Page 72 of Dead Vengeance

“I know,” I reply. “People think this is it. Their small slice of life. That it’s their whole world and there’s no way out. Sometimes it’s hard to help them see the bigger picture.”

“That’s right,” he says, digging a fork into the flaky pastry on top of his pie, though I get the impression it’s more to do something with his hands than because he’s going to eat it. “And my mum, she did everything she could. Everything. But when you don’t have money to move away…”

His hand is shaking a little now, and he’s still not looking at me.

“I’m not like that. I never went with those people.” He pauses, looks up, as if he could read my mind—what I’m thinking of him now that he’s revealed this. As if he needed to tell me that. As if he’s worried I might think worse of him because of this association.

I’ve seen so much death. Heard every sad story there is. And it would take a hell of a lot more than a wayward brother to make me think any less of Liam. “We all have skeletons in our closets,” I try to reassure him. “All of us. Anyone who says they don’t is a liar.”

He scoffs, a touch of bitterness about it, and lets the fork drop, sticking out of the pie. “He was good to me. He was always so nice. You never would have known what he got up to. Because he kept me out of it. He never brought anything home. When I found out what he’d done…”

A second later, he’s stabbing away at the pie again, shutting down, shutting it out.

“What happened to him?” I ask, point blank.

He looks at me for a long moment, like he’s not sure whether to answer me honestly. But eventually he says, “We don’t know. One day, he just didn’t come home. And now…”

I give him a minute, move the sauce bottles around, though my appetite’s fled in deference to the urge to reach out and take his hand. Which I’m not going to do.

“We thought he was coming good for a while there,” he says, so quietly I can hardly hear him. “He stopped hanging out with them, was around, just watching movies with us, playing football. Normal stuff.” He leans hard on one arm. “You don’t notice the day to day normal stuff until it’s gone, I think. Because suddenly, he went back. They were his school friends, you know? And then I hardly ever saw him. He was never home. And then, he just didn’t…” His voice breaks on the words.

“I’m so sorry, Liam.”

“It was years ago.” He shrugs, even if he looks like he’s reliving the moment right now, talking over it with the bravado of the kid who had to accept his brother wasn’t coming home. But he admits, “You’d think I’d be over it. And I am. Mostly. But my mum… she’s not. And she won’t be. It’s left a mark on her that… And so when I saw him yesterday…” The fork drops again, and this time he buries his face in his hands.

And this time, I can’t help it. I reach out and wrap a hand around his arm. “I’m really sorry you saw that.”

As if he can’t even feel me, he speaks into his palms. “I don’t know why he’s there. Why would he be there?”

“I don’t know.”

His hand slips down and takes hold of mine, squeezing tight. “If he’s a restless spirit, I need to know. Or if he’s a hallucination… That’s so fucking sick. That it would show me that. That it could get inside my head like that and make me see him that way. And that’s what I… I think that’s what I needed to ask you.” He fixes me with those deeply troubled brown eyes, the firelight glinting orange and earnest in them. “If you know anything more than what you’ve told me. I… I would really like to know it.”

I’m so close to spilling every single thing I know about spirits, which is a fuck tonne. Because I want to help him. It’s in my soul and my nature to want to help, but especially someone like him, when I can see how much pain he’s in. What this thing is doing to him.

But nothing I have to say is going to bring him peace right now. None of it’s going to give him the answer he wants because I don’t have it. This still makes no sense to me. All it will do is make Liam hate me for getting him into this.

And if I tell Liam I’m a necromancer, it will almost definitely get back to Gerald. And if Gerald doesn’t blackmail me with it, he’ll almost definitely pass it onto some authority and get me in the shit. And that puts more people than just me and Liam in danger.

Every one of these thoughts and considerations is making it take too long to answer. Making it harder by the second to convince him I’m just an innocent bystander in all of this.

He shifts forward, grips my hand tighter, as if he thinks I might try to slip away from him. His words come out carefully, slowly, as if he’s considering every one, like each holds massive importance. “What did Helena mean when she said you called her?”

Fuuuuuuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Nothing.”

He doesn’t let go, only shifts his left eyebrow a touch higher and repeats, “Nothing?”

“Nothing that-that-that I understand. I think she was confused? I think she found herself in my hallway, and she was like, ‘What am I doing in Archer’s hallway?’ And so she thought it must have been my fault.”

He frowns at me. His grip loosens a little.

“That makes sense, doesn’t it?” I practically beg, when what I’m really saying is almost definitely, ‘Please don’t let go of my hand.’

“But why would she think—”

“Did you know she’s a murderer?”