Shadows of Ourselves (The Charmers Series Book 1)

by Apollo Blake

  The door fell shut behind us, and he leaned against the white cinder block wall beside it, brooding down at me.

  “I’m not good at being thrown away,” he said, and I would have bolted then if his words hadn’t frozen me to the spot. “Knowing how desperate you were to break the bond, how eager you were to get rid of me, even after you learned how rare they were, how powerful—what they meant for the souls who formed them—it drove me mad, trying to figure out what I did to make you hate me so much.”

  His words hit me like a slap, every letter leaving a red mark on my skin.

  “I don’t hate you, idiot.” I pressed forward, my crossed arms brushing his stomach. “I hate how I feel when I’m around you. I hate how much of an idiot you make me. And I don’t know the importance of a bond. You just said they were rare.”

  “People say its a gift from God,” he said, “how you know you’ve found the one.”

  “I don’t believe in that one true soulmate Hollywood shit,” I mumbled.

  “What about God?” he asked, and the question caught me off-guard. “It’s funny how little we really know about each other. I can tell you that you’re braver than you think you are, what the shape of your scars feels like. I’ve memorized the way you frown when you first wake up, how your face goes all scrunched up. But I don’t know if you believe in God, or what kind of music you listen to. Your favourite colour, even.”

  “Black,” I said under my breath. Black is a fucking colour, okay?

  “I do,” he said. “Believe in God, I mean. I wonder about that, sometimes. Who made us, I mean.”

  “Oh, fuck. Is this a God talk? Really?”

  Hunter glared, and I felt something like panic flutter in my chest and fall to pieces in the bottom of my stomach. Not the pain of a lie, just sheer anxiety. The emotion was entirely my own; the bond didn’t stir.

  I did not know how to talk about this with him if he was all religious and weird.

  “What?” he said.

  “The universe started as an explosion of chemicals. That’s j—”

  He cut me off, saying, “I know what the big bang is, Sky. Christ’s sake. And I believe that, too. Doesn’t mean I don’t think someone set the charge. That’s what I wanna know. Who hit the trigger?”

  “Lady circumstance,” I said, closing my eyes against a headache.

  “Are you always this skeptic? After everything you’ve seen and done, you really think there’s no God?” he wondered.

  “I think. . .” I didn’t know what to say.

  I think God’s gone off to play in some other corner of the Universe, and left us to rot.

  I think God’s an asshole.

  I think I don’t know what to think.

  I shrugged. “You asked. Not my fault you don’t like the answer.”

  I turned away, staring down the wall. It was easier to talk to that than his face was. It was bad enough I had to say any of this out loud.

  “I didn’t run away because of some plan of God, or because I hate you. I could stand to punch you in the face, sometimes, I mean, but—”

  “By all means, keep talking about how badly you’d like to hit me.”

  I rolled my eyes. Cut to the chase. “I ran away because of me, Hunter. Because it’s what I do. I leave a person shaped hole in the wall every time someone tries to get close to me. I’m a mess. I float around without any direction, I tell myself not to get close to people, so that they can’t tie me down, even though I know it’s too late for that anyway—some days I want to run away and never look back, but the idea of leaving Riley. . .” I shook my head. “Even my mom, sometimes. I can’t imagine a life without her in it, and she’s basically spent the last decade and a half drunk off her ass and screaming at me. So I know what I’m really doing is running. I run from everything. Anything that bothers me, the stuff I don’t want to think about, the stuff I can’t—I run from it.”

  Run from Mom. Run from myself. Run from the magik.

  Except I wasn’t anymore, was I? I was standing here, in Temptation, plotting the assassination of a Charmer crime lord. Even though I knew it was going to kill me, had to kill me. I was not the chosen one, I was not the star of my own fucking show. I was some dumb blond about to get his ass in even more trouble on the slim chance things would turn out right for once, because they had to start sometime, eventually, right? A Faerie queen owed us a favour, and I had memories of a Skinwalker from a past life who had recently walked into this one too. If all that could happen, I could do some good.

  I hadn’t embraced this world on my own. It had caught up to me and tackled me from behind, held me down and forced its poison into me until I was addicted.

  But I was in the thick of it now, and I wasn’t getting out. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  Aching feet, bruises that linger beneath our skin ever after the marks fade on the surface, demons piling up behind our backs until all we know is a constant racing through a breathless dark because we know our problems will destroy us if we stop—we’re all constantly trying to turn our faces away and pretend we can’t see how much things hurt us, how much people change us. It hurts so much to look, but if you don’t you miss a hell of a view.

  I was sick of missing the view. You can only run for so long before your legs give out underneath you, before end up kissing concrete.

  “I don’t want to hide anymore.” I dropped my arms, lessening the distance between us. I could smell his breath, alcohol and breath mints and winter air. “I don’t know if I’m ready to be bonded to you—or to anyone—for the rest of my life. But I do know that I’m not going to be able to stop thinking about you, wanting you. . .just because the bond is broken. You don’t just stop existing for me. I know I don’t want to die tonight without you knowing that.”

  Hunter swallowed, throat bobbing. “So,” he said, voice rough. “We kill Crayton, and then we go to the Seelie queen and make her break the bond. She has her sword, she can’t deny the request. Then we, what? Go on a date?”

  “Sounds like a plan.” I stepped away from him, tearing my head out of the clouded state he sent me into. “Are you going to be okay with this?” I didn’t know how to say it, come right out and ask him. “I mean, he’s your father. . . .”

  “I can do what I need to.” He said, looking away. A muscle ticked in his jaw. “We have to find him first, anyway. I have no idea where he’s located now. The house where I grew up is gone, and nobody has been able to track his signature.”

  “We’ll figure that out soon enough,” I said. I walked over to the wall, leaned against it, and sank to the floor. My ass was instantly frostbitten.

  I patted the ground next to me in invitation because misery loves company, and Hunter sat beside me.

  For now, we had to focus on tracking Crayton—but later on I would need to deal with Hunter. He told me, told himself, that he could kill his father. He believed it so surely that my gift hadn’t registered it as an untruth. But beneath that, deep in the heart of the bond, I had felt the seed of hesitation.

  I ignored it. (See how good I am at ignoring shit that will probably come back to bite me in the ass? You can’t say I have no talents when I’m this good at making poor decisions.)

  Figure out your bad guy, find him, kill him. Then deal with your shit. It was basic order of operations stuff. If Hunter couldn’t do it, I would.

  “Tell me about your dad. Why is he like this?”

  It was a loaded question.

  Hunter’s mom was dead, his dad was hunting him. There was no shortage of traumas that could have led their family to this place in time.

  For a minute Hunter simply looked surprised, as if he’d been presented with a pop quiz and, staring at the first question on the paper, wasn’t sure how to start taking it apart. But soon enough he was talking, and I was listening, and it was both more awful than I’d thought and also not as bad as it could have been.

  Which isn’t to say it wasn’t fucking horrifying, because it really kind of was.<
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  “When I was a kid, he was different. He had this way about him, like he breathed different air than the rest of us, and that air, it was laced with the good shit. Maybe he was just manic, and really good at hiding his lows—he did used to lock himself away for hours on end, sometimes he’d go away for weeks with no explanation when he got back—but nobody ever really thought he would cave. He was just. . .solid. Through and through. Like a fucking war machine, just never getting tired, always fighting the good fight.”

  I wanted to reach out and touch him. Rub away the lines on his forehead, the creases between his eyebrows.

  But I was afraid if I moved it would break the spell and he would close up again.

  “My mother was a lot to lose. She couldn’t just work fire magik—she was fire. Eternal flame blazing through the dark and all that. She might has well have been an Elemental, for all she used other magik. I guess I couldn’t see it when I was young, in that way kids don’t see shit that’s right in front of them, but she took a lot of risks with her power. Made a lot of hard choices. Ava Abbott was, if anything, a pioneer. She learned how to do things that I still haven’t been able to replicate, Sky. Made tiny palaces out of flame that floated in the air, or turned it into dancing figures that would run around the room, up and down the halls, without ever allowing the flames to catch on anything else. She could encase you in a wall of fire as thick as a level of bedrock and it wouldn’t burn you at all. I used to sit on her study, watching her talk on the phone with Charmers and Salamanders—actual fire Elementals, kind of like Penn—or poring through these ancient tomes about the truest natures and anatomy of fire. But what I didn’t know back then, and what I think she chose on some level to ignore, is that there’s a cost to all that power. There’s a price to be paid.

  “But all that beauty was never enough. All those things she could do, all the ways she could become the fire or bend it to her will. . .you have to understand that she loved us. Her family was her life. But sometimes her work took her away from us. Sometimes, even though we were her life, we weren’t enough. She wanted more. Needed it, I think.” He sighed and ran his hands over his short hair, looking as if he could use a coffee or some sleep or a time machine. I could have used ‘em, too, but I didn’t want to stop listening to the sound of his voice. “Like she would lock herself up alone in a room and not come out for hours and hours, because she lost track of time—guess it got burnt up and vanished with the smoke she put off. And if we thought she was a bit too preoccupied with it, at least she was doing good things with it, trying to pass on knowledge for other magikal beings. So we let her be. Or, my father and grandmother let her be, but I couldn’t.”

  “You were a kid, you wanted your mom,” I said. It was simple to me. Nobody knew how it felt to reach for your mother better than I did. And how many times had I had my hands slapped away, or been met by nothing, by nobody?

  Hunter nodded. “I wanted my mom, but my mom was in her study playing with fire, and since everyone else seemed pretty okay with that, I decided I was going to be the one who dragged her out of there.” He stopped talking, staring at the floor.

  “And then? Something happened?” I prodded.

  “Something fucking happened, alright.”

  “You don’t have to talk about it, if you don’t want to. I don’t have to know.”

  Hunter shook his head. “Shut the fuck up. You know I do, and you don’t get to stop listening now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Fine.”

  I blew out a breath. “So.”

  “So. Something fucking happened, yeah. I was standing outside her door that day, and I knew something was wrong, so I was afraid to open it. Like that feeling was in the air, that told you something was about to happen that could never unhappen. Something bad, maybe, but you wouldn’t be able to tell until you opened that door. And I didn’t want to. It was hot, and I was starting to sweat, but it took me a minute to realize the heat was coming from through the door, through the wall. So I reached over to open it, and at that moment something just went—exploded so hard it shook the entire house. Felt like it came from underneath the foundation, from deep under the ground. I hit the floor, and when I got up my dad was standing at the foot of the hallway, just watching with this look in his eyes.

  “That scared me more than anything. You gotta know that it wasn’t just losing my mother that took a part of me that day, it was that look in his eyes, like that was the first time I’d ever seen my dad truly, really scared. Terrified. And it killed something in me. He was shouting at me by then, but all I could think was that I had to make sure Mom was okay—”

  I knew what was coming, and I wanted him to stop. Couldn’t look away from him, though. Or form words.

  A ball of dread rolled in my stomach.

  “—so I opened the door. And there was just fire. The metal knob must’ve been melting already on the other side, because it burned my hand so badly I thought for a second I was dying. And inside was just—flames, Sky. Just a wall of fire with my mother in the center of it, more fire than Charmer, at that point. Not in the way a Salamander is. You see how Penn is, how even though she’s a Sylph, she’s still herself. She is the air, and its part of her, but she’s there, you friend is there. With my mother, it was different. She was no Elemental; she was just. . .gone. You could see it in her eyes that she was something else. And then she was gone.” He shrugged. “Next thing I knew my father was carrying me away. I watched the house explode behind us. Everything was gone with her, just like that. Up in smoke. And my dad—I think that was the last time he was really himself, too, was as he carried me away. After that, he died as well. Slowly, maybe. But still.”

  “Hunter—”

  He ignored me and kept talking, not ready to stop. Not able to, maybe. After all this time, I had the feeling it was the first time he’d told anyone all this, in this way. It was a terrible weight on my chest.

  “Because after that day, with Mom gone and our home destroyed, he wasn’t that happy person anymore. He wasn’t a father or a husband or even a Charmer, truly. He was just this walking chunk of fear and bitterness. And he was powerful.” Hunter actually shivered, now, the motion making the dread in my stomach sharpen and clench, painfully. “He was a force to be reckoned with.”

  After that, there just didn’t seem to be much air left in the room. Not enough to say anything meaningful with.

  We sat shoulder to shoulder, and I wanted to reach out and comfort him again now, just as much as another part of me wanted to run away and never look back. But I had the feeling that both of those would be useless efforts.

  Instead I stared at the floor and tried to clear my mind of the images there, a woman with just fire for eyes, a smaller, shocked Hunter being carried to safety in the arms of the man now trying to kill him, and, by proxy, myself.

  “You have no scar,” I said, and, when he looked confused, “on your hand? No burn marks.”

  He grinned wryly. “I had them healed,” he said. “Looking at the scar tissue was too much of a reminder.”

  I tried to picture a scenario in which he and I didn’t end up six feet beneath the earth.

  “So that’s what magik does,” I said after a while. “It kills people. Or eats away at them. So what’s the point?”

  Hunter sighed. “I don’t know. Why should I? Why should any of us know what the point of it us? Because we have powers? I don’t have the answers you want. They’re the same ones I ask myself, probably. But what I know is this: it wasn’t magik that killed my mother, it was the way she wielded it. I have no idea what she was trying to do in that study, if it was the way she was working that killed her or the fact that she went beyond her limits with no backup. I don’t think I’ll ever really know. The only person who was in that room is long gone, now.”

  “And your father?”

  “Crayton?” he gave me a dark look. “Well, the jury is still out on that one. But I like to think it’s not magik that turned on him, just
the chemicals in his brain.”

  So Mom was foolhardy and Daddy lost his mind.

  Hunter could think that all he wanted, but at the end of the day if Ava hadn’t been toying with forces beyond her control or Crayton hadn’t been born with the darkest power in the world in his hands, ready to corrupt him at a moment’s notice, this would not have happened. Mental illness wasn’t the sole culprit here.

  Magik had done them in, and now it was coming for us. The next generation, the next round, another fight we would lose.

  I didn’t say any of this, though. Instead, pulling my legs up and nestling against his side, I leaned in until I could smell Hunter and feel his body heat, and we just stayed that way. There wasn’t much to say, but there was this.

  If we’re both going to die anyway, we might as well do it like this. I thought, and then his mouth met mine and I wasn’t thinking anything at all.