“Oh, don’t worry about them,” Seb said as he waved one hand dismissively. “No point, is there. Still, didn’t expect discretion from Arms, of all people.”
“His name’s Davy,” Hill said.
It occurred to him, a little late, that maybe he shouldn’t have made the correction. It didn’t matter, though. Seb was already shaking his head dismissively, slobber dripping from loose chops.
“No. No, it’s not,” Seb sighed. “Trust me. I would know. He is a problem for another day, though. Right now we’re talking about you.”
“I would rather talk about the men with knives,”
“And snares,” Seb corrected him cheerfully. He shuffled through the paperwork on his desk. “You can’t forget them.”
He glanced up, his eyes suddenly old.Old-old, cloudy and wet and wrinkled. “Youmustn’tforget the snares.”
Hill swallowed and cringed back in the seat. He glanced at the door and weighed the option of making his excuses to leave.
“I…” he started to stumble his way toward a polite out, but Seb wiped his dirty hands over his eyes and recovered himself before he could.
“Youcame for answers,” Seb said. “And you thought they’d be free, because you have a winning smile and a pure heart? No such luck. Life is generous, death is not. It is, however, straightforward.”
That didnotsound true. Hill squinted at Seb as he asked dubiously. “It is?”
“It can be,” Seb said. “You invoked the spirits to punish your stepfather, and that’s all in motion, no hiccups there, but thatleaves you with questions about your dead dad that only he could answer.”
Seb paused, one perfectly manicured brow raised expectantly as he looked at Hill. The breezy, human resources in a private firm, callousness of his delivery madesomethingcatch in Hill’s chest. He wasn’t sure if it was a sob or a laugh, and he wasn’t going to let it out to find out. It caught in his throat like a dry bit of bread as he swallowed hard.
“I’d like to know—”
Seb shushed him with an upheld hand. “Not my circus, not my monkeys,” he said blithely. “I’m the big-picture man. I don’t need to know the details. It’s enough that you want something we can give you. In return, the Company wants a catspaw in the mortal world.”
They stared at each other.
“Is that a joke?” Hill asked after a long, stiffly awkward pause.
“Why would it be?”
Hill reached up and gestured vaguely around his chin and jaw area to indicate the slobbering dog muzzle that jutted out of Seb’s face.
“Because of the…” He trailed off as Seb just looked confused. “Um…never mind. Why do you need one of those?”
It was not easy for a dog to purse its lips. Seb managed to pucker his around a mouthful of sharp teeth.
“Oh, don’t worry your pretty head about that,” he said. “You’ve already flouted the laws of God and Man—”
“Rules.”
This was the interruption that made Seb look annoyed. He sighed, his loose dog chops flapping. “What?”
“Technically, they are rules, not laws,” Hill said. “A law would have wider scope, more enforcement, and legal consequences of some kind.”
Seb rolled his eyes and started to say something, but he didn’t get a chance. The Invocation of the Spirits had been Hill’s special interest for the last three years. This particular element hadn’t been his main focus, but it still felt reassuring to fall back onto. He would much rather info-dump about ecclesiastical conspiracy theories and metaphysical loopholes than…
…well, men with snares that waited for the dead.
“It’s also the laws or rules of the Church, not of God,” he blurted out. “Since God, by definition, is omnipotent and therefore is aware of the Invocation and, based on the fact it’s not been removed from existence, approves of it.”
Seb picked a chunk of cookie out of his teeth and licked it off his fingers.
“That assumes you’re capable of understanding God’s will,” he said. “Maybe the Invocation is a test. Or a trap.”
