Chapter Four
Hill had disappeared.
“What’s wrong with you now?” Reynolds asked. “Do you need to go stand in a corner and look at a wall or something?”
Davy wasn’t sure whether it was contempt or disgust in Reynolds’s voice. It didn’t really matter. Both put his back up.
He’d forgotten how satisfying the dull roil of his old black temper was in the flesh. Not that he was an even-tempered dead man, either, but chemicals definitely added a little zest to the experience. His tentacles, already agitated, responded to his mood by lashing out.
One wrapped around Reynolds’s neck. The pale, leathery length of it looked stark against a professionally topped-up tan and a black collar. There was no blood to flush with, exactly, but the shadowy pattern that blotched the length of it darkened as it squeezed.
It did fuck all, of course.
What little influence the dead could impose on the living did not extend to popping their heads off like Pez dispensers. It wasn’t fair, but nobody had ever said death was except the Church…and they had good reason to lie.
So Davy could throttle the man all day and—
Reynolds rapped his knuckles against Davy’s forehead.
“Anyone home?” he asked. “Seriously. What’s wrong with you?”
Davy stared flatly at the man as his brain stalled out trying to process the what the fuck of what had just happened.
For a fucking start, people didn’t just touch him like that.
Living him had been an asshole with a temper; dead him was an asshole with a temper and tentacles.
People with any sort of survival instinct usually got the message that he was someone to give a wide berth to.
His lack of response made Reynolds snort and shake his head.
“Might as well talk to a rock,” he said as he reached over the reception desk to swipe his pass. “You’re lucky you’re the Old Man’s kid. Only reason you got a job here.”
Huh.
Davy looked down at himself. Or more accurately, at Hill’s lean, elegant body. That was right. He wasn’t an ex-SEAL merc with a hard-earned reputation for being not-quite-right. He was currently a nepo-baby analyst-twink with pretty eyes.
Funny how easy that was to forget.
“I’ll walk you up,” Reynolds said as the doors to the sleek, all-curved-lines pod of an elevator opened silently in one wall. “Make sure you don’t end up anywhere you’re not meant to be. Again.”
He walked away. Davy stared at his back with narrowed eyes and then followed him.
So the “fuck around and find out” vibes were only skin deep. He was a bit offended by that.
He could fix it, of course. Even in Hill’s body.
It wouldn’t take much. Pain was a distraction; it was the fear of more pain that focused the mind.
A broken finger. Or…as he stepped into the elevator behind Reynolds…
a hand to the back of the head to smack his smug-ass face into the furred reflection in the matte metal walls.
The thought made Davy’s fingers twitch.
Food. Fuck. Fight.
The only three things on his to-do list for this brief return to meat and chemicals. He’d ticked food off the list already, and he really did need to get a move on with the other two.
“What floor?” Reynolds asked as he bent over to squint into the scanner. The light from it flickered briefly over his face as it checked his ID.
Davy indulged his fantasy of violence a second longer, then reluctantly abandoned it. Whatever form “redemption” took for Fraser, it would probably still be best if there was no suspicious behavior on Hill’s part to tie him to it.
And despite the fact Hill’s departure had left Davy to deal with questions like “what floor” on his own, he didn’t want anything…Fraser…to happen to him.
So he stuck his hands in his pockets and gave Reynolds his best blankly unhelpful look.
“My floor,” he said, as if he genuinely thought it was the obvious answer.
Reynolds gave him a withering look, rolled his eyes, and jabbed one of the unmarked black buttons. It was a sure bet. When people thought someone was stupid, they were only ever too happy to be proven right.
“The fact you thought I’d ever be into you?” Reynolds said as he crossed his arms and stared at the shut doors. “That should be part of the diagnostic for whatever you’ve got.”
Davy gave the nape of the man’s neck a sour look as he regretted his decision to practice moderation. He could probably have given Reynolds reason to keep that sneer off his face for the next five years. At least.
Instead, here he was, stuck not doing something he wanted to do. His “No.1 (Step) Uncle” mug better be under the fucking tree.
Um, yeah, no. That was still creepy.
Davy hooked his finger into the collar of his T-shirt and gave it a tug. The gesture caught Reynolds’s eye, and he glanced over. Davy irritably curled the end of a tentacle and flicked the man in the eye.
Useless but…
“Fuck,” Reynolds muttered as he screwed up his face. He rubbed around the bony orbit of his eye with his thumb as he blinked. “Fucking migraines.”
Davy glanced from him to the web of his tentacles.
He hadn’t expected that petty bit of spite to do anything other than frustrate him. The dead might be able to see the mortal world, but that was it. They couldn’t touch it or taste it or fuck it over. Not unless they went polter…but there were some fucking lines even Davy wasn’t going to cross.
It could be coincidence, he supposed. There was only one way to find out.
He reared up one pale, narrow tentacle and held it for a second, swaying slightly from side to side like a cobra as he aimed. Then he struck and jabbed it straight through Reynolds’s eye and twisted it through the honeycomb of his sinuses.
It felt weird. Like nothing where he knew he should feel something. Hill’s body responded to the lack of feedback by pulling up something analogous, the wet, slick warmth of blood thick and slippery as it coated Davy’s hands.
Reynolds seemed to like the experience even less. His face went gray, the sickly color stained around his mouth and eyes, and he had to catch himself against the wall. He bent his head forward; it looked like he was about to puke on his shoes, and Davy’s tentacle flicked up into his brain.
That Davy felt.
The jolt of it went through him like a shock and made his tentacles recoil, knotted in tight around his body.
…Hill’s mouth moving, all lips and tongue and sticky, sweaty irritation.
The brief thought that it wouldn’t be bad for his career as he looked at Hill’s cautiously hopeful face and the sour “No” that scratched out of him.
Shame—he liked women more, but if you got the chance to fuck the boss’s son, you fucked the boss’s son—but this one was a liability.
Fraser didn’t trust him, and that wasn’t something that Reynolds wanted rubbing off on…
Gone.
Davy staggered as he tried to hang on to the thoughts, but they ran out of him like water.
The details first, and then anything but the vaguest idea of what they’d been.
He wiped the back of his nose on his hand.
It was dry, but it felt like it should be bloody.
He could taste the salt and metal of it, the expectation that when he sniffed the hot liquid would hit the back of his sinuses.
His eyes caught his reflection over his raised hand, fractured and misted in the roughed-up metal, and stalled for a second in surprise when he saw…himself.
Davy…that hadn’t been his name, had it?…Jones, with his hard-edged good looks and too dark to read eyes. The lack of any white was a post-death evolution, but they had always been…off-putting. Or so he’d been told.
Although the squirming mass of immaterial flesh that writhed agitatedly around him probably took the heat off the eyes a bit in the “off-putting” stakes these days.
He glanced up in the corner of the cab at the camera he was pretty sure was there and wondered if it could see that.
If it did, then discretion was pointless.
Fraser had grown up in the same sweltering brand of Catholicism as Davy; he knew about the ritual, and he knew how many people he’d pissed off who might use it against him.
Davy checked on Reynolds. The other man looked queasy, and as Davy watched, he wiped blood out of his nostril onto his thumb.
Not even a glance at Davy’s reflection. If it was an act, then it was a good one.
So it was more likely some little-known effect of the Beyond that Davy saw himself in there.
Just in case, though…
He winked at his reflection, just one quick flick of an eyelid before his image faded back into Hill’s hair and mouth and hands.
Best-case scenario was that Fraser didn’t work out who’d pulled his unfinished business out of the ground. But if it did come out, Davy wanted his brother to know he was enjoying the parole.
Davy left Reynolds to puke in the toilets and went to find Fraser’s office.
It didn’t take him long. The biggest office with the least personality. Davy swung the well-cushioned black leather office chair around and threw Hill’s body down into it, all lank and careless grace. He swung a sneaker-clad foot up onto the corner of the desk and reached for the top drawer.
It turned out that thirty years, give or take, did change a man. Fraser had moved his candy from under his pen tray down to PERSONALACC_26. Davy unwrapped the sucker he pulled out and stuck it in his mouth. The plastic crinkled in his hands as he balled it up and dropped it onto the floor.
Davy scraped the thick sugar-scrub waxed coating off the candy with his teeth to get to the sweet-sour pop of raspberry. That hadn’t changed. Fraser would still rather have the candy than actually eat it.
Hill wasn’t the only one life was wasted on.
He rolled the sucker around his mouth, hard shell clacking against his teeth, as he gave the space bar on Fraser’s computer an idle tap with his finger. The screen flickered to life—a bland gray background with a half-translucent corporate logo of an octopus floating in the middle of it.