catch on fast. Dezba’s a Skinwalker.”

  “Skinwalker?”

  “Navajo shape shifters,” she said. “Very powerful, very prideful, and almost always emotionally damaged. Their magik has a high cost. Dezba’s not so bad, though. Well,” she said thoughtfully, “not unless you piss her off. Then she’s really bad.”

  I looked back and saw the Skinwalker staring at our retreating backs. Her eyes met mine, narrowed, and then she turned away.

  She leapt into the air—and changed. Her form blurred, outline shifting and shrinking, and then there was nothing in the place where she’d been but a black crow flying up into the darkness. I watched it soar up high, above the floating orbs of light, and vanish.

  Jesus Christ. That made Hunter’s slaying the Hound look like child’s play.

  This place was surreal—like waking up from a dream only to find you hadn’t imagined it. I’d stepped through the looking glass and into some dark Wonderland.

  “What are you?” I asked the girl at my side. “Wait, who are you?”

  I pulled to a stop and really observed her for the first time. She was taller than me—wasn’t everyone?—and curvy, with wild brown curls and light skin. Her eyes looked like the clear surface of a pond in the winter, and she wore a smile like that was just the natural position of her facial muscles.

  “I,” she said, “am Ursa. And you are in trouble. Hunter just called me from a payphone with an MIA alert and practically told me to form a search party for you.”

  “My mom always said I’d end up on the side of a milk carton one day,” I drawled. She pursed her lips. “So you know Hunter?”

  “I work for his Grandmother—who happens to be expecting us back at any second.” She took my arm again and started walking, and I followed. If she knew Hunter she wasn’t going to hurt me—and unlike Dezba, I felt pretty confident in my chances in a fight with her.

  If it came to that. She oozed about as much danger as a tulip.

  Hunter’s Grandmother, I thought. What would that look like? Unease tingled down my spine.

  What was this? Meet the family, now?

  Give my love to granny, Jackson had said. I was running at the first sight of a Hallmark moment, I decided.

  What were grandmothers even like? I hadn’t ever met mine, and I knew around zilch about either of them.

  As we walked, I stared around at all the odd, colourful shopping options. Rich silk sheets edged with golden beads hung from beams above shops, intoxicating smells drifted out of some of the booths on clouds of stream, and a dreamlike melody drifted to us from somewhere in the distance, an instrument I couldn’t place.

  “What is this place?” I asked. I’d never seen anything like it.

  “The bazaar,” Ursa said. “Think of it as a mall beneath the mall.”

  “And that church?”

  She’d led me to the far wall I’d noticed earlier, coming to a stop outside one of the shops. This one had a delicately carved archway, swirls and spades and little flowers and birds set into the stone, perfectly sculpted. Purple velvet drapes hung from it, obstructing all but the glow shining from inside.

  “No time for that now, we’re here. Come in, and don’t give Althea any sass. She’ll turn you into a toad.”

  “How Disney.”

  “And then fry you over a campfire,” she added pleasantly.

  “That’s one tough grandma.”

  Ursa chuckled. “Yeah, you got that right. Althea isn’t like anybody else.”

  I half expected to find this lady sitting near the fireplace smoking a cigar and petting a white cat, at this point.

  Ursa ducked through the curtain, and inside I caught a glimpse of a brightly lit space with stone walls and cozy, antique furniture. I stepped after her, footsteps muffled by the thick Persian rug on the ground, and came to a halt.

  She’d been right. The old lady sitting in a massive armchair across the room wasn’t like anybody else. She was just like one person in particular.

  I was staring at the old woman from my dream.

  TWELVE

  TEA & TEMPERANCE

  “You’re letting the draft in,” she said, taking a long sip of tea.

  “I hate everything,” I said to no one in particular. I let the drapes fall
shut behind me and followed Ursa to where the older woman sat in a massive old olive green armchair.

  She wore a form-fitting but modest black gown with full lace sleeves, and a pair of wire-framed bifocals. She looked like a cross between the editor of a fashion magazine and a widowed Victorian era woman.

  She was what I would expect to find in a psychic’s tent at a carnival. Where was the crystal ball?

  “Who the hell are you?”

  Ursa looked shocked, but the woman—Althea, Ursa had called her—laughed easily, a throaty rasp. “I am an old shopkeeper. I’m also Hunter’s grandmother. I’m Althea Abbott, and it’s nice to meet you, Sky.”