Chapter 1 #2
“Galowin Madstone, no, no, Mal, Malowin Gladstone, meased to pleet you.”
Mal wished being awkward was a crime so DCI Walters would arrest him and drag him away from this conversation.
Walters just looked down, shook his head, and brought his hand up to his face; Mal imagined it was to block the site of this verbal train wreck.
The sergeant, for all her grace, chuckled and breezed past it.
“You’re looking a bit peaky there, Mallo. First time seeing a body?”
“I wish …”
“So you’re some kind of dead person expert …”
Mal wanted to say yes, but thankfully, Walters interrupted.
“Leave the kid alone.”
Twenty-one, Mal thought.
“And don’t try that.” Walters intercepted a card she had pulled out to give to Mal. “Diviners, I swear! If you’d taken this, she’d be able to follow you to the ends of the earth. Haven’t you got casework to be filling out, Sergeant?”
“I’m all up to date, boss.”
“Then I’ll have to find more for you to do.”
“So Mal, are you still a student?” Desdemona said, turning away from Walters.
“Yeah, I’m studying technomancy at—”
“Des, I’m going to need you to stop interrogating my consultant and trust me on this one,” Walters said, giving her a look that screamed, Don’t make me pull rank again.
“But you brought a student to the morgue?” Des said, pleading to be let in on whatever secret Walters was clearly hiding. Mal wished to be let out of whatever he was up to, but Walters had made it clear: Mal didn’t have a choice.
“He’s about your age. Don’t start with that student nonsense.
Just trust me,” Walters said, demanding the final word.
He hoisted Mal under the arm and walked him away from the mortuary.
As he left, Mal felt as though something was pinching at him.
He gave it no mind, and went with DCI Walters into the busy car park that lay adjacent to the hospital.
Mal had expected a police car but instead, they’d walked up to a battered, black sedan, of which Walters popped the door and stood in limbo of leaving.
“You remember where you’re meeting me later?” Walters said.
“The crossroads between Bow and Copperfield Street, eight o’clock, right?” Mal was ninety-nine percent sure this was right, but he didn’t want to take that one percent chance of being wrong.
“You got it.” Walters paused for a moment. “I know it might not seem like it, but joining us is much better than the alternative, okay?”
Mal just nodded and muttered some okay-isms. He could see Walters was nervous. He hid it well, but clearly a lot hinged on this meeting. Walters could see Mal was equally as anxious; Mal had never been any good at hiding his emotions, only secrets.
“And don’t panic too much, alright? You’ll come along, say hi to everyone, make a proper introduction. They’ll show you about a bit, and probably give you some busywork, something you can handle.”
Mal dreaded the thought of what a secret organization considered busywork.
“You get to keep that family situation going, and everyone on my end knows you’re one of the good ones.”
Mal almost wished they would free him from his family situation and take it all off his hands.
“And for fuck’s sake, whatever you did back there with Des, don’t do that tonight, alright?
I know you’re a smart kid. We’ve just got to make sure they see that.
And iron that shirt.” He clicked and pointed to Mal’s shirt as he spoke; Mal couldn’t help but grin.
Walters nodded, got in his car, then drove off.
Mal let out a breath he felt he’d been holding for the past hour. He untucked his shirt, rescruffed his hair, and tried to shake the tension in his shoulders.
What the fuck am I into now?
He thought as he left the car park and started the journey to his parents’ house.
He rubbed his face with his hands as if he’d just woken up—he prayed he would wake up.
It was bad enough that his secret had been uncovered, but now he had to join some “organization.” An organization he knew nothing about, and that had just lost a member to some serial killer, if Walters was to be believed.
Mal had always assumed secret societies existed; most of how magic was taught involved secretive schools and colleges.
When he first discovered his powers he assumed (because of popular media) that someone fantastical would arrive and whisk him away to a secret school just for necromancers; someplace he’d be surrounded by people just like him; where he’d learn to control his powers, and go on epic quests fighting the true villains of the world.
But that never happened.
Instead, Mal had fumbled from close call to close call, trying desperately not to bring anything else back to life.
Luckily for Mal, there weren’t many opportunities in his day-to-day to bring people back from the dead.
There was an exception to this, and it was an exception he now desperately wanted to avoid as he arrived at his parents’ house.
Or his home as his parents called it, even though he’d moved into University dorms several years ago.
He went round the side of the house and shimmied open his bedroom window.
He had a simple plan: find something smart to wear for tonight without having to deal with his family.
Mal was the fourth of five siblings—three older, one younger.
They had a complicated relationship, each with their parents and then again with one another.
If shit flows downstream, then Mal was the dam that caught it all; he prided himself on not letting it flow any further.
He didn’t always succeed, what with him being human, but he at least apologized when he found a leak.
As he crept into his bedroom, he was pleased to find it empty of siblings.
Each of them had hijacked a corner or a cupboard of his tiny room and had filled it with their crap.
This gave them the impression they could come and go as they pleased; it gave Mal a very different impression altogether.
He could hear several of his siblings yelling throughout the house.
They were always embroiled in some drama or another.
Brode was yelling at Inva for wanting to work abroad next summer.
Pelonie was harassing Brode for trying to move away again, and Brode in turn was giving Pelonie grief for moving back in for the third time.
It was as if Gladstones could only communicate through argument, and Mal didn’t have the want or will to deal with their brand of communication right now.
Mal slipped out of his cupboard of a room and blitzed up the stairs before he could be spotted.
He had no clue where his parents had wandered off to.
He knew they’d be in the house, because they never left the house, but you could usually hear one of them pottering about.
As he reached the upstairs landing, the floorboards creaked beneath his feet and he fell still as if spotted by a T-Rex.
Jocea, the youngest sibling, was coming out of her room and was staring straight at him.
“Is that you kids?” Mal’s mum called from someplace unknown.
Mal turned to Jocea and shook his head, pleading with her not to give him away. She smiled a fiendish smile, then spoke.
“It’s just me, Mum.”
“Ahh good, any idea where your dad is?”
“No clue.”
“I think he’s in the shed,” a voice yelled from downstairs.
Mal put his hands together as if in prayer and mouthed “thank you” at Jocea.
She was his favorite sibling by a country mile, though given the competition, it wasn’t a close race.
Mal was almost where he needed to be; just one more flight of stairs and he’d find his prize.
He heard his mum approach the landing and he bolted, bounding as silently as he could upward and making it to Brode’s old room, which was now storage.
He crept in and silently shut the door behind him.
He turned to find a six-foot-four, bone-bleached skeleton walking straight at him.
“Hi, Dad,” Mal said.
“I didn’t know you were home.” Mal’s dad looked down and, upon realizing he was only bones, activated some magic to put flesh and clothes upon himself. A simple illusion, but one Mal was always grateful for.
“I just popped in to see if I could borrow a jacket. I have a, err, networking event tonight and need to look my best.”