Chapter Two #3
The glass had started to steam up again. Davy let it as he turned back to the shower. He cleaned under his nails to get rid of the rime of hare’s blood and filth, then turned his hand palm up to let the hot water soak into the wound. He hissed softly under his breath at the sting of it.
“I didn’t… I don’t want…” Hill said from the other side of the glass. “Are you listening?”
“Hmm,” Davy said affirmatively. He shook the water off his hand, the water pink-tinged as it circled the drain, and got out of the shower to grab a towel to scrub his hair. “You didn’t want…?”
Hill stared at him, cleared his throat, and managed to flush—not easy when you didn’t have a body to hand. He glanced down at Davy’s cock and then dragged his attention back up to his face.
“Could you at least put a towel on?” he asked.
Davy started to ask, but what the hell. Maybe he’d have been thrown to watch someone else walk around in his meat suit. He gave his wet curls one last scrub and then slung the damp towel around his hips, one hand needed to hold it closed at his waist.
He waited.
“I didn’t say I wanted Fraser dead,” Hill said. “What good would that do?”
That was really not the sort of question that Davy was equipped to grapple with. He stared at Hill for a second and then rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’d make my two days on earth a lot easier? Does that count for anything?”
“I want Fraser to understand what he’s done wrong,” Hill said. “And to make right what he can.”
A glib retort about how Hill still didn’t get a say was on the tip of Davy’s tongue. The seal snapped his jaws together before he could get it out, the cold, inexorable grip of it so tight he could feel it in the memory of his own cold, dry bones all the way back on the other side of town.
Hill had summoned him, and apparently Hill did get a say in what he’d summoned him for. Good to know.
“I’ve got it,” Davy said. “No killing. Justice it is.”
The clamp on his jaw relaxed as he gave Hill his way. Fine. It would have helped if he’d gotten a rundown on the rules to start with, but Davy could take a hint. Although considering he was the one Fraser had murdered, you’d think he’d get a say.
That…
Wait.
Davy narrowed his eyes at Hill.
“When you say you want Fraser to understand what he’s done wrong, you just mean killing your dad?” Davy asked. He poked Hill in the shoulder with a tentacle for emphasis. “Maybe throw in that it was a gray area to go ahead and marry the widow. Right?”
Hill shook his head. “I mean everything,” he said. “Everyone he’s hurt, every friend he’s let down, every deal he broke, every business partner he’s betrayed. All of it.”
Davy started to say something, stopped himself, and took a deep breath.
He held it until he remembered what it felt like to be dead.
Then he asked, “Seriously? Do you have any idea how many…how often he’s…
What do you care who else he’s fucked over?
They obviously don’t care enough about it to stick a knife through their hand. ”
If there was actually any justice, even just a fucking mote, in the world, that would have done the trick. Davy had smooth-talked a bunch of people into getting fucked, or fucked over, without making as good a point as that.
Instead of agreeing, though, Hill just grimaced and shoved his hands into his pockets, his shoulders hunched up to his ears.
His voice was low and scratchily reluctant as he said, “Despite what he did—what he does—Fraser’s been good to me.
To my mom,” Hill said, his voice low and slow.
“He paid for my school and my therapists and a whole life with us. A good life. A life he funded with money from fucking everyone else over, including my dad. All these years, I benefited from what he did because he cared about me and Mom. Meanwhile, the people he didn’t care about suffered.
If all that bothers me now is my own pain, in making that whole for me, then that’s just the same thing, isn’t it?
People that matter to me matter; the rest don’t.
How would that make me any better than him? ”
There was a lot that Davy wanted to say in answer to that, but the cold muzzle of the rite had snapped shut around his jaw again.
Nobody got to be “better.” Everyone played the game. Then they died and played some fucking more.
Apparently Death didn’t want its favorite little idiot here enlightened on how the world worked.
Davy tried to squeeze a “fuck” from between his teeth, but the icy bite of the geas pushed down on his tongue like a salt-cured thumb.
“Fuuuu…ine,” he conceded, pulling his lips back in a frustrated snarl. “You bled for this. You get to call the shots.”
Hill wasn’t quite dumb enough to look relieved. He just relaxed his shoulders and nodded before taking a deep breath.
“Right, first of all, you’re not going to the party,” Hill said. “I don’t want my mom or anyone else—”
Davy tapped the end of a tentacle against Hill’s mouth to hush him.
“No, I think I’m going,” he said, and waited for the icy bite of the rite’s muzzle around his teeth. When nothing happened, he worked his jaw from one side to the other to loosen up the ache and smirked at Hill. “I should say ‘hi’ to my new sister-in-law, if nothing else.”
Hill went pale.
Paler.
Davy’s tentacle caressed the sharp line of Hill’s jaw and tangled through his hair.
“Don’t worry,” Davy told him. “Moms love me.”
It was a waste of a lie—seriously, even his own hadn’t much cared for him—since Hill didn’t look comforted. There was only so much you could do to help people, though.
Davy dropped the towel to the floor, the expensive cotton soaking up the water that dripped off him, and sauntered naked back into Hill’s bedroom. He ignored the choked sound that came out of Hill’s mouth.
They only had until Christmas Day to work with. He needed to get started….