Hill flinched away from the memory like it stung him. Thewhitethat bleached out the world made his eyes hurt.
Couldn’t he just stick tosad, he thought irritably?Did he have to go for psycho-sexual trauma on top of it?
It did work, though.
The handle of the door was crumpled, a child’s fingerprints crushed into the metal, and it swung open.
Fraser still liked expensive socks.
His stepdad lay on top of the bed, still dressed and with paperwork stacked on the bed next to him. He was already awake, and he squinted at the door as he sat up.
“Trudy?” he said.
There had been a plan, the rough outline of a script. It hadn’t been as detailed as Hill would have liked, given the short notice Davy had given him, but he’d done his best. The problem was that when he’d come up with it, he’d not factored in the gutful of despair and grief.
“He was your friend,” he blurted out instead. “She was your friend’s wife. I was his son!”
The papers were blown off the bed, and Fraser was forced back against the pillows. He cringed back and threw his hand up in front of his face.
“How do you do it?” Hill demanded. “Just get up and kiss your friend’s wife and say goodbye to your friend’s son and go to work at your brother’s company? When it’s your fault!”
The headboard of the bed cracked in half. Fraser rolled onto his side and grabbed for the drawer. He yanked it open and pulled out a gun.
It shouldn’t have been—Hill knew who Fraser was and what he’d done before—but it was still strange somehow to see him hold the gun like he knew how to use it.
“Everything you have is built on death,” Hill spat. “You put the people who love you in the dirt and take what they had. Now you have to pay. Youhaveto, that’s how it works. That’s what makes things right.”
Fraser swung the gun up. His finger hovered on the trigger as he squinted at whatever he could make out of Hill, through the Veil and the black hoodie.
“Mark?” he said. “Is that you?”
“You killed my dad!” Hill screamed.
The windows shattered, and the alarm went off.
“What was I supposed to do?” Fraser yelled. He scrambled up onto his knees and lowered the gun. “You went dark, and I didn’t know why. Was it him? I ruined him., Every fucking night, I ruined him. Isn’t that enough? What else do you want?”
He didn’t know.
It was too ridiculous to even despair over. All that anger and grief just ran out of Hill like someone had opened a tap in his gut. The living world faded away, his last glimpse of it Fraser throwing his gun at the wall in frustration, and he sank to the ground in the wreckage of someone’s studio apartment, among the broken furniture and torn-up clothes.
Everything he’d done, all the sacrifices he’d made, literal and figurative, and whatever the Invocation would cost him in the long run?
Fraser thought it was all for someone else.
For everything Hill had done, it looked like death wasn’t so different from life. It didn’t matter how hard he tried to be seen, to fit in, to prove his worth. No one saw him. Not really. Not thehimthat was under the skin and the diagnosis.
Hill buried his head in his hands and laughed at the absurdity of that until he cried.
He might have just cried; there was no one there to confirm that, though.
Chapter Sixteen
Dec 23, 11.10pm
Davy braced himself againstthe wall as a crash made the glass rattle in the windows.
He glanced at the ceiling, cracks spiderwebbed through the expensive plasterwork, and then checked the time on his phone.He ran a few timings through in his head on how long it would take the Hounds to get there.
