Chapter Fifteen #2
It had been a few years since he’d last been here, so he’d not noticed before, but…
The house his stepfather lived in wasn’t that different from the one his brother had been buried under.
It was in better repair and was in a better neighborhood; the bus driver hadn’t hesitated to let Davy disembark at the nearest stop.
Still a strange coincidence.
“Is your mom going to be here?” Davy asked. He snapped a pair of blue gloves over his hands and forced the circuit box on the side of the building open. As he looked at the breakers inside, he made a pleased noise in the back of his throat. “I love old buildings.”
“No,” Hill said. “Mom moved to the lake house full-time during Covid…I mean, you missed it, but there was—”
Davy cut him off. “We didn’t get to work from home,” he said. “But trust me, the dead don’t miss a pandemic.”
That made sense. Hill hunched his shoulders and shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. The card that Seb from the Company had given him jabbed up under his thumbnail on one hand, and he barked his knuckles on the sharp eye sockets of the bird skull Hen had given him.
He’d forgotten about those. It was lucky they’d not fallen out when he was—
Hill glanced at the tentacles. They were currently hackled up as they tossed the makeshift shelter of the unmuzzled spirit that had been squatting back there.
He—she?—had made themselves scarce without needing to be told when they’d seen Hill.
The tentacles had unearthed a sickle-bladed knife from the bedding, which they passed between themselves, while two others pulled out a mildewed book and hung it up by one corner.
Well, earlier.
“Yeah,” Hill said as he tried to get back on track. “Anyhow, she lives out there full-time now. Fraser stays here during the week and goes to visit on weekends. He’ll be here. He’s usually alone.”
“Good,” Davy said and flicked the breakers.
If Hill had been asked, he’d have said the building had already been in darkness.
He’d just edited out all the little power lights and chargers and the faint glow from a TV left on standby.
Hill hadn’t realized the cumulative glow they generated.
When they all cut out at once, the shift to absolute darkness was noticeable.
“Are you going to tell me the plan?” Hill asked.
Davy straightened up, stripped his gloves off, and stuck them in his pocket. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand and looked up at the second floor of the building.
“I think it’s time that my brother gets a visit from your dad,” he said. “And since we’ve had no luck tracking him down…”
He trailed off. A tentacle pulled Hill’s hood up over his head and tugged it down until it nearly touched his nose.
“But he can’t see me,” Hill said. “None of the living can.”
The tentacle pushed the hood back again, enough so that Davy could meet his eyes. “They can’t see spirits,” he said. “They can see polts…some of the time.”
Hill couldn’t even pretend to be shocked. He tried, but he didn’t even fool himself. The minute he’d broken that table, Davy had started to work up to this.
“I don’t…I can’t control it,” Hill said. “I could hurt someone. I could knock down another building. I could hurt you.”
Davy cupped the side of his face in a tentacle. The tension in Hill’s stomach untwisted, just a little, as he turned his face into the caress.
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Asshole.”
The tentacle gave the end of Hill’s nose a tweak. “See?” Davy said. “You do know me. And we don’t need you to unleash the full experience, just…crack the door for Fraser. Let him get a glimpse under the curtain. Like at the cafe. Or when I made you come.”
A tentacle grazed suggestively along the small of Hill’s back. It dipped down under the waistband of his jeans and delved briefly into his crack. He reached back and pulled it out.
“What if I lose control?”
Davy thought about that for a moment as he used his tentacles to zip up the hoodie.
“Try not to, but if you do—” He put two tentacles on Hill’s shoulders and turned him around. “Face away from me.”
Power cut or not, Hill knew the brownstone had a backup security system.
In the living world. In the Beyond, once he got away from Davy’s grounding presence, it was a tenement with stories stacked up until it needed to lean against the building next to it for support.
A woman with a short seed-cracking beak and overalls with a name embroidered on them gave him an annoyed look as she pushed by him in the hall.
“Sorry,” Hill muttered as he shuffled to the side.
“Wet dead,” she said, like it was a slur. At the door, she paused, sighed, and looked back at him. “You know anyone? Family? Friends? Ex who died in a horrible car accident?”
Hill shuffled his feet on the cracked tiles. They were the same in the living world, although the colors were brighter from restoration and they were covered with an expensive rug his mom had picked out. She was never there, but she liked it to still remind Fraser of her.
“My dad,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows at him, glanced at her bare wrist, and clacked her beak together. “And is your ‘dad’ in the building?” she asked.
“I’m looking for him,” Hill said.
He didn’t think it was that convincing. It was good enough for a dead woman with places to be. She visibly marked off her brief concern for him as “resolved” and let herself out.
“Don’t leave any doors open,” she said and slammed the door behind her.
Hill rubbed his chest.
“It’s the walls you should be worried about,” he muttered and poked at the hollow in his chest.
It did nothing.
If Hill felt anything about this—the childhood home his dad’s killer had made for him—he couldn’t get to it. Habit, practice, the shape of his neurodivergence? He didn’t know which to blame or how to get around it.
Except that was a lie. He might be able to bury—or not be able to unbury—his feelings, but he’d never had much luck ignoring logic. Nearly every time he’d used his polt abilities had been triggered by a taste of the living world.
He slid his hand into his pocket. The cookie he’d taken from Seb’s office was crumbs in a greasy napkin at this point.
He pulled it out and tipped its debris into his palm.
A few chunks of chocolate and smears of cream fell between his fingers and bounced off the floor.
The taste of it, when he licked his palm, was sweetness undercut by the stale texture of the cookie and a burst of breathless, uncomplicated joy that was so pure it nearly gave Hill a headache.
A kid, he realized, happy with her cookie and the taste of her own socks as she pulled one canary-yellow foot up to her mouth. The nappy, dry texture of the wool on her gums and…
It had just happened every other time. This time, Hill clung to the feeling and used it like a lodestone to find something similar in him.
It was socks. That was…vaguely embarrassing in a way Hill couldn’t explain. The memory still felt painfully fresh, almost raw.
It had been a month after his dad’s death that Fraser spent the night for the first time.
He’d slept on the couch, his bare feet in expensive socks the first thing that Hill saw when he came downstairs in the morning.
At the time, he’d not thought anything of it, other than being glad to see his uncle.
Later…
Now…
When had Fraser first looked at his mom and thought, “She’s smart and she’s got—”
The walls either side of Hill cracked. Plaster dust splattered the floor underfoot as the tiles cracked and crunched to powder.
He flinched back as the world shattered white, and he saw the still-familiar hall of the brownstone, dimly lit by the light of the moon through the uncurtained front windows.
Frost spread over the pictures hung on the wall, cracking the glass and blistering the ink that chronicled Fraser’s perfectly acceptable life and family.
The antique Tiffany light fitting—another addition of his mom’s—swung violently from side to side.
Hill reached up without thinking to try and steady it. If it broke, his mom would be devastated. She’d gotten it at some Virginia swap meet and— The glass clipped through his fingers and popped. The spray of glass studded the blandly cream wall with fragments of color.
That hurt too much. Maybe it had been throwing in that little bit of disgust at the end.
He shouldn’t have brought his mom into it. It wasn’t like he didn’t know that he couldn’t cope with thinking honestly about that.
He never thought honestly about that.
Hill didn’t think he could put it back into the bottle now, though.
The stairs creaked as he climbed them. The varnish on the banister bubbled, and the spindles cracked, top to bottom. Under his feet, the fabric of the carpet frayed and stained.
Face it that way, Davy reminded him in memory.
He was downstairs, in Fraser’s office next to the kitchen, as he looked for anything they could use. Hill just had to trust that Davy wouldn’t get him arrested—again—and not look that way.
Hill got to the top of the stairs and headed toward the master bedroom. The closed door stymied him for a second, until he remembered trying it once.
The handle rattled but didn’t open. Hill gave it a shove and, on the other side of it, heard his mom giggle.
“Give me a second,” she said, breathless, and then muttering something he’d not caught to someone else. “I needed a nap.”
Hill flinched away from the memory like it stung him. The white that bleached out the world made his eyes hurt.
Couldn’t he just stick to sad, he thought irritably? Did he have to go for psycho-sexual trauma on top of it?
It did work, though.
The handle of the door was crumpled, a child’s fingerprints crushed into the metal, and it swung open.
Fraser still liked expensive socks.
His stepdad lay on top of the bed, still dressed and with paperwork stacked on the bed next to him. He was already awake, and he squinted at the door as he sat up.
“Trudy?” he said.
There had been a plan, the rough outline of a script. It hadn’t been as detailed as Hill would have liked, given the short notice Davy had given him, but he’d done his best. The problem was that when he’d come up with it, he’d not factored in the gutful of despair and grief.
“He was your friend,” he blurted out instead. “She was your friend’s wife. I was his son!”
The papers were blown off the bed, and Fraser was forced back against the pillows. He cringed back and threw his hand up in front of his face.
“How do you do it?” Hill demanded. “Just get up and kiss your friend’s wife and say goodbye to your friend’s son and go to work at your brother’s company? When it’s your fault!”
The headboard of the bed cracked in half. Fraser rolled onto his side and grabbed for the drawer. He yanked it open and pulled out a gun.
It shouldn’t have been—Hill knew who Fraser was and what he’d done before—but it was still strange somehow to see him hold the gun like he knew how to use it.
“Everything you have is built on death,” Hill spat. “You put the people who love you in the dirt and take what they had. Now you have to pay. You have to, that’s how it works. That’s what makes things right.”
Fraser swung the gun up. His finger hovered on the trigger as he squinted at whatever he could make out of Hill, through the Veil and the black hoodie.
“Mark?” he said. “Is that you?”
“You killed my dad!” Hill screamed.
The windows shattered, and the alarm went off.
“What was I supposed to do?” Fraser yelled. He scrambled up onto his knees and lowered the gun. “You went dark, and I didn’t know why. Was it him? I ruined him., Every fucking night, I ruined him. Isn’t that enough? What else do you want?”
He didn’t know.
It was too ridiculous to even despair over.
All that anger and grief just ran out of Hill like someone had opened a tap in his gut.
The living world faded away, his last glimpse of it Fraser throwing his gun at the wall in frustration, and he sank to the ground in the wreckage of someone’s studio apartment, among the broken furniture and torn-up clothes.
Everything he’d done, all the sacrifices he’d made, literal and figurative, and whatever the Invocation would cost him in the long run?
Fraser thought it was all for someone else.
For everything Hill had done, it looked like death wasn’t so different from life. It didn’t matter how hard he tried to be seen, to fit in, to prove his worth. No one saw him. Not really. Not the him that was under the skin and the diagnosis.
Hill buried his head in his hands and laughed at the absurdity of that until he cried.
He might have just cried; there was no one there to confirm that, though.