Page 21 of Sinful Crimes for the Artistically Inclined
“You can’t do necromancy anymore?”
“Probably shouldn’t… For a bit.” Instead, he indicated the small dining table, laden with store-bought chips and dip, crackers and so on, that Joe hadn’t noticed until then. “I got some snacks—I didn’t make anything in the kitchen because of our agreement?—”
“Our agreement? The boyfriend thing?” That was a punch in the gut. ‘I think I’m falling in love with you’, a show of their new relationship in front of their friends, and now… he wouldn't even cook for him in case Joe got the wrong idea?
As the realisation sank in, Joe could feel his features betraying him, from his tight facial expression to the way his arms hung like two lead pipes. Everything felt heavy. How was he supposed to hide a disappointment like that? He gave an unconvincing smile. “Great.”
He moved back to the door. The sledgehammer suddenly seemed like the perfect tool for the job at hand.
Percy had gone unusually quiet, and his silentstudy of Joe only made him feel more unsettled. So Joe asked, in a clipped voice that masqueraded as casual, “What are you going to use?”
Percy’s eyes moved to the sledgehammer. “I don’t know. I thought we might talk about it.”
“And here I thought you just wanted to get the job done,” Joe said sharply—sharper than he’d meant it to be. But what kind of man tells someone he thinks he’s falling in love with them, then offers them French onion dip a few hours later?
Percy. That kind of man. Joe should have known better. Two nights before, he’d had his lips on someone else.
Joe didn’t feel like lunch. And he didn’t feel like sex. But he still didn’t want Percy to die, and he did feel like killing things, so he said, “Get a weapon. I’m about to open it.”
Percy came to his side, pressing his boot over the latch. “Do you think we could take ten minutes to discuss this?”
Veering into sarcastic teenager zone, “Are you sure you’ve got a spare ten minutes?”
“Joe, why are you being like this?” He reached for Joe’s hand, but that was quickly wrapped around the handle of the sledgehammer.
“I’m not being like anything,” Joe replied, forcing himself to meet Percy’s worried eyes. “You asked me here to do this and I want it over and done with. It’s not like I don’t have other things to get on with.”
“All right.” Percy crossed the room to a large ceramic vase, out of which stuck the hilts of six or seven swords. Joe had thought it was a quirky decoration, but the twang of the blade as it slid against the others, the way Percy’s hand held it, suggested it was very real and well loved. “Would you like one?”
Joe gripped his sledgehammer a little tighter. It wasn’t half as manoeuvrable as what Percy had. “I guess.”
“Hmm.” A tight sound. Percy pulled out another blade,which he held out long to examine. A little thinner than his own, but a little longer, too. It looked lighter. And it was golden. “Be careful. It’s antique.”
“Of course it is,” Joe muttered. He accepted it from Percy and laid it down on the floor by his feet.
Percy rounded the trapdoor to stand opposite him. “Are you sure?—”
Joe kicked the latch open, the door flew back with a bang, and an innumerable volley of bones sprung through the hole. Joe dropped his sledgehammer straight into the middle of the pack, and it went down through the aged and brittle skeletons like… Well, like a sledgehammer through old bone. A cacophonous cracking echoed throughout the old church and a puff of bone-dust turned the whole show white.
Percy had already dropped to one knee, and with his sword held flat on its side, he sliced the heads off any skeletons who had been so successful and remiss as to have poked them through. Joe took up his own sword, but went about using his boot to smash the fingers that gripped the floorboards in their attempted escape. He jabbed the sword down at a skeleton climbing up the ladder, and managed to slice across both wrists, which sent it flying back into the others, and made space for him to begin the deadly descent.
“Let me,” Percy offered as Joe slid a foot across to the ladder.
“Why? Are you worried I’m going to cramp your style?” He slashed down at the fingers that reached up for him.
Percy stamped down on a skull that had rolled onto his floor, crushing it flat. “Are you always this passive aggressive?”
“Passive?” Joe shouted. He kicked a foot back, cracking holes in skulls and ribcages until he found enough space to jump down to the earthen floor.
Percy soon landed opposite him. “Maybe if you could tell me what I’ve done wrong, I couldtry to fix it.”
But that was exactly the problem. ‘No boyfriend bullshit.’ He’d said it loud and clear, and Joe hadn’t listened. And that hurt. Joe grasped his sledgehammer, swung wide, and obliterated the spine of a skeleton against the hard-mud wall. “New rule. Don’t ever tell me you’re falling in love with me again.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
NOT AT ALL MY TYPE
So Percy had got it catastrophically wrong. Joe had said he didn’t want a boyfriend, and Percy… He’d gone too far. He knew he should have shut his mouth, but when he saw Joe that morning, so gorgeous… it had just spilled out.
