Chapter 8 Son of Bane #3
Seamus insisted on burying Da with Mal while the others attended their chores, keeping their squalid farm operational.
Mal handed his brother a shovel, and together they dug into the frozen earth, far enough from Mam’s grave that she wouldn’t have to see her husband in the afterlife.
Mal didn’t bother with a gravestone. An unmarked grave was good enough for Da.
“Will the money be enough?” Seamus’s solemn voice was more hushed in the morning’s dewy quiet.
“Aye,” Mal said, wiping sweat from his brow.
“Can I come on the next job?”
Mal set down his shovel and turned to Seamus with a hard expression. “No,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument.
“But—”
“No, Seamus. You’re going to be better than me and Da and all our worthless ancestors put together. You’re going to live without fear. I’ve got plans. We’re moving to Dublin and starting a new life. A better life.”
Mal rolled the body, stripped of its piss and vomit-stained clothes—waste not, want not had been one of Da’s favorite sayings as he beat them. The body thunked into the shallow grave, face up.
Mam had said the devil drove Da to drink. The devil, all right, Mal thought bitterly as he shoveled cold mud onto his father. Dirt covered the glazed eyes, filled the slack, open mouth. Choke on it.
Mal prepared breakfast and planned.
They’d have eggs and fresh bread and real ham from now on without Da drinking their coin away. They’d have peace of mind without his hair-trigger violence hanging over them.
Yet the Bane children, crowded around the scuffed table with their plates piled high, were far from rejoicing. Some wept, some retreated into despondent silence, while others clung to Mal, frightened of the unknown Da’s presence had held at bay.
Despite his repeated reassurances, the children flinched away from his comforting touches. They cast furtive glances towards the door, as if Da might crawl out of the earth and darken the doorway. Dead did not mean forgotten.
Even with the loot from the English Lord’s vault, Mal needed to hustle to earn back the money Da had drunk away.
More time from home meant less time to keep a proper eye on all of them, and protect them from the dangers within and without.
Haunted, they would not soon forget the dead man buried outside.
Mal wished he could scrub the legacy of fear Da had left in his wake like the human stain he’d been.
Over their bent heads, Mal’s gaze landed on the stolen grimoire. Inspiration struck.
That night, with thick clouds covering the sickle moon, Mal made sure his father would never hurt them again.
The grimoire, bound in human flesh, required a sacrifice of blood and an incantation to open its gilt pages. The heavy tome opened with a groan, its pages smelling of time itself and rife with the profanest magic.
Mal had translated this particular ritual with his rudimentary Latin, a leftover from Sunday school, as ‘May you be forgotten.’ He had gathered the necessary items—a bowl of crushed lavender and sage, the warm blood of a slaughtered rooster, and a hand mirror that had belonged to his mother.
He brushed the tarnished metal frame with a pang in his chest. Mam had not survived Da, but Mal and his siblings would.
Alone over his father’s unmarked grave, Mal summoned a memory demon.
The mirror rippled and a woman’s face appeared. Black-on-black abyssal eyes regarded Mal like a jeweler with a loupe.
He gaped in stunned silence. Kieran had bragged about defeating a demon on a job in Belfast, and Mal had believed him as much as he believed any of Kieran’s self-aggrandizing drivel.
But desperation had compelled Mal to try the summoning ritual, and now a woman draped in a Roman stola was gazing back at him with fathomless eyes.
In the woman’s hand was an ornate lamp. Its curling flames glowed with forgotten memories that gave Mal a free-floating nostalgia for something he couldn’t quite remember.
“I am Moneta.” The demon's ethereal voice wrapped around him in icy tendrils. “What do you seek, boy?”
It took several moments for Mal to collect his jaw from the ground. A memory demon was talking to him through his mother’s hand mirror. A demon that had once been a Memnomancer, before corrupting her spirit with the Profane Arts. As Mal was corrupting his spirit now.
He stuttered, then angled the mirror towards the soft-packed earth at his feet. “May my father be forgotten.”
Moneta’s head tilted like a bird. Flames surged inside her lamp.
“Do you seek to siphon your memories, boy? Or theirs?” Her black eyes, shining like an oil slick, angled to the cottage behind Mal, where his brothers and sisters slept.
“I shall let them forget their worst memories. For a small payment. A memory of yours, of my choosing.”
Later, Mal would spend a lifetime regretting how readily he accepted the demon’s first offer. Now, he simply agreed. A memory was a small cost for his siblings’ happiness, free of their father’s shadow.
Moneta raided his memories, compartmentalized like rooms in a house. The demon culled a memory from him, taking one thing he wouldn’t remember to miss. The lamp’s flames grew brighter, fiercer, and an odd feeling swept over him, like something poised on the tip of his tongue.
Wasn’t there somewhere he was meant to be?
Someone he was supposed to meet? He rifled around his pockets for a reminder and found a card with a Dublin address written in a woman’s hand, although he couldn’t recall what the card was meant for.
It made him feel nostalgic for a home he never thought he’d see again, though his own home stood at his back.
Moneta’s smile gleamed like a scythe. Mal smiled back, not knowing how much he had lost.
Months later, Mal was climbing the steps to the Dublin house he’d moved his family into when an unknown woman rushed up to him, heavy skirts lifted and bosom heaving. Her hair, the color of a sunset, had escaped its pins to frame her flushed face.
“Mal! Oh, thank the Lord! Where have you been? I waited and waited for you at my aunt’s, and you never showed. How could you abandon me? The things you forced me to endure on the long road from Dublin and back!”
He stepped away from the stranger who knew his name. “Who the hell are you?”
She drew back as if he had struck her. “Mal, you… know me not? Were you hit on the head? Drugged? Are you under the influence of some manner of devilry?”
“Off with you, woman.”
Her face collapsed. Tears brimmed in her green eyes. “Y-you know me not?”
“For the last time,” he said over his shoulder as he mounted the porch steps. “I know you not.”
Those parting words would become a lasting regret. Even a lifetime of numbness later, after Malachy’s Faustian bargain where he had bartered his humanity for power with Koschei’s Egg, his guilt was still deep enough to drown in.
Every year on the anniversary of her death, Malachy returned to the graveyard where Colleen was buried. Too many of the gravestones there were carved with the family name Bane and the death date of August 6, 1850.
On Colleen’s grave he laid her favorite flowers. Wilted bouquets and rusted trinkets adorned the final resting place of a woman who had been much loved and was still missed, decades after he had forgotten her.
Walking out of the graveyard with no tears in his black eyes, Malachy knew no one would leave flowers on his grave.