Reynolds gave him a withering look, rolled his eyes, and jabbed one of the unmarked black buttons. It was a sure bet. When people thought someone was stupid, they were only ever too happy to be proven right.
“The fact you thought I’deverbe into you?” Reynolds said as he crossed his arms and stared at the shut doors. “That should be part of the diagnostic for whatever you’ve got.”
Davy gave the nape of the man’s neck a sour look as he regretted his decision to practice moderation. He could probably have given Reynolds reason to keep that sneer off his face for the next five years. At least.
Instead, here he was, stuck not doing something he wanted to do. His “No.1 (Step) Uncle” mug better be under the fucking tree.
Um, yeah, no. That was still creepy.
Davy hooked his finger into the collar of his T-shirt and gave it a tug. The gesture caught Reynolds’s eye, and he glanced over. Davy irritably curled the end of a tentacle and flicked the man in the eye.
Useless but…
“Fuck,” Reynolds muttered as he screwed up his face. He rubbed around the bony orbit of his eye with his thumb as he blinked. “Fucking migraines.”
Davy glanced from him to the web of his tentacles.
He hadn’t expected that petty bit of spite to do anything other than frustrate him. The dead might be able toseethe mortal world, but that was it. They couldn’t touch it or taste it or fuck it over. Not unless they went polter…but there weresomefucking lines even Davy wasn’t going to cross.
It could be coincidence, he supposed. There was only one way to find out.
He reared up one pale, narrow tentacle and held it for a second, swaying slightly from side to side like a cobra as he aimed. Then he struck and jabbed it straight through Reynolds’s eye and twisted it through the honeycomb of his sinuses.
It felt weird. Like nothing where heknewhe should feel something. Hill’s body responded to the lack of feedback by pulling up something analogous, the wet, slick warmth of blood thick and slippery as it coated Davy’s hands.
Reynolds seemed to like the experience even less. His face went gray, the sickly color stained around his mouth and eyes, and he had to catch himself against the wall. He bent his head forward; it looked like he was about to puke on his shoes, and Davy’s tentacle flicked up into his brain.
ThatDavy felt.
The jolt of it went through him like a shock and made his tentacles recoil, knotted in tight around his body.
…Hill’s mouth moving, all lips and tongue and sticky, sweaty irritation. The brief thought that it wouldn’t bebadfor his career as he looked at Hill’s cautiously hopeful face and the sour “No” that scratched out of him. Shame—he liked women more, but if you got the chance to fuck the boss’s son, you fucked the boss’s son—but this one was a liability. Fraser didn’t trust him, and that wasn’t something that Reynolds wanted rubbing off on…
Gone.
Davy staggered as he tried to hang on to the thoughts, but they ran out of him like water. The details first, and then anything but the vaguest idea of what they’d been. He wiped the back of his nose on his hand. It was dry, but itfeltlike it should be bloody. He could taste the salt and metal of it, the expectation that when he sniffed the hot liquid would hit the back of his sinuses.
His eyes caught his reflection over his raised hand, fractured and misted in the roughed-up metal, and stalled for a second in surprise when he saw…himself.
Davy…thathadn’tbeen his name, had it?…Jones, with his hard-edged good looks and too dark to read eyes. The lack of any white was a post-death evolution, but they had always been…off-putting. Or so he’d been told.
Although the squirming mass of immaterial flesh that writhed agitatedly around him probably took the heat off the eyes a bit in the “off-putting” stakes these days.
He glanced up in the corner of the cab at the camera he was pretty sure was there and wondered if it could see that. If it did, then discretion was pointless. Fraser had grown up in the same sweltering brand of Catholicism as Davy; he knew about the ritual, and he knew how many people he’d pissed off who might use it against him.
Davy checked on Reynolds. The other man looked queasy, and as Davy watched, he wiped blood out of his nostril onto his thumb. Not even a glance at Davy’s reflection. If it was an act, then it was a good one. So it was more likely some little-known effect of the Beyond that Davy saw himself in there.
Just in case, though…
He winked at his reflection, just one quick flick of an eyelid before his image faded back into Hill’s hair and mouth and hands.
Best-case scenario was that Fraser didn’t work out who’d pulled his unfinished business out of the ground. But if it didcome out, Davy wanted his brother to know he was enjoying the parole.
Davy left Reynolds to puke in the toilets and went to find Fraser’s office.
It didn’t take him long. The biggest office with the least personality. Davy swung the well-cushioned black leather office chair around and threw Hill’s body down into it, all lank and careless grace. He swung a sneaker-clad foot up onto the corner of the desk and reached for the top drawer.
It turned out that thirty years, give or take, did change a man. Fraser had moved his candy from under his pen tray down to PERSONALACC_26. Davy unwrapped the sucker he pulled out and stuck it in his mouth. The plastic crinkled in his hands as he balled it up and dropped it onto the floor.
