Opposite him, Davy swore under his breath as he pried at the melted casing of the burner phone with his thumbnails. The tipof his tongue was caught between his teeth as he worked at it. His scowl was in direct contrast to the piped-in Christmas music on repeat through the mall’s speakers.
“It was easy,” Davy said. “I just told your mom it would make me happy. Happy brother-in-law, happy Christmas blow-out. Right?”
His tentacles snuck up onto the table, over the arms of the chair, and poked at the phone. Or tried to. Davy made an annoyed noise under his breath as they blocked his view. He shooed them back off the table.
They slunk back down. Hill could feel them sullenly coiled under the table, loops of heavy undead flesh draped over his shoes. He tried not to think about what they had, recently enough that he could still feel the ache of it, done to him.
It had been…
He wasn’t ready to think about that, actually. So he frowned at Davy instead.
“You didn’t tell her…”
Davy looked up long enough to give Hill a deadpan stare. “You really think if I told her…” He paused, glanced at the couple at a nearby table, and reached up to push the earbud more securely into place. “Told her the truth, her reaction would be to throw me a party? No, I didn’t. She just thinks the therapist you’ve been seeing about feeling suicidal suggested it.”
It took a second for Hill to recover from that one. He finally pulled himself together enough to shut his mouth and scrubbed his hands over his face. It was his own fault, he supposed. He should have just thought about the tentacle sex.
“The Per Se,” he said. “It’s just around the corner from where I ran into you, isn’t it? My mom took you—me—to brunch?”
“She seems nice,” Davy said. “Fraser was punching up.”
He finally popped the back of the phone off. The already damaged plastic cracked in half as it came apart. Davy swept itoff the table into the bag at his feet and pried the SIM card out. He turned the narrow wafer of plastic and circuitry over on his fingertip as he checked for obvious damage.
Hill stifled the urge to strangle him and twisted his fingers in the cuffs of a hoodie he’d found hanging in the Beyond’s version of his wardrobe.
“That’s what Dad always said, too,” Hill said. “Everyone did, but Mom…Mom always said she was lucky to have him.”
Davy paused halfway through slipping the card into the new phone. He gave the cafe’s plate glass window a wary look and then cocked a silently questioning brow at Hill.
“It’s fine,” Hill said. “I’m not going to…it takes more than just being sad.”
Probably. He said that like he knew, and he really didn’t. It was good enough for Davy, though, who finished installing the sim and depressed the power button with his thumb. While he waited for the phone to run through its start-up, he took a drink of coffee.
Hill reached over the table without thinking to turn the phone so he could see the screen. The display flickered as his fingers grazed over—and a little through—the glass, but that was it. Hill made a frustrated sound in the back of his throat and curled his fingers into a fist. The table rattled under them. Davy cursed as he spilled the coffee he’d just set down. The eavesdroppers next to them put their hands on the cutlery and looked around.
“Like being useless,” Hill said. He held up both hands in surrender and slumped back in the chair as he tried to feel nothing. “That will do it too, I guess.”
Davy waited to make sure there weren’t going to be any aftershocks. Then he grabbed a napkin to sop up the puddle of coffee on the tabletop.
“Don’t get too attached to that idea,” he said. “I’ve got plans, once we finish here, that depend on your being useful.”
Hill straightened up in the chair. “Really?” he said. Despite it being what he wanted, nerves almost immediately set in. He cleared his throat. “Are you sure? Is it safe from the Hounds?”
“It should be,” he said as he tapped at the keyboard with both thumbs. He typed like he was his actual age. “As long as we move fast. What was the name of the restaurant? Delicious?”
“Deli-licious,” Hill corrected him. He got up, stepped over the loosely coiled tentacles, and moved to look over Davy’s shoulder. “Hen said that Fraser had a real grudge against the owner. She thought he’d had them shut down. I suppose they’re lucky he didn’t have them killed.”
Davy shook his head absently. “No,” he said. “Getting them shut down is on brand. Fraser didn’t like killing people. He can’t keep making things worse for the dead.”
At the table next to them, the man snorted out a laugh and muttered, “Like your sister” to the woman opposite him. She glared at him and took a resentful bite of her croissant, crumbs scattered in front of her.
The search results finished loading on the phone. A vintage Facebook page, a defunct Tripadvisor entry, a handful of food reviews, and a food blogger’s reaction to the closure. Davy flicked down, back up, and then tapped the image tab with the side of his finger.
A man grinned, arms crossed over his compulsory artisanal black canvas and leather apron, from in front of the Delilicious. He had short red hair, a birthmark on his jaw, and a wedding ring that glinted gold from one finger.
“I know him,” Davy said. He snapped his fingers as he tried to pull something up out of memory. “Trevor? Thomas? Something with a T.”
Hill gave him a sour look. “You remember the guy who made your bagels, but not my dad?”
