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

by J. Morgan Michaels

  “Safe from what?”

  Gloria sat down in the chair closest to me and took hold of my hand. “Being like us, Hat—having the ability to use magic—it’s an amazing gift, beautiful really, but it can also be dangerous and a tragic burden. We cast that spell so that magic wouldn’t ruin your lives.”

  “But you took away my right to choose,” I said, shaking my head. “I could have been a totally different person. Maybe I wouldn’t be normal, but hell, I might have been happy. You don’t know. You didn’t even give me a chance to find out.”

  “That’s not fair. Magic has always been part of who this family is, and it wasn’t an easy decision to get rid of it. But technology was advancing so fast that it was becoming impossible for people like us to keep our identities a secret. Our family was changing too, we kept getting bigger and bigger, and it was getting to be too hard to protect all the children. And there were just so many things we had to keep you safe from.”

  “But Mom regretted that decision. I know she did. I saw it.”

  “She was with us when we cast those spells, Hat,” she said, without looking at me. “We all made the decision together, even though it was hard, and we stuck with it. Did your mom question it sometimes? Of course. I think we all have at one point or another. But it didn’t matter because the safety of this family was our first priority. And there isn’t any use in us fighting over a decision that was made a lifetime ago. What matters now is what happens next.”

  “No, I think what matters now is that the two people I trusted most out of the whole world lied to me about who I was for my entire life. Now my mom’s dead and it’s like I never knew her, or you for that matter. I wish I could describe how terrible that feels.” I crossed my arms, doubting nearly everything I’d ever believed about my family, doubt that I could see stung Gloria worse than anything else I could say or do.

  “Listen to me. You have a right to be mad. You have the right to be a lot of things. Hate me for it if you have to. I can take it. What I can’t take is worrying that you won’t be alive long enough to forgive me. You have to promise me you’ll keep yourself and this family safe by keeping this all a secret.”

  “What does that mean, exactly? I just forget what’s been happening to me? I go back to being normal? Or, not even normal, I go back to being me—whatever that was. I don’t know what’s happening, but I do know that I’ve spent my whole life searching for something that I thought was missing without knowing what it was. And now, maybe for the first time ever, I feel like I might have found it. I might for once be where I’m supposed to be. And I don’t want to give that up.”

  “I know how easy it can be to let yourself get sucked into this world. I really do. Magic can make you feel like a whole different person, like you can stand on the top of the world and name yourself the king of it. But it comes with a price and it’s not a fair trade. Trust me that there are things going on out there that you don’t see. Dangerous things. I can’t even begin to tell you the number of threats that are waiting out there for Casters, the number of people who would kill us for just being who we are. If you expose your powers, you’re not just risking your life, your risking all of our lives. The only way to keep this family safe is to keep everything you know a secret.”

  There was a long silence as I tried to process everything she was telling me, or not telling me. Could I trust that anything she was saying was true after what I’d found out? “Are secrets the only solution?” I finally asked.

  “Secrets hold this family together.”

  * * * * *

  Sleep was like gold, and I had not enough of either. My habit of tossing and turning had gotten so bad that Cat openly refused to share my bed anymore. That morning, there was still an hour before my alarm would go off and I just laid in bed, staring up at the ceiling, and wishing I could sleep.

  My phone started ringing. It did that a lot these days. I loved my family for caring enough to check in on me . . . constantly, but I still wasn’t ready to talk to any of them in-depth about anything. Looking at the screen, it said, ‘Unknown Number.’

  “Yeah, pass,” I said aloud.

  I’d learned that unknown numbers usually meant the person waiting on the other side was a bill collector. Who knew for what, at that point I had stopped keeping track of them. Despite my extreme work schedule at Cartwright, and the regular shifts at the restaurant, my student loan debt was still crushing me.

  It didn’t matter though. As a master of avoidance, I had already set up a prerecorded voicemail message, with a nasally voice saying: “This number has been disconnected, please check the number or try your call again later. Code 6759.” The message repeated itself about three or four times, just long enough so that the caller wouldn’t notice that it dumped into my voicemail eventually. When that tactic stopped working, I’d change my number again.

  I gave up on the idea of sleep and shuffled toward the kitchen. I filled my coffee pot with water, the brown stains in the glass not bad enough to make me want to replace it, and dumped it into my overused coffee maker. It made horrible noises as it started, and for a second I contemplated how devastated I would be if it stopped working altogether.

  I never slept with a shirt on, so when I walked into the bathroom and turned the harsh overhead light on, the titanium-like metal of my mother’s necklace glistened in the mirror.

  Wait.

  Something looked different, but then again, everything usually did until I put my contacts in. I settled for shoving on my glasses and pulled the necklace up to the mirror to study it. I had seen the necklace on my mother at least a thousand times, and the stone was the same, of that I was certain. But the setting, the setting was different.

  Am I crazy? Is it a different necklace?

  The mesh petals that had once delicately held the stone in place around my mother’s neck were gone. In their place, five solid flames surrounded the gem, erupting out from behind it. The chain was different too; it was shorter and thicker, and it pulled the setting closer to my neck. It looked like something I would have picked out for myself, like it was made just for me and wouldn’t look good on anyone else.

  What is this? I wondered. Why had it changed? How had it changed? Why was it that every time I looked at it, the pattern of colors seemed to be just a little different? I dropped the necklace, and rolled my neck, trying to jump-start my brain and wake up a little more. Its magical transformation was remarkable, but also maddening as yet another secret my mother had kept from me came to light.

  Then, a coldness that even the deepest of New England winters couldn’t bring crept from the stone and onto my skin. A shallow glow formed below the stone, with the lightest tones of turquoise juxtaposed against a darker blue and green background. It created a jagged texture in the stone like sand wet from tears.

  The colors started moving freely as the cold spread to the air around me. Each calming breath I took produced visible condensation in the air and did nothing to calm me. Was the necklace alive? The temperature, the glowing, the movement of colors—they were all superficial. Beyond them, beneath them, the necklace was connecting with me. There was power in it, and I could feel the energy weave through my body, fusing itself to every molecule within me.

  The energy grew, moved from the stone into me, and then exploded out into the world. I watched as it destroyed my bathroom. Anything that once stood erect was knocked over. The mirror shattered slightly in the corners. The faucet turned on. Even the shower curtain and the rod it was attached to came crashing down.

  I ran from the bathroom, pulled the necklace off my neck and tossed it into the chair. Just as I did, the door to my apartment swung open and my landlord barreled in with a large package from his fish market.

  “Hey, Hat. Just some stuff I thought you might like,” he said, dropping the package on my kitchen table. He was a nice enough guy, and often gave me free fish to make up for the fact
that he couldn’t do anything about the house always smelling like it. But right then, as I faced a necklace with a life of its own, I couldn’t have cared less about him, fish, or eating ever again.

  “Thanks. You can just leave it there,” I finally said.

  If he saw my panicked look as I stared at the chair, he didn’t say anything. Instead, he just smiled and left. But I hardly noticed because I couldn’t keep my eyes off that necklace. It had stopped glowing, but even though it wasn’t close enough to touch, I could still feel it with me.

  A final gust of cold air brushed by me. With it were voices in the distance. They sounded further away than I should have been able to hear but had taunting clarity.

  “Murder,” they said.

  Chapter 12

  “What is that doing there?”

  When I got home from work on Friday, my mother’s locked book sat in the middle of my favorite chair, a place I hadn’t put it before I left. Cat was sleeping on top of it and had his face pressed firmly against the leather. He gave an ungrateful hiss when I picked up the book and sat down with it.

  “Did you put this here?” I asked him as he repositioned himself at my feet.

  With everything else that had been happening, I had forgotten all about that book. That locked book. That locked book that didn’t have a keyhole.

  Is this what my life is now?

  Scissors, a knife, a screwdriver, a lighter, unabated pulling and swearing—nothing would break those straps. They were thin and didn’t look all that special, but they took a beating for over an hour and didn’t even fray at the edges. After another hour of continued failure, I grumbled and fell into my chair in frustration.

  I spent the rest of the weekend scouring every corner of the internet to try to find a way to open it. There was nothing to show me how to open a lock without a keyhole, but I did learn everything you never wanted to know about the lock-making process.

  The best bet I could make was an antiques dealer I read about on Wickenden Street. He sold old clocks, locks, and socks. No, seriously. That’s what it said.

  Later in the week, I snuck away from work to find him. Wickenden Street was in a funky area of the east side that had every assortment of eccentric stores within it. The antique shop sat on a misshapen side street with a carved wooden sign above the door that read, “Oddities” in a thick script text. The sign was at such a bad angle that you would have never seen the store if you weren’t looking for it. It could have been intentional.

  The storefront was small. If you took a normal store and cut it in half, Oddities was no larger than that store’s closet. Shelves hung from every open space on the walls from floor to ceiling, with random knickknacks, clocks, books, and dusty wooden figurines filling every square inch of them. Nothing said “antique” to me, unless it was meant in that pleasantly derogatory way people call old junk “antiques.”

  The room was so tight that if you stood squarely in the middle, you could touch the shelves on either side with your hands. It was dark, too, the only natural light coming from behind the dirty shade on the door. The door tapped a bell above it when I opened it, but only made a thud. It looked like the clapper had either been removed or had just fallen out from old age, but its string still dangled uselessly inside the bell.

  An old man with small, round glasses and patchy pockets of white hair around his ears didn’t bother to look up when I entered, nor did he say anything as I approached his tall wooden workbench. Small pieces of metal were strewn about around him, and his miniature hands were working to solder two of them together. He sat atop a wobbly stool, which poorly concealed his considerable lack of height.

  “Yes?” he asked curtly when I’d gotten closer to him. He still didn’t look up.

  “Um . . . I was wondering if you could help me with something.”

  He adjusted his glasses and continued working on his scrap metal. “I’m not here to help. I’m here to sell. You buyin’?”

  “I have this book,” I said, putting my cell phone in front of him. A picture of my mother’s book was zoomed in on the display. “It’s locked and I can’t I figure out how to open it.” When he didn’t look at the phone right away, I slid it closer to him with my finger.

  “Have you tried using a key?” He dropped his metal project and held a small pane of stained glass up to the light, squinting into it.

  A key! Why didn’t I think of that? “That’s the thing, it doesn’t have a keyhole.”

  That got his attention, and he finally looked at me before inquisitively picking up the phone to examine the picture. “A lock without a keyhole, eh? Interesting.” He pulled his head back so he could look at the phone through his glasses on the edge of his nose without moving them, his bushy white eyebrows curving around his biting eyes.

  “Have you ever seen something like this?” I asked.

  He put the phone back down and picked up another piece of glass without looking at me. “Nope. Can’t help ya.”

  “Are you sure? I’ve been trying to find something online about it but haven’t had any luck.”

  He muttered something under his breath and then said, “I doubt you’ll find anything about that lock on one of those damn computers.”

  “So, you do know what it is?”

  “Listen kid, that book isn’t yours, and I won’t be the one who helps you open it.” He got up from his stool and went into the corner to look at something under a large magnifying glass.

  “But,” I looked to the cash register and read from the small nameplate on the front, “Mr. Withers, the thing is, it was my mother’s, and she’s . . . she passed away recently.”

  He looked up again, tilting his head and peering into my eyes. “Hmmm.”

  He made his way toward a door at the back of the store, behind the workbench. “Most things are locked for a reason, kid. Better to just keep them that way.”

  “Oh . . . I understand,” I said as I tip-toed toward him, “sorry to bother you . . . I’d read you were sort of an expert on these things. I didn’t think you wouldn’t know how to open it.”

  He stormed around his workbench, threw his foot up on a lower shelf, and pulled himself up to my height. “If I told you it was a blood lock would you even know what that was? No, you wouldn’t. Don’t come here and tell me what I do and don’t know, when you clearly know nothing. So fine, it’s called a blood lock. You happy now?”

  “What does that mean, a blood lock?” I asked, taking a step backward and hitting the shelves behind me.

  He hopped off the shelf and went back to his bench. “It’s exactly what it sounds like, kid. The blood of the person who sealed it is the only thing that can open it. Good luck with that.”

  “Seriously? Can you step back over here into reality with me for a moment, please?”

  He jumped off the stool again and wobbled on his tiny legs to the back of the store, grumbling before disappearing behind the door and slamming it shut. Things were being thrown around aggressively from the other side of the door, and I could hear them bounce off the walls and even break from where I was standing.

  “Do you have this in blue?” I yelled to him, holding up a tattered leather bag from one of the shelves.

  * * * * *

  “What . . . the . . . fuck,” I said to Cat when I got home from a grueling day on Friday. He was sleeping on my bed, on top of my mother’s book, where again, I hadn’t left it. This time, the necklace was placed neatly on top of it. Last I checked, that was still in the chair after I refused to put it back on.

  Resigned, I put the necklace back around my neck and sat down on the bed. “What do you want from me?” I said to the necklace as if it could respond. “The damn thing won’t open.”

  I stroked the course leather of the book and thought about my mother, and how very little I actually knew about her. Her powers, the necklace, that damn book. “I
guess if you wanted other people to open it, you would have opted for a regular lock,” I said to no one alive.

  Shit. Not again, I thought, as that cold sweat started dripping down my spine. I tried to let it just wash over me again, and my lack of fighting made it a bit easier. The lights and noises were almost manageable, and for the first time, I could barely feel the churning in my stomach. By the time I had gotten to a place of serenity, a new vision unfolded.

  “I think it’s in my book,” my mother said to her brother Kevin. She couldn’t have been much older than eighteen. She was in someone’s kitchen and her hands were stained green as she messed with a heap of herbs and leaves in a big bowl.

  Kevin slammed the small leather book I couldn’t open on the table and grunted, “Mia, the book’s locked.”

  I had never met Kevin—he died before I was born. He was a few years older than my mother, so was maybe twenty-one, twenty-two in that vision. His chocolate brown eyes, which everyone said were like my grandfather’s, twinkled from the sunlight in a nearby window.

  “Calm down, will ya? You’re so impatient,” my mother said, rolling her eyes. “Besides, you were with me when I bought it. You know how to open it.”

  “So you want me to cut you to get some blood?” Kevin smiled and said, “Done.”

  Kevin passed by the knives and rummaged around the kitchen for something smaller to cut with. As he bent over a drawer, the necklace he was wearing slipped out from under his shirt. But it wasn’t just any necklace . . . it was my necklace. Or my mother’s necklace. Or whoever’s necklace. In any case, it was the same necklace, but it was in a completely different setting. His setting was all gold, with a flat back that wrapped around the stone like talons.

  “Cut yourself!” my mother said, moving away from him. “You’re family, your blood is as good as mine.”

  “You’ll still love me when I get committed, right?” I said, reaching down and rubbing Cat’s back as I came out of the vision.