by TA Moore
“I bet if I stagger in covered in blood, he’ll temporarily upgrade so I don’t sue him,” Cash said tartly. He paused as a wash of nausea hit him and he struggled to stay on his feet. His humanity was still thick enough not to blister under salt, but he was still allergic to it. Under his nail beds and behind his eyelids itched in irritated reaction, and his monster felt dry and thirsty around his bones. “Look, this sounds like bullshit to me. I buy there’s still monsters in the world, but they’re out in the woods or deadheading the rails for easy prey. They aren’t at a spa. So I’m going to go, and you can deal with hotel security.”
He stalked out of the puddle of light and felt his way through the dimly lit cave toward the faint sound of the ocean. Instincts strained for him to run, to go to ground somewhere wet and dark until the holiness passed on by, but he reined it in.
“We can’t let him leave!” Abigail hissed. There was a rattle of metal on plastic that made Cash’s head throb with the reminder of whatever they’d whacked him with. “The hotel will kick us out. The last thing they want is to become the Monster Spa.”
There was a tight edge to Harry’s voice that suggested he’d lost his patience with his coworker. “We aren’t the fucking Inquisition, Abigail. We can’t kidnap people. Or murder them. Put that down. Down.” Something hard hit the ground with spiteful force, and Harry raised his voice. “Mr. Davies. Wait.”
Cash turned around but didn’t stop. He walked backward a few steps, the sand lumpy underfoot as he glanced from the bat to Harry. “Outside,” he said.
He had to hunch over the last few steps out of the cave. The roots of the seagrass that grew down through the packed dirt tickled the back of his neck and the tops of his ears as he scrambled out.
The moon hung fat and heavy in the sky. It was full—a good night for werewolves and wisps. Cash wasn’t tied to the moon, but travelers were less wary on a well-lit night. They took more risks. He brushed the sand off and looked around to orient himself. It wasn’t far from the hotel. Cash could hear the faint high notes of music on the breeze if he strained his ears.
“My friends and I used to come here to party after our shifts,” Abigail said as she joined him. She shook her head to shed anything that had gotten in her hair. “We’d steal well whiskey and beer, come out here, sit on deckchairs, and pretend we were fancy bitches like Donna Abascal and her kid.”
“It’s a little more… MacGyver… than our usual hub of operations,” Harry said. “But we’re investigating monsters, Mr. Davies. If I made a mistake, we didn’t want our research to disappear with our bones.”
Shame he’d brought Cash here, then.
“Hookup or boyfriend, I’m in Arkady’s bed,” Cash said. “Why shouldn’t I tell him about you?”
Harry and Abigail traded a look for a second. Then Harry straightened his shoulders and met Cash’s eyes with a steady, earnest look from behind his spy glasses.
“Because we believe that Ilyana Abascal is about to marry a monster,” Harry said. “If it realizes that we know what it is—if her family gives it away through any change in their behavior—then only God will know what it does to her.”
Cash was lucky that poleaxed shock was an appropriate reaction to that sort of information. He gawped at Harry and then swallowed hard, a wet click in his throat from nerves.
“That’s…. That’s something from a fairy tale,” he said. “Monsters don’t marry princesses anymore, if they ever really did.”
Harry took a step closer to him. “Oh, they did,” he said. “Fairy tales are just simplified history, Mr. Davies, you know that. Beauty and the Beast was based on a documented historical event in 1500s France, except the historical Beauty didn’t have a happy ending. Her sisters weren’t able to save her. She married the Beast, and they never saw her again.”
“I know the story,” Cash said. “And plenty of historians argue that a real girl might have disappeared, but the story was exaggerated to make it more newsworthy. Fake news isn’t new.”
Monsters had a different version again. It might not be any more true, but it was said that Beauty was the one who helped them find human skins to hide in. Some stories said it was Beauty’s skin that Donna still wore—in her memory—but the Abascals came from Italy, not France. So who knew?
“When our source contacted us earlier this year, we were skeptical too,” Harry said. “12:28 has chased a hundred stories about monsters while I’ve worked there, and maybe three of them panned out to anything—infant disappearances in five different hospitals along the East Coast in the last decade.”
“Five,” Cash said. He hoped the only was only audible inside his head. The Black Witch ate once a year and apparently didn’t cover her tracks like you might expect. “Jesus.”
Harry nodded grimly. “He also sent us to a woman who was under some sort of monstrous oppression, visited nightly by some creature in the form of a loved one that”—Harry flushed, the color deep enough to be just about visible under the moonlight—“sought some esoteric form of congress with her.”
Yeah, Cash had heard that about the Worm. He supposed if he lived long enough, the more unesoteric forms of congress would get a bit same-old, same-old too. Hard to imagine at the moment, with the warmth of Arkady’s skin still fresh in his memory.
“Of course, we had to get the local authorities involved,” Harry said grudgingly. “For her safety. Unfortunately, that resulted in the monster’s escape when it chose to die rather than be captured. Until the corpse is retrieved, we can’t prove whether Ms. Fennick’s ex returned from his untimely grave through magic or fraud.”
They never considered both. It was always one or the other. That was what the Prodigium was created to take advantage of—humanity’s confidence that they were the only ones who could get used to the modern world.
The Worm was Seated Prodigium, one of the ruling members of that terrible council. Cash was confident the old monster had covered his ass if anyone questioned what his dead host was doing up and walking. That made it more worrying that someone had not just a rough idea of the Worm’s schedule but an intimate knowledge of the host he’d worn. An intimate knowledge of the business of every monster in Roanoke was bad enough, but to be able to track a council member from out of town? That was the sort of information network that required money, power, and influence.
That described the Abascals. They collected secrets like some kids collected stamps, tucked away to lube the deal later. Cash would lay odds that, between the three of them, the Abascals knew a dirty secret about every monster in Roanoke—and that included him.
If Cash believed Arkady that they weren’t involved….
“Who’s your source? Are you sure this isn’t some prank to expose you?” Cash asked. “I’ve lived here my whole life, and the only secret horror story I have seen sniffed out was the contagion that spread through the Lane development.”
That had been bad enough. The contractors on the housing development had known that their housing project edged onto, not just against, the cursed land of the old asylum. They’d rolled the dice that the two-foot-wide strip of land under one house would, at worst, make the paintwork crack. Instead the curse had budded and spread out to the edges of its new boundary line, taking in every sprawling McMansion and shell-white colonial bought up by social-climbing locals.
Ten serial killers had been tracked back to a stay in those placid, character-free houses, never mind the murder-suicides and home invasions that kept the turnover of ownership ticking along. Last year a podcaster went in and was never seen again.
Yet people kept buying.
“He says he’s afraid of retribution,” Harry said. Of course. Cash’s aching head didn’t earn him any favors from the universe. “My theory is that he’s a penitent consort, but—”
“I think he’s a Hunter,” Abigail said. She traded a sharp irritated glance with Harry. “Just because the Church disbanded them doesn’t mean they went away. There are well-researched books that track the
ir continued influence—”
“Well-researched pulp fiction,” Harry corrected her impatiently. He held up his hand to cut off any further dispute. “We will find out soon enough, either way. He’s going to be in the hotel for the wedding, and he’s promised us that he’ll unveil the monsters.”
That would, at least, get rid of the immediate threat. A hall full of unveiled monsters would leave nothing but shoelaces and contacts.
“We’re going to livestream it,” Abigail said.
Cash rubbed his head. Of course they were.
“Two days, Mr. Davies,” Harry said, his voice intent. “That’s all you have to give us. Two days and your faith that the Good Lord won’t let any infernal creature rest in peace on his creation. Do we have it?”
Cash clenched his teeth on a bark of laughter. At the moment he’d buy that God had come back from that long sabbatical and the angels were desperate to look busy—specifically by screwing with his life.
“I’ll give you that,” he said. “But if you’re wrong, your credibility is going to be down the drain. What the viewing public leaves of you, the Abascals will drag through court until all that’s left is money and regret.”
“You’re already saying if,” Harry said. “This is real, and it’s a game changer. Once we reveal that there are still monsters out there—real ones, not half-starved inbreds and mangy Sasquatches? Forget Hunters. The Vatican will empower the Witch Finders with temporal authority again.”
That was something new to worry about. Cash filed it behind the question of who in Roanoke was powerful enough to pull this off… and keep that power a secret from Donna.
“I guess we’ll see,” he said.
Chapter Nine
“IF I needed someone to get the staff drunk and fuck them, I could have hired a maenad,” Arkady said in a tight, controlled voice. His “too pissed off to let the monster out” voice. Cash supposed he was flattered that he could still make someone jealous. He guessed he was still pretty. “Don’t make me regret trusting you, Casper. Not again.”
Cash rubbed grit and sand from his eyes and propped himself up on the narrow mattress. After his near tumble with Arkady the other day, he hadn’t expected his bedroom to be where he woke up today. But the best laid plans of mice and monsters….
The inside of his head felt light and loose, and his skin was too tight. Last night had burned through a layer of humanity, rubbed it down closer toward the grain of the monster. Luckily he had enough of it to spare.
“You married someone else,” he said.
Arkady stared down at him. The grip he had on his monster had dimmed the see-through amber of his eyes down to a dark, almost brown honey. That was the color he had when they first met. It surprised Cash how strange it looked on Arkady now. The arrogant tilt of his eyebrow hadn’t changed.
“So?” he said.
He knew what the so was. Arkady was a monster, but he wasn’t that much of a monster. Only the elders, locked in their luxurious prisons, could be that truly inhuman. The rest of them got humanity by immersion, even the ones who hadn’t been born with it, whether they liked it or not….
So it hurt. So Cash realized he’d always be the charity boy from the South Shore. So neither of them had a choice, and that sucked the most.
“So get over it.”
Arkady gave him a bleak, bitter look. Neither of them ever seemed to say what the other wanted to hear.
You could, the monster pointed out. It was loud against the tender seams of Cash’s skull. I could.
Could, but wouldn’t. It was impossible not to see the irritation that ruffled Arkady’s aura or taste his emotions on the air. That was just another sense, like Cash’s ears or nose. The hook was different. It might not even work—Arkady was a much bigger fish—but Cash wasn’t going to try just in case it did.
“I’ll get over you banging my sister when you get over the chip on your shoulder you’ve had since camp,” Arkady snapped. He leaned down and grabbed Cash’s chin between his fingers to tilt his face toward the window. “What the hell happened to your face?”
Good question. Cash pushed Arkady away and staggered out of the bed. He padded over to the mirror and peered at his reflection. The black eye and the bruise on his forehead had already started to fade, but while his skin hadn’t blistered last night, it had reacted. Under the smooth layer of human skin, pale and flecked with freckles, flat grayish blotches of scarred monster showed through.
His hands were the same, peppered with dry gunmetal-gray flecks.
“You know how it is,” Cash said. “You pick someone up and they turn out to be kinkier than expected.”
“No.” Arkady walked up behind him and pushed Cash’s head forward so he could examine the knot on the back. He made an irritated sound, still not ready to let go of his temper as he wrapped his hand around the nape of Cash’s neck. His grip pinched, hard enough to make Cash squirm. They both stared into the mirror as if their posed reflection might reveal something. “People are going to think I beat you. Maybe I should.”
Cash snorted and tried, halfheartedly, to pull away. “They would think it was about time.”
“I’ve never cared what they think,” Arkady said as he tugged Cash back. The tension in his voice was cut with lust, like rotgut served with a whiskey chaser. “But if someone is going to bruise you, it better be me. What happened?”
Cash leaned back against Arkady’s chest. Buttons scratched against his bare back, and the itch of pleasure prickled in his gut and down the backs of his thighs.
He groaned and pulled away, with more determination this time. Arkady growled, a scrape of stones in the back of his throat, but he let go.
“Yeah, well, not going to be talking much if I’m under you,” Cash pointed out. He grabbed yesterday’s jeans and pulled them on. The time it took him to hitch them up over his hips gave him the chance to pull his thoughts together. “I found out who our leak—your leak—is leaking to.”
“Was that before or after they hit you on the head?”
Cash left his jeans unbuttoned as he reached up to touch his head. He probed gingerly at his skull. It still hurt, but the knot had gone down from a goose egg to a chicken’s egg overnight. The skin had pulled back together as well, although he could still feel the seam of it with his fingers.
“Simultaneously,” he said.
“Who?” Arkady said. His monster pushed up against his skin, a sheen of sickly gold that bled through his honey tan. “I’ll kill them, and all we have to deal with is a traitor. Not the Left Hand and the Prodigium.”
“That won’t work.” Cash sat down on the edge of the bed, T-shirt dangling from his hands between his knees. “It’s not one wannabe Hunter, it’s 12:28. Even if you kill the crew that’s here, it won’t stop the investigation. If anything, it will just confirm to any doubters at the network that there is something here.”
Arkady stalked over and leaned down to take Cash’s hands. He turned them over and grazed his thumbs over the half-faded marks left by the cuffs.
“I want to kill them,” he said.
That made Cash’s heart stutter hard enough that he wondered if Arkady could feel the skip in Cash’s pulse through his skin.
“And ten minutes ago you wanted to kill me,” he said. “You got over that, you’ll get over this.”
Arkady lifted Cash’s hands and brushed a hot-lipped kiss over the marks. It made the tender skin sting and itch as Arkady’s power picked at the wound.
“I didn’t realize I’d gotten over wanting to kill you,” Arkady said dryly as he gave Cash’s hands back. He stalked restlessly around the room to burn off emotion as the gold sheen sank back under his skin. The pressure in the room changed, and the absence made it easier to breathe. “Fine, discredit rather than murder. Them, at least.”
Cash pulled his T-shirt on with a wince as the collar scraped over the back of his head. He ignored the jab.
“We’ll get the chance,” he said. “Apparently they plan to
crash the wedding.”
Arkady stopped for a second and then swore through his teeth. “That makes no sense.”
“Why not?” Cash asked. “No one will have their human skins on. The director is expecting to just catch Yana’s husband—”
Arkady snorted something under his breath and stuck his hands in his pockets.
“—but they aren’t going to stop filming because they see more monsters than they expect. Even if none of the film gets out, a breach of the law that… huge… would bring the Prodigium down like a hammer.”
The Abascals would bear the brunt—even if they hadn’t commissioned the exposure, just to show that no one was above the law—but everyone would suffer. Every monster involved could be relocated… to the bottom of the salt sea if any of the footage did make it out to the world.
“Exactly,” Arkady said. “Why did I want you here for the wedding, Cash?”
“To piss your family off?”
A flicker of bleak humor tucked the corner of Arkady’s mouth. It didn’t last. “No secrets from you, huh?” he said. “Not just that, though. Any monster who could have done this is going to be here. If they’re going to help the humans gatecrash, then they’ll definitely be here. That means they’d be part of the breach, along with the rest of us.”
Cash hesitated as he tried to explain that away. “Maybe that’s to throw the Prodigium off their scent?” he said. “They’d assume the same thing—that no one would expose themselves.”
“Would you put your faith in the Prodigium’s proportionate reaction to this?”
No. Cash wouldn’t. No monster with sense would. He didn’t want to admit that to Arkady just yet, though, so he changed the subject.
“It doesn’t matter anyhow—”
“It’s the only reason you’re here.”
That caught Cash off guard, right between the ribs. He felt his lungs hitch in at the almost physical ache of it, and he spat the sour breath out. It was a lie. Cash could tell that, but it still hurt. Apparently, his pride was an idiot.
