by TA Moore
Table of Contents
Blurb
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Epilogue
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By TA Moore
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Copyright
Cash in Hand
By TA Moore
The last monster died a hundred years ago. At least, that’s what the monsters want you to think.
Half-monster Cash just wants to keep his head down and raise his daughter, Ellie, to be an upstanding member of monstrous society. Even if she’d rather spend the summer with her human friends than learn the art of man traps at Camp Dark Hollow.
So the last person Cash wants to see is her uncle Arkady Abascal, who’s also Cash’s ex-boyfriend.
Arkady has more than Ellie’s summer plans on his mind. He’s there to enlist Cash to find out who’s been selling monster secrets. Cash hasn’t gotten any better at telling Arkady no, but it’s not just his weakness for Arkady that makes him agree. The Prodigium thinks an Abascal exposed them to humans, and now the whole family is at risk—including Ellie.
Recruited to help Arkady identify the culprit—or frame a scapegoat—Cash finds the machinations of monstrous power easier to navigate than his feelings for Arkady. At least, at first. But when things get bloody, he wishes romantic disasters were all he had to worry about….
To my mum, who always encouraged me to have my head in the clouds. And to the Five, who told me to stop messing around and get my fingers on a keyboard.
Chapter One
BLOOD SWEATED out of the freshly applied magnolia paint in slow resiny drops. It dribbled down the wall in thickening lines and splattered over the polished herringbone-patterned wood flooring.
Mr. Stevens made a choked noise in his throat and covered his mouth with one hand. “It’s reclaimed,” he said accusingly through his fingers.
Something dipped into the blood and started to smear it in clumsy, rough lines. Cash backed up a few steps and adjusted the angle of the camera to make sure he got Winslow and the wall in the shot. The exorcist was a rail-thin ginger man with dust-bowl bones and a cheap black suit, fresh from a church in Utah. Well, five years down now, but dust behind the ears was his brand.
He was popular in the Midwest. California preferred a more granola approach, bare feet and compromise, while the demographics in the South were split—but you could never go wrong with a snake handler. Catholics, of course, were popular across the board. Priests just gave good exorcism.
CASH PUSHED in close on Winslow’s face to capture the way the veins in his temples bulged as he stepped forward. Then he tracked down his arms to show knuckly hands reddened, the skin scalded and cracked, as Winslow thrust the bible toward the wall.
“Begone!” Winslow roared. “In the name of Christ and all the holy angels! I tell you. Begone!”
He slapped the bible against the wall, and Cash pulled back hard to capture the moment—the black book pinned to the wall, framed by the spirit’s bluntly unpoetic message.
FUCK YOU.
That was the money shot, which reminded him….
Cash checked his watch and cursed under his breath. It was past 2:00 a.m. already, and despite the number of times he said he’d gotten the kid’s stuff sorted out for camp, he hadn’t. At all.
He glanced up at the angry rag of a thing that writhed against the wall, squashed out of shape like a bug on a windscreen by the bible. It faltered when he caught its eye—or eye-like thing—and tilted his wrist toward it. He pointedly tapped his finger on the glass face and mouthed, “Camp.”
A horrible maw dropped open, misshapen and lined with barbed hook teeth, and a thick, rudely pink tongue flopped out.
“Already?” it said. Well, said wasn’t exactly right. Spirits didn’t have a voice or lungs to fill, but the words dropped into Cash’s soul and rattled it with their force. It sounded a bit like someone making fart sounds with a tuba full of loose teeth. And British. “I’ve been stuck here for months. The two of them are so miserable they didn’t even notice for ages. Lost track of time. I’ll wrap up.”
It winked companionably at Cash and squirmed its way out from under Winslow’s bible. Ectoplasmic sweat dripped down its flanks as it reformed itself. Cash swallowed the stingy urge to retch and looked back down into his camera, which placidly recorded the noncreepy side of the world.
Well, less creepy, Cash corrected himself as the blood peeled off the wall and stuck to a sketchy outline of the spirit’s horrific shape.
Winslow made the sign of the cross, brandished his bible again, and prayed some more. The spirit thrashed, wailed in a thin drizzle of sound, and put on a quick show of breaking things and pulling hair as Winslow roared scripture. They all had a job to do, after all, and Cash’s organizational issues were not its problems. Finally, it exploded in a splatter of blood and wet shreds of something like bloated chicken skin.
Winslow wiped his face on his sleeve and looked around.
“Another evil spirit banished back to hell,” he said raggedly. “Good job, everyone. Anyone want Chinese?”
MR. STEVENS wrung Winslow’s hand as though he thought he could squeeze the holy out like lotion. Next to him his wife smiled and crossed herself gratefully, probably thinking no one there could see the crispy edges her deal with the infernal had left on her aura. Not the spirit that Winslow had just banished. It had just followed the stench of her soul and gotten stuck like a bug in a spiritual pitcher plant.
No, Mrs. Stevens had traded a pound of her flesh for immediate gratification. Based on how much she seemed to loathe her husband and the fact he hadn’t died tragically and weirdly yet, Cash would bet she’d bought stakes in fidelity. Somewhere there was a dirty mistress who was either freshly dead or very confused.
Cash saved their address in his phone. They’d be back before the year was out. Like recognized like, and evil didn’t have many friends. The Stevens’s would keep having bad spiritual luck until the missus either repented or gave in to the creeping temptation to do more evil. Either way would be good for ratings. Viewers loved a good catch-up show.
He slung his kit into the back of the car—piled on top of Ellie’s hockey gear and a pile of discarded sweats and T-shirts that reeked worse than Mrs. Stevens’s soul—and slammed the door shut. His phone started to ring as he got into the car.
Ellie.
“I’ve got everything,” Cash lied smoothly as he hunted through the papers discarded on the passenger seat for the equipment list the camp had sent out last month. “I just have to finish up at work and bring it home. Then pack it. It’s all under control.”
Ellie sighed heavily. “Great,” she said. “Dad, c’mon, can’t I go to the same camp I did last year? We had horses at Camp Tranquility. There was an Israeli guy who taught us Krav Maga….”
“You might have horses at our camp too,” Cash said defensively. “Just… don’t get on their backs. Or touch them. They’ll want to drown you. It’s not personal.”
“All my friends are going to Camp Tranquility.” The whine intensified.
“Well, they’re human,” Cash said. He found the warranty for his battery pack, which was useful but not what he was after. “They get to go where they want, and you get to do what yo
u want. As long as the Prodigium doesn’t say you can’t.”
“Urgh.”
“You’ll make new friends,” Cash said. “Horrible ones.”
“Not. Appealing.”
“Yeah, well.” Cash pulled a folded sheet of paper from down the side of the passenger seat and shook it out one-handed. The horned-mountain logo of Medicine Springs Camp was slashed across the top of the page. It was an effort to blend in, but it looked more like somewhere you sent special, murderous delinquents than a normal summer camp. And, well… accurate, but not the look the Prodigium wanted. “Make the most of it. You’re going. Just think, your friends will be cleaning up horse crap, and you’ll be learning the skills to excel in the corporate world.”
“Like what?”
Cash pinned the list to the steering wheel with one hand as he pulled out of the drive. The call blitzed static for a second as it switched to the car’s onboard system.
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “Disposing of bodies. Cut me some slack here, okay? I’m going to grab the… last… things on the list and get home. Now go get some sleep. You’re going tomorrow. It’s not optional.”
Silence dragged out long enough that Cash thought Ellie had hung up. Then she cleared her throat.
“What if I’m not good at being a monster?” she asked in a small voice. “What do they do then?”
Cash hesitated. He knew the answer. It had never helped him much.
“El, you’re twelve,” he said. “No one expects you to be Grendel’s mom right out the gate. Just be yourself, but cooler.”
His reward for that was an abrupt disconnection. Cash sighed. As he headed to Home Depot, he tried to convince himself it would be fine. He’d gotten through it, and Ellie was more monster than he was.
That would be enough.
EL HUGGED her backpack to her chest as she got out of the car and watched wide-eyed as sixty kids milled around the two black buses parked outside the school. Some of them knew each other from previous years and clustered together to catch up, as though they wouldn’t be on the bus for three hours. Others butted up against each other like adolescent bantams as they jostled to decide who was top dog.
“They just look human,” El muttered to Cash as he joined her.
“That’s the point,” he reminded her. “The humans wiped us all out, remember? The last monster was the Beast of Boston, and they drowned him in salt and sank him in the bay. As far as they’re concerned, and we want to keep it that way.”
The Prodigium did, anyhow. Cash didn’t necessarily disagree—his breed’s traditional haunt was bogs and moors, where you got very bad Wi-Fi and no laundry—but it wasn’t as if anyone had asked him anyhow.
El rolled her eyes at him. “I know that,” she snarked. “I listen. Grandma used to tell me about the Beast.”
“She probably knew him,” Cash said. As he nudged her toward the bus, he added under his breath, “That’s probably why he gave himself up to the Church.”
“I heard that,” El said primly. “Grandma hasn’t killed everything she ever loved, Cash.”
“The only evidence for that is you,” Cash pointed out as he ruffled her hair. “Ready?”
A counselor in a bright yellow sweatshirt smiled at them as they approached, her pen poised over a clipboard. A dozen deaths hung around her shoulders, black rents torn in her aura. They twitched like a fox’s tail as El approached her, and her smile was long and sharp.
“Hello. New girl?” she asked.
El nodded and shifted her backpack awkwardly over her shoulder so she could pull the much-folded permission slip out of her pocket. It was initialed, pocketed, and replaced with a yellow strip of paper to glue around her wrist.
“Don’t worry,” the fox-kin killer reassured El as she put a hand on her shoulder. She winked one bright dark eye. “It’ll be great. We’re going to have a body farm this year, but keep that under your hat. I’m not supposed to tell yet.”
Ellie took a step toward the bus, then turned and tackled Cash. She pressed her face against his chest as she hugged him desperately, her backpack dangling uncomfortably over his arm.
He ignored the tch of a passing dowager and hugged Ellie back. She was all bones and smelled of lavender soap, toothpaste, and whatever perfume her human friends had decided was “the best” this month.
For a second he tasted panic in his throat—that he’d gotten it wrong, raised her to be human, not just to pass, that maybe he should have left her with her grandmother.
“If I get killed,” Ellie muttered against Cash’s T-shirt, “just remember I didn’t want to go.”
She peeled herself off him and stepped back, his T-shirt still pinched in her fingers as if she was going to take him with her. The smile she gave him was halfhearted. Then she looked over his shoulder and brightened up like someone had flipped a switch.
“Uncle Arkady,” she crowed with delight as she broke away from Cash. All her fears about camp appeared to be forgotten. The bag dropped to the ground with a thud as she darted away. “I didn’t know you were coming!”
Cash turned to watch as El threw herself at her uncle—her tall, well-dressed uncle in front of his very nice Porsche. He waited until Arkady turned back around to pull a face, which he personally thought was admirably restrained. The fox-kin counselor didn’t agree; she gave him a look of mingled confusion and disapproval over her clipboard. The Abascals were underworld royalty, one of the few non-Prodigium breeds that could boast no human blood ran in their veins.
At least until some trailer park half-blood by-blow came along and spoiled that for at least one branch of the bloodline.
Cash saw the penny drop in the fox-kin’s eyes as she glanced from him to El and then back again. The “really? For you?” assessment that he never seemed to come out ahead on.
“What can I say,” Cash said dryly as he bent down to grab the backpack and toss it over his shoulder. He grinned at the fox-kin. “I used to be prettier.”
“You’re pretty,” the fox-kin blurted out. “Just weak.”
She immediately went red from her chin to her temples and spluttered a knot of tongue-tied excuses. Cash shrugged it off. She wasn’t wrong, not about the weakness, anyhow.
“I guess some people like that. I’ll just go toss this in the bus for El, yeah?”
The fox-kin nodded, lips pressed together as if she might blurt out something else rude, and Cash carried the backpack over to shove it in the hold of the bus with the rest. He gave it a kick to make it fit. No one paid him any attention. Even the posturing little bantam monsters craned their necks to see what the celebrity was doing.
“Poor thing,” a huldra in Dior, her aura black as tree rot along her spine, said to the redcap next to her—his traditional stocking cap replaced with a Cardinal’s ball cap. “I don’t know how Donna Abascal can hold her head up. The child might as well be human.”
Cash licked the back of his teeth and tasted spite. He wasn’t much of a monster. Even if his mom hadn’t been a truck-stop waitress with a soft spot for pretty liars, he’d have never made the grade with the monsters-who-lunch crowd. He was a wisp. Even his monstrousness was insubstantial and passing. It was just secrets and a knack for seeing things you weren’t meant to.
“At least she’s pretty,” he said. “Humanity is only skin deep, but ugly’s to the bone.”
The redcap laughed, a harsh blart of unrepentant mockery, and the huldra went stiff and hard-looking. Like bark. Her humiliation was sour as lemons and fizzed like sorbet as Cash choked it down. He didn’t know what it meant—hopefully he hadn’t just called a child ugly—he just knew it would hurt.
The huldra grabbed his shoulder and dug her fingers in until his bones creaked.
“Speak to me like that again,” she said through thick, cracked lips as she pulled him onto his toes. “I’ll take your face and wear it at Halloween.”
Cash grinned at her. He didn’t have fangs, but he could feel them in the words on his tongue.
“I’m sure Belladonna will be glad to know you did what she couldn’t,” he said. “Probably grateful. Don’t you think?”
They both knew the answer was no. Donna would rather her worst enemy—and Cash might not be her favorite person, but there was a long stretch of assholes between him and the person she hated most—walk the earth forever than have some nouveau-evil fey do her a “feyvor.” She once described gratitude as “when you have to smile as someone fucks you over.”
The redcap, over his fit of the giggles, cleared his throat. “Gret,” he said mildly. “Your tail’s showing.”
The huldra pinked in embarrassment and let Cash go. She brushed her hands together and patted her face to set the humanity back in place. The ghostly flick of her tail under her dress faded away.
“Next time I see Belladonna,” she sniffed at Cash as she tossed her blond mane of hair, “I’ll give her your regards.”
She turned and stalked off to push her daughters onto the bus. “Before the good seats are taken,” she snapped, her voice thin with distance as she pulled them away from their friends. Cash straightened his T-shirt and snorted.
“Do that,” he said dryly. “She’ll know you’re a fucking liar. I’ve never even wished that old bat ‘many more’ on her birthday.”
This time the redcap nearly choked as he tried to stop the snort that escaped him. He tugged his cap down farther on his forehead and left quickly.
“Dad,” El huffed as she popped out of a clot of suddenly friendly little monsters like a cork out of a bottle. “Were you mean?”
“It’s my art,” Cash said mildly.
El rolled her eyes at him and then surprised him with another hug. “Uncle Arkady wants to talk to you,” she said as she looked up at him. Her eyes were still blue. They’d start to fade now as her monster grew into her. “He said it was important.”
Cash kissed her forehead. “But it probably isn’t,” he said. “So….”
“Pleeeeeeaase?” El begged. “He said you wouldn’t listen, but I said you would if I asked.”
