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

by J. Morgan Michaels

  “What is this?”

  A new light opened in the nothingness above us, drowning out the lantern and showing me Kevin’s emotionless face. His eyes moved away from me to the base of the light where, out of my reach, a scene started to play out.

  Every detail of the room was instantly familiar. A small boy, only about seven, stood alone in the confines of a small library below the light. The boy was looking off into the darkness, unaware of us as we looked on. He slowly circled himself, taking in his surroundings but avoiding touching any of it. Like looking at a picture that someone had taken of me years before, I recognized him as me.

  “Hey,” I called out. He didn’t hear me.

  His eyes twitched as they looked over the books pressed against each wall and I shuddered in response.

  The library.

  It was the library from St. Alberts, my grade school. And it was a room I had seen many times. Its polished wood fixtures and dusty furniture surrounded the boy, making him look smaller than he was, almost toy-like. He was breathing heavy and he pulled on his striped tie. It always did seem too tight around my neck.

  What little kid should have to wear those torture devices anyway?

  “No discussion, no deviation,” said the policy about uniforms there. How insignificant that tie was, I remembered, when a man appeared behind the boy, startling him as he shut the door to the library and locked it behind him.

  My heart jumped as if making a desperate attempt to escape my body before what would happen next. I couldn’t see the man’s face yet, but I didn’t need to. I knew who he was. He made his way into the light, looking at the small boy, looking at me as a small boy. I knew what was going to happen.

  My head started shaking involuntarily back and forth, and I pulled at the chains with all my strength. With each yank, the chains tightened against the wall, further limiting my movements. I strained every muscle in my arms and back in my hopeless attempt to break free. Sweat started to trickle down my skin, leaving behind a trail of fear and self-loathing that existed to me only inside that school.

  “Hey, little buddy,” the man said in his stomach-churning voice.

  The man slowly walked around the boy. If he had wings, it would look like he was circling his prey.

  That library was his hunting ground. As the school’s resident priest, it had become his unofficial office, and the perfect place to find unrestricted access and wield his power over the children of the school.

  The morbidity of that man’s existence started to come back to me, like I was remembering a horrible fairytale a thousand years after I read it. Everything about him crept out from the most disturbed corners of my mind: his voice, the smell of his stank clothing, the way his head naturally rested to the side and forced his eyes up by his forehead when he looked at you.

  My body quivered, sending eruptions of acid up from my already uneasy stomach. I could have thrown up right then if I could just have breathed. The boy’s skin had gone pale as if to show me that nothing had changed, to show me that he felt the same way I did.

  That spell’s power was binding, and absolute. I couldn’t look away and when I tried to close my eyes, the scene continued unchallenged there. Open or closed, my eyes would force me see what that spell presented.

  The scene was all unfolding just like it had before. The boy turned and looked up at the man, the man whose name I refused to say. He wasn’t much taller than I was as an adult, but I still saw him as the boy did, a giant in a seven-year-old’s eyes.

  This isn’t happening. Not again.

  My panicky eyes dodged back and forth between Kevin and the boy. The man placed his hand firmly on the boy’s shoulder and the first tears appeared in the corners of my eyes. Kevin watched me intently but said nothing.

  Hat, get it together. You’ve got this. This isn’t real, it’s just a memory.

  My fingernails dug into my palms, leaving red, crescent-like marks that couldn’t distract me from the pain in my heart. If it was only a memory, why could I feel his hand on my shoulder?

  “It’s okay,” the man said, kneeling to the boy’s eye level and touching his face. That was the moment when the man’s malicious yellow eyes would meet the boy’s, and he’d lose what little hope he had that someone would find him.

  “Stop!” I yelled to him, but he didn’t turn around. The cuffs drew blood from my writhing wrists as I struggled frantically to release myself. The blood dripped down my arm, mixing with sweat before soaking into my shirt.

  The man had taken off my tie, the boy’s tie, and placed it on the room’s only table. My tooth dug into my lip as I watched the boy in front of me do the same. It wouldn’t matter how hard he or I clamped down, the scene would continue with the same horrifying outcome.

  The boy looked out into the nothingness in his small white t-shirt, as the man neatly folded his blue dress shirt and placed it next to the tie. The boy’s cheek twitched subtly, so subtly that only I would notice it because mine was doing the same. Next, I knew the twitch would grow gradually, like your very life essence was crawling up through your body and clawing at your skin to get out.

  I looked around the darkness helplessly, but I was no more help for myself in that moment than I was in that library almost two decades before.

  Someone stop him, the boy and I both thought.

  The man’s callused hands touched the boy’s face again, and I could feel it on my own. Tears broke from my eyes like shards of glass from a weather-torn window. He was a disease, one I’d learned to live with and forget about over the years, but in that moment nothing like that seemed possible for the boy.

  I let my body fall limp, my arms stretched from the chains above as they held all my weight. The pain they caused was nothing compared to the pain the boy would be feeling soon.

  The boy tried to shrug the man’s unwelcome touch, in what would be his one and final act of defiance in that unbalanced battle of wills. The man slapped the boy across his face, and my cheek stung in response. The boy could have cried as the man held him tightly in place, but instead went blank. His mind had escaped the library in refuge, leaving his body to fend for itself. It was a journey he’d take each time he found himself trapped with that man. It was a journey I remembered all too well.

  The man’s hand moved over the stone-faced boy again, except he was looking at the adult me, chained against the wall. I shook my head faster, as if it would make him stop. I pleaded to the Opalescence’s powers to fly from my hands and release me from my bonds to stop him, but they had abandoned me. The man gave a malignant smile as he removed his clothing, to remind me that I was, again, helpless and alone.

  In that spell, the boy I was looking at was more than a memory of myself. He was a reflection, and we were linked at a level that even my violent shaking couldn’t break. I could feel what he felt, like it was happening to me for the very first time. The fear, the pain, the brute violation one man can cause one child.

  And so I screamed; a long unadulterated scream that erupted from the depths of my soul and wouldn’t stop until it reached the ears of avenging angels. I had no words and no thoughts, only that raw, primal scream. It moved me past sadness and fear to a place where anger and hatred pulled at your body until it tore you at the middle.

  “Enough!” I yelled in agony to Kevin. “Make it stop. Please make it stop.” I had to make it end before what would happen next. I had lived through it once, but I was certain I couldn’t again.

  Kevin nodded slowly, and before my next exasperated groan was finished, the scene was gone.

  When I opened my eyes again, I was flat on my back on the floor in Liv’s home, at least four or five feet away from where we had first cast that horrible spell. Candles were tipped over, spilling their hot wax onto the floor, and Liv was standing over me with worried eyes.

  “Oh my god. Are you okay?” she asked. “You started shaking an
d screaming and then something threw you across the room. What the hell happened in there?”

  Hell. What a perfectly malevolent word. I couldn’t respond to her; I had lost the ability to speak. The raging fires of my personal damnation were still swirling all around me, and I was choking on the bitter smoke it left behind. Deserted in a place that cannibalized happiness until all that was left was pain and sorrow. I wasn’t sure how or if I could ever speak again.

  Chapter 27

  I left Liv’s that night with barely more than a grunt. I spent the rest of the night lying on my bed like a corpse, motionless and unable to move my eyes from the empty white wall. The searing shambles of memories that the spell had brought up pulled at me like quicksand, and it was only from the fear that whatever was at the bottom was worse that I was able to keep myself from being devoured by it.

  The remnants of that spell hung against my soul like cobwebs covered in rain and it took me days of silence in solitude before I could regain any composure. I ate and drank only enough to keep myself alive. At every moment, and just for a moment, I wished I were dead.

  The days following my hibernation were enervating as I waded through the marshes of my emotions and avoided anyone and everyone. At work, when I could stand to show up, I was always wherever Liv wasn’t. If I saw her, I knew she’d want to talk about that spell, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what I saw there.

  Texts from Max were left unanswered. I couldn’t let him see the desolate emptiness in my eyes. He’d want to help me, and I couldn’t tell him any part of what caused it. Even if I could have hid all of it from him and pretended everything was normal, I wouldn’t have been able to stand having anyone touch me, even him.

  Reliving what happened to me as a boy with that priest felt worse than when it first happened. I was older, and I understood so much more of what was happening and how bad it really was. But unlike when I was a boy, that spell held me captive to the experience and made me feel every abhorrent detail with undiluted clarity. It wasn’t just a haunting memory, I had no shortage of those. He was victimizing and assaulting me all over again, giving me new memories I’d have to run from.

  Slowly, deliberately, and painfully, I packed up all that baggage and locked it away in the same place it had been for most of my life. If I could just avoid it long enough, I knew it would eventually stop reigning over every thought and action in my life, just like the last time. But unlike the last time, I knew that no matter how far away you lock something like that up in the house of your mind, you always know it’s there, and can still hear the shrill noises as it fights to escape its confines to haunt you again.

  * * * * *

  “Side of Veg!” Talia screamed in my ear in the kitchen of the restaurant a few weeks later. The restaurant was busy, and Ms. Monica had decided that any shift she needed help with required both me and Talia to work. Since then, I had developed a deep-down-to-the-core, gut-punching hatred for that place. It was a raspy hate that showed on my face all the time, and it became harder and harder for me to hide or ignore.

  That night was especially loathsome because it was Ms. Monica’s birthday. That day marked two years since she became a client and I had to start filling in for her staff. It was also a day where she felt she had a free ticket to be extra nasty to everyone around her.

  She liked to treat herself and her friends to a nice dinner to celebrate the anniversary of her parents’ condom breaking. She would proceed to spend the entire night treating the wait staff like jesters in her royal court, forcing us all to do absurd things to showcase her power over us to her friends.

  I drew the short straw, literally, and had to take her table.

  “Manhattan, get my girls here some more of that honey butta bread,” Ms. Monica called as I passed her table with a completely full, and very heavy tray teetering on my shoulder.

  I brought the bread slathered in honey butter over to her table and watched the five of them inhale it like they were at Jabba the Hut’s family Thanksgiving. Ms. Monica grabbed my shirt’s sleeve as I tried to leave. “Manhattan,” she cackled with a full mouth of fresh bread, “you need to be getting me a clean knife, and you tell the kitchen boys that they better not let me catch them puttin’ dirty silverware out again.”

  Talia passed me on my way back to the kitchen with Ms. Monica’s knife and I rolled my eyes at her. She shot me a sympathetic grin, but I was too far gone to appreciate it. Ms. Monica was forcing me into a hushed battle for what was left of my sanity, and she was winning.

  I was in the kitchen plating up another full tray when Ms. Monica started yelling at some of the other servers to get down on their hands and knees to polish the faux brass fixtures.

  Polish the brass fixtures? It was seven o’clock on a busy night. No one had time to polish anything, let alone her ego. I left the kitchen, silently cursing the Wicked Bitch of the West for sitting at the table closest to the door, meaning I’d have to pass her every time I walked to my other tables.

  “Manhattan, where’s that knife at? And get us some more of that ranch dressing.”

  I flung the plates from my tray at my table full of customers who were undeserving of my crappy attitude and returned to fetch Ms. Monica’s knife and dressing. The five of them had already consumed enough ranch dressing to fill a swimming pool, and I couldn’t be certain that I wouldn’t stab her with that clean knife when I brought it to her. I licked the blade on both sides and put it on the tray next to the dressing.

  I will not stab my boss with this knife. I will not stab my boss with this knife. I will not stab . . .

  “I swear to god, if she asks me for one more thing while I’m carrying a tray to another table, I’m going to drop that shit on the floor, and walk the hell out of here,” I said to Talia as I passed her at the server’s station.

  “And where’s our coffee at?” Ms. Monica asked when I dropped off the knife. Her harem of equally unpleasant women smiled as they enjoyed the show she was putting on for them.

  Did you ask for coffee, you psychotic garbage disposal? No.

  I ground my teeth into a smile. “Would you like coffee?”

  “That is what I had asked you. Christ, do I have to do everything around here, Manhattan? It’s my birthday, and I do not think it is too much to ask for a little service in my own restaurant.” Her head weaved and bobbed as she continued berating me. Then she pointed one of her fat fingers at me, the nail so excessively long that it curved at the end and had an everlasting film of dirt underneath it.

  “I’ll be right back with your coffee, ma’am,” I said begrudgingly.

  It was getting harder and harder to handle her, and every time I came out of the kitchen and saw her face I’d wish that I had stabbed her with that butter knife in the first place. Talia tried her best to help me by going to their table whenever she was free, but Ms. Monica could still smell a hint of humanity on my breath and had every intention of killing it.

  Her gauntlet continued for a solid two hours. My face had turned into clay, molded to whatever emotion I thought would make her speak less. The night was winding down, and when the clock hit nine-thirty, I thought I might actually make it through. Besides the Five Brides of the Apocalypse, I only had one other table. I had broken down into a purely mechanical existence, breathing heavy with every step, exhaling as much disgust and anger from my body as I could before taking another. I took one last, deep breath, and held it before walking past Ms. Monica’s table with my last full tray of the night. When I made it past her table I exhaled in relief, but my victory was short-lived.

  “Manhattan! We need more Sweet’N Low,” she yelled. “Now.”

  With my other table watching intently as their food steamed from the tray on my shoulder, I stopped in my tracks and swallowed hard.

  Stay calm, Hat. You’ve got this. You’ve got this.

  With another deep breath, I looked up at T
alia who shook her head from side to side and mouthed the words “Don’t do it.”

  It was too late.

  With a loud smash, the tray and everything on it crashed to the floor below my feet, only an arm’s length away from Ms. Monica’s table. Everyone in the restaurant jumped and fell silence as the crumbling sound of the plates bounced around the room. I moved casually to the server stand and stood there, meticulously picking out a few Sweet’N Low packets from a basket, counting out two for each of them.

  Devoid of emotion and as if I hadn’t just dropped $200 worth of food on the floor intentionally, I strolled up to Ms. Monica’s table and ignored all of their open-mouthed gapes. No one had yet dared to speak.

  I placed the packets between my fingers and ripped off the tops, letting the excess chemical substitute fly across the table, the floor, and everyone sitting there. Then I reached over to each of them and poured a little bit into their cups, not bothering to pull back between them and spilling even more on the table.

  The empty packets got tossed on the table belligerently before I took my order pad and pen out of my apron’s front pocket, looked up at them like nothing happened, and asked, “Anything else for you ladies tonight?”

  I blinked innocently, and they still had no words. “No?” A smirk broke out from my stern face at the first happy thought I had had all night. I turned and walked away, stepping loudly onto the flipped tray, further crumbling the plates beneath it.

  In a defiant strut, I made my way to the door. I knew everyone was still watching me, but I didn’t bother to look back at them. I didn’t care.

  I ripped off my ugly, misspelled name tag without unpinning it, letting it tear the fabric of my shirt, and threw it against the wall. Next was my apron, full of the night’s cash and receipts, which I nonchalantly dumped by the hostess stand. The two scared little hostesses quivered behind the desk before scurrying to pick up the money as it flew everywhere. Then I pulled at my raggedy shirt, popping all the buttons and letting it fall to the ground behind me. Finally, when I thrust open the front door of the restaurant, it slammed against the outside wall and broke off its already rusted hinges. I walked through it in bittersweet triumph.