Cash in Hand

by TA Moore

  Most monsters didn’t bother with real human lives unless they had kids—when you had to get human food for them and send them to human schools and teach them to use computers—but they all still had to pass day-to-day. That was the Prodigium’s rule if you wanted to live in a city where the prey was fat and the Wi-Fi accessible, instead of being banished to a damp cave in the woods.

  There were maybe a handful of places in Roanoke where monsters could socialize without masks. Most of them were pretty low-key—a bar that kept a back door open after hours or an empty warehouse with blacked-out windows where the cops didn’t bother to answer noise complaints anymore.

  The Book and Candle was for monsters who still wanted people to know they were doing very well in the human world.

  As the owner gestured grandly, Cash ducked under a segmented arm and found himself at the barstool next to Gert. She flinched when she recognized him and nearly choked on a cherry in her drink.

  “Look, I didn’t know you were the girl’s father,” she said quickly, as she dabbed at the front of her dress with a napkin. “But I didn’t say anything that other people aren’t saying where you can’t hear them. No one understands why Donna didn’t… act before anyone got attached to the girl. Not like she’s never eaten a baby before.”

  One of her cluster of wannabe socialites giggled through green teeth as she leaned between them to grab a handful of nuts. “Man, who amongst us hasn’t eaten a baby? Right?”

  “You have more human in you than Ellie does,” Cash said coldly.

  “I’m not an Abascal,” Gert said. “It’s just… not right. If they can’t stay pure, how can the rest of us keep ourselves apart?”

  Cash glanced at her extensions and the glittery designer necklace around her hollow neck. “The struggle goes on,” he said dryly. Without the lash of his magic behind it for bite, Gert missed the jab and nodded sagely. Cash clamped down on his monster and glanced around the bar. “Actually, I need to talk to your redcap friend?”

  “Ohhhh,” Gert said, eyes wide. She waggled her finger down the bar, toward the end where the stocky redcap chatted to an even stockier troll. “He’s down there, but he doesn’t like them… little.”

  She smiled slyly at him with thick red lips as she reached back to pluck a black earwig from her rotted-out back. It wriggled as she crunched into it.

  Cash left her to it.

  “I figure once Jon’s eighteen, I’ll just sign all that over to him.” Con the redcap was midflirt as Cash got within earshot. “Maybe head over to Scotland, kill a few farmers, and find a cave. Get back to my roots, you know?”

  The troll licked salt out of a shot glass and looked amused but horny. Beads glittered in the tufts on his long ears and the matted tuft on the end of his tail as it lashed when Cash put his hand on Con’s shoulder.

  “Five minutes,” Cash said. The troll scowled at him. “It’s an errand, for the Abascals.”

  The troll looked a mixture of worried and impressed as they quickly backed away from the conversation. Cash had forgotten how easy it was to move through society with Abascal patronage as a cudgel. It was a shame he couldn’t get used to it. One weekend only.

  “What do you want?” Con asked as he pulled his cap down over his eyebrows and smeared fresh blood across his pale skin. It looked like he and Gert had stopped for murder on their way for mimosas. “I didn’t say anything about your kid. I’m sure she’ll do fine at monster camp with all our real, meat-eating monsters.”

  He snort-laughed at his own joke.

  “I went to camp too,” Cash said. “Trust me, when all your spoiled brat meat eaters cry themselves to sleep at night? Ellie will eat their souls. Don’t worry about my kid. She’ll be fine.”

  From his lips, Cash thought miserably to himself, to the Mother of Monsters’ ears. Children didn’t get killed at camp anymore, but learning to stick up for yourself was a life skill the camp expected them to pick up on their own.

  “What do you want, then?” Con asked. He glanced over his shoulder toward the troll and scowled as he saw a dog-headed man buy a fresh glass of salt. “Come on, man. My wife’s going to be here soon, and if she has to pick someone up for us, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  “It’s the first night of camp,” Cash said. “You’ll find someone. I heard that one of the redcaps got picked up by the cops?”

  Con’s face sagged, and he glanced around. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Guess.”

  “Yeah, right, well. It’s handled,” Con said. “Just like the Prodigium wanted. The guy’s going to take the fall as a human, do his time. If they give him the death penalty, it’ll be a decade, less with no appeals.”

  There was nothing supernatural about a redcap kill. It was natural causes, if you considered being stabbed natural causes for a human. All they really wanted was the blood.

  “How’d he get caught?”

  “I don’t know,” Con said irritably. “He’s my brother, not my friend. What’s it to you, anyhow?”

  Cash leaned against the bar and gestured for the bartender to refill Con’s whiskey. “I work the exorcism circuit, and I’ve heard….”

  He hesitated, and Con finished the sentence for him. “Rumors?”

  “Yeah.”

  Con picked up his drink and gestured for Cash to follow him over to one of the black leather booths. The two goblins already there were roughly evicted so Con could squeeze in. He took his hat off and set it down on the table, where it squished against the stainless steel and left red smears on the metal.

  “When my brother started to go on about it, I thought he was nuts, y’know? There was someone following him, this car he saw over and over, people going through his trash. I told him he was imagining it, that if anyone heard him talking like that, he’d end up on the wrong end of the Left Hand of the Prodigium. Some of us get like that, you know, if we stay on the edges. Too close to humans but not part of the world? Paranoid.”

  “And then he got caught.”

  Con rubbed a hand over his blood-matted hair and picked at the elflocked knots with blunt fingers.

  “Danny’s careful,” he said. “Paranoia makes for a bad brother but a good killer. He didn’t make mistakes. Plus, I’ve heard other stuff. Gert’s nanny? She had her recycling gone through. They took away the bloodstained papers. Another guy I know, a púca, got freaked out by a dinner date. He said the guy put holy water in his glass and then tried to get him to get into a car. Sheep biting the dog, or what? I thought the Prodigium might be poking around—I heard the Worm was in town—but they do what they like, and you said the exorcists are sniffing around. Do you think someone fancies himself a… Hunter?”

  He dropped his voice as he said that and laughed uncomfortably, because it was a stupid idea. Right? There hadn’t been any Hunters since the Butcher. As far as the human world was concerned, there hadn’t been any monsters since the Butcher. Not really. A few insipid monsters left in Europe, a few inbred clans in the mountains—just enough to keep the world interesting but not enough to worry about.

  Bigfoot, of course.

  “Nothing like that,” Cash said. “The exorcists don’t want to play around with bloodbaths and hunts. The whole point is they win every week, except for the occasional two-parter, where they win in week two. The monsters who’ve had trouble, did they know each other?”

  That would have been easy, but Con shook his head. “No. Danny was only passing through, and Gert imported the nanny from Finland. Some relative of hers she’s sponsoring. They didn’t know anyone.”

  Not entirely true. There was one person they all knew, but… there was no way he knew the Worm or the Black Witch. They were real monsters, the only one of their kind that was needed.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Cash said as he stood up. “It’s being dealt with.”

  “By Belladonna?” Con asked.

  “Sure,” Cash said. “Why not?”

  Chapter Four

  THE PILLOWS in the R
oanoke Last Stop motel smelled like mice and KFC. Cash recoiled from it as he woke up, the back of his throat greasy, as if he’d swallowed the ghost of fried chicken past.

  Maybe, he thought sourly as he knuckled the sleep out of his eyes, he should have cashed in his invitation to the estate last night after all. Even if the mattresses were the same ones he’d crashed on a decade ago, he’d bet they were still more comfortable than the fucked-into-exhaustion springs he’d spent the night on.

  Cash stretched out the kinks in his back and rolled off the bed. He shed his briefs as he headed into the shower for a quick wash in the peeling avocado-green tub.

  He stood naked behind the crime-scene-red shower curtain with his face turned up into the tepid stutter of the water. Without opening his eyes, Cash scrubbed with a handful of watered-down lemon shower gel.

  His fingers curled around his cock, slippery with suds, and to his credit, he did try to imagine someone else. Con and his thick-skinned, heavy fighter’s hands, or nice human Pete and his careful touch. Hell, that guy with the cheekbones from the Hunter historical drama on the CW, set back in the glory years of fucking monsters and then killing them.

  He had a whole bank of wank fantasies that weren’t going to mean anything.

  It didn’t matter. Cash could taste smoke and honey in the back on his throat… like he’d just been kissed. The memory of elegant, too-warm fingers skimmed roughly along the tender skin of his cock, and sharp teeth scraped over his neck in a tease of a bite until Cash’s body was just one long wire strung trembling between two aching points.

  Cash could have tried harder to edit in an acceptable fantasy instead, but at that precise moment, he didn’t want to. He folded his lower lip between his teeth as he stroked down his cock and tightened his grip at the base. It wasn’t quite tight enough to hurt, just enough to make him squirm. Until he ached.

  The water spluttered a couple of degrees hotter as someone, somewhere in the motel turned the cold water on. Cash tipped his head forward so it stung the nape of his neck and ran down his spine. He could almost feel Arkady’s body pressed against his, cock hard and hot in the small of his back and stubble rough on Cash’s skin as he worried bruises down his throat and over his shoulders.

  Cash chewed harder on his own mouth as he jerked himself off in close-enough mimicry of his memory of Arkady. Was it the first time they’d fucked, he wondered hazily, or the last? He couldn’t place it outside of the impatient tug of his need right here and now. It felt like honey spiced with whiskey, sticky as it puddled low in his stomach but with a burn to it. Like a bad idea, but he didn’t care.

  Pleasure built like pressure, and Cash lost the slow, almost cruel pace of Arkady’s fingers. His hand jerked along his cock in quick, hurried strokes, and Arkady grumbled in his ear at his impatience.

  “I would have got you there,” he said as he wrapped his free hand around Cash’s throat and squeezed. “Eventually. Once you begged.”

  The thought of that—that scratchy need in his throat as he finally, always, broke and said what Arkady wanted—pitched Cash over the edge like he’d been shoved out a window. He spilled come between his fingers, stringy and sticky as it mixed with the thin lather of soap, and he felt the ghost of a memory bite an approving kiss against his jaw.

  Then the last of the hot water ran out all at once and the shower went from sauna to ice bath. Cash shuddered at the shock against his hot skin, spluttered out a “fuck,” and rinsed off as hastily as he could manage with the plastic shower curtain trying to stick to him.

  He turned the water off—the pipes behind the wall knocked in noisy protest—and dragged yesterday’s jeans on over wet skin. The denim scraped the sensitive skin of his cock and made him shudder with a jolt of pleasure that pulled from his balls to the base of his spine.

  “Ten years forgetting him,” Cash muttered to himself as he dragged his hand down his face and flicked the still-soapy water off his fingers, “and one kiss has him front and center again?”

  Or maybe he hadn’t done such a great job of forgetting… anything at all, now he thought about it.

  Cash snorted to himself, because that was helpful. He squeezed the water out of his hair and pulled his shirt on. The thin cotton wrinkled and stuck to his damp skin. His phone buzzed on the nightstand, and he lunged for it, a sudden burst of paranoia thick in his throat as he expected the worst.

  Instead it was a text from Camp Midnight. The kids weren’t allowed phones—and unless coverage had improved up that mountain, it wouldn’t do any good if they were—but every day the counselors sent proof of life to parents. Cash had forgotten about that, pushed into line with the other orphans and foundlings for a group snap.

  Ellie warranted a picture all on her own. She had a black eye—already—and had a dirt-crusted shovel swung up over her head. It looked like she was having fun. The text said, “A little homesick, but settling in well. Has already made enemies.”

  “That’s my girl,” Cash said.

  He stared at her face for a second. This was for her, because it didn’t matter that she had Cash’s name. She was an Abascal, and everyone knew it. Better people fear her for it than make her the scapegoat for her family’s sins.

  Whatever Cash felt—used to feel—for Arkady didn’t matter. Not that it ever had to anyone else, but now it was a distraction.

  He forwarded the message to Donna. Well, to Shanko, but he’d pass it on. The old monster was nothing if not loyal to her.

  Cash had packed up his stuff and sat down to pull his boots on when someone knocked on the door—two sharp knocks, a long pause, three staccato raps, and then silence.

  Finally. He’d thought he was going to have to leave a message with reception.

  Cash stamped his feet into his boots and left the laces to drag as he answered the door. The woman outside pushed in past him without any invitation.

  Anna-Beth Fennway wasn’t entirely human, but mostly. She didn’t need to be invited inside, she could cross running water, and neither silver, crosses, nor iron made her blister. All she’d gotten from whatever monster had fucked her great-great granny, was that she had a faintly off-putting air about her.

  That and an instinct for the unwholesome. She worked as a spotter for most of the local reality-rite shows, with a folder of possessed houses and demonically influenced souls. Nobody liked her, but they were happy to pay her.

  It was never enough, and she always had a paranoid suspicion that there was worse in the world that she hadn’t found yet.

  There was, of course. But just because you were right didn’t mean you weren’t paranoid.

  “Hey,” she said as she glanced nervously around the room. Her attention lingered on the TV. “What do you want, Cash? I gave Winslow his pick of couples last week.”

  He pulled an envelope of cash out of his pocket and handed it to her. She picked the flap up with her thumbnail and flicked through worn-edged notes. Her chapped lips pursed as she whistled soundlessly.

  “Okay. What do you want?” she repeated, less impatiently and more suspiciously.

  Cash left the door open a crack. “Has anyone paid you to follow someone in particular over the last few months?” he asked. “Go through their trash. See who they associated with. Anything like that?”

  Anna-Beth frowned and tucked the envelope of cash into a pocket.

  “If they did, would I tell you?” she asked. “That’s not how you get work.”

  “I don’t need to know who,” Cash said. “Just if anyone has.”

  Paranoia tasted like tea made with limescale-heavy water. It was almost comforting, but there was a chalky undertone that lingered. Cash’s meal of choice was despair—meaty enough to chew as he supped it—but he could use this.

  Anna-Beth zipped her jacket up to her collarbones.

  “No,” she said. “I heard the rumors too, figured that someone would at least hit me up for a couple of hot zones? Nothing. None of the other stringers in town have had a sniff either. If the
re’s someone shooting in town, they already know what they’re looking for.”

  That was what Cash was afraid of. It wouldn’t exactly be good news that the humans had pierced the Prodigium’s veil of mundanity on their own, but it wouldn’t be Cash’s problem. If it was just some researcher who was here to look for the monster under the bed, they’d have ended up at Anna-Beth’s door. Or her at their door.

  Roanoke didn’t have the most dense monster demographic in the country—that was New York, despite the rent—but monsters had been here since before the first settlers “disappeared.” It had been one of the first places to bend the neck to the Prodigium—two things that weren’t unrelated. They were integrated, and there were no unusual clusters of disappearances or spikes of violence for someone to track.

  For someone to just turn up in town and hit pay dirt? They had to have insider knowledge, and if it wasn’t from a stringer? Then Arkady was right.

  “My number’s in the envelope,” Cash said. “If you hear anything, let me know?”

  Anna-Beth patted her breast pocket to make the cash rustle. “Unless they pay me more,” she said with a thin smile. It was as good as a promise. She liked Cash; he was one of the few people she didn’t make uncomfortable. “I’ll have a sniff around, ask the usual suspects if they’ve heard anything. If I find anything out, are you going to be in town?”

  “Close enough,” Chase said. “My ex invited me to my other ex’s wedding.”

  Anna-Beth raised her eyebrows at that. She reached up and tapped her finger against her neck. “Which of them gave you those?”

  Cash’s hand flew up to his neck. The skin felt hot under his fingers, and he stalked over to the mirror to peer into it. Hickeys dappled his throat from under his ear down to his collarbone, red-and-blue blotches stark and soft-edged against his pale skin.

  Arkady’s teeth on his neck, sharp kisses chewed into his flesh.