“Is the plan to get arrested?” he asked.
“Still working on that,” Davy said. He wiped blood off his—Hill’s!—lip with his thumb. “But probably not.”
Hill glanced back again. For a second he didn’t see the Hound; then it pushed through a giggling cluster of schoolgirls. They shivered, breath visible, and the joy visibly drained out of them. One of them teared up, another rolled her eyes in annoyance and snapped something as she chafed her hands together.
Then another Hound, this one lean and beaky with a Doberman’s streamlined snout, joined it. The two dead men moved in eerie lockstep as they wove through the crowd.
“There’s another one,” he said. Davy muttered a guttural curse under his breath. “They’re going to work out this isn’tFinal Destinationsoon, aren’t they?”
Davy hitched one shoulder. “Eventually,” he said. “But the Company isn’t forgiving, and they aren’t that bright. So not just yet.”
That wasn’t much comfort.
Davy paused at an intersection as his gaze darted across the nearby buildings. He squinted and then made a frustrated noise under his breath. The tentacle that Hill was still clutching squeezed his fingers as Davy pointed across the road.
“Is that the Hood and Noose?” he asked.
“I—” Hill stared blankly across the street as his brain drew a blank on how to identify a business. In the end, it was the surprisingly adept bit of graphic design on the front window that flicked the switch in his brain. A “hooded” crow on a gibbet, all etched out in one swirled blood-red line. “Yes. Yes? Why?”
Davy grinned and lifted his hand, fingers curled into a loose fist, up to his shoulder. One of his tentacles dapped him.
“The dead are like water,” he said. “They find their own level, and Murderer’s Row is mine.”
“No one looks happy to see you,” Hill said under his breath as he shied away from the glare of a woman who had thick black bear paws for hands. An old man with a scarf wrapped over his lower face pulled the folds of wool apart enough to spit on the ground as they passed.
A tentacle jabbed out and grabbed the tasseled end of the scarf. It gave the length of wool a yank hard enough to spin the old man around, bony hands flapping. Hill stammered an apology as he grabbed the middle of the tentacle and reeled it back in.
“You surprised?” Davy asked as he looked back over his shoulder, one eyebrow cocked. “I’m not a nice man.”
Hill supposed that the evidence backed that up. It was just…he’d been nice to Hill. And snarky, impatient, and unnecessarily dramatic about oat milk, but in between that, he’d been nice. The wave of relief that had crashed over Hill when he’d fallen into Davy’s arms on the street…even if they were tentacles…was still very clear in Hill’s mind.
“So I guess the planisn’tto ask for help?” he asked as he half-tripped to avoid a crack in the pavement. Habit made it seem stupid, but under his current circumstances he didn’t want to dismiss any superstition out of hand.
Davy sniggered his appreciation of Hill’s “joke” as he hesitated for a second at a corner. The tentacles decided their route as they reached out and grabbed a leaflet-papered post to drag them in that direction.
“Ask, no,” Davy said. “We’re going to depend on them acting in their own self-interest. Are they still there?”
“Ummm…” Hill hedged as he twisted around to look over his shoulder. Dread cramped in his stomach when he saw only one of the Hounds behind them. “I can only see one of them. He’s getting closer.”
Davy narrowed his eyes and then made an annoyed sound as he scrubbed the back of his hand over them.
“It’s like looking through milk,” he muttered and then shrugged it off. “But it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to see to out-think a fucking Hound. If they’re going to try and cut us off, they’ll do it at Barrowland. Might as well get it over with and meet them there.”
He turned abruptly and broke into a run.
Hill had seen himself run before. It wasn’t an efficient process, but it got him to where he needed to go faster than walking.There wasn’t much more he could expect from it, in his experience.
Somehow, Davy took the same set of bones and joints and made a spring into something loose-limbed and natural. Hill would have been frustrated if he had the time. Instead, he was dragged along in a loping stumble as the narrow tenement-shabby alley in the Beyond queasily shifted in jolting increments to accommodate the passage of someone both living and dead.
Ahead of them, people saw Davy coming and prudently decided it was none of their business. They grabbed laundry—and seriously, even whendead?The random thought flickered irreverently through Hill’s mind—or stalls and slammed doors behind them. Curtains whisked across windows, but Hill saw a few fingers hook the fabric back enough for the owner to peek out.
“Is the dog keeping up?” Davy asked.
He used Hill’s body to dodge around a rusty skip in an alley and boost himself over a chain link fence that didn’t exist in the Beyond. The two worlds glitched and folded around each other, with no one on either side apparently aware of it.
Except Hill.
It was just layers, he told himself in a desperate attempt to quell the existential nausea,just Adobe Undead.
