Chapter Seven #2
“You don’t look like me,” he said. “Not to me.”
Davy blinked, looked down at himself, and plucked the soft fabric of the T-shirt away from his chest.
“Well, that explains why you blush every time you sneak a look at my ass,” he said.
“I didn’t…” Hill spluttered the denial. “I haven’t looked at it.”
Davy snorted. “Please,” he said. “I thought you were just really up yourself, but I guess you wanted to be up me?”
“I don’t even know if the dead do…if they even can,” Hill said. The tone of his voice was remarkably prim considering the topic. He didn’t seem to be able to fix it. “Fuck, I mean.”
“The dead fuck,” Davy said. He pushed himself up off the counter and took a step forward. His tentacles squirmed ahead of him, restless and curious. “I fuck.”
Hill felt parched. Light and hollow and dry with hunger. He thought he might know enough about what sex was to the dead. No need to find out more. He ran his hand around the back of his neck, fingers caught in tangled curls.
“Not like it matters right now,” Hill said. Despite his very recent decision to be incurious, he felt bitterness like a rock in the back of his throat. “You can’t touch me, remember?”
Davy stopped mid-step. He shifted his weight so his legs were apart, soft sweats pulled tight over his thighs.
“Oh, you can touch me. See?” he said as he ran his hand down over his stomach.
His fingers dipped under the waistband, went lower, black fleece tented over his knuckles as he wrapped his hand around his—around Hill’s cock.
Color touched his cheeks, the faint spray of freckles on his face floating on top of the flush as he bit his lower lip.
His eyes were already dark, black from edge to edge, but it was somehow more intense as his lids lowered over them.
A breath swelled his chest, and Hill wondered what that felt like after so long dead.
Before he could chase the thought, Davy lifted those heavy lids and smirked at him.
“And I can touch you. At least, part of me can.”
Hill caught his breath in an eager gasp as Davy wrapped a tentacle around his throat.
It collared him briefly, tight against his skin, and slid upward.
The tip of it—dry and a little rough, not like snake skin but rough leather—traced the curve of Hill’s mouth.
It pulled his lower lip and slid into his mouth, thick and solid as it pushed against his tongue.
Oh.
When he breathed in, he could taste the cuttlebone and salt of it in the back of his throat.
Under the fig leaf of the sweats, Davy dragged his hand along his cock in slow, lazy strokes. His breath was ragged, his muscles tensed, and he watched Hill’s face for a reaction.
Two responses hung in Hill’s head and waited for him to pick. Recoil and make his excuses, or wrap his lips around the squirming tentacle and suck it deeper.
The version of him that sat in a pew and listened politely to Father Thomas every Sunday rattled the bars of his cage at the idea that the choice wasn’t obvious. It was one thing to use the Rite of Invocation, that was…frowned upon, but it wasn’t a sin.
Not like this. This would be a sin.
This would be necromancy.
That should have made the choice easier, but…
Before Hill had to decide, Davy’s phone rang. It was like a switch flipped; the lazy, sultry heat was wiped off Davy’s face. He pulled his hand out of his pants and grabbed the phone, answering it with a cool, “I’ve been waiting.”
The tentacle drew back from Hill’s mouth, slick and wet. It nudged his mouth shut behind it and then gave his cheek a commiserating pat.
Hill felt like a husk. An echoing, desperate husk. He pressed his fists against his stomach as he tried to pull himself together. It felt like more than want; it felt like a weird sort of hunger.
“You son of a bitch,” he said raggedly.
Davy glanced around at him and had the good manners to look apologetic. At least, superficially. He started to say something, paused as he listened to what whoever he was talking to had to say, and then tried again.
“I wish it didn’t matter,” he said. “But there’s consequences for failure.”
Hill supposed there would be. It had been hinted at—sidelong, in veiled terms—in a few of his sources. No one had gone into detail. Maybe they’d assumed that anyone desperate enough to call the dead up wouldn’t get distracted from their task by their own petty pleasures.
The self-loathing sting to that made Hill flinch a little, but he supposed that pew-Hill had earned the right. He rubbed his injured hand. It didn’t hurt, but he remembered when it had.
Everything he’d done to get to this point. The years he’d poured into it—researching instead of living, turning himself into a specter in his own life—and he risked it all being wasted because the dead man had a pretty face.
Despite himself, he glanced at Davy to confirm that, as if he could fool himself by pretending to have forgotten. His gaze skimmed over Davy’s hard, handsome face and down to broad shoulders and…
…and a great ass.
He grimaced at that, not even sure if it was lust or a bad joke, and turned his back on temptation. Only to stare in dismay at the shattered remains of his plate-glass desk. It lay in shards and splinters on the floor, his monitor smashed in the middle of it. That hadn’t been like that before.
“What the hell happened?” he asked in shock as he spun back around to stare at Davy.
He got a shrug, wide innocent eyes, and a confidently mouthed “I dunno” in answer.
That was a lie. An obvious lie.
Hill just didn’t understand why his broken desk was what mattered enough to lie about.
The ass—Hill admitted to himself as he watched Davy bend over to grab the smashed keyboard off the floor—was exceptional.
Technically, he supposed, Davy was right and that was Hill’s own ass. He’d definitely never filled out those sweats so well, though, so…
“And for the record,” Davy said as he straightened up. “I might enjoy fucking with Fraser, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a plan.”
A loose key—the B—slipped between his knuckles and bounced off his shoe. Hill cocked his head to watch it skitter under a nearby chair out of some weird habit, as if he’d care about retrieving it once he had fingers to do it with again.
“So what is it?” he asked as he looked back at Davy. When he got a blank look in return, he bit his tongue in irritation—and how did that still hurt?—before he filled in the question. “The plan. What is it?”
Davy dumped what had been, ten minutes ago, a top-of-the-range gamer keyboard into the trash. He picked a bit of glass out of his palm with his thumbnail.
“The first step is to destabilize Fraser,” he said, with a cool confidence.
“Within the next twenty-four hours he’s going to be hit by a series of problems, large and small, that will affect his work, his finances, and his reputation.
All within a span of time and time of year that make it difficult for him to respond decisively.
Once he’s professionally on the back foot, that’s when we target his… call ’em moral foundations.”
The casual competence was undeniably attractive, but…
“So what you’re saying is the plan is to fuck with him?” Hill checked.
Davy cracked a grin. “Yeah,” he admitted with a shrug. “Pretty much, but the shits and giggles are just a bonus.”
“If you say so,” Hill said. He rubbed his hand around the back of his neck and finally said what was really bothering him. “Is there anything I can do? I feel like a spare part just watching you.”
Before Davy could answer, someone knocked on the door.
Both of them stopped for a beat. When the knock was repeated, Davy glanced at Hill and raised an expectant eyebrow.
Expecting anyone? he mouthed
Hill hesitated and then shook his head. It wasn’t that there was a list of people he had to run through; it was the opposite.
He’d spent so long focused on the dead—their wrongs, their invocation—it was only now that Fraser’s judgement was at hand that Hill realized his life had flatlined.
There was a short list of one who he’d expect at the door, and his mom would be getting ready for the party.
While Hill grappled with the unexpected realization that after Christmas Day, one way or another, he was going to have to find a new focus, Davy padded over to the door.
The blithe disregard he showed for bare feet on glass-studded carpet made Hill clench his toes in his sneakers.
Davy didn’t look through the peephole. He stooped down and peered, sidelong, through the gap underneath.
“What are you doing?” Hill asked. Davy glanced up briefly and brought a tentacle up to his mouth in a “shhh” gesture.
“Why? It’s not like they can hear me.”
Davy started to retort, stopped, and shrugged an acknowledgement that Hill had a point. Of course, that didn’t mean that Hill got an answer, since Davy was audible. Hill sighed and walked over to wait next to him. It was a shame that walking through walls didn’t work.
Or so Davy had said, anyhow, and Davy was a liar…
Just to check, Hill poked the door with a finger. He felt it give under the pressure. It felt like taffy, thick and sticky as it reluctantly gave way. He doubted he could walk through it, but he might be able to push through.
He hesitated at the thought and—
Pain slapped through him like a shock. It sizzled up his nerves from his fingertip to his armpit, then up to jam itself into the base of his skull like a punch.
The habit of being alive made him shove his fist in his mouth to stifle his yelp as he staggered back from the door, free hand wrapped tightly around his wrist as if he could strangle the pain.
It didn’t work, and when he looked at his finger…
There was enough left that it wasn’t technically a stump, he thought with queasy, disassociated clarity. A nub might be the right way to describe it. His finger ended just below the nail bed, chopped off in a clean line that leaked a milky…smoke.
Davy looked up at him and pulled an exasperated face. He also thwacked Hill around the back of the head with a tentacle. Hill glared at him as he tried not to hyperventilate.
“My finger…” he spluttered out.
Davy gestured at a tentacle that squirmed under the door and came back with a blob of something…viscous… It held it out expectantly. Hill stared at it. It looked like a bath pearl, the ones his grandma used to have in a big jar in her bathroom.
“Is that my…finger?” he asked. The immediate, eye-watering jolt of pain had faded. He wasn’t sure how, since he was still short of a chunk of himself.
The tentacle wiggled it at him. The glob of Hill squished down and threatened to pop out of the tentacle’s grip. Hill recoiled.
“I don’t want it,” he protested on autopilot, then reconsidered. “Can it be…reattached?”
It sounded unlikely as he said it, the thing didn’t even look finger-shaped anymore, but the tentacle pushed it insistently at him.
This time the knock on the door sounded like hammering. The slap of bare hands against wood made Hill start. He took a step back and, frustrated, just grabbed the bit of…himself with his good hand. It was cool and slippery between his fingers, but he could feel his fingertips against it.
“Fine.” He closed his eyes, braced himself, and popped the glob in his mouth. Some sort of weird instinct made him try to flatten it against the roof of his mouth, but it was more resilient than it looked. It didn’t taste of anything, but…
…warm skin under his fingers…dust and carpet threads and a foot the size of a dinner plate…
the faintest flutter of a pulse that was so much steadier than his.
Was that…ragged breathing and the shadow against the door as a body leaned closer…
bad? Had he gotten it wrong … warm, wet, and teeth… Fuck.
Hill swallowed, gagged, and looked at his hand. It was still…nubby.
“It takes a minute,” Davy said softly. He stood up and finally took a look through the peephole. “It’s Reynolds. What does he want?”
Well, since Hill had…in fact…misread his relationship with the man very badly, nothing. Unless he wanted to make it clear before the party that Hill was definitely not, under any circumstances, his type.
“I don’t know.”
“Huh.”
Davy turned away from the door to look at Hill. He held up his hand and wiggled his index finger.
“You know, you could have just stuck it back on,” he said.
Hill stared at him. “What?” he said. “Are you serious?”