First Death
'"You know what it's like when your parents are good churchgoing folk and you happen to be born with the devil's mark?" He pointed at his eyes, fingers splayed. "When your father flinches at the sight of you and your mother hangs herself in the barn, driven mad by what she's done?"'
Magnus Bane
City of Bones, Pg 215
"Well, what do you have to say for yourself?" snarles his father, looking down at him. Magnus shudders and doesn't say anything. "Answer me!" The blow to the side of his face is hard but not unexpected, and he doesn't fall. In the corner his mother gasps slightly.
"I didn't do it," he whispers quietly, afraid to say the wrong thing. "I didn't do it, I swear. They were coming towards me and then they just kind of... fell. Like they tripped or something. Into the river. It wasn't me, I wasn't anywhere near them!"
It's the wrong thing to say. Hands grab his hair and force his head back, pinning him to the wall as he struggles. "Am I supposed to suppose," whispers a voice above him in dangerously calm tones, "that the fact that these boys happen to be fellows that you don't get on with is a complete coincidence, then?"
"Yes," he says, voice slightly stronger. Maybe he hasn't said the wrong thing. The hands leave his hair, and he relaxes.
It is a mistake. The hands return, tightening this time around his throat like an iron collar. He yelps, foolishly using up most of the oxygen in his lungs, scrabbling at the hands that are slowly but surely choking him.
"If you won't speak the truth, boy, then you won't speak at all." The words are distant and almost impossible to understand because the world is bluring and his brain doesn't seem to be working. There is screaming and wailing and shouting and swearing, but he doesn't hear, doesn't care. The hands tighten a final time and he shivers, collapsing headlong into the darkness in front of him.
When he wakes, the house is dark, quiet and almost imperceptibly wrong. The air is still and flat, like cider left uncorked for too long. Missing something. A tingle of something, running up his spine, makes him flinch - it is the same feeling from the riverside, where the boys fell...
There is a tugging at his stomach and he follows it, a strange sense of nausea welling up in his throat. He walks outside the house and follows the tugging across the cracked paving slabs towards the old barn. The nausea is building. The barn is empty, hasn't been used for years due to the fact that the roof's come off, leaving just large, wooden beams criss-crossing the sky. If he is honest with himself, it scares him.
He approaches the barn door and feels shivery and strange, like when he had a fever three months back. There is a thrill running up and down his spine, and what feels like a rock lodged in his stomach. The door creaks when he opens it, and the first smell that hits him is one of damp hay and straw. Rusting metal is next, the strange coppery tingle on his tounge.
And finally, Death. He had had no idea Death had a smell until now, when it hits the back of his throat like a slimy, congealed... something. It makes him feel sick, and when he lifts his eyes and sees the body hanging from the rafters, he is sure he shouldn't be surprised. The strange tingling is back, sharper this time, and his voice seemes stronger than it has any right to be as he calls out, "Hello?"
The body is swinging slowly, and it is blown around to face him. He feels sure he should be screaming and crying, but he hasn't the breath. He stands there, shivering uncontrollably in the mild summer air, staring at the empty face of his mother. Then, ever so slowly, he backs away into a corner of the barn and throws up, the nausea and his churning stomach finally getting the better of him. Afterwards he crawls out of the barn and curls up on the damp grass, still shivering. Finally his eyes close and he slips into an uneasy, haunted sleep.
He will awake the next morning to screaming, as his father finds the body.