“I don’t have time for this,” he said as he wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “And you’re not good enough for this.”
Reynolds swung the gun up. “I’ll see you soon,” he said. The muzzle jammed under his jaw, dug in so deep the stubbled skin looked ready to split. His finger tightened on the trigger. Davy lunged forward to try and pull the gun away. He wasn’t surewhy; this solved his immediate problem. But he did it anyhow.
He was too late.
The gun went off. Whatever flesh made Reynolds into Reynolds sprayed over Fraser’s desk and what was left toppled over backwards onto the floor. The gun dropped out of his hand.
Davy took a step forward, running on very old instincts, and kicked the gun out of the way. It skittered under the desk and came to rest somewhere out of sight with a thump.
“It’s nearly midnight,” Fraser said. “What happens then?”
“I don’t know,” Davy said. He stared down at Reynolds as he wrestled with an unfamiliar feeling that twisted sour and green in his gut. It could either be guilt or the creeping suspicion that a dead Reynolds would be no more easily scraped off than a living one. He could work it out later. Davy spun around and hurried back over to Fraser’s side. “But before midnight, you need to learn some sort of lesson about treating people better.”
Fraser closed his eyes in a slow, exhausted blink. When he opened them, he looked disgusted.
“Can’t you just kill me?” he asked with a weak sneer.
“Trust me, that’s the idea I started with,” Davy said. “But you raised a bleeding heart.”
Fraser looked sullen. “Anything I’ve done, I’m willing to answer for,” he said. “But I won’t ask forgiveness for doing what needed—”
Trudy’s voice cut through Fraser’s attempt to talk himself into damnation.
“I killed Mark,” she spat out. “I hid his body. That was me, and you’ve spent the last thirty years treating me well for it. Instead, you blamed this man? Tormented him because of what you said yourself, because you made a mistake. Admit it.”
Fraser looked stunned. “You did what—”
“ADMIT IT!” Trudy yelled, her voice cracking. “Forfuck’ssake, our son needs you to just this once accept you fucked up.”
If anything, Fraser looked more shocked by the cursing than the confession. He opened his mouth a couple of times and then gave in with a mumbled admission.
“Maybe I should have…looked for more evidence,” he said.
Davy waited for a sense that the geas had lifted from him or for the Veil to split and a forgiving light from heaven bathe them both. None of them happened. He shrugged and slapped Fraser on the shoulder.
“Yeah,” he said. “Good enough. Buy him another deli or something.”
Fraser curled his lip in something that didn’tquitemanage to be an expression as he rolled his eyes to the side to look around the room. “I may be dead before that goes through,” he said. “Or in jail.”
“As long as you mean to do it until midnight,” Davy said. He squeezed Fraser’s shoulder quickly before he pushed himself to his feet. “When you do die, look me up. I’ll put a good word in for you with people.”
Fraser snorted.
“People don’t like you.”
He had a point. Davy shrugged. “Look me up anyhow.”
Fraser smiled. His teeth were bloody. “Those IDs you had made?” he said. “I think you pissed Gallagher off. She made you bald. Trust me, you were lucky you died with hair. It didn’t look good.”
The moment was interrupted by Trudy’s strained, desperate voice. “You have a minute left,” she said. “Whatever you have to do to get my son back, do it now.”
She also had a point.
Davy took one last look at his brother, gave Reynolds’s leg a kick, and then headed out into the hall. Now that he wasn’t otherwise occupied, he could feel the tug of something insistent in the pit of his chest. It was anchored just under his backbone and dragged him down the hall and toward the stairs. Just before he stepped down onto the first step, Hill appeared below him. Davy hesitated for a second as the sharp-beaked muzzle made him doubt himself, but he knew Hill’s eyes. His hands.
Long legs carried Hill up three more steps, and then he staggered to a stop just before he reached the top, arms windmilling for balance until Davy lassoed him with a tentacle.
“What happened?” he asked. His eyes flicked past Davy, and then he looked back over his shoulder as he clicked that borrowed beak together nervously. “Did you kill Fraser?”
