Chapter Eleven
Fear was not the same as despair.
Hill sank his teeth into his lower lip as he clawed at the inside of his own mind for the hollowing drop that he’d felt before he did…what he’d done. It was gone, replaced by the staticky need to run.
He grabbed at Davy’s tentacles to try and squirm free. It didn’t work. They tightened around him, one tucked under his chin as it turned his head to look at Davy.
“Is it after you?” Davy asked, then clarified. “Specifically, after you? You weren’t just a target of convenience during a sweep?”
“No, it was…” Hill started to explain, then stumbled to a halt.
He’d been going to say “it was the same thing that happened in the apartment”…
the thing that Davy had lied to him about.
The lie wasn’t a surprise; it was the sort of thing the man Hill had spent years researching would do.
It was the “why” of the lie that made Hill bite his lip and hesitate.
Davy didn’t bother to try and look hurt. He just rolled his eyes in exasperation as he hustled Hill into a loping walk, a tentacle at the back of his neck and slung around his waist.
“I get it, I’m an asshole,” Davy said. “But I’m your asshole, remember? God himself handed you the leash and said, ‘sic ’em.’ Is this really the time to question God’s judgment, before his kid’s big day?”
The laugh hiccupped out of Hill, more from surprise than amusement. It got one sharp “ha” out before panic throttled it back down into his gullet.
“You lied to me,” Hill said. “You knew what happened to my computer.”
The brief look of…regret? guilt?…that crossed Davy’s face surprised him. It didn’t last long, gone in the time it took Davy to look over his shoulder, but it had been there.
“It happened again,” he said.
Hill supposed that was all the acknowledgement he was going to get.
He opened his mouth to answer, but before he could, Davy stepped off the curb and into traffic.
A lifetime of road safety lectures made Hill try to dig his heels in.
It didn’t do much good. The tentacle around his waist tightened and yanked him unceremoniously along in Davy’s wake.
A festive green Ford screeched to a halt inches from Davy’s legs. Hill was the one who flinched at the thought of what might have been. To be fair, though, they would be his legs again at some point…and he’d rather they not be in bits.
The driver of the Ford stared at them, eyes huge and face pale, from behind a swinging Xmas Tree air freshener. A dozen tiny LED lights cast multi-colored shadows on her face. Davy waved vaguely in her general direction and kept on dodging cars.
“What are you doing?” Hill objected as he tried to twist around to check on his pursuers. He’d lost track of them, and he scanned the crowd—of dead and living faces now he was back in close proximity to Davy—for sharp ears and bloodied muzzles. “They’re going to catch up.”
“The Company has two big rules,” Davy said as they reached the other side of the road. “Do what it tells you, and don’t get in death’s way.”
Hill screwed up his face. “What?” he said. “I don’t—”
“If it looks like death might be imminent, when someone plays live-action Frogger, for example, the Company’s operatives keep their distance,” Davy explained. “It’s like they always say, don’t speed when you have a body in the trunk.”
“No one says that,” Hill snapped.
“They should,” Davy said. “It’s good advice.”
“So is don’t play in traffic,” Hill said. “You didn’t listen to that…and flirting with death is only going to keep those…”
“Hounds.”
“…Hounds away for so long.”
The tentacle around Hill’s waist gave him a possessive squeeze, the end of it curled around his thigh. Davy turned and gave him a quick, wicked smirk.
“We’ll see,” he said, with a wink of one hard-to-read pitch-dark eye. “I’m a really good flirt.”
“And you have a plan?”
“Working on it,” Davy said.
He paused briefly to look up and down the street. Hill took a breath to argue and then let it out raggedly.
“Maybe I should hand myself in,” he said. “You didn’t see what I did back there. I’m dangerous. I’m—”
“An idiot,” Davy finished for him. “Shut up and keep moving.”
If he’d meant the offer, Hill could have argued. Instead, he felt a wave of gratitude at Davy’s gruff rejection of it. Without thinking, he reached down and took a tentacle, the skin of it velvety as it curled around his fingers.
They pushed through the crowds on the street. Anytime the Hound drew closer, Davy rolled his ankle and fell off the curb into the street, or got into someone’s face with convincing drunken aggression.
Hill cringed as Davy got bounced off a wall by a furious boyfriend. He mouthed “sorry” to the offended woman on the way by, and then to the outraged bystanders who watched his body stagger down the street.
“Is the plan to get arrested?” he asked.
“Still working on that,” Davy said. He wiped blood off his—Hill’s!—lip with his thumb. “But probably not.”
Hill glanced back again. For a second he didn’t see the Hound; then it pushed through a giggling cluster of schoolgirls.
They shivered, breath visible, and the joy visibly drained out of them.
One of them teared up, another rolled her eyes in annoyance and snapped something as she chafed her hands together.
Then another Hound, this one lean and beaky with a Doberman’s streamlined snout, joined it. The two dead men moved in eerie lockstep as they wove through the crowd.
“There’s another one,” he said. Davy muttered a guttural curse under his breath. “They’re going to work out this isn’t Final Destination soon, aren’t they?”
Davy hitched one shoulder. “Eventually,” he said. “But the Company isn’t forgiving, and they aren’t that bright. So not just yet.”
That wasn’t much comfort.
Davy paused at an intersection as his gaze darted across the nearby buildings. He squinted and then made a frustrated noise under his breath. The tentacle that Hill was still clutching squeezed his fingers as Davy pointed across the road.
“Is that the Hood and Noose?” he asked.
“I—” Hill stared blankly across the street as his brain drew a blank on how to identify a business.
In the end, it was the surprisingly adept bit of graphic design on the front window that flicked the switch in his brain.
A “hooded” crow on a gibbet, all etched out in one swirled blood-red line. “Yes. Yes? Why?”
Davy grinned and lifted his hand, fingers curled into a loose fist, up to his shoulder. One of his tentacles dapped him.
“The dead are like water,” he said. “They find their own level, and Murderer’s Row is mine.”
“No one looks happy to see you,” Hill said under his breath as he shied away from the glare of a woman who had thick black bear paws for hands. An old man with a scarf wrapped over his lower face pulled the folds of wool apart enough to spit on the ground as they passed.
A tentacle jabbed out and grabbed the tasseled end of the scarf. It gave the length of wool a yank hard enough to spin the old man around, bony hands flapping. Hill stammered an apology as he grabbed the middle of the tentacle and reeled it back in.
“You surprised?” Davy asked as he looked back over his shoulder, one eyebrow cocked. “I’m not a nice man.”
Hill supposed that the evidence backed that up.
It was just…he’d been nice to Hill. And snarky, impatient, and unnecessarily dramatic about oat milk, but in between that, he’d been nice.
The wave of relief that had crashed over Hill when he’d fallen into Davy’s arms on the street…
even if they were tentacles…was still very clear in Hill’s mind.
“So I guess the plan isn’t to ask for help?” he asked as he half-tripped to avoid a crack in the pavement. Habit made it seem stupid, but under his current circumstances he didn’t want to dismiss any superstition out of hand.
Davy sniggered his appreciation of Hill’s “joke” as he hesitated for a second at a corner. The tentacles decided their route as they reached out and grabbed a leaflet-papered post to drag them in that direction.
“Ask, no,” Davy said. “We’re going to depend on them acting in their own self-interest. Are they still there?”
“Ummm…” Hill hedged as he twisted around to look over his shoulder. Dread cramped in his stomach when he saw only one of the Hounds behind them. “I can only see one of them. He’s getting closer.”
Davy narrowed his eyes and then made an annoyed sound as he scrubbed the back of his hand over them.
“It’s like looking through milk,” he muttered and then shrugged it off. “But it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to see to out-think a fucking Hound. If they’re going to try and cut us off, they’ll do it at Barrowland. Might as well get it over with and meet them there.”
He turned abruptly and broke into a run.
Hill had seen himself run before. It wasn’t an efficient process, but it got him to where he needed to go faster than walking. There wasn’t much more he could expect from it, in his experience.
Somehow, Davy took the same set of bones and joints and made a spring into something loose-limbed and natural.
Hill would have been frustrated if he had the time.
Instead, he was dragged along in a loping stumble as the narrow tenement-shabby alley in the Beyond queasily shifted in jolting increments to accommodate the passage of someone both living and dead.
Ahead of them, people saw Davy coming and prudently decided it was none of their business.
They grabbed laundry—and seriously, even when dead?
The random thought flickered irreverently through Hill’s mind—or stalls and slammed doors behind them.
Curtains whisked across windows, but Hill saw a few fingers hook the fabric back enough for the owner to peek out.
“Is the dog keeping up?” Davy asked.