by TA Moore
Arkady brushed his fingers down Cash’s throat with a featherlight caress and then sat back. There was a grim cant to his mouth as he drew reserve around him like a coat. He folded his napkin and leaned over to brush a cool, empty kiss over Cash’s cheek.
“It’s another leak, another monster exposed,” he murmured grimly into Cash’s ear. “We need to find who did it.”
He drew away from Cash and slid out of the booth, tossing the napkin down on the table. An impatient gesture of his hand directed the server to lead the way, and they left. It was a different direction to the one that Donna had taken, but that meant nothing. The under-hotel was a maze of tunnels and switchbacks, and only the Abascals knew all the shortcuts.
Cash looked away before anyone noticed he wasn’t just admiring Arkady’s ass. He picked up the wine bottle and stared at the label. It was an Abascal Grand Cru Blanc, vintage 1820, bottled in heavy green glass.
There wasn’t enough left in it to knock Cash out if he finished it off, but maybe if he could convince someone to crack him over the head with it….
He considered it. It might not solve any of a human’s problems, but monster lore was full of stories where someone passed out after drinking a bathtub of gin and woke to find their problems had sorted themselves out. Usually it was a hundred years on and they had a whole new crop of problems, but that wasn’t the point.
But Cash had Ellie to take care of. In a few years, she should be thinking about going to college, stealing her first hearts—or souls, if that’s how the gene pool threw down. She didn’t need to be stuck luring travelers to a cave for her comatose father to feed on their despair.
He was saving that for his retirement.
Cash put the bottle down and took a deep breath. He hadn’t wanted to come back here—and he’d already managed to prove why it was better he stayed away—but here he was. The only way he could justify it was if it was for Ellie, so maybe he should focus on finding the link. Instead of Arkady’s ass.
Why not both?
He ignored that. There were times his monster could be useful, an internal narrator who punctured the lies he tried to tell himself. But not when its stomach was rumbling.
Cash slid out of the booth and followed the flow of the servers toward the kitchen. He took his fancy jacket off as he wove through the tables and fished a stray band out of his pocket to pull his hair back into a ponytail.
“Sir?” one of the servers protested as he ducked through the doors after them. “This is the staff area. The guest exit is—”
“I know,” Cash said. “Don’t worry about it.”
The server looked like he was anyhow, but another man in livery pulled him aside and muttered into his ear. It could be that people around here still remembered Cash, or just the good advice that stopping monsters doing what they wanted was above a server’s pay grade.
Cash left them to it as he headed into the tunnels.
Only the Abascals knew all the shortcuts, but everyone knew some.
THE WAITRESS, Abigail, flicked the ash off her cigarette into the gravel and gave Cash a sheepish look.
“I know,” she said. “It’s bad for you. I’m going to stop, it’s just….”
She trailed off with a defeated shrug and took another quick drag before she stubbed the butt out. It went into the nearby bucket, and she pulled a minibottle of perfume out to give herself a quick spritz.
“Easier said than done,” Cash said.
Abigail laughed in tired agreement as she tucked the Chanel rip-off bottle back into her pocket. Her despair was stale, chewed over every time she exhaled the last smoke from her throat and told herself, “This was the last one,” even though she knew it was a lie.
Go to any addiction self-help group in the city and you’d probably find a wisp there in the back. Addiction was the cheese sandwich of despair, but it never ran out, and there were usually donuts.
“My mom smoked,” Cash said, because his monster had been more of a dick than usual these last few days. “She was a waitress too. It helped her get through a shift without killing anyone. When she got a better job, she quit.”
That was a lie. She hadn’t gotten a better job. She’d worked at the same café until she got cancer. Then she died. Cash didn’t visit her in the hospital. It turned his stomach to glut on his mom’s death, but it wasn’t something he could control.
It made Abigail feel better, though, that brief jolt of hope that she could do it, get a better job and quit, get far away from here. She was probably never clear on why she wanted away from here so much. It was a job, and it paid well, but on some cellular level, she knew what they were and that she didn’t belong.
Her aura flared briefly golden as she believed, just for a second, that she might get away alive.
The monster retched in Cash’s ear and sunk away from that flare of happiness and into his bones.
“You and Mr. Abascal, looked….” She glanced sidelong at him, as if she hoped he’d finish for her. “I thought he was straight. Him and his wife, they were always all over each other when they were here.”
Cash swallowed the glass and acid in his throat. He hadn’t expected that or for it to still hurt quite so much.
“Bisexuality is a thing,” he said.
Abigail gave him an interested look out of the corner of her eye. “Are you….”
“No,” Cash said easily. “I like guys. I’ve never—”
He paused, cleared his throat, tried again. “I’m pretty taken right now.”
Abigail shrugged and nodded. “I mean, if Mr. Abascal looked at me like that? Wow.”
She sighed. Cash could just taste the edges of a tattered daydream, buttercream icing and champagne as her aura fluttered like a veil. That wouldn’t end well for her, but it wasn’t Cash’s job to scare off Arkady’s prey.
“Yeah, well, it’s not exactly something he wants publicized,” he said. His power tasted like marsh water on his tongue as his voice lilted on the night air. “Me and him, I mean, not right now. His ex would have him over a barrel. You know what she was like. Arkady only just about agreed to be seen with me in public. If he finds out about that guy with the glasses taking photos? He’ll lose his mind.”
It didn’t take a genius to work out that Abigail didn’t like Madeline. Humans never did. Even when Arkady’s ex wasn’t actively courting dissent, she had contentious energy. That was the line. The hook was the chance to get closer to Arkady—even through his lover—and, well, if he was bisexual and obviously not that into Cash… who knew what might happen?
It wasn’t a conscious calculation. Abigail was a nice woman. She’d never decide to chase someone else’s man. It was enough temptation to get the hook in her throat. Cash wouldn’t have been able to lead her to her death on that flimsy string, but it was enough to take the first step.
“Okay,” she said. “I mean, he owns the hotel, right?”
“His mother does,” Cash said.
Abigail chuckled as she handed him a warm folded napkin from her pocket. “Yeah, but he’s in charge, you know. She just has tea parties sometimes.”
That hurt Cash’s brain. He unfolded the paper. It was full of salt. The white grains spilled out over his hands, got under his nails, and the sharp ocean smell of it filled his nose. He jerked back and let the napkin fall, lifted away on the breeze as he shook the salt off his hands.
“What the fuck?” he said.
Abigail stared at him. Her aura sagged and faded around her. Disappointment wasn’t despair, but they had a similar taste. Her eyes flicked past him, into the dark. “What now?”
They salted monsters for a reason. Some of them could abide the sea, and wisps could tolerate the salty brine of marshes, but purified into thin, flat crystals it still stung them.
Fuck. Fuck.
Cash lunged for the door back inside, but Abigail blocked him. It was hard to tell if she meant to do it or was just in the way. Before he could decide, something cracked him across the back of the
head. He had a second of hot, monstrous contempt at the fact they thought that would be enough, and then his legs went out from under him, and black washed over his vision.
Chapter Eight
CASH WOKE up facedown on sand. He could smell blood. His head ached. It took him a second to put the two together, but to be fair, he’d just been cracked on the head.
He groaned and tried to roll over. His hands were cuffed behind his back—real metal cuffs, not the plastic restraints that cops usually used. He managed to squirm onto his side and spit out the blood that had run into his mouth. His eyes were glued shut with it, his lashes welded together.
“Here,” someone said.
Water splashed over his face, warm and fucking salty. It made his blood itch and his eyes burn, but he tried to pretend it didn’t as he clumsily scrubbed his eyes on his shoulder until he could peel one open. Cash blinked against the bright light and got his elbow braced to struggle up into a sitting position.
The nondescript man with the glasses sat on a deck chair in front of him. Abigail was behind him, her arms tightly crossed across her breasts. A heavy-duty flashlight was perched on a stack of boxes, strong enough to cast a puddle of light around the three of them. It wasn’t much of a cave—the roof was as much dirt as rock—but Cash supposed it would do.
Abigail’s aura pulsed in time with her heartbeat, and the hot taste of adrenaline popped on Cash’s tongue like sugar. The man was… nothing.
“What the fuck?” he rasped out.
“I told you,” Abigail whined anxiously. “He’s human. Of course he’s fucking human. We fucked up. You fucked him.”
“Iron took him down,” the man said. “Monsters don’t like iron.”
“You hit me on the head with it,” Cash said. His voice was scratchy and his throat dry. The monster tried to crawl up onto the back of his tongue, but he pinned it down. If they knew enough about monsters to try salt and iron, they might recognize his tricks. “Nobody likes that, you asshole.”
There was a pause, and the man grimaced his acceptance of that. He flicked Cash’s wallet open and looked at the cards inside.
“Casper Davies,” he read out from the driver’s license. “You don’t look thirty-two.”
“Thanks.”
“Didn’t say you looked younger.”
Card after card was looked at and flicked onto the sand. Credit card. Credit card. Loyalty card for that sundae place that Ellie loved. Cash knelt on the ground and tried to breathe through his nose as he discreetly worked at the cuffs around his wrists. The cuffs were a bit loose, but not enough to wriggle his hands free without dislocating his thumb.
“You’re in the industry?” the man said as he got to Cash’s union card. He rubbed his thumb thoughtfully around the edge of it. “Who do you work for?”
“Dustbowl Demonologist,” Cash said. The man made a face, and Cash shrugged. “I didn’t name it.”
“I’ve watched that,” Abigail said. Her anxiety was forgotten in an unexpected flash of fandom. “Preacher Winslow. He seems like a genuine guy?”
She looked expectantly at Cash, who hesitated and then shrugged awkwardly. “I guess,” he said. “He believes he’s helping people.”
“You don’t?” the man said. He dropped the wallet to the ground and leaned forward, his hands loosely clasped between his knees.
Cash didn’t look at them. If the Hunter’s mark was on either hand, he’d have already seen it, and most people wouldn’t know where to check.
“We never run out of subjects,” he said. “Look, what’s going on here? If you think someone will pay to get me back—”
“We’re not kidnappers,” the man said.
Cash snorted and yanked at the cuffs behind his back. “You know what, you might be,” he said.
Abigail nudged the man in the shoulder. “He was with Arkady Abascal,” she said with a smirk. “I mean, with with, you know? He said they were a thing. Maybe we could get something out of this. Concrete.”
Cash swallowed the laugh that scratched at the back of his throat. It wasn’t the reaction they’d expect, but… they’d definitely get something if they tried to demand money from Arkady. Or kept saying his name.
“We hooked up,” he said. “He’s bought me a couple of drinks, but he’s not going to pay a ransom for me. My kid would, but she’s twelve, so her worldly wealth is what’s in her pocket.”
The man stood up and walked around behind Cash. Cash tensed, ready for another blow, but instead he felt dry fingers on his wrist. This close he caught the ghost of something from the man.
Disappointment. Annoyance.
“We aren’t criminals,” he said, as much to Abigail as Cash as he unlocked the cuffs.
She rolled her eyes at him and mouthed, “It was a joke,” as she turned away.
“This was just a… misunderstanding.”
“You thought I was a monster,” Cash said. A lifetime of conditioning made his neck prickle as he said that out loud, as if he expected the left hand of the Prodigium to drop from the ceiling to flatten him. “Then you hit me on the head and dragged me… what… down to the shore? Into the woods? That’s one helluva misunderstanding. You know this is Roanoke, right? Not some backwoods Appalachian shack in the mountains.”
For the first time, he felt a solid hit of emotion from the man. Excitement. “You’d be surprised,” he said. There was something familiar about the way he said that, the cadences that his voice fell into as he pulled Cash to his feet. “This area has always been a hub of infernal activity. A bor, a fault line in the world where evil can peek through. You know that. It’s why a third of exorcism programming in the US is made within a hundred miles of this spot.”
“Like I said, we never run out of subjects,” Cash said. “You work for 12:28, right?”
“I do. I’m an assistant director. Harry Treadwell,” the man said as he stepped around and crouched down to collect Cash’s cards from the floor. “Abigail is a local hire.”
His voice was dry as dust. Abigail didn’t seem to notice as she grinned, her lips dark in the dim light.
“I worked here when I was a teenager,” she said. “I grew up on the South End—”
“Me too,” Cash said absently. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but he supposed it was to be cruel when Abigail flushed and glared at him.
“Well, I guess every generation, one of us gets out,” she said cattily. “Although I guess you’ve never worked for 12:28.”
Cash had not. That was 70 percent lack of opportunity and 30 percent choice. It had never seemed worth the risk.
Somewhere between splatter-rite and reality exorcisms lay the respectable ground of paranormal investigation. 12:28 had followed an exorcism for a year, through every unpleasant puking, cursing, scabbing moment of it. Rumor had it the spirit involved had found the experience so intense it had actually been truly exorcised, not just cut free of the honeypot of the house, which only happened in two out of ten cases. Three years ago they’d uncovered the Hairy Secret of Candle Hollow, and tracked a dozen local suicides back to a reclusive family who lived up by the mines.
In Cash’s expert opinion, the Cannock Clan had just enough monster in them to make them outcasts, but the suicides had been more down to the fact that Candle Hollow was a dead-end place to live. No one asked him, and the Cannocks had been driven out of town after the production crew left.
It was a Jesuit-run show, which would fit Harry and his hard-rind aura. Holy men and philosophers were always hard to read… real ones, at least. Fake ones were like a large print pamphlet. But in a professional believer, all the time spent thinking about the meaning of the universe/secrets of God muddied up the want-take-have of the lizard brain.
“So what? Roanoke gets a lot of wannabe Witches of Endor and possessions,” he said. “That’s common knowledge. It isn’t worth an exposé on prime time.”
Harry held out Cash’s wallet, the cards piled neatly on top. “It wouldn’t be,” he said. “But we recently
received actionable information that there’s a more… concrete… threat present here. When you started to pay attention to me, I thought perhaps you were part of it. I may have overreacted.”
Cash grimaced and touched the back of his head. His hair was spiked with blood, and there was a knot the size of an egg on his skull—a freshly boiled egg from how hot it felt across his fingers.
“With a bat,” he said. “I should sue.”
“That’s your right.”
They all knew it wouldn’t do him any good. Harry would just claim he was an ordained cleric in fear of his immortal soul, and all Cash would get for his trouble would be an official expression of regret. Even if Harry had killed him, all he’d get would be a slap on the wrist and a month in a religious retreat.
“You thought I was a monster, though?” Cash said. He tried to sound the right level of skeptical—somewhere between blasé and theatrically shocked. “At a spa? Do you think they’re here for a hot-stone massage?”
“Maybe it reminds them of hell,” Abigail said snidely. Her aura sagged around her shoulders like a baggy sweater, threaded with gray in disappointment as the adrenaline spilled out of her. “Come on, Harry. An hour ago you thought he was some sort of incubus. Now you want to spill your guts?”
Cash swallowed a nervous laugh at that misidentification. A wisp was to an incubus what the flu was to the bubonic plague. The first might kill you, if you didn’t take the right precautions, and the second was an unholy contamination that hadn’t been seen since the Middle Ages.
“He kind of needs to convince me to hold my tongue,” Cash pointed out. He slotted his cards back into his wallet and tucked it into his back pocket. “Hard to do an undercover investigation when the owner’s boyfriend is howling about his cracked skull.”
“Boyfriend, is it?” Harry said mildly. “I thought you said he was just a hookup.”
Cash shrugged. He ignored the faint, weird satisfaction he felt when he used the term. Whether he looked it or not, he was thirty-two years old, and definitely too old to get silly over the idea he had a “boyfriend.” Especially since he didn’t.
