Mostlyavoid it.
His foot caught around the man’s ankle and made him stagger; hot coffee sloshed over gray slacks and very expensive shoes.
“Sorry, I didn’t…” Hill got that much out on autopilot, before his tongue caught up with his eyes and went numb and stupid.
The man made an annoyed noise as he brushed the liquid off his legs and shook it off the newspaper he had in one hand. Gray speckled feathers bristled over human eyes and the start of a human nose—enough to support a pair of reading glasses—before it melted into a pointed yellow beak the length of a forearm.
“Watch where you’re going,” the man snapped, a blunt black tongue wriggling around the words. Then he shook his head and tossed his coffee-stained paper down in disgust. “If you weren’t still wet,I fucking swear.”
He stalked away.
Hill stared after him and then shook himself quickly. He started to jog after Davy, then stopped to grab the paper. The coffee—and how, the thought briefly distracted Hill, had the man planned todrinkit?—stained the front page and smudged the ink. Hill could still make out a few words.
The masthead readThe Dudley Pomp, and the date wastoday. Apparently the big news of the day was something to do with a road. The picture of a multi-level interchange took up most of the space above the fold, with a stern DISRUPTION just visible above the headline.
A tentacle snaked back and latched around Hill’s wrist. He didn’t resist as he hurried past the other…dead? ghosts?…on the sidewalk until he caught up with Davy. A few gave him a look on the way by, somewhere between pity and hunger.
“What did that mean?” Hill asked.
“Huh?”
“That guy had…” Hill trailed off and sketched the outline of a beak in front of his face with one hand. Then he nodded overthe street where the bird-faced man had stopped to look in a window. Davy looked that way and then made an annoyed face at himself. Hill ignored it as he pushed on. “Why? Is it like your…”
He trailed off again and wriggled his fingers in the air. The tentacles pounced on the movement and wove through his knuckles like they were playing.
Davy whapped at them, his fingers passing through them like they were smoke. They still retracted, pulled in close to his body and curled gently.
“No,” he said flatly. “That’s…look, you’re not actually dead. Does it matter?”
“I will be,” Hill said. “One day.”
“Yeah, well, do good deeds. Hope for the best.”
“I prefer to plan for the worst,” Hill said.
The words were out before he rememberedwhythe answer came to mind so easily. It was what Fraser always said. From Davy’s sidelong look, he’d heard it a few times himself…back when he’d been alive, presumably.
“Muzzles are a sign of office,” Davy said after a brief pause. He kept walking as he talked. “Birds, dogs, maggots, hares. Anything to do with the dead. It confers status and conveys position. The tentacles are….”
He stopped on the curb to wait for a truck to pass, and then glanced back at the obedient cloud of tentacles.
“Well,” Davy said. “Think of them as like…more like a rap sheet.”
He stepped into the road. A passing silver Bentley clipped him as it growled by, hip and knee getting the brunt. It made Hill flinch in an immediate atavistic response to the thought of how much that would hurt.
Davy didn’t even notice. The car exploded around him, streamers of dust and smoke unspooled in the air, and he justkept walking. As the car passed him, it knit itself back together. There didn’t seem to be a driver that Hill could see.
He tried to blow out a relieved breath and realized he hadn’t anything in his lungs. It felt a bit stupid to breathe in just to sigh, but he did it anyhow. It made him feel better.
“Did you—” he started to ask. Except he knew Davy hadn’t. OK. Hill wiped his hands on his jeans, the ones that his bodywasn’twearing any longer, and stretched his legs to fall back in next to Davy again. He gave one of the tentacles a leery look as it draped casually over his shoulder, the weight of it a surprise. “What does that mean, a rap sheet?”
Davy made an exasperated sound and pulled his hand down over his jaw.
“It’s…when you die, your sins come with you,” he said. “What they look like when they get here depends on…fuck knows, to be honest. Some people get chains, some get arache-a hound or cat or beast- that sticks to their heels, some get—”
“Tentacles?” Hill said dubiously.
Davy shrugged and idly reached up to poke his ear, as if he had an earpiece in. Of course, Hill realized uneasily, even this early there would be people on the streets. Living people. It was just that Hill couldn’tseethem.
