Instead of agreeing, though, Hill just grimaced and shoved his hands into his pockets, his shoulders hunched up to his ears. His voice was low and scratchily reluctant as he said, “Despite what he did—what he does—Fraser’s been good to me. To my mom,” Hill said, his voice low and slow. “He paid for my school and my therapists and a whole life with us. A good life. A life he funded with money from fucking everyone else over, including my dad. All these years, I benefited from what he did because he cared about me and Mom. Meanwhile, the people he didn’t care about suffered. If all that bothers me now is my own pain, in making that whole for me, then that’s just the same thing, isn’t it? Peoplethat matter to me matter; the rest don’t. How would that make me any better than him?”
There was alotthat Davy wanted to say in answer to that, but the cold muzzle of the rite had snapped shut around his jaw again.
Nobodygotto be “better.” Everyone played the game. Then they died and played some fucking more.
Apparently Death didn’t want its favorite little idiot here enlightened on how the world worked.
Davy tried to squeeze a “fuck” from between his teeth, but the icy bite of the geas pushed down on his tongue like a salt-cured thumb.
“Fuuuu…ine,” he conceded, pulling his lips back in a frustrated snarl. “You bled for this. You get to call the shots.”
Hill wasn’t quite dumb enough to look relieved. He just relaxed his shoulders and nodded before taking a deep breath.
“Right, first of all, you’re not going to the party,” Hill said. “I don’t want my mom or anyone else—”
Davy tapped the end of a tentacle against Hill’s mouth to hush him.
“No, I think I’m going,” he said, and waited for the icy bite of the rite’s muzzle around his teeth. When nothing happened, he worked his jaw from one side to the other to loosen up the ache and smirked at Hill. “I should say ‘hi’ to my new sister-in-law, if nothing else.”
Hill went pale.
Paler.
Davy’s tentacle caressed the sharp line of Hill’s jaw and tangled through his hair.
“Don’t worry,” Davy told him. “Moms love me.”
It was a waste of a lie—seriously, even his own hadn’t much cared for him—since Hill didn’t look comforted. There was only so much you could do to help people, though.
Davy dropped the towel to the floor, the expensive cotton soaking up the water that dripped off him, and sauntered naked back into Hill’s bedroom. He ignored the choked sound that came out of Hill’s mouth.
They only had until Christmas Day to work with. He needed to get started….
Chapter Three
Dec 22nd, 10am
The good went toHeaven, the wicked to Hell, and the unquiet dead lingered in Purgatory.
That was the Church’s party line. They mostly avoided dealing with Purgatory, though, except in the vaguest of terms. Even inthe rabbit holes that Hill had gone down over the last year, there hadn’t been a lot of detail to find.
Still, he’d formed a vague concept of what it was like.
Empty. Uneasy. Somewhere there was no rest. Misty and soft-edged.
Maybe he should have realized that the dead took up more space than the living. The…Beyond, Davy had called it…was a slightly undersaturated magic-eye version of the Dudley that Hill knew. The familiar streets and most of the buildings were there, but just with morefoldedinto the geography to make them fit. An alley would open up like origami to reveal trees long since uprooted and streets that had been renamed or buried years ago. Every building extended beyond what he remembered, stacked up toward the sky with layers of mismatched architecture and clumsily proportioned windows.
It made his head hurt if he looked too hard at it, so he tried not to. The closer he stuck to Davy, the more “real” the living world seemed.
A tentacle wrapped around his waist, casually intimate in the way it hooked into the pocket of his jeans, and nudged him away from a pothole in the road he’d not noticed.
Hill touched it absently in thanks and then shook his head.
“Real” obviously needed a bit of a mental update, he supposed.
The tentacle uncurled from his waist and reached up to push a long hanging branch out of Davy’s way. Davy didn’t seem to notice, and Hill wondered idly if the tentacles were somehow sentient or just autonomous in the same way that blinking and breathing were.
He’d fallen a few steps behind Davy as he thought about that and almost missed it as a cafe door swung open. A lifetime of not paying enough attention to his surroundings made him hop back in time to avoid crashing into the man coming out.
