“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 notsomeoneyou’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 youdoing?” 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 gonetomorrow 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.
Chapter Eighteen
Dec 24, 9.10pm
Davy had expected tobe angry when he came face to face with Fraser again.
Sure, he’d always expected to die young and, if he was honest, which wasn’t like him, he’d probably deserved it. Not forwhatever reason Fraser had for the murder, but in general. He’d not been a good man in life.
Or death, but there wasn’t really any consequence for that. It seemed to be an advantage.
His little brotherhadstill murdered him, though. That was the sort of thing that stirred up all sorts of things from the silt. Or that’s what he’d thought anyhow.
Instead, maybe because he didn’t remember the murder, Davy just watched Fraser avoid a good time like it was a job and felt…
OK, he couldn’t put his finger on it exactly. It was one of the ones he wasn’t good with, but it wasn’t angry or vengeful.
