Cash in Hand

by TA Moore

  He didn’t, but as Cash walked away, he heard the man slur agreement. Eventually the memory would work its way in.

  A server with a plate of canapés in each hand hopped back out of his path with a quick apology. Cash stopped to wave her through and caught a glimpse of motion out of the corner of his eye—a tilted elbow and flexed bicep. He waited until the server had gone by and looked in that direction.

  The man was human and almost aggressively unremarkable, handsome enough, with stylish-enough fair hair and a suit that hit the exact spot between shabby and flashy. Even his aura was muted and tucked in tidily around his body.

  Only the heavy-framed black glasses he wore made a statement. And probably—the man looked at a redcap with a protesting server on his knee and made the same absent-looking adjustment of one leg—a slight clicking sound.

  Winslow’s casting scouts had the same model glasses camera so the crew could check for frauds and, worse, the unsympathetic. It wasn’t “on brand” for viewers to root for the devil to win some asshole’s soul, apparently.

  The scout picked out another couple and adjusted his glasses again. Cash left him to it and headed over to rescue the server from her persistent suitor with a reminder that Donna’s staff was off-limits. The redcap scowled but finally let the woman bounce up off his knee.

  “Thank you,” she mouthed at Cash.

  Cash nodded and touched her elbow. “See that guy over there, with the glasses?”

  “Table seventeen,” she said without even a glance that way. “The creeper. He takes pictures with those glasses every time we lean over the table. Like we haven’t seen Cheater and Mystery Diners.”

  “Get his name,” Cash said. “His room number too if you can.”

  She looked suspicious.

  “I’ll explain later,” Cash told her. “Trust me. I have to go.”

  He left her to clear the redcap’s table—he doubted there would be more trouble with the thought of Donna’s wrath sharp in the monster’s mind—and stretched his legs to finally catch up with Arkady at the huge ebony door with the Staff Only sign. Arkady raised dark blond eyebrows at him.

  “I see you found Natalie,” he said coolly. “Did she have something to say?”

  Cash shrugged as he leaned back against the door and pushed it open with his shoulder. The wards stung as he stepped through, like thorns caught in the meat of his human side.

  “Who can make her out with that accent?” he asked. “You have a spy on site.”

  Arkady stiffened, and his face darkened as he turned to scan the bar.

  “Who?”

  Cash grabbed his sleeve and pulled him through the door into the corridor with him. “Leave him,” he said. “He’s just a scout, here to check how cinematic the weird is. If he disappears suddenly, that just proves there’s something here to investigate.”

  “It’s not proof,” Arkady said. “Not if they don’t find the body.”

  Cash snorted. “That’s a good twenty minutes of footage in the final cut,” he said. “If he’s still here, I can find who he works for later. He shouldn’t get anything he can use, anyhow. As long as they’re above ground, everyone should have their best humanity on show.”

  “Should,” Arkady said darkly, but he let the door swing shut with a secure click. He peeled Cash’s fingers off his arm and lifted them to his lips. The kiss skimmed over Cash’s knuckles and made him swallow hard as he tried to decide if the gesture was hot or ridiculous. “See? I knew you weren’t just a pretty face.”

  “Bite me.”

  “Later.”

  Cash snorted. He tried to take his hand back, but Arkady hung on to it and tucked Cash’s fingers into the crook of his arm. His forearm was taut with muscle and warm through the starched fabric. It felt like it was being absorbed into Cash’s bones as they walked down the hall.

  “Really?” he grumbled halfheartedly.

  “You’re here as my date, you go in to dinner on my arm,” Arkady said. “It’s what people expect.”

  Cash rolled his eyes but left his hand where it was. If he had to play boyfriend for the weekend, he might as well commit to the part. Some things could be ridiculous and hot.

  The set of stairs at the end of the hall started as concrete and metal but gave way to roughly carved stone as they spiraled down. The light of hundreds of candles flickered over the high wall and glazed the milky streaks of lime that seeped out of the rock. A single fiddle dragged a slow, sweet tune from its strings and was stripped apart and played by echoes until it was an orchestra.

  For all its grandeur, the spires and the flocked Victorian wallpaper, the Abascal Hotel and Spa that most people saw was just a roach motel. The real guests—the ones who paid with more than dollars and Instagram lines—stayed down here, in the atmospheric sprawl of tunnels.

  There were suites carved into the stone, with the comforts of modern life and the cave aesthetics of the “good old days,” and caverns that filled with water at high tide for things that didn’t do well dry. Things that were too old or just too strange to pass as human had permanent residency and a very reduced rate for their stay—just the occasional favor, the odd atrocity to show willingness.

  Huge strange mushrooms were grown in frilled tiers on the walls, brittle and flavored with the wine made from pallid underground grapes. Cash had never seen it, but rumor had it there was a larder stocked with the descendants of the missing Roanoke settlers somewhere down deep. For the right guests, drunk on mushrooms and wine, she’d lose them for a baying Wild Hunt under a sky of stalactites instead of stars.

  It wasn’t the only hotel of its kind, although it was one of the oldest. Down here, monsters could dress up like it was the Middle Ages and pretend that one day they’d defy the Prodigium and throw off their humanity. Yet they could still get a Wi-Fi connection to catch up on the next season of The Witcher when it dropped.

  The Great Hall was full of long oak-fossil tables striated with streaks of amber and the pressed bones of things even the Prodigium didn’t have a name for. Servants in livery moved between the tables and served up carved cuts of fresh meat on beaten brass platters or poured glasses of thin pale wine.

  Like the Bell and Book, the monsters who came to enjoy the Abascal’s hospitality had shucked their humanity, but they’d left all of it at the door. Instead of human fashion that pinched wattled skin and didn’t have room for their wings or tails, they were in finery tailored to their monstrosity. A silk fringe tasseled a goblin king’s long, naked rat tail, and a harpy wore matched platinum spinner rings on her taloned hands and the long fingers of her bat wings.

  It was gaudy and indulgent, all trailing sleeves of stiff brocade in brilliant colors and great gemmed metallic ruffs that framed the grim maws of folklore. Upstairs Cash had felt awkwardly overdressed in his jacket. Down here he looked monastic.

  At the center of it all, even though she was tucked away in a booth near the back, Donna Abascal sipped wine and watched the eddy of politics move from table to table. Most of the guests swung by hers to pay their respects and show metaphorical throat. She’d remember them, although it would gain them no favors. The ones who didn’t come by she’d remember too, and take her pinch of flesh in some small, petty way.

  Ellie called Donna “Grams” sometimes. If any of the cream of the Prodigium in attendance this weekend heard that, they’d choke on their own foot-long tongues.

  “Are they all here for the wedding?” Cash asked as they took the last few steps down onto the uneven floor. Like every other rough touch in the caverns, every pothole and stalagmite stump was for the cave aesthetic.

  Arkady dipped his head toward Cash and murmured through a faint smile, “Of course. Not all of them are invited, but they’re to give everyone else the impression they are.”

  He unlinked his arm from Cash’s and put a hand on the small of his back instead as he guided him through the tables. A few of the diners acknowledged them on the way past—a tip of a heavy, horned head or a glass rais
ed in a slime-sticky hand for a brief toast—but others actively turned away to present a cold shoulder.

  That was new.

  Before Cash could ask, they reached Donna’s table. The wig was one he hadn’t seen before, short and a delicate shade of red that curled around her ears, but the woman under it hadn’t changed. The dust of her humanity had hardened like papier-mâché, dry and delicate. What looked like incipient wrinkles from a distance—the start of crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and marionette lines around her mouth—were actually folds and cracks in the skin. Something paler lived underneath, and every day her maids papered over it with powder and grafts of thin see-through skin peeled from… someone. Somewhere.

  There were always rumors.

  “Belladonna,” Cash said. He didn’t bow. At first he hadn’t known he had to, and then… well, being a dick was his art. “Even you can’t be done with a bad penny, huh?”

  She smiled and held her hand out. “Blood of my blood,” she said. The voice that came out of that dainty spider of a woman was a low, rough contralto. It was like rotgut in a crystal tumbler. “Sit. Break bread with me. Tell me how my granddaughter fares at the proving ground.”

  Cash pulled away. Only the hand between his shoulders stopped it from being a step back.

  What the fuck was going on?

  Chapter Seven

  “HAH, SHE’S a scale off the old beast.” Donna chuckled as she looked at Cash’s photo of Ellie. Her fingers tapped like sticks against the screen, and she sighed wistfully. “It’s true, you know. The enemies you make at the proving camp are enemies you have their whole life.”

  “They really hate it when you call it proving grounds,” Arkady said. “It’s Summer Camp now.”

  She dismissed that with an impatient flick of her hand. “Whatever you call it, you never forget your first enemies. It almost makes me regret killing them all at once.”

  It was never a good idea to have anything less than all your wits about you, dealing with Donna. Cash still risked a drink of the grave-dirt-grown wine to settle his stomach. It had a thin taste and a kick that made his eyes water.

  “I hear they found your brother’s leg bone in the Catacombs in Paris,” he said as he picked over the sushi on his plate. The “they” were the Papacy. “That’s half of him reassembled. In another century you’ll be able to take him apart again.”

  Donna smiled at him and slid the phone back over the table. Her fingers hadn’t left smudges on the screen, just a faint white powder like the shed of a moth’s wing.

  “Almost, dear, almost. You can always find new enemies. Sentiment is a drug that even monsters can grow addicted to.” She took a sip of her own wine and arched an eyebrow at him. Her plate was cleared, bones cracked open and marrow licked out. “Although we all crave a little hit of nostalgia now and again, don’t we?”

  The wine had soured in Cash’s stomach. He muttered something agreeable and took a second drink. Maybe it would calm the first down to have a friend. Was he dying? That didn’t make sense—why would she care? Was she dying and this was some last mind game on her part?

  “Speaking of which,” Arkady interrupted, “is Yana here yet?”

  The question flipped Donna’s strange mood like a coin. She frowned and sat back in the booth. Despite her slight frame, it creaked under her weight.

  “Not until tomorrow. Tomorrow evening,” she said, her mouth tipped down in an unhappy pout. “Why come at all, that’s what I want to know. Why marry and miss the party? It’s the last good time you’ll have until your husband gets you pregnant and you can finally hunt him through the woods for sport. Although, of course, some people like their husbands and don’t want to bury them under a cursed oak. More power to them, I say. We all have different needs.”

  She was back to smiling.

  “Maybe Yana is afraid that this fiancé will ‘get lost’ in the caverns like the last two,” Arkady said. “She seems to have a thing for men with a bad sense of direction.”

  “And what will we tell them when they find their way home?” Donna asked archly. “Constancy in this family will die with me. Until they find your father’s body, Arkady, I will consider myself married to him… and a subject of the Prodigium.”

  One of the discreet servers approached the table with a fresh bottle for the table and a message she whispered into Donna’s ear. Whatever she had to say made Donna’s smile tighten, but not slip. She sighed, drained her wine, and rested both hands on the table.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” she said. “I have to go and deal with a… guest complaint. Please, finish the wine and order dessert if you want it. My larder is open to you. If I’m not back before you’re finished, we can speak tomorrow. I’m so glad you could make it, Casper. It isn’t truly a family event without all the family there to bear witness if it goes to tribunal.”

  She slid out of the booth and swept away through the tables, her skirts caught up in one hand. The server left the bottle on the table, bowed, and discreetly made an exit.

  Cash unbuttoned the high collar of his jacket and reached for his wine. “Are you sure she isn’t the leak?”

  “The Prodigium would not consider that a joke,” Arkady said. He moved the glass out of Cash’s reach and stole a roll of untouched fish from his plate. It disappeared into his mouth, and he eyed the last piece until Cash pushed it toward him. That had always been the trade-off, Arkady didn’t order food to consume like a hungry lion in front of Cash, and he got the pick of leftovers. It was a human qualm maybe, but it was hard to enjoy someone’s mouth on your cock when you’d seen them crack a femur open with their eye teeth. “And that performance wasn’t for you. My mother just wants to make a point.”

  “What?”

  Arkady fastidiously wiped his hands on a napkin. “That Yana’s new beau is a fresh pinnacle of disappointment for her, even when compared to you. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Cash said absently. “Donna and I have always known where we stood with each other.”

  Beneath her and as far away as possible, respectively.

  “How does Yana feel about him? Does he make her happy?” Cash asked.

  “Does that matter?” Arkady asked.

  Cash hesitated. There was more than one way to take that question, and all of them had barbs.

  “Not when it comes to the leak, I guess,” Cash said. He paused as a bleak thought occurred to him. “I mean, there’s no way that Yana—?”

  Arkady looked grim as he interrupted Cash. “It’s in all our best interests to find another culprit, don’t you think?”

  The Prodigium only had a few laws—it was the best approach to ruling monsters—but they were enforced with the sort of egalitarianism human society could only aspire to. If Yana had done this, she’d pay the price no matter whose daughter she was.

  “You wanted a liar for a reason,” Cash said grimly.

  He had morals. It would have been easier if he didn’t, but his mother had thought she was doing the right thing when she taught him right from wrong. He couldn’t hold that against her. But if he had to send someone to the salting racks for a crime they didn’t commit, he’d do it rather than let Ellie see her mother strung up for jerky.

  “I did, didn’t I,” Arkady said, a faint edge to his voice.

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Your mother bought me to be your friend.”

  “True. Thanks for the reminder.” Arkady picked up his glass and took a drink.

  “I seduced you because I was a chaotic little asshole, and you were… beautiful,” Cash said. “Nothing has changed. I wanted to kiss you, so I did. Nothing to do with me being a liar, or you pressuring me into coming back here.”

  Arkady looked annoyed. The flash of pinched temper highlighted the lines of his face that he’d inherited from Donna. It faded quickly into a dry amusement.

  “You seduced me?” he said thoughtfully. “Huh. Is that how you remember it?”

  “
I kissed you first.”

  Arkady leaned back in the booth and smiled faintly, a sly tuck of humor at the corner of his mouth. “I knew you were going to, though.”

  “Liar,” Cash said. “You hit your head on the wall.”

  “I knew in general,” Arkady said. Old amusement twitched the corners of his mouth, a hint of almost sweetness. “I didn’t expect you to just go ‘fuck it’ and try to climb me.”

  Cash laughed. He felt guilty about it a second after, a bitter chaser to the humor. Sex was one thing—sticky, memorable, and satisfying to the bones but limited by the simple fact it wasn’t compatible with his life—but these unearthed shreds of old affection were dangerous. They made him remember all the things he used to want.

  Things.

  That was dignifying what a single-minded asshole he’d been back then. He’d wanted Arkady. He’d have taken the life that came with, but nice pillows and servants hadn’t been what woke him sweaty and so hard he ached from his dreams. Like the Prodigium, Cash hadn’t liked to complicate things.

  His inner monster didn’t even bother to come up with a dig in response to that. It just snorted.

  “Simpler times,” Cash said. It would have been better to sour the moment, but he couldn’t quite stomach that along with the sushi. “Simpler us.”

  Arkady reached out and tucked a dark curl behind Cash’s ear. His hand lingered. “Can’t say your moves have evolved.”

  Cash spluttered out half an objection. “That’s not…. You haven’t seen my—”

  “Sir,” the server interrupted Cash’s disagreement. He was pale. They were all pale. No one who worked in the under-hotel was allowed above again. Most of them were night-struck—obsessed with fucking, being eaten, or all of the above by monsters—and eagerly accepted the limitations. Others were dying, but the payment plan made the drawbacks worth it. Once they had been down here a while, there was a texture to their pallor, a greasy rind that fake tan couldn’t hide, but this guy was grayish, and his eyes were wide and anxious. “Milady Abascal said to apologize for interrupting, but you’re needed.”