“Is your mom going to be here?” Davy asked. He snapped a pair of blue gloves over his hands and forced the circuit box on the side of the building open. As he looked at the breakers inside, he made a pleased noise in the back of his throat. “I love old buildings.”
“No,” Hill said. “Mom moved to the lake house full-time during Covid…I mean, you missed it, but there was—”
Davy cut him off. “We didn’t get to work from home,” he said. “But trust me, the dead don’t miss a pandemic.”
That made sense. Hill hunched his shoulders and shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. The card that Seb from the Company had given him jabbed up under his thumbnail on one hand, and he barked his knuckles on the sharp eye sockets of the bird skull Hen had given him.
He’d forgotten about those. It was lucky they’d not fallen out when he was—
Hill glanced at the tentacles. They were currently hackled up as they tossed the makeshift shelter of the unmuzzled spirit that had been squatting back there. He—she?—had made themselves scarce without needing to be told when they’d seen Hill. The tentacles had unearthed a sickle-bladed knife from the bedding, which they passed between themselves, while two others pulled out a mildewed book and hung it up by one corner.
Well, earlier.
“Yeah,” Hill said as he tried to get back on track. “Anyhow, she lives out there full-time now. Fraser stays here during the week and goes to visit on weekends. He’ll be here. He’s usually alone.”
“Good,” Davy said and flicked the breakers.
If Hill had been asked, he’d have said the building had already been in darkness. He’d just edited out all the little power lights and chargers and the faint glow from a TV left on standby. Hill hadn’t realized the cumulative glow they generated. When they all cut out at once, the shift toabsolutedarkness was noticeable.
“Are you going to tell me the plan?” Hill asked.
Davy straightened up, stripped his gloves off, and stuck them in his pocket. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand and looked up at the second floor of the building.
“I think it’s time that my brother gets a visit from your dad,” he said. “And since we’ve had no luck tracking him down…”
He trailed off. A tentacle pulled Hill’s hood up over his head and tugged it down until it nearly touched his nose.
“But he can’t see me,” Hill said. “None of the living can.”
The tentacle pushed the hood back again, enough so that Davy could meet his eyes. “They can’t see spirits,” he said. “They can see polts…some of the time.”
Hill couldn’t even pretend to be shocked. He tried, but he didn’t even fool himself. The minute he’d broken that table, Davy had started to work up to this.
“I don’t…I can’t control it,” Hill said. “I could hurt someone. I could knock down another building. I could hurtyou.”
Davy cupped the side of his face in a tentacle. The tension in Hill’s stomach untwisted, just a little, as he turned his face into the caress.
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Asshole.”
The tentacle gave the end of Hill’s nose a tweak. “See?” Davy said. “You do know me. And we don’t need you to unleash the full experience, just…crack the door for Fraser. Let him get a glimpse under the curtain. Like at the cafe. Or when I made you come.”
A tentacle grazed suggestively along the small of Hill’s back. It dipped down under the waistband of his jeans and delved briefly into his crack. He reached back and pulled it out.
“What if I lose control?”
Davy thought about that for a moment as he used his tentacles to zip up the hoodie.
“Try not to, but if you do—” He put two tentacles on Hill’s shoulders and turned him around. “Face away from me.”
Power cut or not, Hill knew the brownstone had a backup security system. In the living world. In the Beyond, once he got away from Davy’s grounding presence, it was a tenement with stories stacked up until it needed to lean against the building next to it for support. A woman with a short seed-cracking beak and overalls with a name embroidered on them gave him an annoyed look as she pushed by him in the hall.
“Sorry,” Hill muttered as he shuffled to the side.
“Wet dead,” she said, like it was a slur. At the door, she paused, sighed, and looked back at him. “You know anyone? Family? Friends? Ex who died in a horrible car accident?”
Hill shuffled his feet on the cracked tiles. They were the same in the living world, although the colors were brighter from restoration and they were covered with an expensive rug his mom had picked out. She was never there, but she liked it to still remind Fraser of her.
