Page 100 of Mortis

Shocked into silence, Arlo, Kael, and I stared at the floor, shuffling from foot to foot like three naughty dogs caught taking a shit in the house.

“There’s been too much going on around here lately for it to be a coincidence,” Grandad continued, shaking his head. “The break-in. The moving coffins. I may be old, and I may be soft, but I’m not bloody daft. So someone had better start talking.”

Honestly, the whole thing made me feel like the world’s worst grandson. I knew Arlo felt guilty about keeping the smaller incidents from him. I could see it in his face. In the glassiness of his eyes and the slight tremble of his lower lip as he scuffed the toe of his boot against the floor. But none of this was Arlo’s fault. He wasn’t the reason a fucked-up cult was targeting the funeral home. He wasn’t the reason they knew where we worked, where we lived, or who mattered to us.

No, that was all me.

I couldn’t even blame Kael. Not really. Sure, he’d broken into the funeral home and tried to eat one of my clients. And sure, his inner beastie might’ve killed me where I stood if that first night had gone differently. But I was the one who’d invited him into our lives. I was the one who’d offered him another way to survive. A life where he didn’t have to murder innocent people simply to sate his hunger.

Rather than turning my back on danger, I’d opened the door and welcomed it inside. Into my life. Into Arlo and Grandad’s. Into our home. Our business. And I couldn’t bring myself to regret it for a single fucking second.

Because if I’d turned Kael away, if I’d banished him back to Barrowfell Woods, I wouldn’t have seen his face the first time he tasted human food that hadn’t come directly off a corpse. I wouldn’t have introduced him to anime or watched him become absorbed in my favourite manga. I wouldn’t have seen his eyes light up whenever I taught him something new about embalming, or watched him slowly find his own place at Adler & Sons.

I wouldn’t know what his laughter sounded like. What his skin felt like beneath my hands. What it was like to fall asleep with his arms wrapped around me and wake up knowing they were still there.

I wouldn’t have kissed him.

I wouldn’t have fallen for him.

I would’ve carried on exactly as I had before. Hiding in a back room, surrounded by the dead while life continued without me on the other side of the door.

A ghost among the living.

Kael had changed that.

So yes, I felt guilty about our current bout of misfortune. Guilty that Arlo and Grandad had been dragged into something they didn’t understand. Guilty that Mr Simpson’s family had suffered because of a decision I’d made. But as Kael had told me only hours before, I couldn’t regret the path that had brought him to my door. And I wasn’t about to shove him back over the threshold just because something ugly had followed him through it.

So, in the end, I’d told Grandad the truth.

Partially.

A little bit.

Okay, it was still considerably more lies than truth, but it was progress.

I told him about the strange occurrences. The man lurking outside, watching the funeral home. The morning we’d arrived to find the front door unlocked despite nothing being taken. I admitted I’d had nothing to do with the coffins being switched, and that Arlo and I had discovered it at exactly the same time he had.

I left out the part about the mysterious man being connected to a cult.

I left out the symbol carved into Mr Simpson’s chest.

I didn’t mention Sebastian, his veiled threats in the town square, or the fact that he apparently wanted to drag Kael back into a hundred years of trauma.

Small details, really.

Kael remained silent throughout my confession. Not that he could’ve contributed much without turning a difficult conversation into one that involved phrases like Prince of Hell, ritual sacrifice, and cannibalistic cryptid.

But that was fine. I was happy to protect him. And when Arlo tried to shoulder some of the blame, I cut him off and admitted that keeping everything from Grandad had been my idea. That I’d convinced myself there was no point worrying him over something I could handle on my own. Because I was happy to protect Arlo too. Arlo and Grandad both.

They were my family. A family that Kael was becoming part of. And whatever came through our door next, I wouldn’t let it take them from me.

Grandad didn’t speak to me for two days. Honestly, it was the longest we’d ever gone without speaking in my entire life. The man loved to chat. He was always happy to talk my ear off, whether I wanted him to or not. Given the fact he’d raised me, and I loved him unconditionally, I always let him. So forty-eight hours of silence was torture.

But I didn’t push. If Grandad wasn’t talking, it meant he needed space, and I was willing to give him as much as he wanted if it meant we’d be okay in the end.

A few days after the incident in the town square, I was finishing Mr Simpson’s preparations. His body had finally been released after the police held it as evidence, and I was surprised his family still wanted us to handle the service.

According to Arlo, Grandad had offered them a full refund. He’d even started making arrangements to have Mr Simpson transferred to another funeral home in the next town over. But his family had refused, vehemently. They wouldn’t allow anyone other than Adler & Sons to send Mr Simpson off. They said that what had happened was a terrible incident. But they didn’t blame us. In their eyes, we were victims too. Someone had broken into our funeral home and stolen a man from our care. We couldn’t have known it would happen.