by TA Moore
His monster sighed—a long sibilant hiss in the back of his head—but didn’t even dignify that with a jab.
“The Worm was collateral damage,” Cash said. He’d worked that out last night, and he thought saying it aloud would make his head hurt less. It didn’t. “Whoever did this didn’t do it to unseat him. They just wanted to convince the 12:28 crew to trust them. Whatever they want to accomplish with that, it was always going to happen at Yana’s wedding. If it looks like we’re going to derail that, I don’t think whoever it is will just give up.”
“So they reveal themselves.”
Cash nodded and stood up. He didn’t often have to bother, but he pushed the monster down into his bones until they felt tight with it. The gray freckles on his hands faded down to faint blotches, just a shade darker than his skin.
“When does Yana get here?” he asked.
It took a second, but Arkady sighed and answered, “Soon.” He put a knuckle under Cash’s chin and tilted his head back until their eyes met. “She hasn’t asked about you.”
“So?”
Arkady scowled with a flash of peevish irritation at having his own flat statement turned against him, and then he dipped his head down for a kiss. It was soft and unhurried, gentle—not what Cash was usually into, but it felt like… champagne. The fizz of reaction tickled his nerves and made him shiver. Cash leaned into the kiss and caught Arkady’s hips to pull him closer.
This time it was Arkady who pulled away. He stepped back and smirked, his lips wet and well-kissed.
“So get over it.”
He turned and strode out of the room. Cash stared after him in exasperation and ran his hand through his hair.
“I was never under it,” he muttered as he looked around for his boots. “So….”
SHANKO GAVE Cash a skeptical look.
“The guest list?” he said as he hoisted a frozen carcass off a hook and braced it on one broad shoulder. Meltwater ran down his arm and soaked his collar pink. “What do you want that for?”
He shoved Cash unceremoniously out of the way as he headed out of the larder. Cash caught himself on one of the strung sides of meat and staggered as it spun listlessly on its hook. He pushed himself off the cold lump of flesh, brushed the frost from his T-shirt, and jogged after Shanko. His footsteps sounded too loud as they echoed from the frost-crusted walls.
“I just want to know who’s coming,” Cash said as he dodged through the hanging meat to get ahead of Shanko. His breath steamed as it left his lips, thin and gray on the cold air.
“Your betters,” Shanko snorted. The words didn’t fog on the air.
“That could be anyone.”
“Ask your boyfriend.”
The urge to debate that point caught in Cash’s throat. He ignored it as he stretched his legs to duck out of the larder first. There were other ways out of there—one of Donna’s more useful quirks was a dislike for any room with only one exit—but they weren’t pleasant.
“Arkady knows who’s been invited,” Cash said. “You know who’s coming.”
The corner of Shanko’s mouth turned up in a brief smirk. “I do.”
He dumped the carcass onto the trolley with the rest of the cuts for the wedding dinner. The wheels clicked and bounced on the rough floor as Shanko threw his weight against the handle. The kitchen would be busy tonight as they spiced and dressed the meat in cutlets and rolls. It was their one chance in the calendar to show off their skills. Traditionally most of the high-holiday feasts took a rustic approach, with as little preparation as possible before the food reached the table.
Ideally the meal would still be breathing, just lightly greased with a chili rub for pep.
Weddings, though, celebrated deception. Food that looked like one thing but was another, gifts with a hidden sting, and a few oblivious humans to play the fool. Preferably the bride or groom—Harry had been right about that particular hobby—but servers would do at a pinch.
“There’s some people I’d rather avoid,” Cash said as he half jogged along at Shanko’s heels.
“Still running on negative friends, then?” Shanko asked. “Hopefully the child takes after her mother.”
“Yana doesn’t have any friends either,” Cash said.
“That’s by choice. You couldn’t make a friend if you had a Mr. Potato Head and a Hand of Glory.”
Cash broke stride as he visualized that. It made him shudder. “I can live with that,” he said. “Besides, they aren’t enemies. They’re exes.”
It was the truth. Sort of. Only one of his exes was likely to be invited to something like this, even if they were low down the list, but there were a few who might work the event. Cash hadn’t dated a lot—humans thought it was hard to date as a single parent, they should try it with guys to whom baby was a superfood—but even in Roanoke the monster world was small. It was hard not to cross paths with your hookups.
Shanko stopped and leaned on the handle of the trolley. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket to fastidiously wipe his hands and neck and raised a heavy eyebrow at Cash. “You’re on good terms with them?”
“No.”
“Then they’re enemies.” He tucked the stained square of cloth back into his pocket and shoved the trolley back into motion. “I’ll get the list after I deal with the cook, have it sent up to your room. If there’s anyone likely to cause a scene if you catch the bouquet, let me know and I’ll make sure they know better.”
Now that Cash thought about it, that might not hurt. Two birds, one stone.
“Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate that.”
“Why don’t you fuck Arkady, then,” Shanko grunted. “It might put him in a better mood.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Cash said dryly. They reached the heavy metal doors to the kitchen. Cash paused as Shanko pushed them open with one shoulder and braced them on his heel. The crackle of the fire was loud enough that Cash raised his voice. Something unidentifiable and multilimbed dragged heavy chains across the floor from the counters to the ovens. “Hey, you hear of anything weird going on? In the city?”
“The Abascals welcomed you back into the fold,” Shanko said. He always sounded bitter. His voice was scratchy with old disappointments. Maybe it was a bit sharper when he said that. Cash had sucked as a servant, burned his bridges on the way out, and yet here he was, back on the good linen. Yet all Shanko’s years of good service had kept him right where he was—because he didn’t have a pretty mouth and good bones. Cash could hardly object to any resentment there. Shanko snorted and dragged the trolley backward into the kitchen with him. “And the Worm has curled up under our feet until he regrows a human skin. Don’t know who I’d have expected Donna to skin and wear more—you or him. Yet here you both are, under the same rock. Maybe I should send him the guest list too.”
The trolley wheels bumped over the door frame, and the door scraped along the side as it slowly swung shut.
Cash stared at the scarred metal as he took in that bit of information. It made his brain ache, and the little part of him that was still a stupid, cocky asshole twitched to “go and see.” As if the Worm were a tourist landmark to take a selfie at #atleasthediedquick.
He resisted that urge. The Worm being here explained what Donna and Arkady had been doing over dinner. Although not why Arkady hadn’t told Cash about it. He might not have thought it was relevant, or he wanted to keep it a secret.
Cash could just ask, but…. He was good at lies, and Arkady wasn’t. Not once you knew him, anyhow. Before Cash asked any questions, he wanted to be really sure he wanted to know the answers.
Something shrieked in the kitchen, high-pitched and shocked through the heavy doors. Cash jumped and remembered to move on before he got pressed back into service. He doubted Shanko would care whether Cash called himself staff or not if an extra set of hands were needed. Last time Cash’d gone in there, the chef wanted to cut his finger off to see if wisp tasted like fish or fowl.
He strode briskly away fro
m the door and headed out into the guest parts of the underground.
“UGH, EUROPE,” the thin woman with the see-through pallor sighed as she flicked thin, matted strings of hair back from her face with long fingers. Her aura was puffed up around her like a balloon, stretched so thin with her desire to impress that it had gone translucent in spots. “It’s just changed so much from the old days. Nothing smells anymore. Don’t you miss that? That real, ripe stink of human meat?”
She licked wet lips at the thought, a glimpse of fishhook teeth just visible. Her need prickled on Cash’s tongue with a familiar acidic undertaste. All she wanted was everything—raw meat, fresh-carved respect, anyone her eye fell on under her—and it was sharp enough to make Cash’s stomach clench in sympathy.
He could eat.
Cash plucked a square of golden pastry and… what was probably?… some sort of fish smear off a passing tray. He popped it into his mouth whole. The pastry crumbled into thick, buttery flakes on his tongue, and the salt hit the back of his throat with the brackish gene-memory of a marsh.
The reminder made his hands itch, even though it was only treated salt that made his monster shrivel like a dosed slug. He scratched between his knuckles even though he knew it wouldn’t do any good. The irritation was buried under layers of skin, down near the bone.
He scored another glass of thin wine from a passing server—even after all these years of legal drinking, it still felt like he’d gotten away with something—and moved on through the crowd. The siren wanted too much, too single-mindedly, to focus on one thing long enough to set up contact with a production team. Two days into the plot, she’d have gotten hungry and eaten her catspaws instead of talking to them.
Water monsters were suckers for immediate gratification. Look at Cash. He hadn’t even given Arkady the chance to seduce him. In fact to an outsider, Cash might look like the seducer.
Again.
He sipped the wine and wandered through the crowd. The occasional pop of interest/curiosity/spite when someone recognized him tasted like boba in watered-down green tea—a pop of something thick, sweet, and then gone. A flicker of interest in Arkady Abascal’s bit of rough, but it was only for a second. Then they focused back on their own concerns.
The uneasy weight of a fresh meal in the red-skinned yara-ma-yha-who’s stomach, the outline of a shoulder and a hand still visible against the thin skin of the Australian’s distended gut, and the vague, moonlit memories of… before. The regret was like cotton candy—the same sort of disappointment you felt over a meal you hadn’t savored at the time.
Cash left the man to his fig syrup and moved on.
A rail-thin sin-eater, his face all bones and shadows, waved an empty glass in Cash’s face. Half-melted ice cubes rattled in the bottom like dice. “Another whiskey, boy,” he said, voice loud and self-conscious. Then he laughed and glanced at the woman with him for approval. “It’s the bastard’s father. Sorry, I thought you were a server. I mean, you were of course.”
He was all self-satisfaction as he imagined the moment he’d share that bon mot with Madeline. The wisp was crushed, the sin-eater imagined saying as he took Madeline’s hand, I think he went away to cry.
As if she’d care. She was a spiteful monster, but not a particularly petty one, by all accounts.
“Don’t worry about it,” Cash said with an easy, empty smile. “I thought you were a monster. I mean, you know, a real one.”
A sort of liver-colored scald crawled up the sin-eater’s throat and into his cheeks. That, in case anyone wondered, was what crushed looked like. It wasn’t about how scathing the insult was, it was delivering it at just the right moment to puncture whatever idea they’d coddled.
“Fuck you,” the sin-eater spat. “Whore.”
“John.”
Cash walked away. Behind him he heard the sin-eater’s companion ask curiously, “How did he know your name?” He nearly choked on his own snort of laughter and covered his cough with a sip of wine. Monsters could get away with being rude, but laughing at your own jokes was the sort of thing that only Baba Yaga could get away with.
Laughing at my jokes, the monster poked at him snidely.
He ignored it as he stepped over a tail and avoided a thick spill of ruched velvet train. It was the same thing, and besides, Cash didn’t care about the crack at him. That would have been hypocritical. If you dished it out, you had to be willing to take it. But people needed to learn to hold their tongue about El.
They should be grateful it was Cash who taught them that lesson. It just cost them a needle to the ego. Donna didn’t believe in any lesson that didn’t end with someone’s liver on the floor.
It had been a whole thing when Cash sent El to a Montessori preschool. He didn’t think even the few segregated monster nurseries encouraged baby cage matches. It was hardly conducive to staying under the Church’s radar. Toddlers would murder someone over a sticky penny if they knew it was an option.
A slattenpatte sighed in exasperation as she lifted one breast up to dab seltzer on the hot-sauce stain on the underside of the velvet bra.
“Every time I wear white,” she groused. “I get blood on it.”
“So don’t wear white,” her trow escort suggested as he held the glass of seltzer for her to dip into. He looked bored, a thin dark gray man with an explosion of such extravagant lace at his collar that it looked like he had started to froth. “Or learn where your mouth is.”
She lowered her boob long enough to give him an annoyed look from under her heavy brows. “Is that a crack about the children?”
The trow rolled his eyes and groused, “No.” It had been. They both wanted to go back in time, although the length of history they wanted to unwind was different—yesterday and a decade ago, respectively.
Their discontent was small and immediate—the restrictions of parenthood, his mother, the fact they might have murdered the head of the homeowner’s association… or just really wanted to. It was hard to tell if the flickering image of blood on white tiles and torn white culottes on the perfect green grass lawn were real or wishful thinking.
Cash could sympathize, although it was the PTA that always got his goat.
The banshee had fucked someone she shouldn’t. A troll in a glorious cloth-of-gold suit, his tail tasseled and gemmed, had pennies in his pocket and an eye out for a rich lass. Those were just the monsters common enough to have a breed. Others were like the Abascals—a pared-down bloodline that didn’t need to be named. Although, if you were young and in love like Cash had been, you might try dragon or demon and find neither quite fit—or just one horrible, solitary deed that served as their new identity. A short mercreature in pirate finery, long boots on short legs and a nest of jellyfish stingers strung from his nose down, wanted something that Cash couldn’t understand, with a salt-bitter poignancy. The witch in cracked black leather whose grimy fingers made mold sprout where she touched was ripe with simple, cheerful lust for a wedding hookup.
Everyone wanted something. Most of them had secrets they would sweat through a lie to keep hidden.
None of them felt like Harry’s contact. Surely someone who put this whole self-destructive—Prodigium-destructive—plan into play would be consumed by the Abascals’ fall? Not with the question of whether they could pour another thin mushroom cocktail down their throat without puking up their last meal.
Of course, these were only the powerful. Old breeds and up-and-comings who’d gotten a foot on the ladder of power. They wanted to show off their finery to Donna, impress her or intrigue her enough to earn her interest.
The real power-players—the Prodigium movers and shakers—would arrive with the dawn. Much as she hated it, those were the ones Donna needed to show off to in order to stay their peer.
It was easy to slip. That’s why Cash liked it where he was. No one wanted anything from him, and the only person he had to impress was the director with a steady shot.
Cash traded his glass of wine—still half-full, the stuf
f tasted worse than he remembered—with a server for a napkin. The square of fabric was thick and smooth, nicer than any of the suits he’d brought with him. He wiped his hands with it as he glanced around the room. That was the thing about the Abascals. It was hard to stay in their orbit and not just accept their world.
His gaze flicked over the rest of the evening crowd as they milled around and waited for the guests of honor to show themselves. He stopped on a man in the corner of the room who looked almost as out of place as Cash did. Not that Luke Kohary was. The Left Hand of the Prodigium was the power player in the monster world.
He didn’t look it, though. Tall and sandy-haired, with an actual tan, Kohary was dressed down in black jeans and an open-collared shirt. If it weren’t for the wary exclusion zone around him, he might have even passed for human.
Rumor had it that he had been.
Cash wished Donna served whiskey at these events. He didn’t drink much these days—it was hard enough to function during daylight hours without a hangover added to the mix—but a shot of liquid stupidity always made things easier. In its absence, he’d just have to depend on the dumb he’d been born with.
He blotted his hands on the napkin again and headed over to talk to Kohary.
Chapter Ten
NOTHING.
To a wisp there was nothing where Luke Kohary stood but meat. No itch of regret or want, no thin hotdog-broth saltiness of yearning. He didn’t even have an aura, not even a thin rind of one like Harry. It was… disorienting, like he was a projection of some kind instead of a real person.
But Cash could feel the warmth of his skin as Luke grasped his hand. There were rough calluses on his fingers and old scars on the bony back. He was here, even if Cash’s monster didn’t want to believe it.
“It’s an honor,” Cash said. It wasn’t, of course. It was a nape-prickling, pit-sweating mistake that made his stomach regret that fishy bite he’d taken earlier. They both knew that, but niceties and fear were what tied the Prodigium together. “It’s not often you see the Left Hand… socially.”
