Malcolm discovered what he could do like this:
He was ten years old, and there was a dead spider on his windowsill. It was sprawled on the hard shell of its back, four pairs of legs angled jaggedly up toward the sky. Malcolm watched it for a moment, feeling morbidly curious about its existence. He’d learned at school that house spiders only lived for around a couple of years, a short, fleeting life, during which they mostly existed as a nuisance. It was a familiar concept for Malcolm, who had always been big, tall, slow at talking, and constantly muddling his words. His father had always made it clear that his existence had very much been accidental. A surprise, his mother would swiftly correct him, with a cutting glare in his father’s direction, but even then, Malcolm knew a platitude when he heard one.
This spider was around the size of Malcolm’s thumb. If his mother had caught sight of it, she would undoubtedly have shrieked and demanded he fetch the dustpan and brush. Malcolm was forever removing insects from her presence, which was something that always made him laugh, since she miraculously lost that same sense of squeamishness when it came to stewing cow foot or sucking the jelly from the eye of a fried fish. Plus, spiders were different. His father had always been adamant that he not hurt them. You should never hurt a spider, you know, he remembered his father telling him. How else you think Anansi sends us messages?
He’d been thinking of just that, the first time. He had simply reached out to pick it up, to carry it out of the house and away from his mother. Then his fingers brushed the leg of the spider and just as he was thinking, Tell Anansi I said hello, he felt the indisputable sensation of magic.
He knew magic felt different to everyone. His mother always described magic as something musical, that rhythm that allowed your body to move to a beat. He’d seen people draw magic from the heat of rage and anger and blood, who couldn’t summon a spell unless they were drowning in it. For Malcolm, it had always felt like electricity. Magic was white noise to him, a peaceful ever-present rumble that existed at the corner of his brain. It was like brushing your hand over a television screen and feeling the friction crackle against your skin.
He had felt it prickle that day, the wiring in his veins. There was a quick jolt, and then, in the space of a single heartbeat, the spider twitched. He remembered lurching backward, stunned. The spider had gone from stiff and unmoving to scrambling upright onto its eight now-scurrying legs.
He’d stared down at his hands for a long time, as if they might offer some explanation, but they looked as they always did: dark-skinned, bony, and a little smudged with dirt. Yet it was undeniable: seconds ago, the spider had been dead, and now, it wasn’t.
He’d told himself it was a fluke, at first. The day-to-day magics he knew were small, mostly inconsequential things: sticking your finger in a pot of water and watching it boil, clapping your hands and lighting every bulb in the vicinity. These were small tricks, little secrets passed on from the ancestors who lived in their bones. Life and death, however, was something else entirely. You don’t mess with duppy magic. It had been drilled into him for as long as he could remember. Malcolm, who already stuck out like a sore thumb, who was constantly the butt of everybody’s jokes just for being big and slow, whose father’s name was constantly whispered by the kids at school, had known at that moment that this was added attention he did not need. Not when surviving seemed to be hard enough as it was.
So he dismissed it. He packed it away in that small part of him that kept hold of the names the other kids called him, the scraped knees that came from being pushed over, the looks of resignation he’d catch from his father when Malcolm said the wrong thing—and he ignored it.
Or at least, he tried to. At nighttime, when it was just him, lying between cool sheets and ignoring the sounds of his mother quietly sobbing in the next room, he’d poke at the idea. Was it just a one-off? Was it something he could do again? Was it even something he should try?
He would often think of the dot of blood that landed on the center of his palm that day, of how he’d raised a hand and found that his entire nose had started dripping with it, enough to stream through his fingers and run down his arm. He’d remember how he’d followed the spider, his fist still cupped around his streaming nose, heart pounding in his chest the entire time. He’d think of it skittering across the windowsill, and then along the wall, weaving haphazardly along the cracks in the floorboards until it finally disappeared into a crack in the plaster, and he knew, knew in his core that he was on the verge of something.
But more importantly, he’d think of his father. His father had only been gone for a few months at that point, but on those nights, Malcolm would be overcome with the sudden urge to tell him about this discovery. He’d think about how excited he would be. How it might be enough to make him come home. And Malcolm knew it, even at the age of twelve. This—this was the way he would be useful.
Malcolm reached for his dead uncle’s wrist, the skin cold to the touch. At first there was nothing, but he closed his eyes and blocked out the weight of his father’s gaze bearing into the back of his neck, and eventually he began to feel his fingers prickle. It was gradual, the fear numbing the thrum of the magic in his veins, and if he didn’t think about it too hard, he could almost pretend it was just pins and needles. Eventually, just like it had that very first day with the spider, he felt something flicker into fruition beneath his fingers.
“I’m not going to be able to hold this for long,” Malcolm warned his father. Already, he could feel the rush of it slipping through like grains of sand. If he was going to be able to pull this off at all, they would only have a few moments. He tugged on it—an essence, his life—but it was slippery and resistant. Every time his fingers got near, it would sting him, and Malcolm had to forcibly stop himself from backing away.
“Hold on,” his father said. “You’re almost there.”
A trickle of blood dribbled from one of Malcolm’s nostrils. His hands felt like they were being licked with flames, but his father was right. It was a flutter, ever so slight, a faint pulse that Malcolm could carefully drag out with his fingertips.
A heartbeat.
He took a deep breath, counted to three, thought of his mother, and—
Uncle Erwin opened his eyes and sat up, limbs flailing, gasping for air as if he had just broken through water. His eyes were those of a dead man, pale with cloudy pupils, and there was still the odd, stale hue to his skin, but he was awake. He was breathing. He was alive.
“Cas,” Erwin gasped, eyes flitting between Malcolm and his father. He clutched his chest, as if he’d been running. Malcolm watched the heave of his rib cage, a little wondrously: up, down, up, down. Erwin was alive, and it was his doing. “Cas, that you?”
Malcolm kept his fingers firmly locked around Erwin’s wrist, scared that if he let go for even a moment, the spell might just break.
Back when Malcolm’s magic was only just beginning to become what it was, he would trail the garden for dead things to practice with. He’d tried plants first, a few wilted flowers from his mother’s garden, but they remained brown and limp. Then he’d moved on to the more or less sentient: squashed slugs and snails he found curled against watering cans, flies caught unmoving in webs, an unlucky field mouse that had been struck by their neighbor’s wicked cat. He touched them all, and the results were always the same. He could bring things back, but if he didn’t concentrate properly, if he lost thought for even a second, they would aimlessly scramble around for a few moments, confused and bewildered, until they inevitably froze, stumbled, and fell, dead again. Irreversibly so.
He had never tried with a person before.
Erwin blinked rapidly. There was an odd jerkiness to his movements that made him look as though he was being puppeteered. Rigor mortis, Malcolm realized. It hadn’t quite left his limbs. “Cas,” Erwin breathed. “It is you. I knew you would come for me.”
Malcolm felt a wave of sympathy for the old man. Erwin believed that Casper had woken him out of some sense of loyalty, when Malcolm saw it for what it really was: an act of desperation.
“Of course I came for you, Ernie,” Malcolm’s father said easily. It was an old nickname that Malcolm hadn’t heard for years. A name from their childhood, where nicknames had a tendency to stick to you like a shadow. “I said I would, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, yeah. Suppose you did.” Erwin kept glancing around a little frantically, as if trying to grasp his surroundings. Malcolm looked down at where his hand still encircled the old man’s wrist. He could feel Erwin trembling against him.
“Hey,” Malcolm murmured. He kept his hand around Erwin, but loosely, so as not to spook him. It was odd for Malcolm. In many ways his uncle had always been a looming, menacing figure in his memories. Now, he simply looked like a frail old man. Malcolm crouched down so that they were eye level and spoke to him the way he would speak to his mother sometimes, when she woke him up in the middle of the night with her shouts. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re all right.”
Behind him, Casper looked away, a little awkward. “You remember my son,” he said, with a wave in Malcolm’s direction.
Erwin laughed, and there it was. That brutish, mocking noise that used to fill Malcolm’s childhood with dread. “Of course,” Erwin said, and almost sounded pleased to see him. “Little Malcolm. Boy, Cas, if he doesn’t look the spitting image of you.”
He raised a hand, as if to push his glasses further up on his nose for a better look, and then caught himself midway when he realized that he wasn’t wearing them. Dead men, of course, didn’t need glasses. “So,” Erwin said. “I really am dead.”
“You are,” Casper said.
“It’s funny.” Erwin twitched as if to scramble upward—he was still sprawled in the boot of the car—but Malcolm’s hand tightened, steadying him. “I don’t feel too dead, you know?”
“Well,” Malcolm’s father said dryly. “You look it.”
Erwin grinned and a fly buzzed its way out of his mouth and crawled across his bottom lip.
Malcolm snuck a glance in his father’s direction, but Casper’s face was completely blank. Malcolm had vague memories of them hollering at each other over games of dominoes, voices slurred over too many glasses of rum. Of them standing over the barbecue during the summer, playfully bickering over the best way to cook ribs. Malcolm had never had a friend like that, but he imagined this couldn’t be easy.
“Tell me who did this to you,” Casper said, and Erwin gave a laugh as coarse as sandpaper.
“Come on, Cas. Who do you think?”
Casper’s expression hardened. “It can’t be.”
“Well, it is,” Erwin replied. He coughed and something black and tarlike landed on his closed fist.
“It’s not possible,” Casper said. “It’s been over a decade.”
“Almost two,” Erwin agreed. His movements were beginning to be clumsy, as if he were a rag doll. Malcolm tightened his grip, tried to will more of the magic from his fingertips into his uncle, but a cold bitterness had begun to settle in Malcolm’s own bones. He was drying up; he couldn’t hold on much more. “We said it would be long enough.”
“It should have been long enough,” Casper snapped. “She should have starved to death by now. She should be nothing but ash and bone.”
“Well, she certainly isn’t that,” Erwin said tiredly. “You think we miscalculated?”
“No,” Casper said sharply. “We didn’t.”
“She is powerful,” Erwin agreed. “But not that powerful.”
“So someone’s been feeding her,” Malcolm’s father said. He began to pace. Malcolm tracked his movements. He’d never seen his father like this before. Unnerved. Scared, even.
“Is it possible?” Erwin asked.
“Less than ten people on this earth know where she is,” Malcolm’s father said, but that wasn’t a no.
“So someone has betrayed us,” Erwin said.
“It seems that way.”
“We know what she wants,” Erwin said. “It’s the same thing she’s always wanted: me, you, all of us, dead. If someone tries to free her now, they’ll succeed. She’s the strongest she’s ever been, and now look at us. You’re dried up. I’m dead. There’s nothing stopping her anymore. And it won’t just be us she’ll be after, Cas. If she gets free, she will suck the magic of this entire city down to the marrow. Nobody will be safe.”
Malcolm glanced at his father for an explanation, but the old man was simply grimacing, his mouth twisted into a hard line.
“Did you hear about George?” Casper said. His voice was low. If Malcolm didn’t know him any better, he would have thought that he sounded guilty.
Erwin’s head slumped into an attempt at a nod. “They got to him too. I can feel him.…” He gestured vaguely. “Over here.”
“If you’re right,” Casper said, voice hard, “it’s me she’ll be coming for next.”
“Hm.” Erwin slumped a little, his head fighting a losing battle with gravity. He began to blink slower and slower, and this gesture, at least, was a little more familiar to Malcolm. He looked drunk. “Only the magic of a god can kill a god. So unless you have one of those up your sleeve, I’m assuming you have a weapon.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Then you know who you will have to speak to.”
Casper sighed and cursed under his breath. There was something unfathomably teenage about the gesture, in the slump of his shoulders, his hands stuck in his jeans. It only occurred to Malcolm then that his father had never really grown up. Casper had met Malcolm’s mother when they were teenagers, and they’d had Malcolm shortly after, so he’d never really gotten to grow into becoming a man by himself. She had always taken care of him. It was odd for Malcolm to see himself mirrored in this person, when he himself had never had any choice but to grow up as quickly as he could.
“She won’t see me,” his father said. “She banished me, remember?”
The men shared a wry look.
“Well,” Erwin said, and his eyes drifted to where Malcolm was hovering. “You may be banished, but he’s not.”
They both turned to look at Malcolm, and Malcolm immediately wished he could shrink into the shadows. Casper cussed under his breath.
“Well, good luck with that,” Erwin said, and he laughed that brittle, brutish laugh once more. “Sounds like you’ll need it.” It was the last thing he said before his head sank backward, jaw slack. It was like watching a balloon deflate. His chest sagged, fingers loosened, the final beats of his pulse fading under Malcolm’s grip. Then, just like that, he was gone.
As soon as it was over, Malcolm felt a tremendous heaviness hit him. It was like he could suddenly feel the weight of every single bone and organ in his body. There was a coldness in the tips of his fingers that had spread all the way up to his elbows, and he felt hollow all the way through.
Casper let out a frustrated huff and slammed the boot shut, hard enough to make the car rattle. He kicked it, then kicked it again. When the alarm started to chime, lighting the whole street with flaring red, he kicked it once more. One of his sliders went skittering across the driveway from the force of the action, but neither he nor Malcolm acknowledged it. When he was done, he turned back to Malcolm, wiped the sweat from his brow, and straightened his shirt from where it had ridden up.
“So,” his father said quietly, as if not to wake the dead. “It appears I have another job for you.”