Finally, he felt the graze of rough fabric and cold metal trail down his back. He squirmed his shoulders back in reaction and then pulled in all his tentacles butthatone. It lingered in the wall, a pale, fleshy pointer straight through a framed medal that Fraser had never actually gotten.
Davy snorted and withdrew the last tentacle. It hung attentively over his shoulder as he reached out to move the wooden frame and set it neatly down on the couch. He tapped a finger against the smooth gray paint underneath and listened to the light, hollow thump of it.
Just in case.
He punched through the wall.
It fuckinghurt.
Davy recoiled in surprise at the jolt of pain that brought tears to the back of his throat. He pressed his lips together on a yelp and shook his hand as if that would make it better.
What the hell? He sucked in a ragged breath and stuck his hand into his armpit as he waited for the sting to subside. His mind raced from confusion to paranoia that Fraser really did have some sort of anti-spirit measures worked into the structure of the building.
Salt or relics or some shit like that. Davy leaned forward cautiously to peer into the hole he’d made. He’d heard the dry dead talking about stuff like that before, but he’d never paid much heed to it. It hadn’t seemed relevant to his problems.
Nothing looked out of place. Just a dark cavity in a wall and a battered canvas bag hung from a cheap hook.
So why thefuckdid Davy’s hand feel like he’d shoved it into a nest of angry wasps?
He gingerly took it out from under his arm to look at it and grimaced. His knuckles were split open, blood slowly oozing out over ragged chunks of skin, and already stained with the start of bruising. It looked like…
Davy mentally trailed off as he realized that it looked like the hand of someone who’d never punched something before. Probably because it hadn’t. He lifted Hill’s hand to his mouth to suck the blood out of the scraped skin. Between this and the hole in his other hand, currently bandaged up with gauze pads and Band-Aids, Hill’s deal with the dead was going to leave a mark.
Something in Davy’s chest pinched like that was his problem. It caught him off-guard. Nothing about this deal was new to him. OK, possessing someone who’d never been in a fight before was kind of novel. The rest was SOP. He had always been a targeted-strike kind of operative. If he saw the fallout, it was because something had gone to shit somewhere.
Hill would have to deal with the New Year on his own. All Davy could do to make that any easier was his job.
He grabbed the edge of the hole and broke off chunks of the wall, paint chips and plaster dust scabbed over his bloody knuckles. Once it was big enough, he reached through, grabbed the bag, and pulled it out.
It felt usefully heavy, but there wasn’t time to make sure.
Davy picked up the frame he’d set aside, the medal inside askew on its mounting from being handled, and hung it neatly back on the wall. It didn’tquitehide the edges of the hole.
Again, though, that was the point.
Davy brushed himself off, slung the bag over his shoulder, and headed back out. He grabbed a package from the Secret Santa pile on his way out. It was neatly wrapped and felt heavy enough that the fact it didn’t rattle when he shook it suggested that—he checked the neat, smiling Santa tag—Steven Wills had scored a good present.
Sucked to be him.
Davy pulled the tag off and tossed it in a bin on the way past. He whistled tunelessly to himself as he went to find Reynolds. Halfway there, he paused as the thought of Hill nudged at him. There wasn’t much he could do to find Hill in the Beyond, but he could give him a heads-up that he was leaving.
Somehow?
Chapter Five
Dec 22 2.30pm
“Being dead,” the manbehind the big desk said, “it ain’t so bad, huh?”
Hill sat on the edge of a hard leather chair, coffee cup and cookie balanced on a small plate on his knee, and tried to work out where to look. The more or less human eyes, pale brownand lightly creased around the edges, or the blunt brindle dog-muzzle that sopped up coffee with a long red tongue.
He thought that it was probably polite to focus on the eyes, but he wasn’t sure how anyone managed that.
“I guess you get used to it,” Hill said. “I prefer being alive.”
“Call me Seb”sat back in his chair. It creaked under him as his weight shifted. He cocked his head to the side. For a second Hill forgot about the teeth as he instinctively glanced up, half expecting to see pricked dog ears stuck up through the well-cut auburn waves.
“Do you?” Seb said. His chops stretched back from his teeth in a wide, toothy grin as he asked, “Why?”
