Whatever was down there tightened its grip on him. Hill winced as he felt his wrist bones creak and ache. The cold dulled the pain, but not enough. He clenched his teeth and pulled. It felt like trying to pull a mastodon out of a tar pit.
One-handed.
He could feel the tendons and muscles in his shoulder strain and fray as his arm took the strain. The pain crawled up his neck, through his jaw, and into his skull. It wasn’t like he had a choice, though.
Pull it out of the grave, or he went in.
Hill dragged it out. Strings of dirty, matted hair broke through the surface of the blood first. He grimaced and braced himself for the memento mori decay of a spirit more than ten years in dirt and concrete.
He expected rot, grease, and naked, stained bones.
There might have been guilt.
Davy Jones broke through the barrier between the grave and the living with a gasp, clots of blood dripping from his stubbled jaw and sandy hair. His skin had gray undertones, the spray of freckles over his nose like flecks of ink, but was intact and smooth over the sharp bones of his face.
The only injury was a thumbprint smudge of bruising at his hairline, just off-center from his nose.
His eyes were wild and black, edge to edge.
Lust wasnota reaction Hill had expected to have to worry about. Did it count as necrophilia, he wondered distractedly, or since there was no carcass involved, was it still just necromancy?
Blood splashed Hill’s face, cool and sticky thick, as something pale and boneless writhed up out of the pot. He tasted old salt and metal on his lips. Before he could spit it out, the pale…limb?…wrapped around his neck and pulled him down into a kiss.
Davy’s cold tongue darted into his mouth—it tasted like fresh blood, after all this time, and dirt—and Hill’s breath caught in his throat. He wasn’t sure if it was from attraction or the wet noose of muscle and skin wrapped around his neck.
This wasn’t…
He tried to grab at the spirit’s hair, tangled and clotted with blood, but another pale whip of flesh snapped up out of the bloody mixture to grab his wrist. Slow, dark hunger twisted uneasily under Hill’s skin, and his focus scattered at the departure from what he’d expected.
First-hand accounts of what happened after the rite was complete were rare. Those who survived it rarely wanted to talk about it. Those who didn’t were even more retiring on the subject. The scraps thatdidexist mentioned the spirit’s rage and unpredictability, not…this.
What theyhadall agreed on, though, Hill reminded himself grimly, was that not finishing the ritual was a bad thing.
He struggled to his feet and dragged the dead man—heavier the more of him there was in the world, all long bones and pale, tangled tentacles—with him.
Part of him was rattling around the inside of his brain in a panic. Whatever it wanted to say was muffled by lust and fear, but Hill figured it was probably the tentacles.
The pale, blood-smeared whips of them wrapped around Hill’s thighs and toyed with the ends of his hair. It definitely seemedlike someone would have mentioned them, even if they left out the way they squeezed your cock through your jeans.
Blood dripped onto the floor as Davy planted his bare feet back into the living world. He gripped Hill’s jaw with one hand and deepened the kiss.
The taste of bones filled Hill’s mouth and seeped down into his lungs. The chill made his marrow ache and his blood feel slow and sludgy as his heart labored to move it on.
He couldn’t breathe.
Hill tried to pull away. He clawed at the spirit’s bare—broad, hard-muscled,not the time!—shoulders and yanked at handfuls of matted blond hair. Only the parts that were bloody, slick and cold, felt solid. The rest gave like smoke or candy floss under his fingers. Neither made the spirit react, except to tighten its grip and kiss him harder.
It wasn’t…
This was…
It wasn’t that bad.
Hill relaxed into the dead man’s cold embrace and kissed him back, fingers knotted through bloody hair. He just had to let go.
Of his breath. Of his anger. Of everything.
Hill staggered back a couple of steps. He stared in confusion at the back of someone’s head, a cowlick swirl of dark hair at the nape and a mole just under his ear, until he realized it was him. His back. His hair. He assumed his mole, but he’d never actually noticed it before.
