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

  Copyright © 2018 Tribeless Publishing

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Secrets the Walkers Keep

  By J. Morgan Michaels

  Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data

  (Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)

  Names: Michaels, J. Morgan.

  Title: Secrets the Walkers Keep / J. Morgan Michaels.

  Description: [Middletown, Connecticut] : [Tribeless Publishing], [2018] |

  Series: [Casters of Magic]

  Identifiers: ISBN 9781732714700 (paperback) | ISBN 9781732714717

  (hardcover)| ISBN 9781732714793 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Family secrets--Fiction. | Magic--Fiction. |

  Retrocognition--Fiction. | Self-realization--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.I34432 S43 2018 (print) | LCC PS3613.I34432

  (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018955886

  To crashing thunderstorms, star-lit skies, and the person who taught me to enjoy them.

  I love you, Mom (even though you lost my skis).

  JM

  Chapter 1

  Cheering filled the room as my cousin Paige walked through the run-down doors of the hole-in-the-wall bar that we frequented all too frequently.

  “I have arrived,” she said, flopping herself into my arms for a hug.

  She grabbed my glass and took a long sip from the small straws sticking out of it. “You want one of your own?” I asked her, trying to pry it from her hands.

  She shook her head and laughed before finishing my drink completely and pushing the empty glass across the bar. “Sure.”

  “Two more, please,” I said to the bartender.

  “Another one?” a man near me asked. “How many cousins can ya’ll have?” He was leaning uneasily against the wall in a futile attempt to stop himself from swaying.

  “Enough to start our own soccer team,” Paige said, noticing that I was already ignoring him.

  That night was like too many others—my family drinking and talking in the feeble light of a bar with cheap drinks and scant virtue. At some point, someone had playfully nicknamed those nights ‘Cousins & Cocktails’, and I had started attending them long before I was old enough to drink.

  “I don’t think I’ve met you before,” the man said to me, cheap beer spilling down his already dirty hand.

  “That wasn’t really in the form of a question, so I don’t have to respond, right?” I asked Paige, still not turning toward the man.

  “His name’s Manhattan,” she said, scurrying off to join our other cousins by the pool tables.

  “Yeah, thanks for that,” I said to her back.

  My cousins loved doing stuff like that to me. My name was just too peculiar not to spark conversation from people who had never heard one like it. And it was always, always a conversation I didn’t want to have.

  “Really?” the man asked.

  It was our favorite bar, our own little corner of the world, but it had its price. It was always infested with pickled old drunks like him, a constant reminder for those of us in our twenties of what we didn’t want to become someday.

  “No. Not really. She was kidding. My name’s Bob. Excuse me,” I said.

  I moved away from my new friend and through the small crowd to find my cousins. “I still can’t believe she named her Rain,” I said, picking up an earlier conversation. “What the hell is that?”

  “I know, I mean, seriously,” Paige said. “What kind of person gives such a beautiful baby such a stupid name?”

  “My sister. Who else?” my cousin Damon said. Rain was his older sister’s new baby, and the first person in the family to have a name worse than mine.

  Not unlike family dinners, it was customary during Cousins & Cocktails to partake in some light family smack talk, mostly about those who weren’t there but sometimes about those who were. That was just something we did, but we knew never to say something about someone that we wouldn’t say to their face if they asked. I’d like to think that’s because we were just that honest, but it’s probably truer that we were a family of talkers, and you could assume anything you said to someone was fair game to be repeated.

  “Do we know who the father is?” Paige asked over the chatter of the others.

  “I’m guessing her boyfriend, but who knows with her. I can’t even remember if she ever mentioned his name,” Damon said with an indifferent shrug. His sister wasn’t exactly known for staying with the same man, job, or hair color for very long.

  “Rain Walker?” Paige shook her head. “Could your sister be any more of a hippie?”

  “Are we sure it’s Walker?” Damon asked, and everyone laughed in response. Women in our family hadn’t changed their last name with marriage since long before it was socially acceptable. Their children always carried the Walker name too, despite what anyone had to say about it, including their fathers.

  “Another?” Damon asked me from the bar.

  I moved closer to the bar. “Kettle One, on the . . .”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s what you always get. That wasn’t my question.” He waved to the bartender and pointed to our empty drinks.

  “So, where’s your girlfriend tonight?” I asked.

  “No idea,” Damon said. “We broke up yesterday.”

  “Oh. Sorry. What happened?”

  “Who knows? My mom thinks she couldn’t deal with the family, but it’s more likely that she caught onto the fact that I wasn’t that into her. She kept saying things like ‘let’s move into together’, and I was saying things like ‘let’s spend less time together.’” Damon handed me my new drink and clinked his beer bottle against it. “Clearly I’m broken up about it.”

  Another one bites the dust, I thought.

  No one could understand what they were getting into when they started dating a Walker. Few families were as large as us. Even fewer were as close as us.

  It seems most people have cousins, but they’re the definition of distant relative. You see them at a wedding or a funeral, and you call yourselves family, but you’re otherwise unattached and any real interest you have in each other is contrived and a bit brittle. In the Walker family, however, the word cousin was interchangeable with brother or sister, and you could easily use it in a sentence five or six times and be talking about different people. After all, there are eighteen of us.

  That night carried on as they always did. The laughter got louder, and the drinks seemed to evaporate all on their own. The room filled with more family as a few others joined us, and before long it was well after midnight. The outdated jukebox looped through the same set of songs, at the mercy of the only people paying into it—us.

  “Hat, get your ass over here,” Damon yelled to me a while later, holding up shots.

  I took a shot from him, brought it into the air to match the others waiting there and asked, “What are we toasting to?”

  Damon shrugged and then looked around and said, “To the dirtiest goddamn bar in all of Providence
.”

  I downed the frothy shot and looked at the clock on the wall.

  1:17 a.m., the last thing I’ll remember clearly.

  And it was.

  Songs from the jukebox were still playing in my ears as I tenderly lifted my head off the pillow. “Ugh,” I said aloud, realizing I had slept in my contacts and hadn’t bothered to shut the lights off.

  How did I get home? I wondered, fishing through my wallet. Judging from the receipt with the exorbitant tip I couldn’t afford and my illegible signature, I must have taken a cab.

  No one does Thursday nights quite like us.

  “Damn it, Cat!” I yelled, as the memories of the night before drifted together into one large, throbbing headache.

  My cat jumped off the table and ran swiftly into the closet to hide under a pile of unused luggage. On the table, he left an empty fishbowl and a lifeless fish in a pool of tepid water. “Again?” I yelled at him.

  That was the third goldfish I had bought in two weeks. I didn’t know why I even bothered. I was never home to look at the damn thing, and the people at the pet store were starting to look at me funny when I went in for replacements.

  I rolled my eyes as I scooped the fish into the trash can. Cat never wanted to actually eat them. He just sort of treated them like toys. Unfortunately, he hadn’t learned, or hadn’t learned to care, that once his toy was out of water, it would die.

  Cat had a real name once, of course, but it was something silly and hard to pronounce. That’s what happens when you tell your five-year-old nephew he can name the stray you found. His breed made him deceptively smart. His disposition made him funny and just plain devious.

  A half hour later and running late, I made my way to the door. My sunglasses were already on to shield me from the sun’s attack, and my mug was full of coffee, the only thing that made getting up make sense most days. I closed my front door and leaned up against it.

  It was an abnormally warm morning—the last of the hot summer days encroaching on the city before the season would shift away without warning. I took a deep breath, summoning the strength to push through my hangover, and took my first step into the new day . . . only to be pulled back and slammed against the door. I hadn’t noticed that I had caught part of my shirt in it as it closed.

  Lovely.

  My phone buzzed with a picture Paige took of us all the night before. All I needed was for it to pop up on someone’s Facebook page. Cousins & Cocktails was supposed to be a secret, from our moms at least.

  “Morning!” my semi-new and habitually chipper mailman said as I crossed the street to my car.

  I smiled but didn’t say anything back, partly because I couldn’t spare the energy and partly because I never liked forced pleasantries. I wondered if the hint of a circular tattoo peeking out from his chest was professional or not. Then I looked down at myself—unshaven, disheveled and dehydrated—and thought perhaps I shouldn’t judge others when I lived in my own very fragile glass house.

  My trip to work was foggy at best as I drowned myself with as much coffee, water, and aspirin as my stomach could handle. I made it through the doors of my office and to my desk without any unwelcome early-morning conversation and was slumped in my chair fishing through a pile of unopened mail before I bothered to pull my sunglasses off. When my head involuntarily laid down against my two-year-old desk pad, I lied to myself, saying I would stop drinking on work nights.

  “Die!” someone shouted behind me.

  I jumped a little from the volume of it, but I didn’t bother to turn around. Whoever it was, they were trying in vain to pull a piece of crumpled paper from the gullet of our office printer. It was an evil piece of middle-aged machinery that had been around so long we had come to call it Sadie (short for sadistic). Sadie played by her own rules and it wasn’t uncommon for her to decide she was done working by Friday. She always liked long weekends.

  A steaming cup of coffee appeared above my head and I lunged for it.

  “You can thank me for this later,” my coworker Talia said. “Wow. You look like I feel.”

  If she felt as bad as I looked, she was doing a wonderful job hiding it. Her smooth, dark caramel skin was as flawless as ever, and there wasn’t a hair in her full, straight black mane that was out of place. If she hadn’t been the one to bring me the coffee, I might have considered throwing it on her so she could look as bad as she claimed to feel.

  Talia was probably the closest thing I had to a friend outside my family. Something I’d always struggled with. Sometimes it felt like we were bred that way, to have our closest friends be bound by blood. It was easier in some ways because no one understood the impact of a family our size. It was harder it other ways—like trying to figure out who you were without your family. I cherished my non-Walker friendship with Talia more than I could explain to her over a cup of coffee.

  “What’s this?” I asked, reaching for the excessive stack of papers she was trying to slip onto my desk unnoticed.

  “Just some stuff that needs to be pulled . . . from storage. Sorry.”

  I don’t really think she was sorry. ‘Storage’ was a rat-infested chamber of death, a low-rent building we kept in the seedy south side of town to store all of our archives. I was the most qualified person to go there, because I was the only person who didn’t know how to say no.

  “It’s alright,” I said, “I’ll have them by Monday.”

  There was nothing normal about Cartwright & Company, a quality that was both aggravating and the key to its success. It marketed itself as a “full-service client management company,” but we were actually a conglomerate of dozens of different services. Basically, if a client wanted it done, we did it. And if a client wanted something shitty done, I did it.

  That day, I spent hours in a stuffy copy room. The copier was hot with exhaustion by the time I pushed the big, green start button for the one trillionth time. The task at hand, the one that required my overpriced college education, was one thousand and one copies of one thousand and one different documents. The room had not nearly enough ventilation, and it didn’t take long to become a toner-scented steam bath.

  I love my life.

  They called me a ‘project assistant,’ which loosely translates from corporate vernacular into ‘paycheck slave who learns fast’. That meant I got the jobs no one else wanted or knew how to do. I had done everything from running papers around Rhode Island and fetching piles of fresh, free-trade coffee, to managing complex databases and restructuring business plans.

  But those are just some examples of the more glamorous tasks I got to do. I had also cleaned bathrooms, babysat excessively unruly children, and once had to put on a gorilla costume and hand out fliers outside one of our client’s stores. It was 97 degrees out that day, and the costume smelled like mulch and peppermint disinfectant.

  The first happy thought I had all day was when I checked my cell phone and saw a text message from my mother.

  “Dinner on Sunday. I’m making turkey. If you make it on time, you get dessert,” it said.

  My mom was funny and loving, in equal measure, which made it so easy to have her be part of my everyday life. And I knew I was lucky to have a mother like that, one I didn’t dread hearing from. As if she knew I needed it, her Sunday dinner announcement was going to be enough to get me through the rest of the day.

  After about six or eight more gallons of water, I started to feel more like a normal human being again. I was dangerously close to finishing my copying jobs when Talia slipped into the room carrying a messy blue file folder and sticking out her chest a bit. When she fluttered her eyes at me, the fermented stench of trouble filled the room.

  “Why do I have the feeling you bring me bad news?” I asked.

  All beautiful women are guilty of trying to use their beauty, and all the features that come with their beauty, to get what they want out of men. And Talia was
no exception.

  “You caught me,” she said, handing me the folder. “Some of the files you had were wrong, or I gave you the wrong ones, something like that. Anyway, they have to be re-copied. I’m sorry.”

  To the passerby, Talia was a sultry and somewhat striking woman with perfect nails and a large enough investment in shoes to finance a year-long world cruise. But to those of us that knew her, she was chronically absent-minded about everything except her appearance; a quality you would try to convince yourself was endearing until something important got lost in the bedraggled hole of her mind.

  My job wasn’t the kind you had because you loved it, it was the kind you had because you needed to eat. I finished college a little early—early enough to realize how much debt I was really in. Broke, frustrated, and a little lost, I returned home to Providence. Talia was dating Damon at the time, and she pushed me to apply at Cartwright & Company. With all the numbers in my bank account preceded by minus signs, I was in no place to decline any job. I don’t think I even asked her what I would be doing, just when the first paycheck would arrive. I loved Talia for getting me this job, and I hated Talia for getting me this job.

  By lunch time, my destruction of the rain forest was complete. With arms full of paper, I was ready to make my way out of the copy room. But it was a long walk back to my desk, and the thought of having to talk to anyone about anything was about as appealing to me as socks are to a child at Christmas. Call me dramatic, but I popped my head out from the doorway to scope the hallway, super-spy style, and made sure no one was coming. Then I practically ran against the walls, dodging office windows and ducking behind the stacks of paper in my arms to avoid eye contact with anyone that walked by.

  It was a successful run, and I was just a few feet away from my desk when someone coughed from behind me and said: “I’m going to kill you.”

  Chapter 2

  I spun around, and too fast, too, because all the copies I was holding spilled out of my hands and onto the floor. Standing behind me with a confident smile and two cups of coffee was my cousin Charley.