That gave him a strange, “turning up naked to English class,” dream feeling.
“You know my mom didn’t name me Davy Jones, right?” Davy said.
Hill had…not. The only information he’d had about the dead man had been that name and his dad’s guilt. Even the address had been something he’d had to dig through shell companies and bank transfers and old calendar entries to narrow down. So that explainedthat, he supposed.
“Why—”
“I made problems go away,” Davy said. “They never came back, just like they’d been sent to Davy Jones’s locker. Since I was already called ‘Jones,’ it stuck, and then I died and my sins…I guess they thought it fit too.”
“What was your real name?” Hill asked.
Davy glanced at him. He quirked the corner of his mouth in a smirk. The lazy confidence of the expression made Hill struggle to find the lines of his own face under the handsome blond overlay of Davy.
Not gonna ask how many bodies I sent down there?” he asked.
Thatwould, Hill supposed, have been a good question. Logically, it was the important one, but what Hill wanted to know with sudden, unexpected need was the name.
When he didn’t edit the question, Davy shrugged.
“It was…”
He trailed off. Surprise flickered over his face, chased quickly by consternation. He reached up to rub his forehead, frown lines indented under his fingers.
“It was… umm…” Davy tried again, face pinched as he tried to shake down the answer from his brain, and then laughed instead. He shrugged it off dismissively. “It wasn’t important then, and it doesn’t matter now. Come on. We’re here.”
The afterlife as a concrete experience was new to Hill. He would be willing, however, to put money on Davy being wrong about that. It probably wasn’t the time to push, though.
He stopped on the pavement and looked up.
Unlike some of the buildings, Fraser’s offices didn’t look much different in the afterlife. The tinted glass was nicotine brown instead of black, and the long white concrete pillars were chipped and gray. CIRATTA HOLDINGS was written in a discreet gold font on the main doors. Shadows moved against the windows, just visible enough that you could see some of them looked inhuman.
Hill took a shallow breath and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand.
“I still don’t know what good you think this is going to be,” he said. “If there was any useful information at Ciratta, I would have used it before summoning the dead.”
Davy took the ID badge out of his pocket and clipped it to his shirt.
“You’re not me,” he said as he straightened the badge and headed up the low flight of well-worn steps.
He changed how he walked as he climbed. The lazy, cocky confidence of Davy Jones, not currently dead and enjoying it, changed to something hesitant and careful. Hill didn’t know what he was doing at first.
Then he realized it was him. He walked like that.
“I really doubt that was necessary,” he muttered under his breath as he squared his shoulders and headed up the steps.
The doors had started to swing shut as he got there, and he had to jump through. A tentacle caught him by the elbow and steadied him when he stumbled. He didn’t know if he should thank it or not, so settled for a quick pat. When he looked up, his stomach sank as he saw the tall sandy-blond man leaning on the reception desk.
Or didn’t, he supposed. His stomach was currently a foot to the left, possessed by a dead man who was about to be caught out by one of Fraser’s more…embarrassing…lackeys.
“That’s Luke Reynolds.” Hill leaned in toward Davy. “He knows me. He’s going to know you’re not—”
“Hill,” Reynolds said as he pushed himself off the desk. He didn’t give Davy—or Hill—a second look as he instead pointedly glanced at his wrist. “Early for you, isn’t it?”
Davy blinked at him and hunched up one shoulder in a scarecrow-awkward shrug. The gesture did not look the same way that Hill remembered it felt from inside the shoulders.
“I left something upstairs,” Davy said. “I want to get it before the party later.”
Reynolds mugged surprise. “You?” he said. “You’re actually going to turn up and socialize with us cogs in the machine, Fraser’s lackeys? That’s a change.”
