Mal, apparently lost in thought, took a moment before he turned back to Mo. “Feel what?”
Mo made a general kind of gesture in the air around her. “This breeze.”
It was a cool, damp breeze, that ruffled her short hair and raised goosebumps on her arms; it was one of the first winds of autumn, a sudden foreboding of early nights and falling leaves come unexpectedly out of the calm, drowsy September night. She’d only worn a t-shirt, not anticipating the need for anything more, and was now finding herself hugging her arms to her chest to stay warm. But Mal seemed not to have noticed at all.
“Hm? Oh. In a way,” he said.
“In a way? What does that mean?”
Mal shrugged. “I can tell that there is a breeze. But I don’t feel cold from it. Don’t feel cold at all anymore, or hot.”
This felt slightly unfair, considering that she was cold while meanwhile Mal was wearing three times as many layers as her. She didn’t mean to bring that up, exactly, but the question spilled out anyway: “If you don’t feel cold, why do you wear all that?”
Mal glanced down as if he was only just now noticing the clothes he was wearing: a hooded jacket and battered red scarf over a flannel shirt and a Doctor Who t-shirt underneath that. “Well, I like it,” he said. “But also, it helps pad me out.”
Mo shot him the raised eyebrows of confusion. Mal smiled. “I don’t really look like a living person anymore, do I? I mean, you’ve seen me naked--”
She would have done quite the spit take if she had been drinking anything. “Dude! You can’t just--”
“What? When you were doing the post-mortem on me--”
The post-mortem. The first time she had met Mal, all laid out on the slab like any other corpse. It was true she’d seen him naked. You saw a lot of people naked when you were a medical examiner. She’d gotten quite used to it. But said people weren’t supposed to wake up afterward. That made things feel awkward.
“Yes, I know, but you can’t just say that out loud like that,” she mumbled, glancing around to see if anyone had overheard. But the pier they were walking on was mostly empty. If any of few scattered other people around had overheard their strange conversation, they didn’t show it.
“Why not? No one’s listening. Anyway, you gotta live a little. And I say that as a dead person.” Mal flashed her an unnaturally white grin, and for a moment she caught a glimpse of something devilish in his eyes. It caught her by surprise. Not that she knew Mal very well yet, but in their limited interactions so far, he had always been polite, a bit awkward, and generally very innocent seeming.
Then again, he was a vampire. Probably you didn’t get to keep that position for long by being too innocent.
“My point is,” he went on, “when you saw me, did you think I looked normal?”
“Well...no. Not really,” Mo had to admit.
She’d known, even before she knew that Mal was anything other than another unidentified stiff, that there was something strange about him. It was hard to pin down—something about how thin he was, something about the build of his frame, the sharp angles of his bones, something, something—something off.
And he had looked like a corpse alright, all waxy pale skin and sunken, still face. He still looked like a corpse when he sat up and looked around, just a corpse that was moving. And that was...unsettling.
The extra layers did help, though. Buried under innocuous flannel and a nerdy t-shirt, there was a lot less of that unnatural figure to catch the eye. It made it much easier to think of him as just a normal person, and forget for a while what he really was.
“Okay, I see your point,” she said. “But...what about the scarf?”
“Sometimes I have to hide my face.” Mal pulled the edge of the scarf up over his nose and mouth and waggled his eyebrows at her. “Or hide some blood stains. I try not to be a messy eater, but sometimes...things happen.”
The breeze came back, and Mo shivered involuntarily. Mal glanced at her. “Are you cold?”
“Little bit,” Mo admitted. “Wasn’t expecting it to be this chilly this evening.”
“It gets cold by the water. Or so I’ve been told.” To her surprise, Mal slipped off his jacket and offered it to her.
“What? What about your whole...that whole thing you were just saying?”
Mal shrugged. “It’s alright for now. Not a lot of people around. Unless it makes you uncomfortable?”
He did look a little odd without the extra padding of the jacket, a strange, foreboding shape in the dim light. For a moment she felt a different kind of shiver, the age-old fear of looking out into the dark and seeing a monster lurking there.
But then she looked up at his face. The scarf had slipped back down, revealing his features again. Pale and sharp and...almost a little sad.
She took the jacket. It didn’t fit her so well; Mal was shorter than her and considerably skinnier, but she made it work.
“I can’t go getting uncomfortable around dead people now,” she said. “I’d be out of a job.”
Mal smiled. “So, anything else you want to know about?”
“Oh yeah. Loads.” They started strolling down the pier again, passing in and out of the glow of the lampposts overhead. “Does garlic bother you? What about silver? Holy water?”
“Pfff, garlic. Let me tell you about garlic...”
