Shadows of Ourselves (The Charmers Series Book 1)

by Apollo Blake

  She was raising her arm. She held something in her hand—her eyes met mine, Destiny grinned, and then she threw it.

  The tiny package hit the ground before I could get a close look at it. It burst apart and red dust swept out and poured into the air, thick and hazy. I coughed and stumbled back. Christ, she carried around smoke bombs? Ursa called out somewhere behind me and Hunter shouted my name again, but it was too late for any of us to reach each other as the cloud of smoke spread. Within seconds I was lost in a sea of ruby powder hanging in the air. I charged through the cloud at the spot where I’d last seen Destiny without thinking, and out of the cloud, where she stood smiling like she’d just won an Olympic medal or some shit.

  I kept back, tense. “It isn’t classy to pick on old ladies, you know.”

  She laughed, flashing fangs again. “Who are you talking to? I’m over a hundred years old.”

  “What?”

  She scrunched up her face, dripping superiority. “I’m a Vampire, duh.”

  Duh. Like I met Vampires every day. But I’d suspected it, and I was right. Holy shit. Besides, any doubt I might have had was erased when a lie didn’t register.

  “For someone over a hundred,” I told her sadly, “you sure dress a lot like Hannah Montana.”

  “Oh, fuck you kid.”

  Vampires existed. Skinwalkers. Wolves made of shadows.

  What was next?

  If the effing tooth fairy turned up to party, I was killing someone.

  Destiny glared at me and bared her teeth, showing off gleaming fangs. I became a lot more aware of my exposed throat. Not great.

  I tried to drag up that well of power from deep within, the energy I’d felt snapping around me, like wires pulled so tightly they snapped from the pressure, when I made my phone float. Like stretching a muscle I’d never bothered to exercise.

  But I couldn’t tap into Hunter’s powers again—not on command. Maybe the bond wasn’t strong enough, or close enough to settling (thank God for small miracles) but I couldn’t force them to wake up and work for me.

  Destiny lunged, and something caught spark.

  As the vampire reached me I threw out my arms, a sloppy imitation of Althea’s earlier pose, but it worked. I felt the power flood me like a shot of adrenaline straight to my heart, and a coffee table flew out of the scarlet fog coating the air to slam in the slim girl’s direction. She dodged the heavy piece of furniture, and it smashed into the wall, shattering instantly. Wooden splinters rained down, and she laughed as she strode toward me.

  This was what fear looked like: a girl with a fancy charm bracelet and a pair of very real fangs coming at me with a grin on her mouth and thirst in her eyes.

  A blur of motion sped by me and straight at her—Hunter had broken through the smoke, and he was after her with a vengeance, lightening fast. His movements reminded me of the violence of a storm out at sea. I could feel myself painting it—the crook of his elbow in the intersection where sky met water, the curve of his hunched back as he lunged like the wide arc of a full moon, nestled among clouds of blood red smoke. There was beauty in the terror, and I didn’t know if I was more afraid for myself, or for him, or of him—what he would do to her. Was I about to see him murder someone? Was that what he’d done for this ex-boss?

  Had Hunter been like her, before?

  He crashed into the Vampire and the two of them flew at the wall. The impact came with a sickening crack. Destiny slumped over, dazed, and Hunter dropped her like a broken toy.

  He turned to me, and I took a half-step back and raised my arms, a fighting position—

  Not your enemy. I caught myself at the last minute, and forced my fists to unclench, but it wasn’t before Hunter registered my stance and looked regretful for a second.

  He blinked, and the emotion was gone.

  Striding forward, the Charmer boy grabbed my wrist and yanked me along as he passed.

  Behind us, Destiny muttered a dazed curse.

  “Come on!” he tugged me after him like a child.

  I was too focused on finding the others to tear my arm free. Ursa stood in the back doorway ahead of us, bouncing up and down with nerves as she waved us forward. She held open the curtain and we slid by.

  At the last second I looked back at what we were leaving behind.

  In the front room, Althea stood alone as Axel and Destiny rose to their feet. The old woman’s back was to me, her posture confident as she waited for their attack. Then the curtains fell shut, blocking her from view.

  FOURTEEN

  CHANGE OF RULES

  Ursa led us through the back room, out the rear entrance I’d seen earlier, and into a dark stairwell that seemed to go up forever. Moss clung to the rock walls, patches of it glowing a luminescent blue, lighting our way. She clattered onto the steel staircase and we followed her, heading up the endless flights even as the sounds of a great fight were swallowed behind us. The stairs could have gone forever, and I would have just kept following Ursa and Hunter up, staring in front of me.

  Did we just leave her to die? Or them?

  I glanced at Hunter, but there was no emotion on his face but determination as he climbed the stairs beside me.

  I looked ahead again.

  There was a flash of memory from when I was small; the shifting orange light of some duplex hallway as Mom carried me up the stairs, cradled to her chest with my face buried in the folds of her winter jacket.

  I felt cold sweat beading on the back of my neck.

  All I could think was I’m in over my head, I’m in over my head, I’m in over my head.

  Never should have gone to Temptation that night, never should have slept with Hunter, never should have thought I was capable of dealing with his world, never should have been stupid enough to have been born.

  My head swam with unease, thoughts clouded.

  There was the haze, and the echoing of our footsteps.

  For a while the only sound was our heavy breathing, the clang of our feet on the stairs. We were a flood of motion being lifted by a tide of panic, rushing faster and faster the higher we got.

  After a while the silence was too much. “Althea—”

  “Can handle herself,” Hunter assured me. “She’s one of the strongest Charmers I know, even with just telekinesis.”

  Just telekinesis. Because that’s nothing.

  I wasn’t as sure of her as he was, but I tried to quell my panic. “Is that really her only gift?” I asked as he nudged me to speed up again. Ahead of us Ursa kept a decent pace.

  “Yes,” he said. “It is now. Why?”

  I bit my lip, unsure of how much to tell him. In the end, I decided to go out on a limb and trust him with just this much. A test, of sorts. “I had a dream last night, and Althea was in it. She said this crazy stuff, about a bloodline, and turning the tide—something about a flood of shadows?”

  Hunter smiled. “Dramatic,” he said. “Sounds like her.”

  “Then she fell of a cliff.”

  “Ouch.”

  “But it couldn’t be—not if her only gift is telekinesis.”

  “General magik,” Ursa chimed from above, and I wrinkled my nose. There was that term again. She’d said it in the kitchen.

  The flood of information was almost too much.

  “What?”

  Hunter allowed, “General magik is a collection of small types of spellcraft that any Charmer can perform, regardless of their number of gifts, or what they are. Sending visions, influencing dreams, seeing the magik world, through wards that most mortals can’t. Forming Pathfinders. It very well could have been Althea in your dream. You’ll have to ask her the next time you see her.”

  And if I don’t see her?

  “And if it wasn’t?” I lost my footing on the stairs and tripped, slamming my elbows into the edges. Hunter was kneeling next to me in seconds, helping me sit up. “I’m fine,” I growled, pulling away.

  He helped haul me to my feet anyway, and I brushed myself off myself off
and kept going. “If it wasn’t,” he said, “then maybe you’re divining the future in your dreams. It could be another gift.”

  “No way.”

  I was not fucking psychic. I got caught in the rain every other day, missed the buss constantly, always got taken with the flu by surprise.

  If I could see the future, even through cryptic dreams and visions, I would have avoided a lot of bullshit. A mugging, watching Mom vomit blood a time or two, nights where I’d smoked too much and got sick and vomited myself.

  I’m no fortune teller.

  Whatever that dream actually had been, it stuck with me. I kept coming back to it as we rose, like a worn page in my favorite book; running my fingers over the words again and again until the ink blurred and they stopped meaning anything at all. Every time I replayed the dream, Althea’s words in my head made less and less sense.

  Not that anything was making sense right now. I was constantly on the verge of dying, the last few days. I’d just left an old lady to finish a fight for me. I’d always thought of myself as kind of fragile, physically—what I lacked for in strength I made up for with snark. Well, that and my ability. But this? This was a new low. I’d basically left granny to get eaten by the big bad wolf. On the other hand, Hunter was her grandson, and he’d done the same. He didn’t seem very worried, either, which either said a lot about him or a lot about her—it remained to be seen.

  I really hoped I could trust him, that I wasn’t putting my faith in someone who would lead me too far down the rabbit hole to find my way back.

  If he did, I’d set fire to it and watch him and his world burn.

  I was not playing games, here.

  “Are we almost there?” I asked Ursa. She stopped at the top of the flight and looked back down at us.

  Her frizzy hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat, arctic eyes alight with energy. I wondered if the same light was mirrored in mine, after the exertion, or if they were the same dark, bitter shade as ever, no light filtering through the iris. Too often when I looked in the mirror I reminded myself of an old person, eyes weary, skin bleached from days and days without seeing the sun. Like I was frail and dying and constantly stuck in this winter, even as the people around me got flashes of summer heat.

  We’d gone up at least fifteen flights. How deep beneath the ground was the bazaar?

  “A few more flights,” she said. “We’re almost at the part that was built by mortals, and then we’ll be able to access the street.”

  “How deep beneath the ground were we?”

  “I’m no geologist,” Ursa said as Hunter’s arm brushed mine. I stepped away, and caught him frowning at me. “But there are people who think it’s not even there, physically. That the tunnels leading down are charmed with some kind of portal magik and it transports us to another part of the world. Or a different one entirely.”

  “Magik is amplified in Saint John,” Hunter said at my side. “There are just some places like that in the world, where magik is part of the universe. New Orleans and Tuscany and Cairo.”

  “All those, and Saint John?”

  He laughed. “There are other places, too. They don’t tend to correlate to human cities or settlements, but they do tend to attract large numbers of mortals and Charmers alike, so many of them have become notorious, famous places.”

  “And others, not so much.” Saint John did not scream magikal hot-spot. More like, cheap seafood and prime hiking spots and stark poverty. It was a lot more tourist trap than mystic outpost.

  “Sapporo,” said Ursa. “That’s where the good magik is at. Paper charms and wind experiments.”

  “Never heard of it.” I said.

  “I have,” Hunter said. “Because they never stop mentioning it. It’s a city in Japan.”

  “They?” I asked. Did Ursa plan to run off to Japan with the old lady or something?

  “I use gender neutral pronouns,” Ursa said ahead of us.

  “Gender is kind of an illusion anyway,” Hunter said at my side, “because—”

  “Do you want his head to explode?” Ursa asked. “I’m pretty sure he can wrap his head around it without you bringing up that.”

  Hunter smirked, but shut his mouth.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing important,” his grandmother’s assistant assured us. “But yeah, Sapporo. It’s nice. Not as crowded as Tokyo, and, like, way more magikal. I’m really interested in paper magik. There’s a really good scene for it there, so I want to spend a year or two there.”

  “Magik for everything,” I mumbled.

  I pictured all of these magikal beacons or whatever they were, imagined lines of alchemy spreading beneath the surfacing, flourishing and intertwining as they snaked across the globe under our feet, crisscrossing the earth.

  Nothing. I knew nothing.

  “We’re almost there,” Ursa said then—which was useless, because we’d been almost there for what felt like forever now.

  But soon the walls began to change, growing smooth and manufactured, the moss falling away in exchange for flaking blue paint on the cement walls, illumination replaced by fluorescent lights. Installed, not carved. mortal. Within five minutes we were being showered in weak, dying sunlight through a metal grid above our heads. Ursa pushed the grate up and aside, and a blast of cold air snaked in and ghosted over my face. Great, back into fucking New Brunswick November. I hated the cold.

  Then we were climbing up onto the cold pavement, into the dying afternoon light. Hunter boosted me up after Ursa, hands lingering on my hips too long for comfort as I hauled myself onto the ground.

  Back in the mortal world, but it all felt different.

  Looked different, too. Less flimsy, somehow.

  Like, hey, maybe I have a serotonin imbalance and some emotional trauma to work out, but at least up here there aren’t fucking girls with wings running around and secret passages ways waiting to swallow me up.

  Or at the very, very least, at least up here I couldn’t see those things. Or hadn’t been able to before.

  I felt more in my element, either way.

  I wasn’t supposed to be underground, running for my life and casting spells. I belonged up here, listening to experimental indie rap and eating my savings in instant noodles and moping.

  Ripping people off by stealing the path to the truth and making them pay me to lead the way, so I could get out of this city and get a tiny apartment somewhere and start painting.

  Riley was going to come to Toronto with me—or we’d go somewhere she wanted, out of the country, even, I didn’t really care either way—and she would get a job at some magazine or journal and I would be able to paint all day and maybe be a functioning fucking human being for once.

  That was the end goal.

  Not waking up every day and walking through this fucking acid trip of a world. Vampires, man. Fucking Vampires.

  Ignoring Ursa’s outstretched hand, I helped myself up, relishing the pavement scraping my palms as I heaved myself up. I liked that, sometimes, a little pain—not to punish myself, just remind me I was still here. Still had something to lose and things to do. Enough to wake me up.

  “It’s snowing.” Hunter pointed out.

  He was right, of fucking course. The only thing worse than all of this would be all of this in the snow. The tiny, delicate flakes drifted down in wide loops and loose spirals, lazy and enchanting.

  “First snowfall of the season,” Ursa said thoughtfully. They held their hand out and caught one of the flakes in their palm.

  We were in the wide alley lane on the left side of the City Market, and we’d come out of one of the grates on the ground. I’d walked over it hundreds of times without even knowing what was really below me. Magik branching out in tunnels like roots. But Brunswick Square was connected to the market through an underground pedway, so it made sense that Althea’s secret back exit came out onto a street nearby. How many of the other manholes and drainage pipes and vents set into the street led down into
these secret places?

  I was still staring quietly down at the darkness, out of the reach of the fading sunlight, when it hit me. The sun was setting.

  But. . . .

  “Wait a minute. It wasn’t even noon yet when I went down to the bazaar, and we were only down there for two hours tops. How is it early evening right now?”

  “Time passes differently in the underground,” Hunter said. “The magik is part of the landscape down there, things happen out of order, go off-kilter.”

  “It’s glitchy down there.” Ursa said.