…boots instead of Converse, comfortable but heavier as he walked, and that low-grade but constant ache in his knee from a misstep on old stairs in a Moscow apartment block. His hair had been damp with rain, and he’d shovedadoor open, palm flat against the glossy green wood, as he glanced over his shoulder to say,“You didn’t have to do this.”
“Do what?” the kid asked.
Davy tripped over his own feet as he staggered out of the memory. He caught himself against the fence and then straightened up, brushing his hands together.
“I didn’t say anything,” he lied in a rough voice.
It wouldn’t have convinced anyone who’d ever known him, but the kid just looked confused and shrugged it off. He stuck close to Davy’s heels, unconsciously tucked into the mantle of his tentacles, as they walked down the street.
Davy had plenty of questions he needed answers to. Time was short, and the stakes might even be high. So he was alittle surprised that the first one he asked was, “So, what’s your name?”
The kid looked startled too. Maybe at hearing that question from his own face.
“Hill…” the kid said, and then glanced sidelong at Davy. He added the rest reluctantly. “Hill Rosen.”
Huh.
That cleared up…fucking nothing.
Davy took a bite out of the cheeseburger. The heady taste of cheese, hot meat, and warm, starchy bread filled his mouth. He closed his eyes and groaned in satisfaction as he chewed. Even the sting on his tongue from not letting it cool only added to the experience.
Thank the Reaper that restaurants still did Lost Souls opening hours on Solstice.
“Albie Rosen,” Hill said. “You seriously don’t remem…”
He stopped and glanced uneasily at something that Davy couldn’t see. Something dead, presumably. Being incarnate had drawn the veil over the Beyond that the living enjoyed. All Davy could see of it was Hill, who was essentially haunting him, and his own tentacles…who’d been haunting him since Davy died.
On principle, he raised one of those and swatted whatever was taunting Hill away. Opposite, Hill unhunched a bit and rubbed a bony, elegant hand over his face.
“You really don’t remember my dad?”
Davy licked grease off his fingers. “It’s not ringing a bell,” he said.
“He worked for Fraser since…forever. He’s the one who buried you in that house.”
“I was dead at the time,” Davy pointed out. He picked up some fries and dunked them in the curry sauce before he took a bite. The pop of starchy potato flavor was better than sex. He sucked the salt off his fingers and caught the flicker of lust in Hill’s pale, clever eyes as he watched. His body—Hill’s body, technically—tightened in reaction…and yeah, well, maybe the fries weren’tthatgood. “We didn’t do introductions. Besides, it’s not like he killed me. Right?”
Something bleak and angry crossed Hill’s face, tightening his jaw and twisting his lips. He gave a short, hard shake of his head.
Davy took a noisy slurp of soda.
“Don’t worry. It’s good enough as far as the powers that be are concerned,” he said. Water ran down the side of the paper cup as he set it back on the table, puddling on the scored Formica. He left a smudge of blood overlaid across the logo and frowned as he checked his hand. Blood had soaked through the rough dressing, but not enough to be a problem. It would stop soon enough. Davy blotted his hand against his leg as he went on. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. If you want something bad to happen to dear old Dad, I’m still your man.”
Hill gave a small, humorless twist of his mouth.
“Something bad already did,” he said. “Someone killedhim.”
“Huh,” Davy said. He scratched the side of his jaw as he thought about that. “Look, I’m not trying to be precious about this—fuck, I’d do it for the fries if it was up to me—but my remit to do shit to assholes, at least on this side, is tightly regulated. I could swing ‘helped cover up my murder,’ but I need to have some skin in the game.”
So he’d been told anyhow, and he wasn’t interested in pushing his luck about it. Consequences in Beyond tended to the…unpleasant, and you’d no choice except to survive them. Davy was a shark, but still a small one in a very big ocean.
Some of the big sharks had been there for centuries.
Affiliation with the Company could buy you some protection, but…well…that was all about appearances. Davy had expected to be punished for his sins when he woke up dead, just—he pulled the spiritual stigmata of his tentacles in and wrapped them around his feet in a tidy knot—not by the afterlife’s equivalent of High School cliques.
“How about this?” Hill said. “The same person who killed him? They killed you.”
Davy drew back as he took that in. That was…
