Shadows of Ourselves

by Blake, Apollo

“She’s a better person than me.” I shrugged at her. “I figured if I was gonna be saddled with it I might as well drag you down with me.”

  “Whatever, loser. Let’s get going.”

  I followed her down the steps, still considering. I had no idea why I was defending Penn when I’d been the one shooting her death glares for lying earlier. The last thing I wanted was for Riley to get caught up in this world like I had, but on some level I’d known she would end up following me into it.

  And on some level, I wanted her to. Wanted to share it with her. And to make sure I wasn’t the only one it left a mark on.

  At the bottom of the stairs Jackson cut a path along the edge of the bazaar, skirting around the outer side of the rows of kiosks and huts. A tiny streak of light darted by trailing sparks. A few tiny humanoids were illuminated like a burning coal in the center of the glow.

  “Pixies,” Jackson mumbled with distaste. He swatted them away like they were horse flies.

  One of the sparks caught on my hoodie, and I watched a tiny flame sear to life for a second before patting it out with the sleeve of my jacket.

  “If you kill Tinker Bell you will officially be the worst tour guide ever.” Riley kicked a rock out of her path, and the sound echoed as it rolled across the uneven ground. “So. This cathedral. How did it get underground?”

  “The Incubi moved it here after their empire fell, to protect it. By the time the first settlers arrived, any traces of it were long gone, and those Incubi had moved on. Local Mi’kmaq and Maliseet tribes had their memories of it, vocal histories, but even those became murkier as they were passed down.”

  “So how is it we know it’s here today?” I asked.

  Jackson glanced back. “It was rediscovered by a group of Charmers in the early thirties. The Incubi restored the cathedral and started to study the old relic magik the found here, while the local community formed the bazaar.”

  “As much as I appreciate the history lesson, do you think it’s even possible that I have a relic down there?”

  “I’ve seen it happen.” Jackson said. “Well, only twice. . .but still, it’s possible.”

  “Will it hurt?” Riley asked. I hit her on the arm.

  Like that’s what I want to start thinking about five minutes before I do it.

  Jackson grinned. “Oh yeah, a bunch.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Don’t worry, Twinkie—I’m fucking with you. It’s totally harmless. You’ll get the powers you left behind when you created the relic, if you even made one, and a few flashes of memory, either from that same life of one of the ones that followed it.” He clapped me on the shoulder as we came to a stop in front of the massive cathedral doors. “Then you’ll wake up good as new. At least, that’s what happened to the other two.”

  “Wake up? I’m not the fainting type.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  Penn cleared her throat. “Boys? Priorities?”

  It was becoming increasingly clear that Penn was more Jackson’s supervisor than she was his assistant. He was like an Abercrombie model with the brain of a thirteen year-old.

  The doors were at least twenty feet high, and from down here the cathedral went up so high that it faded into the gloom behind the Pathfinders, the spires piercing the dark. The silence seemed to press down on everything, like it was a physical force.

  “How do we get in?” I asked, lowering my voice.

  Jackson stepped forward and rested his open palms against the cold iron. There was a shift in the air, the energy surrounding us spiked at the contact, and then the massive gates started to shift outward, pushing us all back. The doors groaned as they split apart. We stood before the open door of the cathedral, staring in.

  It was dark. Anticlimactic, I know, (I myself was hoping for some kind of gothic, Dracula’s sexy castle kind of vibe) but it was pitch black in there. A wall of darkness. Not only could I not see shit, I couldn’t see how we were supposed to find our way, either. Did producing night vision goggles out of thin air count as general magik?

  “Stay close.” Jackson said. “Once we pass through oblivion, the relic should recognize you.” If it exists.

  “Oblivion?”

  “The darkness,” Penn said. “It’s as thin as a sheet of ice. No problem.”

  “Magikal privacy curtains. That’s hot.”

  “Right?” said Riley.

  “See you on the other side.” Jackson stepped forward.

  He kicked up dust as he walked toward the entrance and stepped through the blackness like it was nothing more than a spotlight. The surface rippled as he passed through it, and then it had swallowed him whole. Freaky.

  Penn prodded Riley to go next, so we stood to the side while she stepped close to the oblivion, and then into it. I was next.

  I moved forward, eyes narrowing the closer I got to the wall of ink. I ran my fingers over the surface and drew them back quickly at the shock. It was cold and sleek, like a slick of ice on asphalt. I took a deep breath and shoved myself through, like diving into a frozen lake.

  ~

  As a kid I was fucking obsessed with the lies. They hurt, like the sting of Mom’s open palm when she slapped me, like the burn of her lighter, which I stole from her purse every chance I got so I could hold my fingers over the flame.

  You know the biggest lie we tell ourselves? That we don’t like pain. We do. We fucking love it.

  Deep down we all secretly think we deserve to be hurt, to be torn apart piece by piece. We hold it close to our heart, until the bitterness overflows. I’ve always known I was a ticking time bomb, but that didn’t stop me from playing with the fuse while I was growing up. One day, I nearly set the house on fire.

  I was in the kitchen, hunched in the corner near the old hamster cage—an ill-fated line of rodents each named Hamtaro had convinced my mother not to buy me any more living creatures, but the cage still stood there as an empty testament to them—with her silver lighter clutched in my twelve year-old hands.

  Earlier in the day I’d had my first appointment. It was a typical story; he cheated, then he lied about it, she suspected, blah blah blah. Except the meeting hadn’t gone as planned—the guy had freaked out, called us a hoax, convinced his girlfriend (the desperate, naive idiot that she was) — that we were the liars. They’d forced a refund out of us.

  Mom had slapped me on the face and then closed herself in her room.

  That wasn’t good. She kept the bottles in her room. Well, back then she did at least. Later they spread through the apartment, like a disease attacking the system of our communal living space, turning every interaction to rot and stale breath. Green and brown glass, usually stained with ash from her cigarettes, building up in stacks until they threatened to fall and attack you, living things looking for prey in all the right places.

  Her closed bedroom door felt safe, though, a barrier between us. It always felt safer when I couldn’t see her, when the sounds of her movements were muted through the thin walls.

  I could make my mother out to be a beast. I could convince you that she was every monster under my bed, the shadow lurking in the background of my youth, always ready to sink her teeth into me. I could—and I should. God knows the bitch deserves it. But that isn’t what she is.

  She’s just a person. A delirious, damaged, toxic person—rotting from the inside out and overflowing with anger and bitterness.

  Looking for someone to blame for life.

  I got that from her, this dark, twisted anger rolling in my stomach like a car tossed off an interstate, glass and metal twisting and crunching, a symphony of breaking windows and raised voices and tilting lights like carnival rides and sirens, all flashing into one beam of concentrated heat, turned inward, burning me. Someday it’s gonna make me drop dead.

  We swung high and low, together, working in tandem and out of it, crashing against each other when it was the later. I feel nothing halfway. Everything is the end of the world.

  But at le
ast growing up, with Mom, seeing her crazy right there on the shelf with mine, it was like, at least I’m not alone.

  So yeah, I was afraid of her. But not as afraid as I should have been, that afternoon. I was tired, drowsy from the shouting, the couple slamming the apartment door on the way out.

  It had been winter then, and the chill was seeping into the house, so stealing her lighter held a dual purpose—it satisfied my obsession with the device and kept me warm. Mom always said that heat was a waste of money, and I should put on another sweater. I had very few that fit.

  Today she was too busy to say anything, locked in her den, drinking herself to sleep. I could hear the TV running through the walls, a prerecorded laugh track echoing with crisp static. So I crept out of the corner and pulled out one of the rickety chairs at the table, folding my tiny frame over the edge of it.

  Mom had gotten a bunch of elderflowers from the old lady next door (Delightful Deborah, we called her, because she was always so hyped on uppers that she thought everything was fucking lovely beyond belief and wasn’t it such a beautiful day?) and Melissa had used one of her rare moments of sobriety to shove them into a vase and slap them on the center of the table.

  Plain as they were, they were a spot of life in our dingy, trashed kitchen, with cracks in the tiles like broken ice, and plastic navy blue counter tops that had faded and been scratched to hell, over the years.

  I wanted to see if they would burn.

  It took me a few tries to get the lighter to even come to life, flicking the striker three or four times before the flames caught, since it was nearly out of oil.

  My eyes widened as the flame licked at the edges of the flowers.

  They lit up like a fucking fireworks show, and the stench of the smoke filled the kitchen, thick and cloying.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Mom was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She was slimmer back then, body holding out for some last vestige of a recovery before it realized there wouldn’t be one, before she spent too many years poisoning it. Her hair was greasy and unwashed, skin gleaming with stale sweat. She was desperation made human, the definition of a hot mess.

  Tennis career? Over. Baby daddy? Gone with the wind. Unwanted kid who ruined aforementioned tennis career? Fucking pyromaniac. As if it wasn’t bad enough I had supernatural gifts.

  She was pissed. Looked pissed, at least.

  She’d caught me with her lighter before, but not like this, not lighting shit on fire, just staring at it, or trying to strike it. We stared at each other over the burning bouquet in the center of the table, dark smoke twisting into the air. The haze of it filled the room as the fire ate through the white blooms and stiff green stems. I wrinkled my nose.

  Mom charged forward. I dropped the lighter and dove out of the chair as she stumbled drunkenly in my direction. Her hip smashed against the edge of the table, jostling it, and the vase tipped and rolled across the surface. The water spilled out of it, expunging the flames and flooding over the sides of the table. Water pooled on the floor, full of ash and white petals floating in lazy circles. Beauty caked with grime and brushed with accident.

  Mom slipped on the water, barefoot, and she grabbed at me as she went down. Caught me around the ankle and yanked me back over her knees.

  I was instantly soaked, the dirty water clinging to my bare legs, seeping into my shorts and shirt. I shrieked and thrashed as Mom’s fingers dug into my shoulders, and she whipped me around. I was still trying to twist out of her grasp when she slapped me across the face so hard my teeth knocked together.

  My eyes filled with tears, blurring the ugly kitchen behind her.

  The world twisted as she dropped me, and I slumped to the ground. “If I ever catch you playing with fire again, I’ll fucking kill you.”

  She was lying. I knew she was lying, because it hurt—she was always good at making me hurt. It still made me cry.

  Probably should have been grateful she wasn’t really willing to murder me.

  Melissa stood and stepped around me, swiping her lighter off of the wet table. She rubbed it dry on the side of her sweater. My mother made to leave the room. She stopped. Looked over the mess of floating white petals and shards of blue glass. Uttered a curse.

  “Go to your room,” she sighed. “I’ll clean this up.”

  I crawled to my feet and stepped carefully around the glass. She watched silently as I crept, red-faced, tear-tracked, out of the room, a sad little ghost.

  I remember thinking that I would have given anything for the power to turn back time and leave that lighter where I’d found it. I also remember wishing she hadn’t put out the flames.

  When I got into my room I held out against voicing the lie for as long as I could, letting the pain linger and sharpen until I had to bury my face in my pillow and bite the fabric to keep from screaming.

  These were my memories: red marks on my skin from her hands on me, cigarette smoke staining my hair while I fled.

  So many of my nights had been spent alone, walking through the city. From Uptown to the West Side, from the South End to the East Side. In the middle of the night, under stars that looked more like scars of light burned into the flesh of the night sky, breath spreading out above me, ice in my pulse. Frost and breath and the pounding of my broken heart, the companions of my youth. They were the only ones that didn’t leave. I would walk until the my legs ached and my feet bled, until the sun rose and the buses started running, and then I would take one home and no one would wonder where I’d been. There was nobody there to wonder; she’d drunk herself away.

  Memory was a tangled web of threads I couldn’t make sense of, couldn’t unscramble. I could turn them over and over in my hands for my entire life and never learn to understand them. No: My memories from this life were heavy enough—I didn’t need to be carrying any from the last few on top of them.

  I also didn’t have a choice.

  I kept letting my fear send me running. But what had running ever done for me? It had left me with aching legs and an empty chest, the same as those walks.

  The list of things I knew for sure was pretty short:

  One, Hunter hadn’t broken the bond yet—and he might fail to break it altogether.

  Two, if that did happen, Crayton would never stop coming after me. I would live in hiding like Hunter, a tool he could use to track his son that he would never stop lusting after.

  Three, that even if Hunter did break the bond, and I turned my back on the entire conflict, I would never be able to sleep at night again.

  If left unchecked, Crayton would tear his way through this city like a storm, his paranoia and greed for power growing with every new victory, every new victim drained. He wouldn’t be a Charmer anymore—he would be a monster. A real one.

  I was going to stop him.

  I refused to leave my life a blank canvas. It was time to shape myself into something new. . . .

  Something dangerous.

  ~

  On the other side of oblivion was a silent stone hall full of echoes and empty space. A few guards stood against the walls silently, a mix of Incubi and Succubi. One of them tipped her head at Jackson as we passed.

  Riley was standing in place a ways ahead, neck craned to take in the sheer height of the ceiling. There were no Pathfinders here, only flaming torches set in the stone walls every ten feet, and the flickering light of the blue flames was reflected in her dark violet hair.

  “Do you feel anything?” Penn asked as she caught up. She touched my elbow. “Any tug in a certain direction?”

  I moved away from her. “No. Should I?”

  Jackson turned to walk backwards as he spoke to me. “Eventually. It could take a minute to kick in—if you ever left one, it should start to warm up to your energy as the bond wakes. Until then, we just walk around.”

  We just walk around. No big deal. Not like we’re on a time-sensitive mission to kill an evil Merlin rip-off or anything.

  He led us away f
rom the massive entrance hall and the guards, deeper into the temple. It was larger inside than I’d expected, extending far back into the reaches of the bedrock, so far I couldn’t see an end to it. It was dark, narrow—it reminded me of pictures of the Parisian Catacombs I’d seen online. We passed through a massive archway, and suddenly we were surrounded by towering stone columns, edges rough where they’d been carved out, as if with the crudest of tools. Every single one of them was riddled with holes—little caves unto their own, in various sizes. In each of them was a relic.

  They were all different. Dusty, half-rotten old tomes with Arabic scrawl on their bindings. Jewels, tiny statuettes, even a few knives and swords with finely detailed hilts. Each cubicle held something new, a little piece of a Charmer hoping to send a part of themselves on into the desperate, lonely future.