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Get inside, get inside, get inside, get inside, I thought, but couldn’t say. Or even whisper, with vamp hearing all around. Damn it, Billy! Get a clue!
But, of course, he was going to bitch first. “Why do you always do this to me?” he complained. “There I was, having a perfectly nice dream about a brew and a busty lass—”
Caedmon burst out laughing.
“Sorry,” he told everyone, from behind his hanky. “I’m just excited.”
I glared at him some more, and he waved the hanky at me for some reason. Like saying go ahead, get on with it. Yeah, I thought back, that would be nice!
“—and what do I wake up to? Bodies!” Billy looked about in disgust. “Why is it always bodies?”
Get inside, get inside, get inside, get inside.
“You could wake me up for a party sometime,” he pointed out. “Or a nice card game, or a chat, or a barbecue. I mean, I couldn’t eat the food, but it’s the thought that—” He stopped. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”
Get inside, get inside, get inside, get inside, you son of a—
Billy slipped inside my skin.
“—bitch!”
“Oh, that’s nice,” he said, and it echoed in my head. Because there was one way we could silently communicate, but it required sharing a body. Something I had no problem with, since we’d only done it about a thousand times now, and because I needed help!
“Help!” I almost shrieked, and mentally grabbed him.
“Oof! What the—let go of me!”
“You have to help me! They want me to read these guys’ minds and they’re dead and I don’t know how and they’re dead!”
“Okay, okay, wait,” Billy said, extricating himself from the death grip I had on his spirit. “They want you to do what now?”
I explained. “So you have to help me!” I said when I finished. Because people were starting to shift position impatiently. It was put up or shut up time, only I didn’t have anything to put up!
Billy looked around again. “But . . . they’re dead.”
“I know they’re dead!”
“Don’t yell. I’m already in your head.”
“Fine, just tell me what to do.”
“About what?”
“What do you mean about what? You’ve done this before—”
“What? When?”
“You do it all the time! You drift through people’s heads, picking up on their thoughts—”
“Yeah, live people. Which these ain’t, in case you missed it. They’re not even whole anymore.”
And the next thing I knew, I was picking up the severed head, or rather, Billy was. The dishwater blond hair was wet against my hands, although not with blood. It felt like water.
“Beer,” Billy and I said aloud, and the officer nodded.
“He was drinking with some of these others. Or perhaps just fell into a puddle of it. We found an overturned table and spilled tankards among the bodies. But they were in one of the large dorm tents. Nobody saw what happened.”
I didn’t answer. I was trying, really hard, not to notice that I was holding a man’s head in my hands, but it wasn’t working. The blue eyes were fixed and staring, and had started to dry out. I suddenly understood why they always closed corpses’ eyes in the movies, even weighting them down with something. That blank, lifeless stare was—
