Chapter 8 Son of Bane
Son of Bane
The day Malachy killed his father and summoned a demon began with a too-human argument.
“You promised me, Mal.”
Colleen rounded on twenty-year-old Mal, planting her hands on her ample hips in the middle of the busy cobblestone street.
Dubliners flowed around them, standing like rocks in a stream of traffic.
There were more people on this bustling street than their entire village back in County Cork, all casting irritated looks over their shoulders.
“I said it before and I’ll say it again, Malachy Bane. I don’t like how you earn your coin or the company you keep doing it.”
Sighing, he tugged Colleen into a less busy area. The apples of her cheeks were flushed a telltale color. He braced himself for a haranguing.
Mal had grown up watching her creamy skin freckle in the summer as they romped through fields with their never-ending gaggle of siblings trailing them.
He had watched the dimples smooth from her cheeks as she blossomed into a young woman; had seen those cheeks blush as he stole kisses from her in the dark church alcoves.
Now, her face was flushed with anger, her green eyes alight with renewed vigor for an old argument Mal was fucking tired of.
“Colleen, the money from this job will be enough to move both our families out of their hovels and into proper houses here.”
“I have tried turning a blind eye, with how much the money has aided us. But the Lord sees all.” Colleen made the sign of the cross, then adjusted the pretty bonnet atop her head of sunset-colored hair.
She hadn’t complained when his dirty money bought the bonnet for her, nor when he had kept food on her family’s table after the village suffered a dismal harvest.
Mal wasn’t above a little crime to feed his eight younger brothers and sisters.
Stealing was the only way out of that dead end village other than a cheap pine box.
Unlike his cousins in Galway, Mal had grown up in a part of the countryside where people had no childhood, and he was determined that his siblings would have better.
This Dublin job—his biggest heist yet—was his escape from the fate Colleen’s God had damned every son of Bane to. He would buy his family a grand house on a cobblestone lane. They’d shake off the muck of poverty and the bruises of Da’s fists and start over.
Afterwards, he'd use his portal magic for less illegal gains.
Like a steamboat ticket somewhere, anywhere.
He could only traverse where he had traveled before, and there were a great many places to explore so he could return through a portal later.
In the dark hours before dawn, Mal laid awake and pictured the possibilities.
Beyond his village-shaped prison, he longed for more, for all of it, to rearrange the heavens themselves to suit his needs.
Not that he could tell Colleen about that. Not that he could tell Colleen about much of anything, given the anger reddening her cheeks.
“This must stop once we’re wed, Mal.”
He couldn’t hide his grimace. Their presumed nuptials hung over him like a scythe, severing the possibilities bursting around him like spring flowers.
The world had opened to him at last, a portal away, and now it was shrinking again.
Colleen wanted him to dig a hole for their family to live out of, every day the same until he died, as his mam had died, as his youngest siblings had died—like animals.
With the magic itching in his veins, how could he confine himself to the smallness of marriage? Particularly a marriage he had neither proposed nor actually agreed to.
Colleen glanced around the busy street and lowered her voice. “You laid with me as man and wife. Now you shall make it right in the eyes of the Lord, in a proper Catholic church. You said you’d do right by me.”
“And I shall,” he said in a tight voice. To the other lasses he’d bedded, sex hadn’t meant anything. To Colleen, it had meant everything. They had a history, growing up a few farms apart, and that meant they had to have a future, too.
“Just this once, Mal,” she’d said that foolish night when he’d hesitated on her offer to take their fumbling farther. She had slid a finger into the tear of his resolve and yanked. “Just this once, and that’s all it shall be.”
All the blood must have fled to his cock for god help him, he did, just once, lay with her in a wheat field beneath the stars. As always, he wore a sheath to trap his seed from infecting her with child. Seeing his own mam die in childbirth had made him unerringly vigilant on that front.
It wasn’t a minute later in the panting aftermath that Colleen had turned to him, all blushes and sighs gone, and said in a final tone, “We shall be married.”
Her words had settled on him, heavy as shackles. He’d stared, open-mouthed, then repeated that single damning word: “Married.”
Though Colleen was not pregnant and he had not touched her since, he was still trapped by other people’s expectations. The ghost of his mother’s quiet disappointment haunted him. Marrying Colleen was what Mam would have expected of her eldest.
Mal adjusted the collar of his scratchy suit, feeling it tighten around his throat.
He’d bought the suit with what little was left over after keeping his family alive through the endless winter.
It might be too small and several years out of date, but it was his.
The armor separating him from the penniless hovel he’d grown up in and the splendor of Dublin’s potential waiting at his fingertips.
Though, in this fine neighborhood, people looked at him in his too-small suit like a stain.
He checked his pocket watch. “Jesus, can we talk about this later? I’m late for a job.”
“What have I told you about using the Lord’s name in vain?”
He vented an irritated breath. Her list of grievances against him grew longer by the day.
Not going to church, swearing, stealing, fornicating…
The catechism had been beaten into him like every child in their village, but god had never answered his prayers.
Not while Mam wept as Da raped another baby into her, while she withered away, sucked dry from marrying a brute and birthing his copper-haired brood.
Not while his brothers and sisters cried themselves to sleep with empty bellies.
Not while Da pissed away the coin Mal scraped together by increasingly illegal means and beat them black and blue.
No, god had never listened nor cared. God had abandoned the Irish long before Mal’s miserable existence began in a dead-end village at the dead end of the southern coast.
“I don’t have time for this, Colleen. Kieran is waiting for me.”
By the color in her cheeks, she was far from running out of steam. “Kieran Doyle, that Ulsterman lowlife thug you associate with, is a Protestant.” She uttered the word like a curse.
Mal wasn’t sure what was worse for her—that Kieran had been born in northern Ireland or born a non-Catholic. Either damning detail would be nothing if she knew what Kieran and Mal really did on these jobs.
He had met Kieran Doyle, a lad more like himself than he realized on a job years before.
A Choromancer, Kieran had called himself.
A single word to encompass the impossible things Mal had been able to do since his voice dropped.
It had been Kieran who told him about magic and the Covenant and the need for secrecy from humans.
Da had beaten Mal enough times for “disappearing” that he had known to hide his peculiar abilities long ago. Now he knew why.
While Kieran could traverse through walls, Mal could traverse across cities, even counties.
He had learned the hard way that a slight miscalculation in traversing could have devastating consequences, and dropping from bowel-liquefying heights was the least of them.
Yet he had continued testing the limits, honing his accuracy and precision.
It was a game of mathematics, really, and Mal was awfully good at those; calculating angles and connecting vertices in a global geometry of possibilities.
By bending the fabric of space, distance had become a mere intellectual concept to Mal.
His magic made miles miniscule. Each new place he traveled was a constellation of coordinates, expanding the map in his mind’s eye and adding vertices upon which his magic could pivot.
What had started as a horrifying thrill was now his preferred travel method.
He could rob a man in London and be back home in County Cork to cook his family dinner.
Mal didn’t know why he and Kieran had magic and others didn’t. He only knew that for the first time in his life he had power. Power to see that the world was bigger than his miserable corner of it. Whether that power was gifted from god or the devil, Mal didn’t care. Finally, he could be free.
But never for long. He always came back to his wretched village. Back to Colleen and her nagging affection.
They neared the red-light district where Kieran rented a dingy flat. Anticipating her moral indignation, Mal stopped them short of the seedier parts of the Monto.
“The job will take several hours. There’s a church down the way if you’d like to pray for my immortal soul there.”
Disapproval pinched her face as she scanned the street, infested with prostitutes and British redcoats. “Take this.” She handed him an address card. “This is my aunt’s house where I shall be staying until your… business is done.”
With that, she left, and Mal took his first full breath in days of ceaseless browbeating. Relationships, in his limited experience, were like wading through a swamp of misunderstanding, only to learn to loathe each other.