Chapter Two #2
“Huh,” Davy said. He scratched the side of his jaw as he thought about that.
“Look, I’m not trying to be precious about this—fuck, I’d do it for the fries if it was up to me—but my remit to do shit to assholes, at least on this side, is tightly regulated.
I could swing ‘helped cover up my murder,’ but I need to have some skin in the game. ”
So he’d been told anyhow, and he wasn’t interested in pushing his luck about it. Consequences in Beyond tended to the…unpleasant, and you’d no choice except to survive them. Davy was a shark, but still a small one in a very big ocean.
Some of the big sharks had been there for centuries.
Affiliation with the Company could buy you some protection, but…
well…that was all about appearances. Davy had expected to be punished for his sins when he woke up dead, just—he pulled the spiritual stigmata of his tentacles in and wrapped them around his feet in a tidy knot—not by the afterlife’s equivalent of High School cliques.
“How about this?” Hill said. “The same person who killed him? They killed you.”
Davy drew back as he took that in. That was…
He should want to hear this, but suddenly he didn’t know if he did or not. It turned out he didn’t get a choice.
“My stepdad,” Hill said. “Fraser Jones.”
Yeah. That made sense. Davy supposed it wasn’t really a surprise.
He’d not known who killed him. Most didn’t.
It took an hour, give or take, to write a memory from the brain to the spirit.
That meant the dead only ever had their best guess about the moment of death, but Davy’s guess was pretty fucking informed.
He just wasn’t sure how he felt about being right. Emotions had never really been his thing. He had them, but other than the big two—fight or fuck—they’d always been behind a paywall.
Luckily, being a smartass came with the free tier.
“So what you’re telling me,” Davy said as he reached for the burger, “is that my little brother got married, and I didn’t even rate an invite?”
He took a bite and chewed as he watched realization dawn on Hill’s expressive face as he put the names together and realized it wasn’t just chance and the fifth most common surname in the US.
It was OK.
He wasn’t the first to miss the connection. He might well be the last, though. Gravestones were good for making that sort of thing clear.
“So, what,” Hill said in a shocked voice. “You’re my uncle?”
Huh.
Davy blinked as he thought about that and then put the burger down.
Gross.
Step-uncle.
It was, Davy decided, an important distinction. Besides, it wasn’t like Davy had been on speaking terms with Fraser before the murder. Even if he’d been alive, he’d probably not have crossed paths with Hill. And as it was, he’d been dead longer than Hill had been alive.
Davy mentally weighed the justifications up and…yeah, it was fine.
That sorted, he tuned back in to what Hill was saying.
“…they said my dad killed himself,” Hill said. “For a long time I believed them, but then I found the files Dad had hidden on his old e-reader. Files about you. About the things he’d done for Fraser.”
Davy slouched back against the cool copper-clad wall of the elevator and stared at his own reflection in the doors.
Both of them, as Hill paced back and forth over the carpet anxiously.
He kept having to step over Davy’s tentacles where they spooled out slack and lazy over the floor.
The urge to trip him with just a twitch of one appendage swelled in Davy’s chest and was quashed again.
“And you think Fraser killed him?” Davy asked.
“No,” Hill said. “But it made me wonder, and either way it’s Fraser’s fault, isn’t it? Either he killed my dad, or he’s the reason my dad killed himself. And he definitely killed you.”
“Fair enough.”
Davy idly hooked a finger into the collar of his T-shirt to pull it away from his neck. The long line of his own neck, all tendon and pale skin, made his mouth go dry.
I swear, the memory of his mom’s voice hissed the unwelcome interruption in the back of his head, you were hung in another life.
She’d been dead longer than him. Habit still made him knock it off.
Besides, they were nearly there.
Davy glanced at Hill, who’d stopped to stare at the slow flick of the last two floors. He didn’t slouch. With a sigh, Davy pushed himself up off the wall and straightened his hoodie. It wasn’t quite parade rest, but he managed a rough approximation of good posture as the elevator stopped.
The doors swung open, and the smell of fresh cookies wafted over Davy.
Next to him, Hill fell back a step. His mouth went slack as he glanced around whatever was on the Beyond side of the Veil in confusion.
“Where is…” he stammered. “What’s happened to my apartment?”
…
Yeah. That was a metaphysical lesson that Davy didn’t want to get into today. Mostly because of time; partially because fuck if he actually understood how it worked.
“Just stick close to me,” Davy said as he draped one long, boneless arm over Hill’s shoulder. “You’re not going to be dead that long, and you won’t remember it afterwards.”
Hill started to shrug Davy’s arm off, flinched away from something that came too close, and decided to stay where he was.
“So this is your place?” Davy said. He followed his nose over the wooden floor to the open-plan kitchen and a covered plate set out on a counter.
There was a card propped next to it, a cardinal staring festively from a white, expensively printed background.
Hill ignored it for now as he unboxed the plate. “It’s nice.”
Hill hung on to the end of Davy’s tentacle, and the thin fingerling length twirled through his fingers as he trailed after him.
“It’s Fraser’s place,” Hill corrected him. “I just live here. They didn’t think I could cut it on my own.”
Davy made a pleased sound under his breath at the platter of cookies he’d exposed. They weren’t hot anymore, but they were the size of his palm and shiny with sugar crystals.
“Yeah,” he said as he picked one up. “Rich kids are easy marks. Just tell them ‘I like you for you’ and they leave you in the same room as their wallet.”
He lifted one and took a bite. His nose wrinkled as the taste exploded on his tongue.
It was…
He chewed as he tried to identify the flavor that flooded his mouth.
It was chocolate. He knew it was chocolate—what the fuck else would you put in a cookie—but he couldn’t get his brain to believe it.
The taste of meat had been instantly familiar, but this just wouldn’t click.
He swallowed and poked his tongue between his teeth after a hard chunk of biscuit.
Today he’d learned you could be old enough to forget the taste of chocolate.
“It’s carob,” Hill told him as Davy took a second bite.
Davy grimaced and spat the mouthful out into his hand.
“Why the fuck?” he asked.
“Vegan, remember?” Hill said. “No dairy.”
Davy wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. “You know what, life is wasted on you.”
A humorless smile twitched Hill’s mouth. “You’re not the first to say that.”
Davy picked up the card and flipped it open.
“Hey,” Hill protested. He grabbed at the card with one hand, his fingers wisping through the thick parchment. “Where did you get that? It’s for me. You can’t just–”
“And yet I am,” Davy said with a shrug. He hitched one tentacle up to block Hill.
Maybe Hill couldn’t grab the paper, but his fingers swiping through it made it hard to read.
Davy glanced over the neat, angled script that said it hoped to see him—well, probably not him, but not like they’d know—on Christmas Eve.
He fanned the invite idly in the air and raised his eyebrows.
“Look at that, back from the dead for—” He checked Hill’s watch.
“—two hours, and already my social calendar is filling up.”
Hill scowled. “You’re not going.”
Davy shrugged as he turned away. “Shouldn’t be dead if you want a vote,” he said as he headed down the hall to find the bedroom. There were still a few hours till dawn, but he was on a deadline, so he couldn’t waste the wee hours. “First lesson you learn.”
It wasn’t, but…why spoil a nice night with that sort of detail?
Hot water battered the back of Davy’s neck. The steam filled his lungs, hot and sweet with the raspberry and chamomile smell of the shower gel.
It was on the label. On his own he’d just have called it “sweet.”
Close his eyes so he couldn’t see the squirm of his tentacles against the glass walls of the shower, and it was almost like he’d never been dead.
“You can’t go.”
Well, it was as long as he ignored his tentacles and the original occupant.
Davy ducked his head under the steam to rinse his hair, raspberry scented foam shedding in sheets to swirl around his feet.
He emerged, blew drips of water from his nose, and turned to swipe one hand over the misted glass.
Hill stared at him for a beat and then looked away, his expression flustered.
Hell if Davy knew why. It was Hill’s body; presumably he’d seen it naked before.
“We already covered that you don’t get a say,” he said. “But for the sake of argument, why not? What better place to kill Fraser than at the company Christmas party? Trust me, you won’t be the only one there who wants him dead. Not unless he’s changed.”
Hill’s eyes snapped back to Davy’s for a beat as confusion overrode whatever weird hang-up he had about his own naked ass.
“What?”
“He wasn’t likable when I knew him,” Davy said. “Most people don’t get nicer.”
“That’s a pessimistic view of human nature.”
Davy shrugged. “It’s my experience.” He scratched his wet collarbone as he thought about it, then shrugged an acknowledgement. “To be fair, I’m an asshole, and like attracts like.”