Chapter Twelve
It wasn’t the fight that Davy had wanted, but he supposed you had to take what you could get.
Or, he thought dourly as he fumbled blindly with his tentacles, fucking find.
He edged to the side of the street and leaned against a car, hands in his pockets as he tried to look like someone who didn’t need an intervention to the passersby.
From the worried look an older man gave him and the way a young dad power-walked his baby’s stroller past Davy, it wasn’t working.
A stab of pain raked through his chest, like teeth scraping the gristle off his ribs. He instinctively yanked that tentacle back, losing a chunk of meat and splattering plasm up the wall, and swung another in low. If the teeth were up there, after all, there’d be a leg down…
There it was.
He wrapped the tentacle twice around the Hound’s calf and yanked. The leg bent but didn’t shift, and he didn’t snatch it back quickly enough. A hand grabbed it, clawed fingers digging down into the dense muscle, and something cold and sharp and…hollow…stabbed through it and into the ground.
Davy staggered as the chill sucked on him. The Beyond was set at cool, but this was different. It was a numb, deadening cold that sucked the energy out of him. His tentacles felt heavy and sluggish, like it was too much of an effort to lift them up.
So he let them drop.
One tentacle might not have been enough to move the Hound; all of them dropped on him at once was a different matter.
Davy sagged down onto his knees, his hands braced against the ground, as he groped out a map of the Hound.
It got another chunk of him, claws ripping rents into pale flesh, but he jammed a tentacle into its ear and pushed another against the wet, hard grape resistance of its eye.
Another tentacle wrapped twice around its throat and squeezed enthusiastically.
Every time, Davy thought groggily. The dead didn’t breathe, but his tentacles still always tried for a strangle. It did make it difficult for the Hound to get at him with those teeth, so he let it be.
A yank made the Hound howl. Even sheltered in Hill’s meat, Davy felt it hit him, an atavistic jolt of fear that went from the back of his skull down to clench his balls. The rest of its pack would hear it too.
It would still take them too long to get here.
That was what passed for Davy’s plan, anyhow.
He twisted his tentacle down farther into the Hound’s ear, stretching it out as thin and wiry as it would go. The labyrinth of the inner ear was clammy and sticky with wax as he drilled down. The eardrum popped like a balloon as he jabbed it.
The Hound writhed and threw its head back as it realized what he was doing. It grabbed hold of his tentacles and yanked, twisting them around its forearms like rope as it tried to pop him out of Hill like a mussel out of its shell.
That was a new sort of pain. Davy didn’t even know what to do with it. It was like hitting his funny bone with a hammer made of acid, only all over.
If nothing else, it helped fight the sluggish exhaustion from whatever still pinned him to the ground. He jammed his tentacle into the corner of the Hound’s eye until he felt something give—wet and slick—and he could hook the end of it around the edge of the socket.
“Down, boy,” he grunted as he yanked as hard as he could.
For a beat nothing happened. His heart dropped into his boots in dismay and his brain scrabbled for another plan, only to come up blank.
Before he could try anything desperate, he yanked again, and this time the muzzle gave.
It slid free with a wet ripping sound, like skin being peeled off.
The Hound howled again, only for it to choke off into a human shout of pain.
The muzzle in Davy’s grip was suddenly lighter and colder, just bone and teeth instead of hair and muscle.
He tossed it blindly at what was probably a wall.
The Hound in his grip wasn’t done yet, though.
He stamped on whatever it was that nailed Davy’s tentacle to the ground.
The pain read as pins jammed up under all of Davy’s fingernails at once, and he retched, bile splattering from between clenched teeth and out his nose.
Someone in a pair of nice leather boots took a quick step to the side and then quick-stepped past him. At this point, “someone who’s fine” had clearly left the building. The best he could hope for was that he looked more like someone who needed a paramedic than a cop.
Then it all stopped.
Well, most of it. The dull, chewed-rib throb of the skewer in his tentacle persisted.
Davy spat out a mouthful of hollandaise and lifted his head.
Hill, a dented length of metal gripped in one hand, stood over what, when Davy squinted, he assumed was the Hound. His face looked even paler than usual.
“Are you OK?” he asked.
Davy shrugged an answer to that. It felt odd inside Hill, but he had no context to decide if it was going to be a problem or not.
He got his elbow under him.
“Vultures anywhere?” he asked.
Hill looked up at the sky. Fair enough, Davy supposed. He wrinkled his nose and sniffed hard. “Scavengers. Bad men with knives and forks come to clear the plate.”
Someone touched his shoulder.
He swung on them out of instinct before the “Are you all right?” sank in. The woman fell back with a startled cry, one gloved hand up to her face. Blood splattered over the back of the cream leather.
Fuck. That was the cops, then.
“Yeah,” Hill said nervously as he looked around. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple prominent against the line of his throat. “A couple. Should I…stop…them?”
He had the good sense to sound like he wasn’t sure that was going to work.
Good Samaritans had pulled the woman that Davy had cold-cocked away. She had tissues pressed to her nose and older women clucking over her. The less nurturing among them went for dragging Davy to his feet and slamming him against a car.
“You think ’cause the solstice is past, you don’t have to worry about payback?
” the ruddy-faced man in a mid-tier suit demanded as he hoisted Davy up onto his toes.
Pain tore through Davy as his tentacle stretched out, ripping around the Hound’s skewer.
He let the other tentacles fumble with it—the handle stung like nettles as he gripped it—and work it out of the ground.
The man gave Davy a shake. “The spirits aren’t the only ones who can hurt you. ”
Huh. Looked like he’d get that fight after all.
Davy spat out the last of the sick in his mouth. It splattered over the man’s jacket, and instinct made him draw back.
“Let them clean that up,” he said. The Hounds would come back—the Company had a retention clause—but it would take a while once Murderer’s Row’s best broke them down for parts. “Get out of here before anyone sees you.”
The man holding Davy hesitated as his expression tried to decide between confusion and disgust. Before it could settle, Davy solved it for him by punching him in the face.
As the brawl kicked off—messy and highly charged and packing the area full of living, breathing bodies to push the Beyond back—he saw a brief glimpse of a shadowy, predatory press of bodies that faded away as Hill made himself scarce.
Then someone slid a punch through his guard and split his lip. He focused back on the problem at hand.
Being arrested as a rich kid was a whole different experience from being arrested as gutter trash. They’d given him a sandwich and a Starbucks, for fuck’s sake.
Davy would rate it 10/10. He would be arrested here again.
The desk sergeant handed his wallet back to him. “…and tell your dad thanks for the donation to the Widows and Orphans fund,” she said. “We appreciate his continued support.”
“Thanks,” Davy said as he tucked the wallet into his back pocket. He scrawled something that would probably pass as Hill’s signature on the papers handed to him, playing on the bruises on his ribs to explain anything weird. “He appreciates everything you do for the city.”
Bullshit, obviously. Fraser appreciated everything they did for him, or he’d not keep paying them to do it. Most people would rather pretend they were being generous than admit they were bought and paid for, though.
The desk sergeant smiled and nodded as she shuffled the paperwork back together.
“Don’t worry about this,” she said. “It was obviously just a misunderstanding.”
Davy nodded. “Give the lady who got hurt Fl…our lawyer’s number,” he said. “We’ll make it right with her.”
Why not, after all. It was one jab at Fraser, and, well, Davy didn’t feel great about the woman’s nose. If it had actually been Hill in need, she’d have been doing a good deed. It wasn’t her fault she’d got a hair-trigger asshole instead.
“I’ll do that,” the sergeant said, her mouth tucked in an approving smile. “Happy holidays.”
Davy took his jacket and shrugged it on as he left. As he walked out, he saw Hill sitting on the bottom step and Reynolds on the curb, in front of a black SUV from the company fleet. He paused on the steps under the pretext of fixing his collar as he weighed how he wanted to play this.
“Fraser asked me to pick you up,” Reynolds noted as he pushed himself up off the door.
He looked haggard, with a twitch under one eye and his collar wrinkled, but he sounded normal enough.
Hill looked up and bolted to his feet in surprise as Reynolds came into focus for him.
He glanced up at Davy for direction, and Davy did his best to communicate “play it chill” without looking weird.
Reynolds didn’t seem to notice the slight gesture of his hand.
“He’d have been here himself, but…apparently, there’s a few unseasonal fires he needs to put out. ”
It was hard to be annoyed with someone who came bearing good news.
Davy took the last three steps down.
“That’s new,” he said, and took a punt on what portion of the world could still be volatile enough to be relevant decades on since he’d been involved. “The oil fields?”