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

by J. Morgan Michaels

  “He didn’t just die, Liv, he was murdered.”

  “He wasn’t the first Caster to be murdered either,” she said, walking away.

  “Hat,” Cooper called to me. “Have yourself a look in here.”

  He was standing next to a large telescope, but the lens was pointed at the wall and not the sky. “But . . .”

  “Go on.”

  The moon, full, bright, and in all its glory, was in perfect view from the telescope. “Holy shit,” I said. I looked up into the sky, which was covered in clouds and the moon nowhere to be seen.

  “Like it?”

  I studied the craters of the moon from a view I had never seen before, and then its backdrop of amazing stars. “How?”

  Cooper leaned in close to me and whispered. “You can see just about anything.”

  “Like?”

  “Like anything. Just think about what you want to see.”

  I thought about Providence first, and the panoramic view you can sometimes catch from Prospect Park when it’s a clear day. The telescope blurred then refocused and the city at night filled my view. It was higher than you would see from Prospect Park, with the lights of the buildings creating a glow around the few tall buildings in the downtown area. I thought about my apartment next, and slowly the telescope started to zoom in. It passed over the buildings, and into my ghetto neighborhood, before stopping just above my block. The neon sign for the Colombian fish market above my apartment was just close enough to be read.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “It’s whatever we want it to be. It’s our place to be what we are; something we can’t do out there in the world very often,” Cooper said.

  The tension and memories that I carried with me into The Playground drifted away, and I played with the telescope for a while, having it show me all kinds of amazing things. Cities I had never been to, the rain forest, Antarctica, and even the earth, from as far away as I could imagine.

  Around me, everyone freely exposed their powers to each other in playful but somewhat reckless ways. They looked liberated, happy even, and I wondered if theirs was a life I could let myself be drawn into and really be a part of. It was a whole new world for me, one that clearly flew in the face of my aunt’s wishes, but that night was the most phenomenal night of my entire life. The world had presented itself to me on a silver platter, waiting for me to take a bite out of it.

  “Try to loosen up, mate, you’re all tense,” Cooper said to me later when he found me leaning against the bar watching the others.

  “I’m good. I’m just still taking it all in, I guess. It’s still sometimes hard to believe that all this stuff was happening around me my whole life and I had no idea.”

  “That’s the story of the centuries, isn’t it? Some people see magic, by accident or whatnot. But they choose not to believe. They choose to stay in their little worlds believing little things,” Cooper said. He filled my glass with Blue Ice and then his own. “Perhaps part of your problem is that you still think of yourself as one of them looking in at us, rather than one of us looking out at them.”

  “So you’ve got me all figured out, is that it? Maybe it just takes me some time to process things. I’ve always been more of an observer anyway.”

  “I suppose you probably mean pushover.”

  “What?” I asked indignantly.

  “It’s alright; there’s no judgment from me on that. You were born into a world that taught you to play by the rules, to ask for things nicely, and to be okay with it when you don’t get them. This,” he looked around, “this can change that. It makes you realize that maybe you don’t have to live in their world anymore. That’s why our world tends to scare them a bit.”

  “And who is this ‘them’ you keep talking about?”

  “Everyone else. The average man. Whatever you want to call people who don’t have powers like us. I hate to say it like this, but they are two very different worlds, and it’s difficult for us to live equally in both. Doesn’t it feel good though? The liberation of it all. The freedom. Being more than them.”

  “I don’t know that I ever wanted to be more than anyone else. More than what I was, maybe. But doesn’t this all seem a little too easy? I mean, twitch our noses and poof!—the world is an easier place?”

  “I didn’t say easier,” he leaned in and whispered. “Better perhaps.”

  “Alright, boys and girls,” Cooper announced to the group. “It’s time for a little fun.” He walked over to the patio table and dumped out some stones from a cloth pouch.

  “Didn’t we learn our lesson with these the last time?” Liv asked.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “They’re called honesty stones,” Cooper said to me. It was pretty clear from everyone else’s face that they had seen them before. Each stone had a colored symbol on the top, a combination of circles, lines, and triangles. He flipped them over and mixed them around the table. “Alright then.” He picked up a stone and hid it in his hand and watched as everyone else did the same.

  The stone I picked had a deep purple circle with two bent lines extending unevenly from the middle like wings. “Looks like you’re mine,” Cooper said, showing me his matching stone.

  Everyone else paired off and went to separate areas of the courtyard. I moved my chair in closer to Cooper’s and asked, “What do we do?”

  “Just push your stone up against mine.” He placed his stone on the table with the symbol facing up. “Once the two stones touch, you’re bound into the spell until you give an honest answer to the other person’s question. It’s sort of like magical truth or dare.”

  “Great. I’m not sure that . . .”

  He put his index finger on the stone. “Don’t be a wanker. Just do it.”

  I slid my stone slowly across the table until it touched his. As they connected, there was a jolt that zapped my finger. I tried to pull it away, but it was as if it was glued to the stone and the stone was glued to the table. The space around us got dark. The music and the voices from the others faded into the distance and we sat alone in a space of our creation, a tiny tear in reality.

  “Go on then, you start,” Cooper said.

  “I don’t know what to ask.”

  “Ask anything,” he said. “It’s just a game, don’t over think it.”

  Game or not, I wasn’t going to waste the opportunity to ask the one question I really thought he wouldn’t answer otherwise. “Don’t you . . .” I swallowed hard and started again. “Why doesn’t it bother you that Justin was murdered at your club?” My eyes sank away from his, unsure of how he’d respond.

  He looked around and took a deep breath. He was either going to explode all over me or brush it off completely.

  “It bothers me,” he said, the volume of his voice shallower than I’d ever heard it. “It bothers me a great deal. He was my employee and my friend. But you don’t know me particularly well, do you? I’m the type of person who needs to focus on the future, and Justin’s death, no matter how much it bothers me, is in the past. Death and murder are unfortunately not uncommon for people like us. There isn’t a person here tonight who hasn’t lost someone they love because of magic. It’s a part of our life, and we have to accept that or else we’d do nothing but mourn.”

  “But, don’t you think that . . .”

  “Sorry,” he cut me off with a smile, “you only get one question.” His natural volume had returned and he pulled his finger from his stone. “My turn. Let’s see . . .” He probed me with his eyes before leaning back in his chair. “Do you think you’d like to shag our girl Liv?”

  “I don’t know,” I said before trying to pull my hand from the stone. My finger didn’t budge.

  “Not good enough,” he said, tapping the table. “It only releases you when you’re honest.”

  “I was being honest,” I said. “I
really don’t know. I mean, look at her. Who wouldn’t want her? I do, or I think I do, or I think I want to,” I said.

  If that answer wasn’t good enough, I’d have to be locked in that spell forever. I was being honest; I didn’t know how I felt about Liv, but I did know I wished I felt more. I also kind of wished that she would look at me in the same way she looked at him. But that wouldn’t have been fair—how could I ask her to be more into me, when I wasn’t sure I was into her at all?

  Another light shock came from the stone and I was finally free from it. Cooper was still smiling at me when the light and sounds around us normalized and the tear in reality sealed itself up.

  “Good game?” Liv asked as she wrapped her arms around Cooper. “What did you guys talk about?”

  “Hey,” Cooper barked at her, “you know the rules. That’s between me and him, right?”

  “Oh yeah, definitely,” I teased Liv, trying not to remember that she had the power to get that information from me if she really wanted it.

  A muffled but loud noise came from inside the house and Cooper darted his eyes between us. “Have another drink and maybe we’ll try the stones again,” he said before slipping in a door to the house and locking it behind him.

  Chapter 17

  The weeks were starting to pass by quickly, and when I wasn’t working, I was spending my time at Equinox. The memory of Justin’s death had been pushed to the recesses of everyone’s mind, including mine, and I had forged a new kind of “normal” for myself there.

  Cooper, Liv, and the rest of their band of free-spirited Casters continued to show me how to live in the moment and what it meant to have powers like ours. With them, there was always magic around, and that was comforting, exciting, and a little unstructured—all things I needed in my life at the time. It was the only thing helping me to move on from my mother’s death, something I was starting to feel like I was finally doing.

  The first snowfall didn’t blanket the city streets until well after a dreary Christmas. Even though we were a devoutly unreligious family, Christmas had a special place in my mother’s heart, and ours by extension. The first holiday season without her seemed devoid of purpose, with none of us willing or ready to bring any holiday cheer too close to our hearts. If it hadn’t been for Sydney’s kids, we probably would have just skipped it altogether.

  “Are you coming to New Year’s?” a text from Paige asked after I skipped the traditional post-Christmas Walker get-together that I was sure everyone else had attended.

  For the first time since I was born, the Walkers were not regularly appearing characters in the story of my life. They were once what made me everything I was, and yet I was wholly disconnected from them now. My world had built a path for me to walk down, and I knew my tight-knit family couldn’t come with me, nor could they understand why. Even if I wanted to share it with them, I wasn’t sure it was safe or that they would believe me.

  “Of course!” I wrote back.

  Paige had been doing the family’s New Year’s blowout bash at her house since I was eleven and I had never missed it. New Year’s was on a Friday this year, a recipe for an extra-large and extra-extravagant party.

  “Good (or else I’ll break your fingers),” her reply said. That was Paige’s not-so-subtle way of letting me know that while everyone had been lenient about my habitual absences recently, they weren’t going to be forever.

  New Year’s was one of those events that the Walkers considered mandatory. You needed a doctor’s note, a rare disease, and a plane that was broken down in a foreign city to consider missing one of them, and even then, it would never be forgotten.

  “So, party at your cousin’s this weekend?” Talia said, sitting down on my desk.

  “Isn’t there always? I can’t believe it’s already New Year’s.”

  She grabbed my cup and took a sip of coffee. “You have been missing in action a lot lately. Damon keeps asking me if you’re still alive.”

  “Yeah, I suck.” I pulled my coffee back from her. “Are you going?”

  “I think so.”

  I leaned on my desk and looked up at her. “Does that mean you guys are officially seeing each other again?”

  “Not sure. I guess it’s just one of those things that’s convenient and comfortable. I like him, I’m just not sure where we stand.”

  Damon’s relationship with Talia, if you could call it a relationship, seemed both destined and doomed. They continued to float aimlessly in and out of each other’s lives like rafts on a rapid river. When they’d cross each other briefly, they’d hold onto the other’s raft to see if either was anchored in place for once. But neither ever was, so they’d float further down the river together, unanchored, and eventually let go and drift apart, waving goodbye until the next time their rafts met.

  “You’re totally going to end up marrying him and being my cousin-in-law,” I teased.

  “Yeah, because you need more of those. Hey, what’s that?” she asked, reaching toward my head.

  “What’s what? Ouch!” I yelled, grabbing my head as Talia removed her hand. “What the hell?” It felt like she had ripped out a chunk of my hair.

  She purposefully contorted her lips into a pouty face and stuck out her chest slightly at me. “Sorry! My ring got caught. You had some lint or something in your hair and I was trying to get it out.”

  Looking for a bald spot, I patted my head and hissed at her. “Was that your way of trying to distract me? It didn’t work, by the way. How long are you two going to go on like this?”

  “You know I love him, it’s just that we’re never in the same place at the same time. It’s hard because we get along so great, and he’s so sweet, and he’s . . . really good in bed.”

  “That’s just too much information.”

  “You asked. See you at the party.” She strutted back to her desk with an overmodest smile and my coffee cup.

  * * * * *

  Friday came quickly and I drove to Paige’s, even though she only lived a few blocks away in the nicer neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant. The driveway was stacked with cars, so I parked on the street; a set-up for a quick getaway. I could already hear the beats of party music bouncing down her lawn as I got out of my car, and laughter and shouting trickling down behind it.

  Charley and Paige greeted me from the porch. “Hat!” they both said.

  “You better get in there, everyone’s been asking about you,” Paige said, tossing back the last of her drink and jetting into the house.

  “I thought I might have to come get you,” Charley said. “I’m so happy to see you that I won’t even give you shit for never texting me back.”

  “Hi!” I gave her a rough hug, lifting her off the ground. “Is Victor here?” I whispered as I put her down.

  She smiled at me. “Nope, thankfully.” He tended to be as equally odious to her as he was to me, so she always understood why I didn’t want to see him. “I think he’s at your dad’s house for the night.”

  Our dad actually, but we’ll have to get to that later.

  “Did you hear that he was having a fucking fit about your mom leaving part of her house to me? As if I asked her to. What an asshole.”

  “Agreed. Hey, did your Mom show up to this thing tonight?”

  “Yeah, she’s chatting up that guy that Aunt Gloria used to date.”

  Shocking.

  “I know. Classy, right?” Charley said, rolling her eyes. “She hasn’t even said hello to me yet.”

  From room to room, I progressed through the house in an obligatory lap to say hello to my family. I pretended to remember the names of the other people I encountered, sure that I had been introduced to them at some point. In a family as large as ours, there are always a plethora of people who come and go and come again, and it’s nearly impossible to remember who is who, especially when you don’t care that much. Ex-boyfr
iends and ex-girlfriends. Ex-husbands and ex-wives. We weren’t strangers to exes, but despite not wanting to be related to us anymore, some of those exes just never wanted to leave.

  Most of my mother’s siblings had been married at least twice, and her youngest sister skewed the average with six marriages to five different men. My generation wasn’t on track to do much better. Five of my cousins were either on their second marriage or just ending their first; the rest of us wouldn’t be far behind. If the Walkers had to stick by that whole “till death do you part” thing, we’d die a whole lot sooner than we seemed to already.

  “What are you doing over here?” Damon asked when he found me in a corner later. “Come on, your sister is looking for you and driving me crazy in the process,” he said, yanking on my arm.

  Damon got distracted by new arrivals to the party and I broke free from his grasp. Across the room, Finn was standing with some girl I had met before at some point. It might have been that girl who lived above the pizza place on the East Side, which I was sure was the main reason he was dating her at all. I waved and started walking over to him when Sydney stepped in front of me.

  “Gonna avoid me all night?” she asked, putting her hands on her hips.

  “No Syd, I wasn’t avoiding.” I leaned in and kissed her cheek. “I just got here and was just looking for you.”

  “Liar. Listen, I had the lawyers mail those papers to your office again, because we never see you anymore. You need to sign them and send them back, ASAP.”

  “Sure. Whatever you say, sis.” I smiled. Charley slipped past us and handed me a drink without stopping to interrupt a conversation she wanted no part of.

  “No, Manhattan, I’m serious. We can’t do anything with the house until you sign those papers.” She grabbed onto my shirt and pulled me down a little, closer to her height. “Sign . . . the . . . damn . . . papers.”

  “Wow. Full name and everything. Okay. I promise I’ll sign them on Monday. But I can only do that if you don’t kill me now. Right?”

  When I was able to escape from her, I made my way back to the bar. It was clear it was going to be my favorite place that night.