Chapter Seventeen #2
There was one thing he definitely remembered, though. No matter how much he tried to forget.
The grass underfoot turned to the cobbles of the stable yard. Hill pulled his arm out of Hen’s grip.
“Where were you that day?” he asked. “When he killed himself, where were you?”
She spun on her heel to glare at him.
“Do you want to see him or not?” she snapped. “It wasn’t easy to make this happen, you know. It’s only because you’re special, and it still wasn’t easy. Look what they did to me!”
Hen snatched the mask off her face. The skin had been peeled off before, to leave bare bone for the mask to catch on, but now it was scraped down to the bone. Tool marks scored over the white surface of her jaw and cheekbone.
“Where were you?” Hill insisted.
She heaved an aggravated sigh. “At work!” she said. “I had a job, didn’t I?”
That sounded like a real question, not a rhetorical one. And she’d been dead a good year when Albie killed himself. She might have been at work, but it had been here. Not in the living world.
“Why?” he asked.
Hen stared at him, then turned and bolted for the stables. “He’s here!” she yelled as she grabbed the doors and threw them open. “You can get him. I’m sorry I helped him before!”
The Hound shoved her out of the way. There was no malice in it, just impatience. It still bounced Hen off the wall. She slid down to sit on the ground, her arms folded over her head, as the rest of the Hunt followed the lead out.
Five of them, although one of them was dragged out on all fours, the bridle twisted around his head and gripped in another Hound’s gauntleted hand.
“I’m sorry,” Hen said into her knees.
She might have meant it for Hill or the Hounds. It was hard to tell.
“Me too,” Hill said.
He turned on his heel and ran. Back the way he’d come at first, but when he got to where he’d left them, Davy was gone. Fraser was still there, his cigar smoked down to a stump, but he stared through Hill with those cold, heavy eyes.
Hill muttered a curse under his breath, changed direction, and ran back toward the house. He didn’t have a plan. It might be OK. Davy always made that work.
He crashed through the kitchen doors shoulder-first and rolled over the floor.
The staff, the living ones, stepped through or on him without noticing as they fed in and out of the party.
It was only the dead, with serving trays of steaming roast things and pitchers of milky cocktails, that stepped over or around him.
Hill pushed himself back to his feet, hands slipping on the floor, and shoved his way through both toward the doors. He wasn’t quick enough.
Someone behind him grabbed a handful of hair and yanked him back.
The dead servers cringed back against the wall, eyes wide and beaks agape with panic. The bright pink insides of their mouths seemed to pulse as they stared at the Hounds.
Dangled from one of the Hound’s pawlike fists, Hill managed to stretch up onto his tiptoes to take his weight. He swiveled around to stare at the Hound, both hands raised to claw at the big gauntleted hand.
“Why?” he asked. “I’ve only got three hours left. Why can’t you leave me be?”
To his surprise, the Hound actually looked sympathetic. Not enough to let him go, but his eyes looked soft, and the long jut of his muzzle was relaxed.
“Because it isn’t right,” the Hound chewed the words out. “The dead and the living don’t mix. It opens doors.”
Hill kicked at him. It didn’t do much good. “Once it’s Christmas Day, I’ll be living again. I’ll not have anything to do with the dead until I’m dead. I swear.”
For the first time, the Hound curled its lip. Over the words, not the kick.
“You lie.”
“No,” Hill said. “I’m not. I won’t.”
“There’s always someone,” the Hound said. “There’s never not someone you’d lie for.”
It backhanded him. Hill’s vision ran black at the impact; then he hit a table and crashed to the ground.
He took a stack of plates and serving trays with him that landed with a clatter around him.
Hill tried to get up. He thought he was doing a good job until he realized the Hound had dragged him by the collar.
“After a while,” the Hound said as it handed him off to two other Hounds. They grabbed his arms and kept him on his feet, “You won’t even mind.”
They dragged him, ankles uncooperative, out of the kitchen.
Hill couldn’t focus on despair or anything else through the rattle in his skull. He dangled from their grip as they marched through the party. The dead quailed back as they passed, hands up to cover beaks and maws and mouth parts in polite shock.
Just as Hill was about to give up, he saw his mom stride across the room, dodging around the living who got in her way. For a second, Hill felt like a kid at school again, not sure if he was happy to see his mom ride to the rescue or humiliated.
Both, maybe.
“What are you doing?” Trudy demanded of a server. “I told you, the champagne is for the toast! Take it back.”
Hill clung to the feeling with both hands.
It might only be the memory of despair—and a kid’s sharp, here today and gone tomorrow despair at that—but it was all he had.
It wasn’t enough. The world cracked around him—shattered white lines spreading out across the world—but before it could break completely, one of the Hounds grabbed him by the hair.
A yank pulled his head back, throat pulled tight and exposed, and then a bridle was shoved in his mouth.
Nothing happened at first; then his skin turned to acid and his bones to liquid fat. He could feel skin and flesh peel away from his bones, absorbed by the mask as it grew new bone spurs to hook onto his skull. The teeth bit down into his tongue and…
It was like food. But inside the little boba pops of life he’d stolen from cookies or coffee or the taste of a tentacle on his tongue, this was death. Someone’s death. The death of every tooth that gashed his tongue.
The painful, airless squeeze of his chest as he struggled for just one more breath of air that tasted of bleach and shit and other people’s vomit.
Blood spread in a slow, glossy pool under it. He could see his face in it, the reflection blurred and dark, and the mess the bullet had made of his skull.
Water, bitter and chlorinated in his nose, as she sank under. Again. This time, she just let it happen and sank
…down
….down
The deaths drugged Hill and dragged him down into the cold, heavy grave with them. The Hound let him go with a shove and he slumped to the ground. That was what a dead man did, after all.