Chapter Twenty #2
Davy took a step forward, running on very old instincts, and kicked the gun out of the way. It skittered under the desk and came to rest somewhere out of sight with a thump.
“It’s nearly midnight,” Fraser said. “What happens then?”
“I don’t know,” Davy said. He stared down at Reynolds as he wrestled with an unfamiliar feeling that twisted sour and green in his gut.
It could either be guilt or the creeping suspicion that a dead Reynolds would be no more easily scraped off than a living one.
He could work it out later. Davy spun around and hurried back over to Fraser’s side.
“But before midnight, you need to learn some sort of lesson about treating people better.”
Fraser closed his eyes in a slow, exhausted blink. When he opened them, he looked disgusted.
“Can’t you just kill me?” he asked with a weak sneer.
“Trust me, that’s the idea I started with,” Davy said. “But you raised a bleeding heart.”
Fraser looked sullen. “Anything I’ve done, I’m willing to answer for,” he said. “But I won’t ask forgiveness for doing what needed—”
Trudy’s voice cut through Fraser’s attempt to talk himself into damnation.
“I killed Mark,” she spat out. “I hid his body. That was me, and you’ve spent the last thirty years treating me well for it. Instead, you blamed this man? Tormented him because of what you said yourself, because you made a mistake. Admit it.”
Fraser looked stunned. “You did what—”
“ADMIT IT!” Trudy yelled, her voice cracking. “For fuck’s sake, our son needs you to just this once accept you fucked up.”
If anything, Fraser looked more shocked by the cursing than the confession. He opened his mouth a couple of times and then gave in with a mumbled admission.
“Maybe I should have…looked for more evidence,” he said.
Davy waited for a sense that the geas had lifted from him or for the Veil to split and a forgiving light from heaven bathe them both. None of them happened. He shrugged and slapped Fraser on the shoulder.
“Yeah,” he said. “Good enough. Buy him another deli or something.”
Fraser curled his lip in something that didn’t quite manage to be an expression as he rolled his eyes to the side to look around the room. “I may be dead before that goes through,” he said. “Or in jail.”
“As long as you mean to do it until midnight,” Davy said. He squeezed Fraser’s shoulder quickly before he pushed himself to his feet. “When you do die, look me up. I’ll put a good word in for you with people.”
Fraser snorted.
“People don’t like you.”
He had a point. Davy shrugged. “Look me up anyhow.”
Fraser smiled. His teeth were bloody. “Those IDs you had made?” he said. “I think you pissed Gallagher off. She made you bald. Trust me, you were lucky you died with hair. It didn’t look good.”
The moment was interrupted by Trudy’s strained, desperate voice. “You have a minute left,” she said. “Whatever you have to do to get my son back, do it now.”
She also had a point.
Davy took one last look at his brother, gave Reynolds’s leg a kick, and then headed out into the hall.
Now that he wasn’t otherwise occupied, he could feel the tug of something insistent in the pit of his chest. It was anchored just under his backbone and dragged him down the hall and toward the stairs.
Just before he stepped down onto the first step, Hill appeared below him.
Davy hesitated for a second as the sharp-beaked muzzle made him doubt himself, but he knew Hill’s eyes. His hands.
Long legs carried Hill up three more steps, and then he staggered to a stop just before he reached the top, arms windmilling for balance until Davy lassoed him with a tentacle.
“What happened?” he asked. His eyes flicked past Davy, and then he looked back over his shoulder as he clicked that borrowed beak together nervously. “Did you kill Fraser?”
“He’s not dead,” Davy said, “He just looks like shit.”
Hill reached up to touch Davy’s bloody face. For a second Davy thought he could actually feel the cold brush of spectral fingers.
“Are you OK?”
“Reynolds,” Davy said with a shrug. “You were right about swizzle-sticking his brain. It wasn’t good for him. But he’s dead now, so that’ll be my problem moving on.”
Somewhere, a bell started to toll. It didn’t sound like the sort of bell Trudy would have in her House and Garden spread house. Davy swore under his breath as he wrapped his tentacles around Hill, caressing his face and memorizing the nape of his neck.
Hill looked up. “Already?” he said. “I’m not ready. Davy, I think I lo—"
A tentacle wrapped under his beak and shushed him.
“Save it,” Davy said. “For someone who can do it back. Who can kiss you and give you a life. When that’s over, then you come find me…and I’ll make you fucking forget him.”
Davy unhooked the muzzle with his tentacles and slipped it off. He wanted to see Hill’s face one last time He caressed the side of Hill’s face with a tentacle and traced the line of his mouth.
“Fraser didn’t kill me,” Davy said. “He didn’t kill your dad either.”
Hill shook his head as he refused to accept that. “No. No, that makes no sense,” he said. “If Fraser didn’t kill you, how did you end up buried in the basement of a house my dad owned?”
It wasn’t a hard question to answer. All it took was a second’s thought. Davy had hoped that Hill would just accept his word, but he should have known better. He saw the pieces fall together as Hill’s face sank.
“No,” he said, his voice cracked. “He wouldn’t.”
“I guess he regretted it,” Davy said. “And he already paid the price, more than once.”
Hill kept shaking his head. “No,” he said. The certainty was already gone, though. “My dad?”
“Fraser never knew,” Davy dodged that question with a different truth. “He thought Greg—the deli guy—had killed me for another player.”
The bell tolled again. That was four.
“The Hounds are here,” Hill said. He pressed a kiss to one of Davy’s tentacles. Part of Davy had always, no matter how useful they could be, hated the pale, visible manifestations of his sin. Not right now. “Will you be OK?”
The bell struck five.
“Fraser learned a lesson,” Davy said. “He’s going to make things right.”
At least, one thing. That was probably enough.
“Once everyone is back where they belong, there’s nothing in it for the Hounds to hassle me,” Davy said. “You’re the one who shook things up.”
The bell struck six, and Davy felt the pressure suddenly intensify.
He sucked in a startled breath as he was squeezed out of Hill like toothpaste out of a tube.
The empty body dropped onto the stairs like a puppet with its strings cut.
Someone in the party that was, Davy realized, still happening downstairs, screamed in shock.
Then the living world faded as the Beyond reasserted itself on his senses.
Hill was still there. He stood in front of Davy, his silver green eyes wide with surprise.
“Hey,” Davy said. He reached up and cupped the side of Hill’s face with his hand. “I guess we get a minute.”
“It’s not enough,” Hill said.
“No.”
Over Hill’s shoulder, Davy saw one of the dogs, snub-faced, brindle muzzle scored with scars and jabbed with thorns, step onto the stairs.
Seb? He thought that was it. They’d done business before. He knew Davy, anyhow. His battered muzzle stretched into a dog’s wet, pink smile.
“Be smart, Davy,” Seb said as he started up the stairs.
Two Hounds followed him, although they looked worse off than he did.
“The dead stay dead. It might be useful if that wasn’t true, but it is.
We can’t have him going back to the world with all this locked in that pretty head of his.
Imagine what he could ask of us to do our bidding, what he could tell the living. ”
It was hard to tell if that was a threat or a suggestion.
Davy twitched as the clock struck nine. He wrapped a tentacle around the back of Hill’s neck and pulled him into a kiss that was cold and electric and tasted of bones.
They kissed with the frustration of two days of only being able to touch through proxy, and the slow, cold knowledge that it would be sixty years before they kissed again.
Finally, Davy pulled back. He stroked Hill’s mouth with his thumb.
“Don’t miss me,” he said.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Hill answered.
Davy grabbed him by the arms and waist, tentacles hooked around the waistband of his jeans, and tossed him up onto the landing.
Close enough to his body. While Hill spluttered a startled protest, Davy, now back in the clothes he’d died in, brushed himself down and grinned at Seb and the Hounds as they stalked toward him.
“I don’t suppose we can discuss this?” he said.
Seb glanced around at the Hounds that flanked him, then back to Davy.
“Maybe some other time,” he said. “Right now, get out of my way.”
Davy grabbed a champagne bottle someone had left on the stairs, tentacle wrapped twice around the narrow neck, and swung it around to smash against the side of the Hound’s head. He might not win this fight, but he’d make them remember it.
The bottle smashed, green bits of glass scattered on the carpet, and then the Hounds were on him.
They tore and battered each other. The Hound’s teeth ripped Davy’s hand down to the bone, and he ripped its ear off with a twist of a tentacle.
They slid and slipped on stairs slick with ectoplasm as Davy grabbed at muzzles and dug into eyeballs, and they shredded and ripped at him.
Eleven.
“Davy,” Hill blurted from behind him. “I can’t just…”
But it was too late for him to do anything stupid. The bell struck midnight, the Veil snapped closed, and Davy turned around just in time to see Hill’s body stir on the steps as its owner slid back home.
He was safe.
Davy grinned in relief and then swore as Seb grabbed him by the hair.
“You,” the Company dog said through bloody, broken teeth as he pulled Davy’s head back at an uncomfortable angle. “Owe me a polter.’
Davy spat at him.
That was dumb, but it was Christmas. He deserved a treat.