“I said I wanted to get it before the party,” Davy said. “Not that I was going to the party.”
The receptionist chuckled. Reynolds’s expression soured.
“Suit yourself,” he said. “At least we won’t have to worry about you throwing a tantrum over the food, Little Lord Fauntleroy.”
Hill’s ears burned with the memory ofthathumiliation.
“It wasn’t—” he started to defend himself, then realized it was pointless.
“Don’t worry about it, sweetheart,” the receptionist said as she unplugged a lead from her desk and pulled the collar of her shirt down to click the jack into the connector in her throat. When she spoke again, her voice came from the intercom inside the elevator as the doors opened. “The living aren’t real; they can’t hurt you. I’ve buzzed you up.”
Oh.
OK.
Right.
“Thanks,” Hill said. He pointed self-consciously at Davy. “I should probably wait for him.”
The receptionist smiled at him and pushed her cat-eye glasses up her nose.
“Don’t worry about him,” she said. “He knows his way around. Thing is, he’s a results man. If you want answers…well, the dead see a lot. The doors won’t stay open forever.”
Hill licked his lips as he hesitated. He’d ridden that elevator every day for the last three years. It had always been glass and polished metal. Even when his dad had worked here. The worn cherrywood panels and musty orange carpet had never been partof the design. That, somehow, made him more nervous than the box’s undeniable resemblance to a coffin.
“Shit or get off the pot, love,” the receptionist advised as she fished a packet of cigarettes out of the drawer. She tapped one out into her fingers and winked at Hill when he looked at her. “Terrible habit. Never get started. It’ll kill ya.”
She struck a match. The flame was wispy and more smoke than light. It still worked to light the cigarette. As the receptionist breathed in, the doors started to close.
The smart thing to do would be to let them.
Hill’s death was—hopefully—temporary. By Christmas he’d have his body back, and Davy would be…wherever spirits that finished their business went. Agreement across the board, from Church doctrine to Reddit boards, was that beingtooinformed about the dealings of the dead ended…
Badly. Or well. Either way, the important part in that was the “end.”
The problem was that, while Hill might have consistently tested asintelligent, among other things, a smart man would have let sleeping dogs lie. Not gone to Player Street and kicked them back to life.
He bolted for the narrowing gap of the elevator doors.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Davy’s head jerk around to see what Hill was doing.
“What is it?” Reynolds said as he turned in the same direction. “There’s nothing there.”
Davy’s tentacles shot out to grab at Hill. One snatched at his ankle. He managed to jump over the thick cable of it and stepped on another as he staggered on landing. That gave him a flash of unnecessary guilt. He blurted a muttered “sorry,” even as another tentacle grabbed his hoodie. The collar jerked up under his throat and…even when you didn’t need to breathe, that stillfelt unpleasant. He yanked his arms free, the jacket left to dangle from the tentacle’s grip, and threw himself at the gap.
The last and longest tentacle grabbed his wrist, and Hill braced himself for a rude halt. Except it didn’t tighten its grip and just slid away, the dry, cool tip of it caressing Hill’s palm as it let him go.
He made it to the elevator just in time to squeeze through the doors. His momentum crashed him into the back wall of the cab, his hands braced flat against the fly-speckled old mirror. When he turned around, he had just enough time to shrug an apology to Davy’s glare before the doors slammed shut.
A distorted reflection stared back at him from the beaten copper that clad the doors. The warm tones of the metal tinted his skin with brown and pink instead of gray, but somehow it didn’t look like his living face. Just an idea of what he’d look like dead in the flesh.
He looked down at his feet and started to put his hands in his pockets. When he only found empty air, he remembered the somber flag of his hoodie left where he’d shed it, dangled from one of Davy’s tentacles.
“Shit,” he muttered, briefly at a loss for what to do with his hands.
“Language,” the receptionist’s voice chided him from the speaker. The mechanism cranked, and the cab rattled upwards, fast enough to make him stagger. “Hold on to your bones.”
Chapter Four
