Chapter Five
“Being dead,” the man behind the big desk said, “it ain’t so bad, huh?”
Hill sat on the edge of a hard leather chair, coffee cup and cookie balanced on a small plate on his knee, and tried to work out where to look. The more or less human eyes, pale brown and lightly creased around the edges, or the blunt brindle dog-muzzle that sopped up coffee with a long red tongue.
He thought that it was probably polite to focus on the eyes, but he wasn’t sure how anyone managed that.
“I guess you get used to it,” Hill said. “I prefer being alive.”
“Call me Seb” sat back in his chair. It creaked under him as his weight shifted. He cocked his head to the side. For a second Hill forgot about the teeth as he instinctively glanced up, half expecting to see pricked dog ears stuck up through the well-cut auburn waves.
“Do you?” Seb said. His chops stretched back from his teeth in a wide, toothy grin as he asked, “Why?”
He sounded genuinely interested.
Hill grimaced a smile and wondered if he had somehow stumbled into a job interview against his will. It had happened before. That was how he’d gotten his job at CIRATTA, ambushed in the break room when all he’d been there for was to drop off some paperwork before Fraser left on a business trip.
His stomach felt the same, and he was drawing blanks on what he was pretty sure should be easy questions to answer.
Why did he prefer being alive?
Was “people do” a good enough answer?
Hill awkwardly took a bite of his cookie to buy himself a second. It looked like a double-stuffed Oreo, but as the cream and biscuit coated his tongue it tasted like…
With Janet? Out of everyone she’d picked fucking Janet?
The memory rolled over his tastebuds and down his throat before he could choke on it. Frustration, jealousy, and bitten-back tears for the filling. Hill coughed and set the rest of the treat back down.
“The food’s better,” he said.
Seb laughed. There was a crack in one of the dog’s teeth, a line of rot that threaded brown and deep up toward the gumline. Hill watched it with uneasy fascination as the man shook his head and wagged a dirty-nailed finger.
It looked like blood rimed under his thumb.
Years of lessons in being normal told him that it wasn’t; of course, it wasn’t. Why would a man have blood under his nails in a nice office like this? He was just oversensitive.
The part of Hill that was always sharp and intolerable about things, made of sandpaper and unapologetic about it, grimaced at him inside his head.
Why would he have a dog face? The rules clearly don’t apply.
“The spirit of a biscuit,” Seb said and nodded to the plate on the table. “Sometimes you get a bad one. Try again.”
Hill licked the taste of someone else’s heartbreak off his lips and was queasy about how much he was tempted.
He’d always been told to think about how the other person would feel, and he had always assumed that was literal.
An internal IFTTT process. That had been raw, immediate as his own pain or anger.
He could still taste the hot salt of her—he felt sure it had been a woman, although he could not say why—anger in the back of his throat.
“No.” His voice was dry and scratchy. He leaned forward and gingerly slid the plate onto the edge of the desk.
The untouched coffee sloshed over the side of the cup and stung his fingers.
It hurt, but…it didn’t spill over and spread.
It stung his knuckles, and it was done. Hill would have been amazed if not for… well, everything else. “I’m good.”
Seb shrugged. “Your loss,” he said as he picked up an Oreo. He tossed it in the air and snapped at it like a…well, a dog. Sharp white teeth caught it in midair and sheared it in half, a swipe of that long, wet tongue getting both into his mouth. “But there’s more to death than food.”
The image of Davy’s ass, tight and firm and still glistening from Hill’s shower gel between the veil of lax, squirming tentacles, strolled through Hill’s mind. It felt like he blushed. He didn’t know if it was possible to do that without a heart or blood supply.
Of course, other things depended on blood flow too, and as Hill shifted awkwardly in the chair, it didn’t seem to be having any trouble. Hill crossed his legs and folded his hands over his lap as he tried to focus on Seb.
It shouldn’t have been this difficult; the man had a dog face.
But Davy had long, lean thighs with a scar carved into one like punctuation, and he walked with a cocky strut that shouldn’t even have been possible in Hill’s body.
It was hard to keep that imagery caged up in the “Unachievable crushes”—for so many reasons—area of his brain.
On the other side of the desk Seb gave Hill a wet, wide smile.
“You’ve seen some of what we have to offer,” he said.
Hill wondered with quick, cringy embarrassment if the other man somehow knew what he was thinking.
Could spirits do that? If they could, and Seb was aware of Hill’s mortification, he ignored it as he went on.
“And there is the question of inevitability.”
“Everyone dies,” Hill admitted. “That doesn’t mean I’ll have unfinished business. I could go to heaven.”
Seb chuckled. That was…unnerving, but he pressed on before Hill could ask what was so funny.
“Or…hell,” Seb pointed out, still somehow smirking with his dog lips. “But if you don’t, and you end up in the Beyond, the Company is a good friend to have. I’m sure that your new…associate…has had some stories to tell about us, but—”
“No,” Hill said.
Seb blinked. For the first time he looked genuinely off-balance. “No?”
Hill shook his head. “He’s not mentioned you.”
“Huh,” Seb said. He scratched along his jowls as he absorbed that, and brindle hair stuck to the white cuff of his sleeve. “I suppose he’s been dead longer than most who get Invoked, but… nothing? Not even about the men with snares and knives at the end of the tunnel?”
“Wait. The what?”
“Oh, don’t worry about them,” Seb said as he waved one hand dismissively. “No point, is there. Still, didn’t expect discretion from Arms, of all people.”
“His name’s Davy,” Hill said.
It occurred to him, a little late, that maybe he shouldn’t have made the correction. It didn’t matter, though. Seb was already shaking his head dismissively, slobber dripping from loose chops.
“No. No, it’s not,” Seb sighed. “Trust me. I would know. He is a problem for another day, though. Right now we’re talking about you.”
“I would rather talk about the men with knives,”
“And snares,” Seb corrected him cheerfully. He shuffled through the paperwork on his desk. “You can’t forget them.”
He glanced up, his eyes suddenly old. Old-old, cloudy and wet and wrinkled. “You mustn’t forget the snares.”
Hill swallowed and cringed back in the seat. He glanced at the door and weighed the option of making his excuses to leave.
“I…” he started to stumble his way toward a polite out, but Seb wiped his dirty hands over his eyes and recovered himself before he could.
“You came for answers,” Seb said. “And you thought they’d be free, because you have a winning smile and a pure heart? No such luck. Life is generous, death is not. It is, however, straightforward.”
That did not sound true. Hill squinted at Seb as he asked dubiously. “It is?”
“It can be,” Seb said. “You invoked the spirits to punish your stepfather, and that’s all in motion, no hiccups there, but that leaves you with questions about your dead dad that only he could answer.”
Seb paused, one perfectly manicured brow raised expectantly as he looked at Hill.
The breezy, human resources in a private firm, callousness of his delivery made something catch in Hill’s chest. He wasn’t sure if it was a sob or a laugh, and he wasn’t going to let it out to find out.
It caught in his throat like a dry bit of bread as he swallowed hard.
“I’d like to know—”
Seb shushed him with an upheld hand. “Not my circus, not my monkeys,” he said blithely. “I’m the big-picture man. I don’t need to know the details. It’s enough that you want something we can give you. In return, the Company wants a catspaw in the mortal world.”
They stared at each other.
“Is that a joke?” Hill asked after a long, stiffly awkward pause.
“Why would it be?”
Hill reached up and gestured vaguely around his chin and jaw area to indicate the slobbering dog muzzle that jutted out of Seb’s face.
“Because of the…” He trailed off as Seb just looked confused. “Um…never mind. Why do you need one of those?”
It was not easy for a dog to purse its lips. Seb managed to pucker his around a mouthful of sharp teeth.
“Oh, don’t worry your pretty head about that,” he said. “You’ve already flouted the laws of God and Man—”
“Rules.”
This was the interruption that made Seb look annoyed. He sighed, his loose dog chops flapping. “What?”
“Technically, they are rules, not laws,” Hill said. “A law would have wider scope, more enforcement, and legal consequences of some kind.”
Seb rolled his eyes and started to say something, but he didn’t get a chance.
The Invocation of the Spirits had been Hill’s special interest for the last three years.
This particular element hadn’t been his main focus, but it still felt reassuring to fall back onto.
He would much rather info-dump about ecclesiastical conspiracy theories and metaphysical loopholes than…
…well, men with snares that waited for the dead.
“It’s also the laws or rules of the Church, not of God,” he blurted out. “Since God, by definition, is omnipotent and therefore is aware of the Invocation and, based on the fact it’s not been removed from existence, approves of it.”
Seb picked a chunk of cookie out of his teeth and licked it off his fingers.
“That assumes you’re capable of understanding God’s will,” he said. “Maybe the Invocation is a test. Or a trap.”
“Maybe,” Hill said. “But that’s not a law, and honeypots are generally frowned upon.”