A flood of emotions washed over Trudy’s face. Some of them didn’t sit easily together. The brief glimpse of relief surprised Davy, although that was quickly unseated by fear. She grabbed his hands. Her fingers traced over Hill’s knobbly knuckles and the faint spray of freckles as if to confirm it was his.
“My son,” she asked. “Is it…is he gone?”
Her voice, other than a brief catch, was surprisingly composed. It was her fingers that shook. Davy took her hands in his and held them still. He was surprised at how gently he did it. Maybe even without Hillinit, the body remembered something of the man.
“He’s not here. At midnight, when this is over, I’ll go back through the Veil and Hill will get his bones back,” Davy said. With any luck it wouldn’t be a lie. “What happened to me, Trudy?”
She chewed her lower lip, worrying off the coat of Pepto-Bismol pink color.
“Do you need to know?” she asked. “For this to…end well?”
Davy studied her face. She’d had work done, from the woman he remembered, but it was subtle. In the circles she moved with Fraser, there was a fine line between not trying and trying too hard. He had the feeling that she’d been clinging to that line by her fingertips for a long time.
“No,” he said. “Hill might, but that’s up to you.”
She looked down at their linked hands and, very deliberately, pulled hers away from him. She straightened the collar on her jacket.
“So, I don’t have to say anything?” she said.
“You don’t,” Davy said. “I’m just curious if Albie killed himself from guilt or shame.”
That made her flinch. The surprise on her face was sharply obvious as she looked at him. She tilted her chin and smiled thinly.
“And to think, I never thought you were smart enough to be cruel, Mark,” she said.
The ‘Mark’ still didn’t feel right.
“No, just lazy,” Davy said. At least, that had been what every teacher who’d tried to motivate him as a kid had said. “Did you—”
He broke off as, over Trudy’s shoulder, he saw Reynolds in a Prince Charming outfit shoving a middle-aged man in shabby overalls through the crowd. Davy didn’t recognize him. The pieces only fell into place as the man looked around, and hesaw the freckles swimming on drink-ruddy skin and the dregs of ginger at his temple.
Fraserhadalways hated to leave a job unfinished.
“…killed you,” Trudy’s confession pulled his attention back to her. For a second he weighed the satisfaction of knowing against the embarrassment of having to ask her to repeat that. He supposed he already knew more than he had to start with, so… Luckily, she touched her stomach as she went on. “I wanted Albie to get us away from you, but he wouldn’t listen. He just kept talking about loyalty and how he’d known the risks the same as you when he’d signed up. But that wasn’t true. You were violent people; he wasn’t. We weren’t. We shouldn’t have been part of that world.”
“So you killed me?” Davy asked. He kept one eye on Reynolds as the man headed toward the back of the house.
“I didn’t really think it through,” Trudy admitted, with a half-hearted laugh she choked on. “Sorry…I…I was sorry. It was just that you came to my house for something, and I was so angry. Then you were dead. I don’t really remember the bit in the middle. Just hating you, then you were dead. It was like it just happened, on its own. Except for the blood all over me. When Albie came home, he said we couldn’t let Fraser know what had happened. That we had to get rid of the body…you.”
“So he dug the grave.”
She nodded. “He cried the whole time,” she said. “He never even liked you that much, but it broke him doing that. That night, I knew we’d not survive what I’d done, but I didn’t realize he wouldn’t. Now you know, what are you going to do?”
Davy sighed, blowing the sheet away from his face. He leaned over the dropped a kiss on Trudy’s forehead.
“I’m going to go and stop my brother from making the worst mistake of his life. Or, at least, what would be the last one,” hesaid. “Then I’ll go back to being dead and leave you to pick up the pieces.”
She laughed shakily at that. “Son-of-a-bitch,” she said as she sniffed back tears and wiped her nose on her hand. “You fight dirty.”
Davy shrugged his acknowledgement of that. He turned to leave her there as he pushed through the crowd of vampires, cats, and serial killers after Reynolds. Before he got far, Trudy grabbed hold of his sleeve from behind and fell in next to him.
“What are you--?”
“I don’t love Fraser,” she said. “He’d not have appreciated that, but we have a good life. I don’t want to lose it. And I don’t want to lose Hill the way I lost his Dad. He can’t think that anything that happens here tonight was his fault. I’m not sitting this one out. You can’t make me.”
Davy begged to differ. Hecouldhave made her, but…
“Fine,” he said. “Let’s make it a family affair, sis.”
