Page 11 of Mortis

The question whispered through the back of my mind.

And not for the first time, I chose to ignore it.

“Teds . . .”

Something tickled the side of my face, and my brain made a half-arsed attempt at rebooting. The fog of sleep was still too thick, though, and I could already feel myself drifting back under.

“Teddy . . .”

Hearing my name stirred something in my head, because the voice was familiar.

Arlo.

It sounded like Arlo.

But why was he in my dream?

A sharp prod to my bicep made me groan. Still mostly asleep, I tried to roll over. But before I could, a heavy weight landed on my lap, pinning me to the mattress. Claw-like hands gripped my shoulders and shook me until the haze of sleep slowly ebbed away.

“Theodore Thomas Adler, will you wake the fuck up?!”

I slowly opened my eyes. Warm light spilled through the crack in my bedroom door, illuminating the lump holding me hostage. Despite my bleary vision, I immediately recognised Arlo looming over me and realised he hadn’t been part of my dream after all.

He’d been in my bedroom and deliberately woken me up.

The little shit.

“Lo?” I croaked, my mouth dry. “What time is it?”

Arlo shifted on top of me. I reached up to rub my eyes, but before I could, a pair of round wire-framed glasses were placed carefully on my face, and the world snapped into focus.

Arlo was dressed in a pair of black-and-white striped silk pyjamas. The shorts had ridden halfway up his thighs, and his pale skin practically glowed in the dim light. His hair was tied back in a tiny ponytail, and star-shaped stickers dotted his cheeks.

Spot treatment.

At least, that’s what he’d claimed.

Honestly, it looked like he’d lost a fight with a stationery cupboard.

“It’s almost two.” He shrugged, as though waking me in the middle of the night was a perfectly normal thing to do. Though, to be fair, Arlo had never let something as trivial as social norms stop him from doing anything before.

Arlo rolled off me, landing in the empty space to my left. He’d slept there often enough after nightmares that I’d started sleeping on the right side of the bed by default, leaving room for him if he needed somewhere safer than his own. And after eight years, waking up to find Arlo wrapped around me like an octopus was hardly surprising, even if I’d gone to bed alone.

The man treated personal space like a personal insult.

Normally he was quiet when he snuck in like a thief in the night. The only time he ever woke me up like this was⁠—

Realisation slapped me across the face, and I groaned.

“The security alarm.”

“It’s your turn,” he reminded me, poking my shoulder. As if there was any chance I’d suddenly forgotten why he’d launched himself directly onto my bladder at two in the morning.

I sighed.

Adler & Sons’ alarm didn’t go off all that often. But every now and then, we’d get a call from the security company my grandad had used since before I was born, reporting a possible break-in. Usually, it was nothing. Blackthorn was small, barely a town at all, really. With a population of just under two thousand, almost everybody knew everybody, and there was an unspoken rule about not screwing with local businesses.

Nine times out of ten it was nothing more than a group of bored teenagers, trying to prove they were brave enough to spend the night in a building full of corpses. Which, in my professional opinion, was a stupid decision. Spending a night with the dead was hardly exciting. I’d done it myself loads of times.