Cash in Hand

by TA Moore

  It was meant to be cruel, and it worked because it was almost true. A low-key liar who Arkady could trust had been exactly what Donna expected of Cash when she sponsored him. It wasn’t as if his mom could afford the fees at Midnight Springs.

  Cash had just been too human for it. Not to mention, at sixteen, a horny little bastard.

  “Donna has other wisps working for her,” Cash said. “One of them—”

  “Someone that I can trust,” Arkady repeated in a clipped voice. “Everyone currently in Donna’s employ is… suspect. They’re too close.”

  “Too close to what?”

  “To real monsters.”

  Cash took a drink. “You’re going to need to explain,” he said. “The veiled insults aren’t really helping me follow.”

  “I didn’t think they were that veiled,” Arkady said. His eyes flickered tungsten yellow with irritation, although Cash didn’t think it was entirely aimed at him. “Someone is selling information—about us, about our… business—to your colleagues. In particular, business in and around Roanoke. A redcap was nearly caught on camera at a body dump, the Black Witch of Merrimac was doorstepped outside her own house with a list of missing children and a photo of her fifty years ago, and the Worm has lost his seat on the Prodigium after a tip-off led the Jesuits to his latest… interest. He shed his human skin to escape the hunt without exposing us—left the husk for them to fish out of the river—and has to go to ground until he can grow a new one.”

  There was a pause. When Cash didn’t fill it, Arkady grimaced for him.

  “Say it,” he ordered.

  There was A Way to couch accusations among the well-bred and horrifying, a delicate hemming that didn’t put any backs up. Cash had been dragged up, though. He knew the rules, but he could get away with pretending he didn’t.

  “You know Donna did it, right?” he said. The family line had been—for centuries—that Belladonna didn’t want a seat on the Prodigium, just to live quietly with her children. Everyone knew it was a lie. The head table of the Prodigium had brought their wasted feet down on the matter and blocked her ascension. She owned some minor seats outright and was owed by half the rest, but the Prodigium would never let her put her skinny ass directly on a red velvet seat. Not if they could help it, anyhow.

  With a local seat suddenly empty, they might not be able to stop her, not without making their objections public rather than just… understood.

  Arkady looked away, his profile sharp, the slice of his nose and the set line of his jaw. “She denies it,” he said. “To the Left Hand of the Prodigium, to the Black Witch, and to her heir’s face.”

  “And she’d never risk her good name for a lie.”

  “She wouldn’t risk her skin for a lie,” Arkady said. He pushed his hair back from his face as he looked at Cash. “My mother is a terror in the night and a curse on the land, but when she came here, she gave the Prodigium flesh and bone, the same as all the other great old monsters of the world. If she breaks one of the Cardinal Laws, the Cardinal Law, they’ll kill her. And… and besides, how? I can’t imagine her sneaking out of the manor to go and meet up with a priest in a bar to trade confidences.”

  “Most shows have tip lines,” Cash said. “People call in sightings. Stuff. All she’d need was a number. Do you really believe she didn’t do it?”

  Arkady hesitated—just a flicker of guilty something in the tilt of his mouth before it was gone—and then nodded.

  “I do,” he said. “I don’t put it past her, and she’ll shed no tears for the Worm. But if it was her, she’d have made sure he was dead.”

  That was true.

  Cash chewed the inside of his cheek. Part of him wanted to nope out before he got caught in the politics of it all again, but he was a monster. If someone outed him, then his coworkers would film as Winslow pinned him down and filled his eyes and his mouth with silver and salt. Then they’d come for Ellie. They’d damn her for a monster—even if she wasn’t enough of one to fight back yet—and call it a job well done when they tossed her corpse in the sea.

  Monsters were selfish things. They could love and be generous, but the thought at the forefront of their mind was usually for themselves. Cash was caught off guard by the sick rush of anger that hit him at the thought of Ellie pinned down by Winslow’s bony piety and old bible. He dragged his mind away from the thought of his hands closed around Winslow’s flushed throat and scowled at Arkady.

  “What do you want me to do, anyhow?” Cash asked. “The sort of people who would know the Worm’s comings and goings, his latest conquest? We don’t exactly hang out in the same places.”

  The sort of people tapped to make the Worm’s visit to his latest conquest run smoothly didn’t send their spawn to camp on a bus. And they had spawn, not children.

  Arkady stood up and straightened his jacket with an absentminded tug. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “They’re all going to be at the estate this weekend for a celebration and to see if Donna is going to join the Prodigium or my father in his grave. All you have to do is see who’s lying when they say they think Donna betrayed us all.”

  “I don’t exactly have an invite, so how are you going to explain why I’m there?” Cash asked as he stood up. He didn’t like being loomed over. Old resentments left a bad taste on the back of his tongue, and he tried to wash it away with the last of the beer. It didn’t work. “Tell them I’m your driver?”

  Arkady put his knuckle under Cash’s chin and tipped his head back.

  “No, you’re going to be my date,” he said. Cash flinched at the idea. He’d rather be the help than playact that. There was a bleak satisfaction on Arkady’s face as he watched Cash’s reaction. “To my sister’s wedding. Everyone will just assume I want to ruin her day.”

  Chapter Three

  THERE WAS a shop in Savannah that made stationery for monsters. Most of them had email—hell, most of them were on Grindr—but pixels and programs didn’t quite have the same… malevolence as vellum and ink, smooth as bloody silk.

  It was a family business, the paper shop, although some of the apprentices hadn’t wanted to join the family at first.

  Arkady had left the invitation propped on the coffee table, against the drained beer bottle. Glossy black ink sketched out the location and date in perfect loops, while the names of Ilyana and her new husband-to-be scored the paper in acid-gold letters. It looked obscenely unfortunate—an omen with an RSVP.

  Apparently Jerome would be there, as the groom. No second name. Either Cash was meant to know already, or Donna didn’t want anyone to mention it. It was hard to tell without more context.

  “Yana,” Cash said to the answering machine. “Call me.”

  He hung up and tightened his grip on the phone in frustration as he fought the urge to throw it into the wall. It wouldn’t help. It just felt like it would. Cash scowled, grabbed the bag he’d packed for the Gramercy shoot, and called Tom as he headed down the hall into his bedroom.

  “Family emergency,” he said as Tom answered. “I can’t make it. Get Barrows. Remind him he owes me one.”

  Cash emptied the bag out on the bed. His jeans, T-shirts, and toiletries were tangled around each other. He liked the old band T-shirts—a very human interest that 90 percent of people didn’t want to talk to you about—but inconspicuous at an upper-class monster destination wedding they weren’t.

  What they were, Cash realized as he dangled a TORN T-shirt from his finger and Tom yelled in his ear, was clean, though not exactly fresh. He’d shoved them in the bag about a week ago so he wouldn’t forget them, but they didn’t smell like Arkady’s skin.

  “Dude, Barrows is good, but he flinches,” Tom said as he wound down from angry to annoyed. “You don’t flinch. Remember the Darling Demon shoot? She puked bile in the shape of a snake at you, and you didn’t even twitch. That’s what I need. Fucking steady hand.”

  “Yeah, well.” Cash pulled his T-shirt over his head and tossed it at the hamper in the corner of
the room. “Make do with Barrows. I can’t come.”

  “Did you get a better offer?” Tom asked suspiciously. “I’ve heard rumblings there’s some big investigation being shot up in your neck of the woods.”

  “From who?” Cash asked, phone tucked against his shoulder as he pulled black cotton over his head. He still smelled like Arkady, but at least it was only magic and not skin and sweat.

  Tom snorted at him. “Fuck off,” he said. “You just dropped me in the shit. Why should I do you any favors?”

  “I’d owe you one,” Cash said. His voice felt cold on his tongue, damp like mist as he let his power soak into it. Sometimes it worked over the phone, sometimes it didn’t. It depended on how susceptible the person on the other end was. “I could put in a good word for you with Winslow. You could follow up on that Utah story with him.”

  He felt the tug as Tom took the bait, the specter of profitable respectability briefly very real for him. The Utah story, what had come out through official channels, wasn’t just sensational, it was tragic… but no one involved would talk about it. Winslow had been there, though, right in the middle of it, with his buttoned-up starched shirt and worn bible. If the good preacher vouched for Tom….

  Tom spat the hook right back out. Either the magic had failed or he just didn’t know.

  “Go fuck yourself, Cash,” he said. “I won’t forget this, you asshole.”

  He hung up. Cash sucked the sour reek of spent magic back down and tucked the phone into his back pocket. His bones ached with the first dull twinge of hunger as the monster grumbled with the wasted effort. Cash grimaced. He was out of shape. It was just easier to eat at work—demons always prepared more misery than they could eat—than find the time to make someone suffer from scratch and take El to hockey and help her with her homework.

  Maybe he needed to make the effort, though. He didn’t want El to cut her metaphysical teeth on fast food.

  Or, his monster slipped into his brain as Cash opened his wardrobe to grab stuff, show yourself up in front of Arkady, who spends power like it’s pennies down a well.

  Cash licked the taste of smoked honey off his lips and thought about the faded glitter of Arkady’s eyes. It was unusual for anyone under a century to have worn their skin down that much. Most monsters born under the Prodigium’s rule since they decided to let humanity believe they were more or less extinct could still be outside at noon without issue. For Arkady to have shed so much that he burned it off in the morning sun….

  That wasn’t his business. He pushed jackets and T-shirts aside to grab some of his dressier clothes from the back of the rail. They weren’t exactly monster fashion—which favored velvet, brocade, and frills—but they’d do well enough.

  He rolled them up, stuffed them into his bag, and pinned them down with his elbow while he dragged the zip over. The invite said the ceremony started on Friday, midnight, which gave him two days to get there. There was no reason he couldn’t sniff around a bit first. If he could solve Arkady’s problem without having to play boyfriend in front of the monster aristocracy—an idea that made him feel like his chest was being crushed—he’d take it.

  Your own man.

  Cash had a feeling that mocking echo was his own, nothing to do with the hungry thing in his marrow. He ignored it as he slung the bag over his shoulder and headed out, grabbing the invite on the way through the living room. The paper was thin, smooth, and just a bit too warm as he tucked it inside his jacket.

  If his human contacts didn’t know who was buying secrets, maybe the monsters would be more help. The Black Witch and the Worm probably weren’t going to take his calls, but he knew where at least one redcap was this afternoon.

  Where else would an upwardly mobile monster enjoy murder and mimosas but at the country club?

  THE BOOK and Candle Country Club perched on the shore a few miles outside of Roanoke city limits. If you looked it up on Google, it claimed to be a golf club, but the landscape around it was all bare rock and scrubby, salt-stunted trees instead of smooth and manicured. The members liked to play different games, and no one ever got out of the rough.

  The guard at the gate leaned down to peer through the open window at Cash. His eyes flickered over Cash and then around the interior of the car.

  “This is a members-only club, sir,” the man said. His breath smelled like a meatball sub, and he wanted, so badly, an excuse to punch someone. Cash didn’t even have to try to pick that up. The tag on his shirt said West, and he spun his finger in the air as he directed Cash, “You’ll have to turn around.”

  Cash hung one hand over the steering wheel.

  “I’m a guest,” he said.

  West pushed himself off the car. “I’ll check the list.” He stepped back toward the hut and grabbed a clipboard. “What’s your name, sir?”

  “I’m not on the list,” Cash said. He let West’s expression curdle into satisfaction before he pricked the smug bubble. “I’m with the Abascals.”

  West was human—for now, someone had their hooks in him for him to be trusted here—but he knew the name. He scowled, his disappointment thin and tea-bitter when Cash inhaled it. He clutched his list with both hands.

  “Anyone could say that,” he said.

  “But they’d only do it the once,” Cash pointed out. He pulled the invite out of his jacket and held it up. In the sunlight the gold letters trembled as if only surface tension kept them from sliding off the page. The edges blistered—tiny white bubbles of water—and curled. “I have a wedding invite to deliver.”

  “Who to?”

  “Some lucky monster who probably doesn’t want to stand Donna Abascal up.” Cash tucked the invite away, out of the sun, and grinned at West. The low-grade anxiety that oozed out of the guard wasn’t much of a meal, but it took the edge off Cash’s hunger. “You have no idea how much she hates when people don’t RSVP. She’ll bite your head off for it.”

  They both knew he meant it literally. That part was actually true. Donna didn’t value manners particularly—she’d clean her nails with someone’s bones at the dinner table—but disrespect she didn’t tolerate.

  Cash could testify to that.

  After a moment of indecision, West swallowed hard and leaned back into the hut to open the gates.

  “I’ll let management know you’re coming,” he said.

  Cash drove through the tall gates and down the narrow, winding road toward the clubhouse. Halfway down there was a dark, splattered stain on the road where something had died. It might have passed for an animal, but whoever it was had left a handprint smeared across the concrete.

  Careless. That was the sort of thing that ended up on Google Earth.

  A tall, painfully thin woman waited for Cash outside the club as he pulled into the white-marble horseshoe-curved drive. Her hair was so shiny it looked wet, and when she smiled, she had braces on her uneven teeth. Ena Caldwell. Her mother, Keiko, owned the country club, but she’d worn out her humanity before she even moved to the US. Cash had never met them, but people talked.

  “I think that’s far enough,” Ena said as Cash got out of the car. “If the Abascals have business in the Book and Candle, they send Shanko, not some… pretty little gift basket.”

  “Well, it’s his day off,” Cash said. “I’m looking for a huldra, Gret, and her redcap friend.”

  Ena pulled an annoyed face and scuttled forward, black “legs” extended from her milk-pale sac of an aura, to grab Cash’s shoulder. Her fingers dug down toward bone as she squeezed.

  “I don’t need wisp trash at my club, fucking my guests,” she hissed as she leaned down toward him. “Or picking out their secrets like whelks from the shell. Bad for business. Now I told you—”

  She stopped midthreat and snapped her mouth shut. The click of her teeth was audible, and her nose twitched as she sniffed the stink of Abascal power that still clung to Cash’s skin and breath.

  Cash peeled her hand off his shoulder. “The huldra?” he said. “And I’ll tell
Shanko you missed him today. He’s always got an eye out for a new lady friend.”

  Ena made a sour face and pulled her hand out of Cash’s grip as she backed away.

  “I meant no disrespect,” she said stiffly. “The Abascals don’t usually have truck with your kind.”

  Strangely enough, that still sounded like disrespect. Cash’s monster drummed at his ribs in response to the insult, but he let it pass. Ena could wrap him up in a bow and liquify him over days if she wanted, and Cash wasn’t interested in the time it would take to return the favor… although it would be easy.

  He could feel the water nearby. It wasn’t the still, drowning pools wisps favored, but it still cozened at him. Time and cold patience would be all it would take. The water would back him up….

  Ena hissed at him, a flash of something black and hairy behind her human teeth. “I’ll rip your tongue out of your head, wisp,” she warned. “The Abascals have no use for that.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Cash said dryly.

  It took a second and then Ena caught up. She put her nose in the air and waved her hand brusquely at his car.

  “Park that in back where no one can see it,” she said. “And don’t linger. Servants get to obey orders, not enjoy the amenities. Gert and her friend are at the bar.”

  She stalked off. Cash moved the car. No need to be a dick about it.

  CASH HAD just seen half the monsters in the bar at the camp drop-off. A few of them raised a hand to wave him over to their tables, invitations that caught Cash by surprise. He guessed that not socializing with his own kind was on him, not them. That or they’d seen him talking to Arkady. He preferred that explanation.

  Uncomfortable, Cash dodged the overtures and pushed his way through the crowd.

  A werewolf, Gucci shirt split at the seams over heavy muscles, chewed on a bloody bone like a rib at a party and sipped nightshade with a fancy umbrella in it. He was deep in conversation with a naked hairy woman who dripped a steady stream of water into a puddle around her Louboutins.