The thing was, Malcolm didn’t have until tomorrow.
He waited until the others had fallen asleep. They’d set Malcolm up on the sofa in the spare room at the back of the diner. Max had draped a blanket over him, and he’d borrowed a pair of joggers and a sweater from Eli that came up a little small. Sunny had wheeled in an ancient-looking space heater, mumbling something about drafty old walls, and he’d been left staring up at the ceiling through the synthetic orange glow. The good thing about the kind of old English buildings the diner was set in was that you could hear every creak and groan. It took a long time for the house to settle. He heard Eli and Sunny bickering in the hallway over who got the best blankets, and then over who got to use the bathroom first, and then again over the blankets, before Max finally intervened and they all went to their respective rooms. Malcolm waited until the footsteps above him subsided and the lights in the hallway went out, until he was certain that the others had fallen asleep, before he pulled himself quickly to his feet and silently got dressed.
The fang was where they’d left it, with Sunny and Max. Officially, watching over it was Sunny’s job. They’d settled on leaving it with her after even more bickering. Why’d I have to keep it? Sunny had scowled. You know I’m not historically good at being responsible.
Because… Eli had replied, fumbling around the words. You’ve got no magic. Malcolm had waited to see how Sunny would react to that, but she’d said nothing. Just turned on her heel, face completely blank, and left. Eli had caught him watching them and sighed. She doesn’t like to talk about it, he’d explained. But Sunny’s got no magic, so it’s like… she’s an unloaded gun. Less risk of a misfire.
Now, Malcolm pushed the door open as quietly and carefully as possible. When the door made no creak, he crept inside. Max was staying in Sunny’s room, since they figured it was better she didn’t go home tonight. They were both buried deep under the covers; through the darkness, Malcolm only caught a glimpse of Max’s satin headscarf and Sunny’s socked foot hanging out from the duvet. Sunny hadn’t been lying earlier when she’d said it was cold. He felt a chill now, and fought back a shiver. He pushed it aside and got to work quickly, his heart beating rapidly inside his chest; he was hyperaware that any moment he could be discovered or they could wake up, and then he would have no feasible explanation to offer. He checked drawers and cupboards; at one point he fumbled over a pair of trainers left on the floor. There was a tense moment when a floorboard creaked beneath his foot, and Malcolm froze, certain that one of them would stir. Luckily, the moment passed. Max rolled over, and their breathing continued undisturbed.
He dropped to his knees and felt more than saw it: Sunny’s small denim backpack was shoved haphazardly under her bed. He knew without looking that the fang was inside. It was like raising his hand to an open flame.
Above him, Sunny mumbled in her sleep and rolled over. Malcolm took a deep breath. Careful not to unfold the tea towel wrapped around it, he slid the fang out of the backpack and returned the bag to its position under the bed.
It wasn’t until he’d closed the bedroom door behind him that he allowed himself to exhale. It would probably take them a while to notice the fang’s absence in the morning, but by then, it would already be done.
He knew Max had closed up the front, and since Malcolm had never been good at untangling spells, he went for a window at the back. He could see that it was unlocked, but when he went to open it, it remained stubbornly shut, despite him pulling on it with considerable strength. Magic, then. After a moment, he sighed, wrapped a tea towel around his hand, and punched through the glass. It took two attempts, but eventually the window caved in, and Malcolm knocked away the shards to pull himself out.
He landed with a grunt and waded through the unkempt weeds at the side of the building to unlock his bike. He kept the fang stuffed in the front pouch of his hoodie, careful not to touch it, but mindful of its presence. It was dark as he made his way to the main road, and his focus was on not tripping over bin bags. He didn’t notice Casper languidly leaning against the front.
“Fancy seeing you here,” Casper said as Malcolm stepped out into the open.
“Oh.” Malcolm tried desperately to school his face into something neutral. The streets were mostly empty at this time of night, all the shops having closed their shutters and turned off the lights. One taxi place was open across the road. Malcolm could just about make out a bored-looking employee slouched behind the counter. “I, uh, thought you’d gone home?”
“Decided to stick around.” His father was smoking again. Something about the act made him seem a lot younger. Malcolm wondered how long he’d been out there. There were a bunch of cigarette stubs by his feet, but Malcolm couldn’t tell which ones were new. “Couldn’t sleep. You want one?”
Casper didn’t seem to be making fun of him. He briefly toyed with the idea of accepting, but then imagined himself going home with the scent of nicotine on his fingers, having to tell his mother that he’d smoked his dad’s cigarettes.
“No,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Suit yourself.” Casper leant back against the glass and turned to look at Malcolm from the corner of his eye. “Big day tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
“Lot of pressure for someone like you.”
Someone like you. Malcolm flipped the turn of phrase over in his mind a few times but still couldn’t dissect where exactly the cut in it landed. Still, it stung.
“I guess.”
“No one could fault you for wanting to leave.”
Malcolm searched Casper’s expression for any signs of irony, but he appeared to be sincere.
“I’m not running away,” Malcolm said.
Casper only shrugged. “It would be the smart thing to do.”
“It would be weak,” Malcolm said.
“The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Malcolm kept his voice even and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Is that what you think of me? That I’ll just run away?”
A police car sped past them, sirens blaring, briefly casting flashes of red and blue on them. Casper gave him a long, sideways look. “Malcolm, I don’t think anything of you.”
Malcolm didn’t know what to say to that, so he let it settle somewhere in his chest.
Casper sighed heartily and stood up. “What I mean to say is that it’s what I would do, if I was in your position.”
“Right.”
“You’re my blood. Believe it or not, I’m trying to look out for you.”
Malcolm almost laughed outright at that. “You’re trying to look out for yourself.”
“Well, like I said, the two aren’t—”
“—mutually exclusive. I get it.”
They both fell quiet. Casper took a drag of his cigarette and tilted his head back, like he was tracking stars that neither of them could see. “You’re just like me, you know.”
“Yeah?” Malcolm said. “How’s that?”
“Selfish.”
Somehow the way he said it didn’t make it seem like an insult. It was just a fact, in the way he might’ve been commenting on Malcolm’s hair or eye color. Still, something about it made Malcolm’s blood boil. “Me and you,” Casper continued. “We’re always looking for something more. I don’t think your mother ever really got that. But I do, and I know what you need.”
“I don’t need anything from you,” Malcolm said.
“No?” Casper sounded genuinely sympathetic. “Look at yourself, Malcolm. She has you living in the same council flat she was in when I met her. Scrounging off benefits and hanging around with these youts? Your mother’s rotting away, Malcolm. Soon your entire life will be spoon-feeding her mashed potatoes and reminding her of her own name. Be realistic, son. You’re my blood. What are you without what I’ve given you?”
The truth was, Malcolm could count the things his father had given him on one hand, and yet he was right.
He was careful to keep his voice even. “Where is the rest of Mercy’s magic, Dad?”
“Is that what you think?” Casper laughed, humorless. “That it’s hers? That magic is mine. I earned it. I worked hard for it. The things I had to give up just to hold it in my hand—” He shook his head. “If you think I would ever give that up, then you don’t know me at all.”
“No,” Malcolm said. “I know exactly who you are.”
“Malcolm,” Casper sighed, but Malcolm ignored him. He turned his back and swung his leg over the seat, and just like that, he rode into the night.
To an outsider, the council estate Malcolm lived on looked like any other regular block of flats: a lively, redbricked new build where kids did wheelies on the pavement and drew chalk hopscotches on the sidewalks. Malcolm had lived there long enough to know the magic of the place, though. He knew which walls had protective sigils carved into the brick, which flats housed shadows that were best not to be disturbed. He knew which balconies caught the best views of the moon and which windowpanes he could walk past and always find lined with herbs and greenery.
For Malcolm, though, it was just home.
It was the alleyway where he had learned to ride his bike up and down with his neighbors. The corner shop he stopped by every day after school to buy fizzy drinks. The NO BALL GAMES sign where he tore his jacket running from some kids at their rival school.
That night, Malcolm tried to let the place anchor him as he weaved through the familiar maze of buildings to get home. He felt unmoored by his father’s words, and they looped through his head. You’re my blood, he’d said. What are you without what I’ve given you? The truth was Malcolm had no idea.
The flat was still when he let himself in. Washing was strewn over the balcony, and there were a few unopened letters on the doorstep. Malcolm took a key from his back pocket and locked up behind him, leaving his shoes by the welcome mat and flipping on the lights.
His mother’s bedroom door was closed, which he at first assumed meant that she must be sleeping. When he went into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water, however, he found a handwritten note stuck to the fridge. GONE OUT WITH BRENDA, his mother had written. BE BACK LATE. DINNER IN THE FRIDGE. LOVE YOU X.
Malcolm felt a swell of affection. His mother’s friend Brenda was known for hosting what the aunties called “a true Big People Shubz,” the kind of old-school house parties that lasted way, way into the early hours of the morning. Malcolm stared at the note for a long time, something resolving in him. She’d been well enough to call up her friends. To put on her good dress and do her hair and go out and have a nice time.
What are you without what I’ve given you?
He supposed he was going to find out.
He started with the candles. The notebook he’d taken from his father showed them being set out into a circle. He took some extra-long matches from the kitchen and, careful not to get any wax on the carpet as he lit them, laid them alongside the ingredients they’d got from Legs but kept the fang covered. Even through the fabric, he could feel its magic rushing and pulling him in like a tide.
He turned the flat’s lights off. Then he took out a bowl and found a bottle of rum from his mother’s drink cabinet, and paused. The spell called for something with sentimental value, a gift to sacrifice. He looked around, and the oil landscape of St. Elizabeth that hung above the television, the one his father had gifted his mother, caught his attention. Fleetingly, he considered using it, imagining the thrill of satisfaction that would come at watching it shrivel and burn in flames, but then he envisioned his mother’s face when she inevitably found out. Instead, Malcolm carefully lifted the painting off its hook and disposed of it in the next room over, where it couldn’t taunt him.
He fingered the pendant he always wore around his neck, an heirloom from his father. But no—as appealing as it would be to watch that burn, it wasn’t technically a gift. He’d taken it from his father’s belongings. Plus, he liked to wear it as a reminder of everything he wasn’t.
It wasn’t until he was sitting down again, cross-legged on the floor, that he noticed he still had on the bracelet that Eli had gifted him back at the House of Spiders. It hadn’t been a small gesture to Malcolm. To keep you safe, Eli had said. Without thinking too much about it, Malcolm placed it in the bowl with the ingredients and the written incantation, doused it with the alcohol, and dropped a lit match.
Once they had burned, he took the mirror from the hallway and placed it at the center of the circle. Malcolm took a deep breath and put his hand to the floor. He felt something distantly. It was almost like hearing a party from a few walls away. The vibration hummed at his fingertips.
From this angle, he should have only been able to see the ceiling of the flat in the reflection. Maybe an inch of the top of his own forehead. Instead, he was looking down at the unmistakable roots of a tree, sloping and twisted, just like he’d seen at the nine night. And there, underneath, was the hastily dug grave marked with a wooden cross where Mercy would have lain buried for all those years. A blink later, it was gone, replaced with the normal reflection of the light swinging above him.
Twenty years ago, his father would have sat in the same position, gazing into the same doorway. He, of course, wouldn’t have been alone. There would have been seven others, sat in a circle around him. Malcolm wondered if they would have been joking around as they always seemed to be in photographs, or if the weight of what they were about to do was heavy enough that there had been a somber air to the proceedings. Regardless, it didn’t matter; they were dead now. Casper’s blood was the last key to opening the door. The same blood that ran through Malcolm’s veins.
By now, as Casper had explained to them, the spell would be threadbare and tattered, like the fraying ends of a rope. In order to recreate the spell and seal Mercy away, Casper had said they would first need to unpick the original one. Malcolm was just cutting the final cord. The thing was, Malcolm had no intention of redoing the spell.
Before he could lose his nerve, he sent a shard of magic across his hand, sharp enough that the blood welled in his palm, and let it drip into the bowl. He reached out his hand, sticky and wet, and picked up the fang.
Malcolm screamed.
It was like holding a branding iron. All at once, he felt the magic soar through him, desperate to escape the fang’s hunger. It shot white and electric behind the lids of his eyes. He almost let go, but he fought through it. He only had seconds.
What are you without what I’ve given you?
His father’s voice looped over and over in his mind, but Malcolm pushed it away. He focused on breathing, on reciting the words of the spell, as his father would have all those years ago. Even though his voice wasn’t loud, he knew she would hear. The spell didn’t want to break. It lashed at him with razor-edged tendrils of magic, a failsafe undoubtedly put in place by his father, determined to make him crumble. He felt it all, like dozens of tiny needles, everything he was and wasn’t. His rigid bones; his rotten, corrupted magic; he was his father, right down to his marrow.
And then, just when he had reached his limits, when he was seconds from thinking I don’t think I can do this, he heard a voice, crystal clear in his ear. Her voice.
Yes, you can.
Trembling, Malcolm raised his arm, fang in hand, to plunge it into the glass and sever the last thread of the spell. It resisted him. He had to use all of his strength to push through it, until his arms ached with fatigue, the fang sizzling at his skin. He had to. For Mercy. For his future. For his mother.
“Malcolm?”
His eyes opened, but it wasn’t the daughter of Death he found himself faced with. It was his friends. Magic crackled at Eli’s fingers from where they’d forced open the door. As soon as he released the fang, it went flying from his grip and landed between them, rolling to and fro. There was Sunny, hands held out placatingly toward him, and Eli, calm and steady as always, a book under one arm. No Max. She must have been back at the diner, watching his father, who, of course, would have sold him out. He’d probably known what Malcolm was doing all along. Malcolm almost wanted to laugh. Of course Casper could not allow him even this one thing, Malcolm thought viciously. Of course, he would never allow Malcolm to possess an idea that wasn’t dictated by Casper’s own thoughts and feelings.
“Malcolm,” Eli said, tentative. He edged forward, only stopping once he reached the ring of candles separating them. Neither of them reached for the fang. “Please don’t do this.”
Malcolm didn’t move. He couldn’t, even if he’d wanted to. The magic rushed out of him, and in its absence, he was left feeling limp and drained, gasping for breath. There were cuts and scratches up his arms from where the magic had torn at him.
“Stay back,” he warned. He needed to reach the fang, but his body wasn’t cooperating. He had to do this. He couldn’t let them stop him.
“It was you,” Sunny said. If she was surprised, he couldn’t tell. Her voice was completely devoid of inflection. “You kept Mercy alive all this time. You fed her your magic.”
Malcolm set his jaw. It was as if he had sold them out for thirty pieces of silver. “Yes.”
“How long?”
“Two years.” Malcolm couldn’t look at them. “She came to me in my dreams after… after my mother. I thought it was just a nightmare at first, but then she offered to help.”
“And the others?” Eli said. “Did you kill them?”
“No,” Malcolm said. “Of course not. I just… found them. Tracked them down.”
“And let Mercy send her monsters after them. Let her rip out their hearts and feed off the magic.”
It was true, but he didn’t know how to explain that Mercy was just doing what she had to. They hadn’t seen where she’d been locked away. They hadn’t felt the claustrophobic darkness, the soil dusting their lips and the earth under their nails.
“Malcolm,” Eli sighed. “Whatever you’re about to do—you can still stop this. We can figure this out together.”
“I don’t have a choice,” Malcolm spat.
“I know it feels that way,” Eli said. “But we can still go through with our original plan. We can recreate the spell and keep her from hurting anyone else. Nobody has to be hurt. Let us help you.”
“Help me?” It came out brittle, a hollow laugh. “You stole my own magic from me and thought I was too stupid to notice.”
Eli flinched as if he’d been hit. “No,” he said. “That’s not… I didn’t mean for—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Malcolm said. He felt the magic stirring in the palms of his hands, low and steady like an old engine. “I have to do this.”
“If you let her go, she won’t stop at just hurting your father,” Eli said. “You realize that, right? More people will get hurt.”
“Don’t you get it?” Malcolm frowned. “People will get hurt if I don’t.”
“Look, Grim,” Sunny said. She took a cautious step forward. “I know what it’s like to have so much anger inside your chest that you feel like it’s eaten everything good inside you. I promise you I’ve done much worse, and I’m still here. We can fix this. Come on. Don’t make me beg. You know that shit’s undignified.”
She smiled at him, this sad little half smile. Eli edged forward alongside her, and Malcolm knew. He just knew. If he let them get any closer, they would talk him out of it. He would hand over the fang and change his mind. They might even forgive him. They’d probably go back to Pam’s and finish their original plan. But he also knew his mother wouldn’t find another chance like this. She would only get worse. She would forget. He would be alone, and that felt… intolerable. Because now he knew. Now he knew what it was like to not be alone. He couldn’t go back to how things were. He wouldn’t.
“I’m sorry,” Malcolm said. He raised his hand and sent his magic shooting toward them. It poured from his palms in a hot, blinding white light that he felt all the way down to the roots of his molars. Before he could lose his nerve, before either Sunny or Eli had a chance to register what was happening, he leapt forward, grabbed the fang, and plunged it straight into the mirror.