Page 58 of Any More Questions for the Corpse?

There was a shocked pause as his family froze, then Mal embraced all that he was.

The lights flickered and Mal vanished. A creature appeared behind his parents at the head of the table: a skeleton emblazed in shadow. Mal’s parents collapsed onto the dinner table as the anima was taken from their bones. Mal’s siblings looked at him with all the horror and disgust his parents had. Even Jocea could not hide her fear. The hourglass-thingy began to shake with the room. Slowly, it opened. A small shadowy ball floated out from Mal, suspended in the air. It moved steadily toward the pink hourglass-thingy. Scratching, clawing at the air around it. All eyes were fixed on the horror show. It landed in the hourglass’s opening, which snapped swiftly shut around it. In an instant, the room was back to normal, and so was Mal. Shock and terror still filled the eyes of Mal’s siblings.

“I’m done. These two are your problem now.” Mal pointed to his parents before turning to Jocea and whispering, “Sorry.” Mal’s parents were slowly coming back around, getting up from the table as if they’d both nodded off. Mal went back to addressing the others. “That thing”—Mal pointed to the pink egg-timer-hourglass that gleamed in the middle of the dining table—“will keep these two going in my absence. It should go off once a week, then reset itself. Don’t touch it.”

Mal let out a long, slow breath, one he felt he’d been holding in for over a decade. Then he turned around and walked straight out the front door.

23Lost and Found

“You alright there, Mal?” Des said, throwing a tiny ball of paper at him.

It had been nearly seven hours since Mal had abandoned his family, and he was not doing so well. Something was eating away at his stomach. He thought he’d done the right thing; it felt like the right thing at the time, but now, now he just hurt.

“I think so,” Mal said, rejoining the land of the living. The gang was lounging around the library; they’d pushed several pieces of furniture together to form a sort of semicircular menagerie of comfort in front of the fireplace. They were slouched and slumped upon them eating pizza, and watched as the fire crackled gently at their feet. Mal had spent a good five minutes dealing with a confused pizza man trying to explain where he needed to go. For some reason the Order’s secret headquarters wasn’t on his map.

While they ate, the group had been trying to figure out whether they should go to Taran’s funeral or not. Yu was firmly against it. Hala and Des were firmly for it. Mal had zoned out. They all agreed it felt strange being invited, especially because it had been Elaine who’d invited them. They all agreed they should pay their respects to Taran, but none could decide on what to do about Elaine. She had helped cover up several murders and could have prevented more had she come forward. Taran wasn’t exactly to blame for any of his actions, but they all agreed Elaine could have done something.

Yu thought they should pay their respects after the funeral so as to not let Elaine know their intent; Hala and Des wanted to go, but for very different reasons. Hala wanted to tell Elaine that they weren’t going to pursue her for anything she’d done, and Des wanted to tell Elaine the exact opposite and that she should expect to be wearing a purple tracksuit in her near future.

(Purple in this case because all magical UK prisons require inmates to wear purple tracksuits upon entry. I would tell you why but you’d think I was taking the piss. Okay, you twisted my arm, I’ll tell you. During the fifties a specific shade of purple called “Byzantine Magenta” was scientifically deemed the most magical color. You’d think magical scholars would have better things to do with their time, but here we are—they can’t all be Merlin. Anyway, because magical prisoners are contained within a large dampening spell, the color is supposed to help the inhabitants feel some vestige of their lost power. Most people also believe the garishness of the color forms a part of the punishment.)

Mal still hadn’t formed an opinion on the matter. (That being what to do about Elaine, not the color purple, of which he was a fan.)

“What do you think about all this?” Des said, nudging Mal.

“I agree,” Mal said, doing the conversational equivalent of looking at the ground while walking headfirst into a lamppost.

“Yes, but with who?” Yu said, gesturing to the group.

“With whom …” Hala whispered, taking glee in correcting them.

“All of you …” Mal said.

“You sure you’re alright?” Des said, nudging him once more.

“Sorry, let me turn my brain on. Hala is right—”

“See!” Hala said, triumphantly.

“Let me finish. If Elaine was willing to die to put this right, clearly she’s hurting. But Des is right”—Des glared triumphantly back at Hala—“that she did break the law, and guilt doesn’t mean no punishment.”

“So …” Hala said, “what do you think we should do?”

“What can we do?” Mal said. “Everything she did was part of the mess that the Order covered up. These killings are never going to be ‘officially’ solved. What can we actually do?”

“We could frame her for a similar crime?” Yu said, to an array of glares. “Okay, no framing, fair enough.”

“So your solution is …?” Des said.

“I’m not sure,” Mal said. “We should go pay our respects; he did save our lives. But maybe not at the funeral.”

“See!” Yu said.

“I don’t know, it feels wrong not going,” Hala said.

“I know,” Mal said, “but that funeral is about mourning the man those people knew, not what he became at the end.”

Mal remembered the little funeral Walters had given Kosh after everything that had happened. Once Mal had put the skeletons back in their graves, Walters had found Kosh’s parents and buried him with them. The others didn’t seem to understand, and Mal couldn’t blame them; Kosh had tried to kill them all. But after the others had headed back to the car, Mal watched as Walters mourned the man Kosh had once been.