Chapter Fifteen
“You never did tell me how you pulled the costume party off,” Hill said. He poked the bag at Davy’s feet with his toe. It didn’t crinkle with the contact.
Opposite him, Davy swore under his breath as he pried at the melted casing of the burner phone with his thumbnails. The tip of his tongue was caught between his teeth as he worked at it. His scowl was in direct contrast to the piped-in Christmas music on repeat through the mall’s speakers.
“It was easy,” Davy said. “I just told your mom it would make me happy. Happy brother-in-law, happy Christmas blow-out. Right?”
His tentacles snuck up onto the table, over the arms of the chair, and poked at the phone. Or tried to. Davy made an annoyed noise under his breath as they blocked his view. He shooed them back off the table.
They slunk back down. Hill could feel them sullenly coiled under the table, loops of heavy undead flesh draped over his shoes. He tried not to think about what they had, recently enough that he could still feel the ache of it, done to him.
It had been…
He wasn’t ready to think about that, actually. So he frowned at Davy instead.
“You didn’t tell her…”
Davy looked up long enough to give Hill a deadpan stare.
“You really think if I told her…” He paused, glanced at the couple at a nearby table, and reached up to push the earbud more securely into place.
“Told her the truth, her reaction would be to throw me a party? No, I didn’t.
She just thinks the therapist you’ve been seeing about feeling suicidal suggested it. ”
It took a second for Hill to recover from that one. He finally pulled himself together enough to shut his mouth and scrubbed his hands over his face. It was his own fault, he supposed. He should have just thought about the tentacle sex.
“The Per Se,” he said. “It’s just around the corner from where I ran into you, isn’t it? My mom took you—me—to brunch?”
“She seems nice,” Davy said. “Fraser was punching up.”
He finally popped the back of the phone off. The already damaged plastic cracked in half as it came apart. Davy swept it off the table into the bag at his feet and pried the SIM card out. He turned the narrow wafer of plastic and circuitry over on his fingertip as he checked for obvious damage.
Hill stifled the urge to strangle him and twisted his fingers in the cuffs of a hoodie he’d found hanging in the Beyond’s version of his wardrobe.
“That’s what Dad always said, too,” Hill said. “Everyone did, but Mom…Mom always said she was lucky to have him.”
Davy paused halfway through slipping the card into the new phone. He gave the cafe’s plate glass window a wary look and then cocked a silently questioning brow at Hill.
“It’s fine,” Hill said. “I’m not going to…it takes more than just being sad.”
Probably. He said that like he knew, and he really didn’t. It was good enough for Davy, though, who finished installing the sim and depressed the power button with his thumb. While he waited for the phone to run through its start-up, he took a drink of coffee.
Hill reached over the table without thinking to turn the phone so he could see the screen.
The display flickered as his fingers grazed over—and a little through—the glass, but that was it.
Hill made a frustrated sound in the back of his throat and curled his fingers into a fist. The table rattled under them.
Davy cursed as he spilled the coffee he’d just set down.
The eavesdroppers next to them put their hands on the cutlery and looked around.
“Like being useless,” Hill said. He held up both hands in surrender and slumped back in the chair as he tried to feel nothing. “That will do it too, I guess.”
Davy waited to make sure there weren’t going to be any aftershocks. Then he grabbed a napkin to sop up the puddle of coffee on the tabletop.
“Don’t get too attached to that idea,” he said. “I’ve got plans, once we finish here, that depend on your being useful.”
Hill straightened up in the chair. “Really?” he said. Despite it being what he wanted, nerves almost immediately set in. He cleared his throat. “Are you sure? Is it safe from the Hounds?”
“It should be,” he said as he tapped at the keyboard with both thumbs. He typed like he was his actual age. “As long as we move fast. What was the name of the restaurant? Delicious?”
“Deli-licious,” Hill corrected him. He got up, stepped over the loosely coiled tentacles, and moved to look over Davy’s shoulder. “Hen said that Fraser had a real grudge against the owner. She thought he’d had them shut down. I suppose they’re lucky he didn’t have them killed.”
Davy shook his head absently. “No,” he said. “Getting them shut down is on brand. Fraser didn’t like killing people. He can’t keep making things worse for the dead.”
At the table next to them, the man snorted out a laugh and muttered, “Like your sister” to the woman opposite him. She glared at him and took a resentful bite of her croissant, crumbs scattered in front of her.
The search results finished loading on the phone. A vintage Facebook page, a defunct Tripadvisor entry, a handful of food reviews, and a food blogger’s reaction to the closure. Davy flicked down, back up, and then tapped the image tab with the side of his finger.
A man grinned, arms crossed over his compulsory artisanal black canvas and leather apron, from in front of the Delilicious. He had short red hair, a birthmark on his jaw, and a wedding ring that glinted gold from one finger.
“I know him,” Davy said. He snapped his fingers as he tried to pull something up out of memory. “Trevor? Thomas? Something with a T.”
Hill gave him a sour look. “You remember the guy who made your bagels, but not my dad?”
“I thought we’d agreed that was the Company’s fault,” Davy said. He tapped one of the images and bounced his heel impatiently as he waited for the information to load. “And I didn’t know he had a deli, I was just fucking him.”
At the table next to them, the woman sniffed over her croissant. “Now that sounds like your sister.”
They glared at each other. Hill felt briefly guilty at being the unheard cause of contention, but then got distracted as Greg Tannenbaum—and yes, he was a bit smug that Davy had been so wrong about the name—appeared on the phone.
“I…um…didn’t expect that,” Hill said. “Was it serious?”
Davy glanced up at him, raised an eyebrow, and then went back to the phone.
“You’ve met me,” he said. “What do you think?”
Hill braced himself for that to sting worse than finding out Davy used to have a thing for a guy that would call his restaurant “Delilicious.” After all, it wasn’t like Hill had thought Davy was a virgin.
If he dismissed someone he’d actually been with like that, though, what did it mean for some sad little orphan he couldn’t even touch?
It should have hit Hill in every nerdy, neurodivergent, never-fitting-in insecurity he’d built up over the years. Except…
You don’t need to miss me.
Because Hill had met the man, and that was up there with “I know” on the declaration of feelings by the emotionally incompetent scale.
Whatever the force that approved or denied opening the Veil had expected this to be? It wasn’t nothing. Probably a tragedy, and definitely time-limited, but it was still more of Davy than Greg Tannenbaum had gotten.
Hill leaned on Davy’s shoulder—well, on a handily placed tentacle in the same general area—and squinted at the screen.
“I meant, was there any reason for Fraser to think he mattered?” he said. The tentacle he was leaning on curled up his arm and along his shoulder. It idly caressed his jaw as he talked. “That you’d have told him something? Or he saw something?”
Davy snorted. “I’d be fucking offended if he did,” he said. “It wasn’t like we were dating. We just fucked sometimes.”
He paused and glanced over at the eavesdroppers next to him. “Now you either commit to the fight and bring up someone’s mother, or get the fuck up and go pay your bill.”
The man bristled. His partner had the good sense to think better of it and grabbed his arm. A quick glare and a tug at his sleeve gave him enough time to decide she was right. They got up in a huff and stalked off.
Davy stared flatly after them to make sure no one had second thoughts. Then he went back to flicking through web entries on Greg while he picked up his phone. Hill glanced at him and then after the cowed couple.
It was times like this that made it hard to remember that, to the rest of the world, that was Hill. He could see Davy’s lean body and heavy, brutally handsome face. All they saw was Hill…a man who’d never successfully intimidated anyone unless it was over the Erie doctrine.
Apparently, the spirit did make the man.
“Maybe Fraser was jealous,” Hill said.
“Of Greg?” Davy said skeptically. “I doubt it. Fraser didn’t bother with his dick much, but when he did, it liked smarts and pussy.”
Oh.
OK, there was the horrific price that Hill had to pay for violating the natural order. Those words were not going away.
While Hill swallowed bile, Davy frowned over the phone.
Then he made a rude noise and swiped the screen closed.
“There’s something there. You were right about that,” he said.
“The man’s house burned down. That’s a bit too much bad luck to be natural.
But we’ve only got a day left, so there’s no time to dig into it.
I’ll see if I can get Gallagher on the job. ”
“You told her you only wanted one thing,” Hill said.
“I lied,” Davy said. He drained his coffee cup, head tilted back and throat working, and grabbed his bag as he stood up. It got slung over his shoulder, whatever costume was inside straining the plastic handles. “I do that. You should try it. In fact, why not start now?”
He smirked and headed off across the forecourt. Hill tried to hesitate, but the tentacle already had hold of him, so he just got hauled along for the ride.
Hill paused on the street and stared at the flat facade of his stepfather’s brownstone.