Chapter Sixteen #2
Hill glared at it for a second and then grabbed it as he stepped over the low wall around the grave.
“What happens if we fail?” he asked. “If we don’t get through to Fraser by tomorrow.”
Nothing good.
Davy supposed he should lie about that, but it would hardly be convincing. Hill had seen enough of the Beyond to know that Death wasn’t a forgiving place.
“Whatever it is,” Davy said as he curled a tentacle around Hill’s waist, “the last thing you’ll hear before it happens is that you should have just let me kill him.”
“I don’t know,” Trudy fussed as she picked at the edges of the gauze dressing on Davy’s hand. “Maybe you should see a doctor.”
Davy took his hand back. “It’s just an allergic reaction,” he said. “It’ll be cleared up by New Year’s.”
That was very probably the truth, one way or another.
“He probably caught something, lurking around old churches,” Fraser said as he stepped away from his tense conversation with the police and joined them. “There’s a reason they close the gates at night.”
Trudy glanced at him and then at Davy. A pale eyebrow lifted interrogatively.
“Is anyone going to normalize giving context?” she asked. “Or is this a boy’s club only?”
It would, Davy thought as he glanced sidelong at Hill, help.
Hill leaned in to murmur in his ear, which wasn’t necessary, but Davy enjoyed it, so he didn’t point that out.
“I was at St Januarius last night,” he said quietly. “It’s where Dad is buried. I wanted him to think that’s who I wanted to use the Invocation for.”
“I take it someone saw me?” Davy asked.
“Saw you where?” Trudy poked for an answer.
“I went to see Dad,” Davy said. It rarely bothered him to lie, but that felt weird on his tongue. He had to fight the urge to look apologetically at Hill. “I wasn’t going to…I didn’t expect to get in. It just felt bad not to try.”
Trudy sighed and gave Davy a look that was more disappointment than anger.
“Again?” she said. “Oh, Hill.”
“I can understand that,” Fraser said. “But you should take Father Thomas’ advice. You don’t want to see your dad like that.”
He sounded genuinely grim. Davy wondered what he thought he’d seen last night when Hill had confronted him. Before he could try and pry, Fraser’s phone rang in his pocket. He fished it out, glanced at the screen, and pulled an apologetic face at Trudy.
“I need to take this,” he said. “I’ll see you at the car.”
He turned and walked away through the gravestones. Snow crunched under his expensive loafers as he took a shortcut off the main path.
Trudy watched him walk away and then turned back to Davy. “I should go with him,” she said. “Something is bothering him, and that’s when he fires people. I’m still going to see you tonight?”
“I have a costume and everything,” Davy confirmed.
She nodded and left, picking her way precariously through the snow in heels. When she caught up with Fraser, they exchanged a few words, and then he turned to come back over to them.
“I’ll send a car to fetch you tonight,” he said and held up his hand. “No arguing. There’s been some unexpected tensions with some of our business associates. It’s best to play it safe for a couple of days. Understood?”
The last thing Davy wanted to do was lie. The Dudley bus system could have been worse, but it also could have been a motorbike. He knew which he’d prefer. Unfortunately, that was Davy, and he could, out of the corner of his eye, see Hill bristling at the offer.
“I don’t mind taking the bus,” he lied.
“I mind,” Fraser said. “Just take the car. I don’t want to worry your mother.”
Hill was still gesturing no, but Davy had made his pro forma protest. That would have to do.
“Fine,” he said. “But that’s your birthday present.”
Fraser looked amused and satisfied. Before he could go, Davy stepped forward and looked at him intently.
“Is there anyone you’d want to talk to?” he asked. “With the Invocation?”
Fraser gave a startled, not very amused chuckle at the question.
“If you’d asked me last week…” he muttered, then shook himself. “No. Nobody. The dead should stay dead. It’s kinder. On them and on us.”
He shoved his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and hunched his shoulders up towards his ears. The expression on his face was troubled as he turned and stomped back over to Trudy.
“You were right,” Hill said. “It looks like Mark, whoever he is, struck a nerve.”
Davy hung his fancy dress costume in its garment bag on a hanger and hooked it over the top of the wardrobe door. He had just turned away to go into the bathroom when his phone rang.
There were only a few people it could be. Davy picked the phone up and waited in silence to find out which of them it was.
“If Davy’s really back?” Gallagher said after a moment. “Tell him to fuck off. I’ve sent you what I could find on Tannenbaum, and that’s it. We’re square now. No more debt.”
“And the new ID?”
“With the courier,” Gallagher said. “They’re on schedule to deliver tonight, at the party, like you asked. I had to use some age progression software on the photo I had of him. Hope he doesn’t mind, but I made him bald.”
She hung up.
Davy reached up with a tentacle to touch his hair. Although he supposed it was Hill’s hair, so he couldn’t claim any of it officially. Not that he’d needed to. He’d died with a full head of hair, so that wasn’t going to change now.
Besides, he shared at least 50 percent of his genetics with Fraser, and Fraser had a good head of hair.
While Davy struggled with his unexpected insecurity about his hair, he opened his email program and waited. It had already been sent, according to Gallagher, but it was only when he opened the app that the email appeared at the top of the list. No tone. No notifications. It just arrived.
He opened it and flicked down and across, sliding the unresponsive PDF back and forth on the small screen to get all the details. It was a thorough report—Gallagher had her pride—but Davy just skimmed it.
All he really needed was the Cliff Notes version, and Gallagher delivered. The highlights of Tannenbaum’s last thirty years popped off the page for him.
Debt.
Bankruptcy.
Insurance fraud.
Divorce. Two of those.
His house was foreclosed on. His parents' house burned down.
He was on the no-fly list.
Hell, apparently he’d been the victim of a home invasion in the early hours of this morning. He was going to spend Christmas in a hospital.
It was a lot of misfortune for one man, but the sticking point was that Tannenbaum didn’t seem worth all that effort. He was politically moderate, socially neutral, and he drove at the speed limit. There was nothing about him that seemed like the trigger for a decades-long harassment campaign.
Fraser had been called a sociopath before—as had Davy, although that hadn’t been in a therapeutic environment—but he wouldn’t spend resources on something like this without a reason.
He didn’t have a green front door. Davy checked. It had been red.
His tentacles had been draped around the room while he read: draped over the back of a loveseat, slung bonelessly over the handle of the bathroom door, curled up on the bed like a cat. They suddenly stirred and picked themselves up.
Davy turned as Hill walked into the room. He looked…tired? He did, but that wasn’t it exactly. It took a second, but Davy remembered the word his mom had always used for people she didn’t care for.
Drawn.
He looked drawn, like someone had just sketched him in. Last night had drained his eyes to a dull greenish gray and left shadows at his temples and collarbones. Or maybe that was just the Invocation, a supernatural reaction to being somehow wrong.
“You look like shit,” Davy said.
“Thanks.” Hill reached out and stroked one of the tentacles absently.
The brush of his fingers against it still mapped straight to Davy’s cock.
It seemed crass to bring it up right now, though.
He shifted his weight awkwardly instead.
Before he could think of something to say, Hill spoke up. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Davy asked.
Hill gave a humorless little laugh. He reached up and stuck his finger in his ear, wriggling it briefly.
“For whatever is going to happen if Fraser doesn’t redeem himself,” he said. “You were right. I should have just let you kill him.”
“I know.”
This time Hill’s snort of laughter was genuine, and hard enough to make his eyes water.
Davy waited until he finished.
“I was definitely right,” he said. “I want that on record, but…I’d rather you were. It’s not the real world, but I like your world better. In your world, I’m better somehow.”
Hill sniffed and wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. “But you still wish I’d just let you kill Fraser?”
“So much,” Davy said. He put a companionable tentacle around Hill’s shoulder. “But you didn’t, so we’ve got to convince Fraser to make right a lifetime of wrongs with a masquerade ball and a spirit with a mistaken identity.”
“By midnight.”
Davy checked the clock. “Five hours,” he said.
“You really think we can do it?” Hill asked dubiously.
“No,” Davy admitted. “But if all else fails, I’m just going to kill him and hope for the best.”
The rite clamped down on his jaw in punishment for that blithe threat. It felt like prongs being driven down into his jawbone, like how he’d always imagined muzzling to feel. But it made Hill laugh again, so he’d bear it.