“Just don’t make any promises,” he said. “And don’t eat anything that isn’t you.”
Hill grimaced sickly at that and rubbed his hands together. His thumb grazed the nearly grown-back nub of his finger, and he hesitated as he looked at the door.
“How do I?” he asked.
“There’s a knack to it,” Davy told him.
His tentacles weren’t talking to him.
Davy double-bagged the glass from the desk and ignored their knotted-up sulk. He didn’t have the time to deal with themandwork out why the fuck he’d lied to Hill.
Twice.
He cursed under his breath as he stepped on a bit of glass and had to balance on one foot as he reached down to pick it free from his heel. The splinter glittered between his fingers as he looked at it.
Hill’s ash-toned pallor and washed-out silver-green eyes had blanched white. A hollow outline of a person, only a shadow of a panicked Hill visible under its skin. The temperature in the room plummeted, and Davy’s breath ghosted into life as it left his lips.
It had been a long time since he’d felt cold. It definitely wasn’t as good as food.
The desk broke first, shattered into chunks and splinters of frosted glass.
It felt like it took forever to stop gawping like an idiot at the broken bit of furniture. It couldn’t have been that long, because his tentacles were already trying to crawl back inside him, squeezed in tight to his body and braided around each other, when what was left of the computer was smashed into the ground by an invisible something, and the word dropped like lead in his gut.
Polter.
He’d not felt his heart stop for a long time either, but thishadbeen what it felt like.
Shit.
The memory made Davy uncomfortable in his borrowed skin, like lemon sting in the back of his throat.
Fight, fuck…and fear. If anyone had asked him, that wasn’t the emotion he’d have picked, but he guessed it made sense it was the one that dropped for paywalled users. Luckily, it turned out his panic response was to make a wisecrack about blue balls through his dry-as-dust mouth.
And it had worked. This time. Next time they might not be so lucky.
Orrrrr…the part of Davy that was a full-time asshole nudged at him impatiently…they could roll the dice and find out. Hill wasn’t really dead. Who knew if he was bound to the same awful scale as other spirits when it came to the turn?
To the type of man Davy had always been, that made sense. It wasn’t his skin in the game, so why not go all in? Polters could manifest in the living world, and even if Hill didn’t look much like his dad, it wouldn’t take much to convince Fraser that the dark-haired, lean spirit was the dark-haired, lean man he’d murdered.
But Davy had seen the Company’s polters rolled out. Just the once, to clear a neighborhood they’d wanted for some obscure, unpopular Company project.
They had shuffled out of the Company trucks in shackles of bone, nothing but shrouds of who they’d been. Burned-out eye sockets and tongues, wet ash on white cheeks. Then, when the shackles were taken off, they’d exploded into shredded skins fluttering over screaming, brutal rage.
Davy didn’t want to see Hill like that. He definitely didn’t want to be the one who pushed him to it.
The thought gave him an uncomfortable feeling under his skin, and he grimaced as he rolled his shoulders back. Maybe it was just self-preservation of a sort that had made him bitehis tongue? The last thing he needed was to learn “guilt.” Four emotions were definitely one too many.
He flicked the splinter of glass into the sink and hefted the bag to carry it over to the door. Halfway across the living room, someone knocked at the door.
Reynolds again?
Before Davy could work out a response to that, there was the beep and click as the door was unlocked. It swung open.
“So, you aren’t dead?” a pretty blonde, vaguely familiar woman said from the doorway as she brushed snow off her sleeves. “I assumedthatwas why you weren’t answering your phone.”
Davy drew a blank for a second, then remembered the gross cookies.
Fuck.
