Cash in Hand

by TA Moore

  “The asshole,” Cash said.

  IT WAS funny how perspective changed a place. Cash had grown up on the north side of the island in a trailer with one bedroom and a view of the refineries out his window. Even the despair around there was junk food—empty calories with no real bite.

  Even though there were no walls and the house was literally on wheels, it had been a prison.

  Back then Cash had aspired to be Shanko. Everyone on the island, monster or human, was afraid of the tough old man in the black suit. They paid him their debts, they asked him for favors, and he drove around the island in a black Jeep he had other people clean for him. Cash’s ambitions hadn’t been able to imagine anything more than that.

  Until one day Shanko had driven him up the long drive to the Abascal Hotel and Spa, all crushed-white-shell gravel and spiked slate roofs, and Cash had realized this was it. This was freedom—from the low-grade ache in his bones as his monster chewed on him for food, from the hand-me-downs that never fit in the crotch or the pits, from everything—and all he needed to do was be what they wanted.

  Shame he’d fucked that up, really. It would have been an easy life. Half-human had always been too human for Cash’s own good, especially where his stupid cock was concerned.

  Except his cock hadn’t really been the problem, had it? His cock had always been happy with what it got out of the deal.

  For a second Cash held his breath, a trickle of pain tangy as a penny on his mental palate as he waited for the body blow. That was the truth, but only half of it. His head was full of silence. In the end, the truth only hurt once. A lie that mattered could be picked open a hundred times.

  When Cash knew that, you’d think he’d acknowledge he was lying to himself. He didn’t, though, he never did.

  These days the estate looked like a trap. A pretty one, with amazing beds, but still just another cage.

  Cash pulled up around the back of the hotel and tucked his battered old Dodge into a space in the staff parking lot, between Shanko’s new black Jeep and a shiny blue Porsche with a child’s car seat in the back. It would have been satisfying to pull his junker up front and watch a valet’s face curdle, but he didn’t want to be stuck here. Not any more than he already was.

  He grabbed his bag from the back and headed toward the worn concave steps down to the hotel’s back door. It opened before he got to it, and Shanko loomed up to block the way in.

  Monsters were vain things. Most of them clung to their youth and human beauty for as long as they could—decades, centuries—until they could collapse directly into a grotesque old age. Shanko, for all ten-year-old Cash had thought he was an old man, was solidly middle-aged. His hair was short and dense on top of a heavy, sallow face.

  There was always a faint smell of old meat around him, worked into the fibers of his shirts and suits. Not the hot, sweet copper stink of fresh meat, but dried flesh.

  Old bones and dusty marrow. No one knew what Shanko was. He was just Donna’s grubby left hand, her loyal dog for a few centuries at least. There were more than a few portraits of Donna, powdered and pomaded in lace and bloody velvet, with Shanko in the background hard at work with the bits left over.

  “I should have drowned you like a rat when you were still small enough to fit in the bucket,” Shanko said with contempt. “Do you really think you can fuck your way back into Arkady’s favor?”

  Cash was two steps up. The few inches of height put him eye to eye with Shanko, close enough, anyhow.

  “What makes you think I haven’t already?” he asked.

  Shanko spat at his feet. The wad of phlegm was thick as chewed gristle. “Because he doesn’t stink of bog water and regret,” he said. “And you ain’t limping.”

  Cash snorted out a laugh despite himself. “Still a comedian, old man,” he said.

  Shanko scowled at him from under thick eyebrows that looked as if he’d carved them straight from a cow’s hide.

  “I gotta do something to break the tension,” he said. “Otherwise people just throw themselves at my fucking feet. The girl at camp?”

  Shanko didn’t bother to learn names, or at least admit he had, until people turned eighteen and their monsters fit under their skins. Before that, what was the point?

  “Yeah, first year,” Cash said. “She was worried she wouldn’t make any friends—”

  “She’s an Abascal,” Shanko interrupted dismissively. “Friends are for people who can’t buy or bully minions. You have friends.”

  “And you have neither,” Cash pointed out.

  Shanko stiffened slightly as the jab slipped past the usual toothless cruelty and caught him on the raw. He scowled at the sting, a horrible knot of heavy flesh on his face, but accepted it as his due. Sometimes he needed a reminder that Cash wasn’t an indentured servant anymore and that the Abascals had handed him Ellie like she was a castoff for the charity box before they realized they could love her.

  “I got a picture this morning,” Cash said. “She’s settling in okay.”

  He pulled his phone out and showed Shanko the picture. It turned out a smile didn’t look any better than a scowl on his broad face.

  “Good girl,” Shanko said. He stepped back and gestured for Cash to come in. “Arkady said to put you in your old room, in the family’s wing.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d care if I asked to be put somewhere else?”

  “I’d think you were an ungrateful little bastard,” Shanko said as Cash squeezed past him. He closed the door behind him and threw the corridor into pitch blackness. His voice scraped ominously out of the darkness, wet as flesh on the back of Cash’s neck. “Just like you always were. It’s a better room than mine, bog-haunt. I sleep down here, with Belladonna’s hounds.”

  “You should take that up with Human Resources.”

  “I’m not human.”

  Cash shrugged and started forward. The darkness faded around him, watered down by a thin pearl-gray film of light as his eyes kindled. It would be hard to lure someone off the beaten path to drown them in a bog if they lost sight of you in the dark. He’d never seen it himself, but Ellie said he looked like a skull nightlight.

  “Call PETA, then,” Cash suggested. “What did those dogs do to deserve listening to you fart all night?”

  Shanko chuckled, the sound thicker in his throat as it crawled around in the dimness. He gave Cash a casual cuff around the back of the head. The clip of heavy bones and thick knuckles against Cash’s skull rattled his brains and made him stagger, but if Shanko had meant it, Cash would have been out for the count.

  “Be careful,” Shanko said, his voice dropping back to something almost human. “Belladonna knows you’re here, and she’s said nothing of it—not to her son, not to me, not even to her hounds.”

  Shit.

  Chapter Five

  NOTHING HAD changed since Cash left.

  It would have been creepy if there had been anything personal there to start with. Cash looked around the room in search of something he’d left or a gap he could fill with a memory. But nope. He’d lived here for five years, and even the pictures on the wall had been chosen by someone else.

  Of course—Cash eyed the heavy black wood adjoining door—he hadn’t really lived here, had he. It had just been somewhere to put his clothes.

  He kicked the bed frame. “Still there?” he asked.

  An eye rolled out from under the bed, attached to a long braid of sinew. The pupil was a small, fang-lined mouth that mashed aimlessly at the air.

  “Where would I go?” it whined miserably in a voice like a thousand gnats that drilled directly into whatever part of Cash’s brain handled self-pity. A sort of sick, confusing misery retched into Cash’s throat for a second and made his heart falter before his monster got in the way of it. “I’m bits. Not even all of them. A housekeeper vacuumed up a toe.”

  “You shouldn’t litter,” Cash said. “And I’m back for a couple of days, so you need to shift. I can’t sleep through you crying all night.�
��

  A hand, disarticulated and clumsily strung back together in no particular order, crap-crawled from under the bed. It splayed flat on the floor and dragged itself out, lungs splayed like wings as it wheezed and burped.

  When parents told children there was no monster under the bed, they were telling the truth. Ghosts, on the other hand, loved it under there.

  “I live here,” it whinged. “Why should I have to leave?”

  “You don’t live,” Cash said. “You do moan all night long.”

  It had picked up an extra eye from somewhere—not human, maybe one of the guests’ pets had died—and it leveled all three on him reproachfully.

  “I was murdered,” it reminded him. “Chopped up for dogs. Evicted. You never even sleep in here.”

  “Times change,” Cash said. “And it’s only for the weekend.”

  It groaned, fluttered smoke-stained lungs, and laboriously took flight to wobble drunkenly through the ceiling. Splintered ribs hung under it like a daddy longlegs’ pencil-stroke limbs and rattled against each other as it moved.

  Spirits—like the one at the Stevens’s house—were free agents… usually. The gravitational well of a human’s bad deeds could trap them in places or people, but they could usually break free eventually. Ghosts were the wrecked bits of souls not up to the commute to heaven or hell.

  Most of them were screaming bags of frustrated rage, driven to avenge the slights that ended their mortal lives, even when they didn’t have enough of themselves to know what those slights were. They either succeeded in that or an exorcist moved them on. It was different if they were killed by a monster. Then they got left where they died.

  The hotel had maybe a dozen official ghosts, like bag-of-bones there, that had stitched themselves together into something like sentience. Then regretted it. Being a ghost sucked.

  Cash dumped his bag onto the now unoccupied bed.

  “Are you waiting for me to come to you?” he asked.

  A low, whiskey-rough chuckle came from the other room, through the door that led to Arkady’s quarters.

  “That would be a change, wouldn’t it,” Arkady drawled.

  Cash rolled his eyes. Power—whether it was money or monstrosity—warped people’s ideas of how the world worked. Arkady had gotten Cash all the way out to the island, but he was put out that Cash wouldn’t go the last five feet.

  As if he was the one who did all the running. Ever. In anything. Even when they’d been together.

  “Fine.”

  Cash pulled his camera out of the bag and stalked over to the door. Then he hesitated as he reached for the handle. It would be… weird… if it were locked. He didn’t know if it would matter or not or what it would mean if it did, but it would definitely be strange.

  He grabbed the polished brass as if it were hot, and he twisted it. It wasn’t locked. The door swung open over thick deep-pile black carpet and revealed a room that was as soullessly luxurious as Cash’s was sparse. There was plenty of personality in the thick oil-painted scenes of the homeland hung on the walls and the heavy cherrywood furniture that tried to make the sprawl of a suite seem small.

  It just wasn’t Arkady’s personality.

  Or it hadn’t been. He didn’t know Arkady anymore, it just felt like he did. He stepped across the threshold.

  “Happy?” he asked

  Arkady looked up from his laptop. He was slouched in a dark oxblood armchair that was all bronze studs and high, carved back. A glass of deep red wine sat on the table next to him, and he still sat with one leg hooked over the thin armrest of the chair. His feet were bare, and Cash nearly choked on his own lust.

  His own monster squirmed in his bones, distracted and aroused by his arousal. It didn’t want what he did, not exactly, but it was close enough to be hard to separate.

  Arkady studied Cash, pale yellow eyes hard to read. “You’re late,” he said.

  “The wedding doesn’t start till tomorrow,” Cash pointed out. “Shanko won’t even have stocked your mom’s larder.”

  Once it did start, it wouldn’t end until Monday evening. Monsters didn’t gather often. Most of them weren’t social creatures anyhow, and the Prodigium discouraged it. So the few events that did draw them together had to carry a lot of weight. A wedding wasn’t just about two people making a dynastic alliance, it was an opportunity to politick, to gather information, reaffirm old alliances, and give new slights.

  Oh, and to be conspicuously richer and more terrible than your neighbor. Always that.

  “You aren’t a guest,” Arkady pointed out. He closed the laptop and set it aside so he could stretch out more comfortably. His smile was sharp. “You’re family, if you squint.”

  Cash looked around for a place to sit. There was nowhere but the bed, massive enough for five people and unmade, so he knew it would smell of Arkady. It felt like a trap.

  “You could have the chair,” Arkady offered lazily as he watched Cash. “If that would help.”

  The thought of Arkady in the rumpled bed, all long lines and boneless elegance on silk sheets as they talked, was vivid enough that Cash’s mouth dried. He closed his eyes and slowly let his breath out.

  “It really wouldn’t,” Cash said tightly. He sat down on the edge of the bed—it smelled pretty much how he’d imagined, flesh, musk, and the sweet-bitter tang of magic—and tried to ignore Arkady’s smirk. “Yana needs to tell Ellie about this.”

  Arkady blinked. “About the Worm?”

  “About the wedding,” Cash said. “She’s her mother.”

  “And you’re her father,” Arkady said. “I hadn’t forgotten the details of how she was born, even if I have forgiven her for them.”

  Cash pinched the bridge of his nose. He ignored the old argument that wanted to puke out of his throat to be rechewed. Arkady had been married to someone else, yet Cash was still the one cast as the homewrecker. It wasn’t fair, but it wasn’t relevant either.

  “It’s the sort of thing a kid is meant to know before it happens,” he said. “This man’s going to be her stepdad, and she’s never even met him. Her mom is getting married and doesn’t invite her to the wedding? Her uncle keeps it from her?”

  Arkady propped his chin in the palm of his hand, elbow braced on the arm of the chair, and listened patiently. A faint, fond smile curled his mouth. Eventually Cash’s irritation with that elbowed the annoyance about the wedding out of the way.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I forget sometimes how human you used to be,” Arkady said. “It’s cute.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Arkady grinned. “You only have to ask.” He ignored Cash’s annoyed splutter and pushed himself easily up out of the chair. “If this marriage meant anything, even you would have heard about it. It’s a sop to Yana’s sentimentality and an excuse to host a gathering, since we haven’t had a birth, a death, or any significant event in years. She’s marrying a nobody, and this wedding means nothing. It’s just an excuse to enjoy my mother’s hospitality and plot against her in front of her face. If Ellie is upset, I’ll explain that to her.”

  “Sure,” Cash said dryly. “Because the cold politics of romance is what a kid who kisses her picture of Shawn Mendes good night will find comforting.”

  “One day she’ll marry for power,” Arkady pointed out. “She needs to get used to the idea.”

  “No,” Cash said flatly. “She won’t.”

  Arkady shrugged. “It’s years away,” he admitted. “We can discuss the details then.”

  “No,” Cash repeated.

  “You’ve gotten very fond of that word,” Arkady said.

  “So’s Ellie,” Cash said. “And she’s twelve, so all she needs to know is that she has a new stepdad, not about dynastic marriages or the cost of power-brokering your loved ones.”

  Arkady picked up his glass and drained it. The liquid looked too thick for wine as he licked it off his lips.

  “So, what, does she think that, at some point, Madeline and I actually
liked each other?” he asked. “That I gave up on us because I just liked the cut of Madeline’s jib?”

  Well, that question had gone places Cash didn’t think he could deal with right then. He looked away from Arkady’s mouth. That had always made thinking easier.

  “That’s pretty much how it works with humans. Once you take murder off the table, people pick misery over divorce more than you’d think.” Cash glanced down at the bag balanced on his thigh and seized on that to change the topic. “Speaking of which, it doesn’t make any sense to tell people I’m your boyfriend.”

  Arkady cocked his head to the side. “Boyfriend?” He poured another glass of thick red liquor from a chilled copper flask. “I thought we’d agreed to take it slow and just date for a while. I’m not comfortable with how fast you’re moving.”

  He smirked at Cash’s glare.

  “It’s your sister’s wedding,” Cash said. “You only take a date to that if you plan to eat them rather than see them again.”

  Arkady tilted his glass in acknowledgment of that point. “Your plan?”

  It was not disappointment that Cash could taste in the back of his throat. He patted his hand against the camera. “This year, in addition to the portraitist, you also have a photographer. It’ll give me an excuse to mingle, to talk to people, pick out what they want.”

  Arkady looked curious. “Can’t you just tell?” he asked. “Pick out their crimes from their aura?”

  “I can see it,” Cash said. “It doesn’t mean I always understand it. And that’s with humans. Monsters are a whole different kettle of sin.”

  “And we hired my sister’s ex-lover, the half-human who outraged our bloodline with his offspring? Why?”

  “To rub in that I’m still just the hired help?”

  “You were never just that,” Arkady said, a flash of anger bright in his pale eyes. “And there’s just one problem with that.”

  “What?”

  Arkady walked over to the bed and leaned down to cup the side of Cash’s neck in his hand. His skin was dry and warm, and the edge of his nail was sharp as he dragged it down over the trail of raw red bruises that Cash knew still looked livid on his skin. It made a shiver run down his spine, and he bit his lip.