Another yank and he felt somethingtear. The…pain?… It wasn’t the same as the hot, nerve-ending battering of Hill’s physical pain, but it wasn’t anything that Davy had gotten used to in the Between either. It was deep and wet and felt like someone was trying to pull his cock out through his spinal column.
Davy clenched his jaw against it and hung out as his tentacles mobbed whatever it was. Little jabs of pain pattered over his body—a bruise under his knee, a fingernail dug in that caught in the hinge of his jaw—but nothing like the original agony.
He—well, the bits of him still in the Beyond—finally managed to wrench free of whatever had grabbed him. Davy staggered at the release, his knees weak as he tried to remember where they went. A passerby grabbed his arm, her face concerned under a Santa hat, to steady him. He grimaced out a pro forma “thanks, no, I’m OK” as he got his balance.
The concerned stranger didn’t look convinced, but after a searching look reluctantly moved on with her bags of shopping.
Davy gave his head a brisk shake—didn’t help, never did, fuck knew why he always tried—and straightened up. His veins felt as dry as his mouth, and his heart was doing double-time against his ribs. It felt like the aftermath of a fight, even if it wasn’t the one he’d been after.
“The hell was that?” he muttered.
His tentacles were an agitated tangle around him, except for the injured one. It sagged around his feet, heavy and sluggish, ectoplasmic skin bruised and punctured.
Davy crouched back down and pretended to tie his laces as he examined it. He grazed a hand along the length of it, his fingers sinking through the torn flesh until it touchedhim.
The dead didn’theal, not exactly, but they didn’t care to be changed either. An injury was something gone forever, but it didn’t leave a scar. You were just…less. Usually, anyhow. The Company had a way, or so he’d heard, but that was proprietary information. Even most of the dead at the Company didn’t know anything other than that it existed.
That or the ones that Davy had cultivated were better liars than he’d thought.
Davy gave the tentacle a pat and straightened up…just in time for Hill to barrel into him. Instinct made him try and catch the man, but he barely had time to register the panic on Hill’s face before they passed through each other. The chill cut down into Davy’s bones and dug sharp fingers into the muscle of his heart.
The clutch at his chest, his fingers tangled into his T-shirt, made another passerby slow down to look at him with concern. Apparently, everyone today wanted to be a good Samaritan. Davy glared it out of them and grabbed for Hill with his uninjured tentacles, wrapping the whip-thin ends around Hill’s chest and arms.
Hill struggled against the tethers for a moment and then visibly relaxed as he realized who had him.
“What’s wrong?” Davy asked as he reeled Hill back in. “Are you OK?”
Hill looked at him, and Davy felt a brief, hard pang of something that made his chest hurt, and then, when he didn’t have the emotional nous to deal with that, made him angry. It was efficient if nothing else.
The lively silver-green shade of Hill’s eyes had faded, down to moss-green in one and completely gone to pewter in the other.His cheeks were marked with unmistakable smuts of greasy soot.
It was what passed for stigmata with a polter.
“What did you do?” Davy amended the question, his voice tight and frustrated. His tentacles picked up on his mood and gave Hill a quick, angry shake.
Hill grabbed them and peeled them off his arms. It didn’t do much, as they squirmed back in to cling to his thighs and around his throat.
“I don’t know,” he said. His voice pitched up an octave towards panic as he dragged the tentacle from around his throat with frustrated, clawed fingers. “I don’t understand any of it. It doesn’t make any sense, and— Leave me alone!”
The words burst out of Hill. He wasn’t looking at Davy, though. His attention was focused, wide-eyed and desperate, over Davy’s shoulder. Whatever he saw…
Around Davy, the temperature dropped enough that the last-minute shoppers shuddered and hunched down into their coats, not placing the “goose walked over their grave” chill. His breath smoked as it left his lips, and the Veil thinned. It didn’t lift, and it was still thick enough to hide all but the shadows and shapes on the other side, but it was enough.
Even as a silhouette, there wasn’t much you could mistake a dog-headed dead man for.
The Company had let the Hounds out of their kennels.
“Fuck,” Davy said, with feeling.
Chapter Eleven
Dec 23rd, 1.30pm
Fear was not thesame as despair.
Hill sank his teeth into his lower lip as he clawed at the inside of his own mind for the hollowingdropthat he’d felt before he did…what he’d done. It was gone, replaced by the staticky need to run.
He grabbed at Davy’s tentacles to try and squirm free. It didn’t work. They tightened around him, one tucked under his chin as it turned his head to look at Davy.
