“He’s not dead,” Davy said, “He just looks like shit.”
Hill reached up to touch Davy’s bloody face. For a second Davy thought he could actually feel the cold brush of spectral fingers.
“Are you OK?”
“Reynolds,” Davy said with a shrug. “You were right about swizzle-sticking his brain. It wasn’t good for him. But he’s dead now, so that’ll be my problem moving on.”
Somewhere, a bell started to toll. It didn’t sound like the sort of bell Trudy would have in herHouse and Gardenspread house. Davy swore under his breath as he wrapped his tentacles around Hill, caressing his face and memorizing the nape of his neck.
Hill looked up. “Already?” he said. “I’m not ready. Davy, I think I lo—"
A tentacle wrapped under his beak and shushed him.
“Save it,” Davy said. “For someone who can do it back. Who can kiss you and give you a life. When that’s over, then you come find me…and I’ll make you fucking forget him.”
Davy unhooked the muzzle with his tentacles and slipped it off. He wanted to see Hill’s face one last time He caressed the side of Hill’s face with a tentacle and traced the line of his mouth.
“Fraser didn’t kill me,” Davy said. “He didn’t kill your dad either.”
Hill shook his head as he refused to accept that. “No. No, that makes no sense,” he said. “If Fraser didn’t kill you, how did you end up buried in the basement of a house my dad owned?”
It wasn’t a hard question to answer. All it took was a second’s thought. Davy had hoped that Hill would just accept his word, but he should have known better. He saw the pieces fall together as Hill’s face sank.
“No,” he said, his voice cracked. “He wouldn’t.”
“I guess he regretted it,” Davy said. “And he already paid the price, more than once.”
Hill kept shaking his head. “No,” he said. The certainty was already gone, though. “My dad?”
“Fraser never knew,” Davy dodged that question with a different truth. “He thought Greg—the deli guy—had killed me for another player.”
The bell tolled again. That was four.
“The Hounds are here,” Hill said. He pressed a kiss to one of Davy’s tentacles. Part of Davy had always, no matter how useful they could be, hated the pale, visible manifestations of his sin. Not right now. “Will you be OK?”
The bell struck five.
“Fraser learned a lesson,” Davy said. “He’s going to make things right.”
At least, one thing. That was probably enough.
“Once everyone is back where they belong, there’s nothing in it for the Hounds to hassle me,” Davy said. “You’re the one who shook things up.”
The bell struck six, and Davy felt the pressure suddenly intensify. He sucked in a startled breath as he was squeezed out of Hill like toothpaste out of a tube. The empty body dropped onto the stairs like a puppet with its strings cut. Someone in the party that was, Davy realized, still happening downstairs, screamed in shock. Then the living world faded as the Beyond reasserted itself on his senses.
Hill was still there. He stood in front of Davy, his silver green eyes wide with surprise.
“Hey,” Davy said. He reached up and cupped the side of Hill’s face with his hand. “I guess we get a minute.”
“It’s not enough,” Hill said.
“No.”
Over Hill’s shoulder, Davy saw one of the dogs, snub-faced, brindle muzzle scored with scars and jabbed with thorns, step onto the stairs.
Seb? He thought that was it. They’d done business before. He knew Davy, anyhow. His battered muzzle stretched into a dog’s wet, pink smile.
“Be smart, Davy,” Seb said as he started up the stairs. Two Hounds followed him, although they looked worse off than he did. “The dead stay dead. It might be useful if that wasn’t true,but it is. We can’t have him going back to the world with all this locked in that pretty head of his. Imagine what he could ask of us to do our bidding, what he could tell the living.”
