Cash in Hand

by TA Moore

  Kohary smiled coldly. He had very green eyes, so opaque you could hardly see the monster underneath.

  “Trust me,” Kohary said in a soft, rough voice. “Socially is the only time a monster sees me. My professional visits are… brisk.”

  And the monster ended up dead. Cash took his hand back before it got too clammy for either of them to ignore.

  “I guess that’s reassuring,” he said. Kohary looked at him curiously. It was probably the first time that anything about him was described as “reassuring.” Cash showed his teeth as his nerves insisted that his survival required him to be an ass. “That you’re here for the finger food, not our fingers.”

  Kohary waited a second—long enough for Cash’s mouth to go sand dry—and then laughed. It was a pleasant sound, low and warm, and his eyes crinkled at the corners like he meant it. Behind him a spirit dropped out of the curtain treatment. It twitched on the floor, stunned, and the scavenged bits of it evaporated into grease and dust.

  “At least not yet, anyhow,” he said. “I’m surprised Arkady didn’t tell you to expect me.”

  Cash considered the ball-pinching idea that he might have stepped on the fucking Left Hand of the Prodigium’s toes… or fingers, he supposed… when he kissed Arkady. He hoped someone would lie to Ellie about how he’d died, or at least why.

  “No,” he said, his voice thin in his throat.

  “The Prodigium isn’t just a soulless council of monsters and demons. We’re a family, and we attend family events,” Kohary said dryly. He took a drink of wine and looked away from Cash as he scanned the room. After a moment he glanced back at Cash and snorted. “It was a joke. You can laugh.”

  “I knew that,” Cash said. Or at least he’d thought it was an option, although his throat had not been confident enough to take a risk. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I’m trying to imagine you turning up at the hospital with a baby gro. It’s not easy.”

  “I do gift cards.”

  “Good choice.”

  “Arkady is my finger on the pulse of Roanoke,” Kohary said. That was news. Cash tried not to look like he’d been caught off guard, or not any more than he already did. Kohary looked him up and down. “And you’re his wisp. You’re prettier than his wife.”

  Cash raised an eyebrow. “I have met Madeline,” he said. “I know that’s not true.”

  Madeline had the sort of personality you expected to find under a rock—which wasn’t a drawback when you were a monster—but she was beautiful. It was a weapon, of course, but just because it had a cutting edge didn’t make it unreal.

  The candlelight glowed fitfully in the wine with sparks of luminescence as Kohary took a sip. He wiped the moisture off his lip with his thumb, the black spike tattoo on the webbing very dark and sharp-edged. “I prefer humans.”

  Cash flushed. He wasn’t sure if that was an insult or a come-on, or which was more disturbing.

  “Half-human,” he said.

  If that, by now. He’d always be half-human born, and every monster who didn’t like him would throw it in his face, but it didn’t really matter once you survived your childhood. If you did. The camps had judged him monster enough, and the wisp in his bones ate his mask thinner every year.

  Live long enough, and he’d be as wary of the sun as Arkady. That was the dream, he supposed, but sometimes he thought he’d miss it once it was gone—like a pulled tooth, the empty socket always some sort of surprise.

  “Half’s enough. More than that, and they don’t… like it.”

  Once, when Ellie was still a toddler, she’d put a cockroach in her mouth. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, since she put everything in her mouth, but Cash had still nearly gagged. For the first time, he thought he must know what it felt like, as the question “Like what?” tried to scramble up his throat.

  He didn’t want to know, but his monster desperately did. It was an asshole.

  “Of course, I suppose you were already in the area,” Cash said. It wasn’t safe ground, but it was safer. At least it was only casual murder under his feet, not the question of whether what Kohary did in bed was more or less esoteric than the Worm. “I’d heard you were here about that redcap who got caught, although redcaps seem below your pay grade.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Camp drop-off gossip,” Cash said promptly.

  Kohary snorted, but it was a lie that was hard to poke holes in. A good 75 percent of every Prodigium scandal in the last century had started as drop-off gossip. Evolution—or the devil—might have designed most monsters to be solitary predators, but parents needed to unwind over liquor.

  “Fine,” Kohary said. “Don’t worry about me, wisp, or my business. You’ve enough of your own to keep you busy. It can’t be easy to watch your ex get married.”

  “You should know.”

  The words slipped out of Cash’s mouth—which had apparently decided to unlink itself from his brain. He felt himself blanch, his face cold except for hot spots on his temples and tongue, as Kohary turned to look at him.

  Black. Kohary’s monster had black eyes, dull as coal.

  Fuck.

  Cash’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He swallowed stickily and fumbled for a take back. Before he could come up dry on that, a hand touched the small of his back and he breathed in mead and linen.

  “Kohary,” Arkady said. His voice was tight, strung through with suspicion and discomfort but still awkwardly courteous. “Enjoying the wine? The grapes came from the caverns in Italy where my mother grew up. A taste of home.”

  Kohary blinked, and his eyes were green again and unexpectedly regretful.

  “It’s… a taste,” he said. “Earthy.”

  “Fungus,” Arkady said. “Donna always says it tastes like why she came to America, but it’s traditional.”

  “And she’s a traditional woman?” Kohary asked as he set the glass aside.

  “She’s a businesswoman,” Arkady corrected. “She doesn’t have to enjoy the tradition to see its worth.”

  “Out for herself,” Kohary said. “Good to know.”

  The undercurrents in the conversation could have drowned a horse. Cash shifted uncomfortably away from the tension, and Arkady tugged him back, fingers hooked in the waistband of his jeans.

  “My sister is on her way,” he said. “We don’t want it to look like you’re avoiding her.”

  Black threads flickered in Kohary’s eyes as he drained the rest of his wine. To his credit, he didn’t grimace at the taste. Most people did until their palates accepted their fate.

  “Good idea,” he said. “How things look isn’t something that can be ignored.”

  Arkady’s knuckles pressed into the small of Cash’s back as his hand tightened. “It can be for a weekend,” he said shortly.

  “Perhaps. Go greet your sister,” Kohary said. He was talking to Arkady, but his eyes were on Cash as he said it. “Don’t let me keep you. We can catch up later.”

  Hopefully not.

  Cash waited until there were bodies between them and Kohary to let the full-body shudder escape him. He felt more relieved than he had when he got out of the cuffs last night.

  “He’s not that bad,” Arkady said as he moved his hand up Cash’s back. It would look less like he was dragging Cash somewhere.

  Cash snorted. “That’s clearly a lie,” he said. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Arkady dip his head and tilt the corner of his mouth in a wry acknowledgment. “Is the fact you work for the Left Hand of the Prodigium one of those things I would have known if I’d asked?”

  “If you asked the right people,” Arkady said. “Ellie doesn’t know. Donna does.”

  “I wouldn’t ask Donna if my head were on fire,” Cash said.

  “She likes you now.”

  “Somehow that’s worse.”

  Arkady made a dry noise of agreement and slid his hand up Cash’s back. He walked his fingers along the knobs of his spine up to the weird, sensitive spot between his shou
lder blades. The sort of spot that only someone who knew—still knew—your body could find. Awareness prickled under Cash’s skin like inverted goose pimples, and he felt his ears flush.

  “It does take the thrill out of you being the bad boy,” Arkady said. “Her approval, you know?”

  It was only monsters who’d look at the two of them and pick Cash out as the bad influence. Good influence, he supposed, from the human side of things.

  “It’s a shame,” Arkady murmured as he nodded a coolly distant acknowledgment to a… thing? Cash hadn’t been introduced. The monster bent its great, thorn-antlered head back to Arkady, mindful of the other guests around it. “But if you can’t ruin my reputation, at least you can look pretty on my arm. For a weekend.”

  Cash ignored the pointed restriction as he nodded polite acknowledgment to the monster—it’s wild bloodred eye had already rolled on over the crowd, but it was never wise to assume that was the only way something could see. “And who should I have asked about the Worm in residence?”

  There was a beat as Arkady absorbed that question. Then he smiled pleasantly and leaned down slightly toward Cash as they paused.

  “Did your human filmmaker tell you that?” he asked tightly. “And mind your tongue, for once. No one is meant to know the Worm’s location while he regenerates.”

  Cash ignored the insult. It wasn’t as if Arkady were mistaken. A habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time was great at mealtimes when you were something that ate negative emotions, but it didn’t get you many invites back. Cash couldn’t even blame it on the monster. A lot of it was him deciding to be a dick.

  “Harry wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “Monsters are basically extinct, remember, and if they aren’t, only the plodders are left. Sasquatches and hedge witches, hex men and redcaps. If someone went into a producer’s office and pitched that the… your honored guest… was still around, they’d be laughed out of town. Why is he here, anyhow? Why isn’t he loaded onto a train home?”

  “Because he’s too weak,” Arkady said bluntly. “He probably wouldn’t survive the trip. He demanded sanctuary from my mother, and if anything does happen to him, then we pay.”

  The bottom dropped unhappily out of Cash’s stomach at that bit of information. That was something he shouldn’t know, that it wasn’t a good idea to know. He tried to move away from Arkady but got tugged back. Arkady cupped his fingers, warm and dry, around the back of Cash’s neck. He didn’t squeeze tightly enough for it count as scruffing Cash. Not quite.

  “You asked,” Arkady pointed out.

  “And you could have lied.”

  “Would you have believed me?”

  No, probably not. Arkady was a really bad liar when you knew him. That didn’t make the faint sick feeling in Cash’s stomach go away, though. The Worm had killed people for less reason than knowing his weaknesses.

  “And people wonder why I don’t ask questions,” Cash muttered instead of acknowledging Arkady’s point. It would have been a good time to actually take that advice, but he glanced over his shoulder toward Kohary. “That’s why he’s here?”

  “Well, he wasn’t invited,” Arkady said tiredly. His fingers tightened slightly around the nape of Cash’s neck. “Should I be jealous?”

  “No,” Cash said with a slight shudder. It wasn’t that Kohary was more powerful than him—so was Arkady—but everyone knew what the Left Hand did for the Prodigium… and how he did it. Cash glanced sidelong at Arkady and gave in to the temptation. “Should I?”

  Arkady stopped in the middle of the hall and leaned down to kiss Cash. It was rough and possessive, sharp teeth and a hungry tongue. His magic slipped into Cash’s mouth along with Arkady’s breath, sweet and heady. It seeped down his throat and into his blood until he could feel the hot golden prickle of Abascal magic stretched out like a net between his flesh and his skin.

  It was a trap of sorts, but Cash knew what he was doing when he said “Deal” to an Abascal. There was a lot they could do to you without that, but once you started to barter, that was the hook in your soul. For a human it ended much the same way it did for a trout, but it was a bit more… survivable… for something whose soul was meant to die with it. It was a lot harder to extract for consumption.

  More enjoyable too, at least that was Cash’s experience of the honey trap.

  And the soul is still not the bit of you that he has on a line either, the monster mocked him, but lazily. Arkady’s magic wasn’t something that could sustain Cash, but like faerie food, it felt like it could. The dull nibble of a few days unfed was washed away by a thick, sated feeling.

  Arkady’s fingers were buried in Cash’s hair again as he finally raised his head. His eyes were bright gold, like coins, and he looked as glutted as Cash felt.

  “Maybe just stop asking stupid questions,” Arkady said in a low, rough voice. He tightened his grip and tilted Cash’s head back a little to get a good look at him. Behind him a thin woman licked her lips with a wet split tongue and fanned herself with a webbed hand at the display. “But this works. It’s my sister’s wedding, after all. I don’t want her confused about which ex you’re here for.”

  Cash swallowed the assurance that she wouldn’t be. It felt like a stone in his throat, but Arkady’s ego didn’t need to be any larger. Yana had always known where she stood. It was where she preferred to be.

  “If she misses it, I’m sure everyone here will tell her,” he said.

  “Good.”

  Arkady ruffled Cash’s hair, grabbed his hand, and headed for the stairs. Halfway up, something occurred to Cash.

  “Wait,” he said as he hesitated between one step and the next. “Yana knows why I’m here, doesn’t she? She knows what’s… going on.”

  Arkady glanced at the two goat-headed men at the banister, goblets of not-the-best vintage in their hands. They flinched and moved their discussion down a few steps, out of easy earshot, at least.

  “Of course not,” he said. “You know what she’s like. Yana can’t keep a secret to save your life.”

  Yeah, Cash mused, that’s what everyone thought.

  THE CAREFULLY composed family scene in Donna’s drawing room made Cash’s fingers itch for a camera. Donna sat in a black leather wingback chair, dressed all in pale gray silk and velvet with a delicate scrap of silvery lace pinned into her wig. The matriarch in mourning—most monster weddings did end in someone dead, after all. On the other side of the chess game in progress, Arkady sprawled lazily in fitted leather two shades away from black, his eyes and hair bright even with his monster pushed down under his skin.

  It made him look younger, his mother’s favorite son again instead of Kohary’s whatever it was Arkady actually did.

  Call it the “Monsters Reception” and leave it to the viewer to pick out the wrong details in the background. The twisted things carved into the arms of the chairs, the fact the chess pieces were all monsters, and the candlesticks that were hands of glory—the wicks the corpse-long fingernails soaked in paraffin.

  Then there was Cash, rumpled and uneasy in black as he leaned on the back of Arkady’s chair. He figured the picture would definitely make more sense without him in it.

  Donna finally selected Medusa from her side of the board and moved her forward.

  “You can sit, Casper,” she said as she positioned the queen neatly on her square. “You aren’t Arkady’s aide these days.”

  Goose bumps prickled along Cash’s arms as he shook his head and tightened his grip on the back of the chair.

  “I’m fine here,” he said. “I’m used to it.”

  Donna smiled at him, fishhook teeth behind glossy red lips. Her eyes were still and dark as a bog, with the same sucking bottom. Cash found that rather lovely, of course, but it was still dangerous.

  “So are we,” she said. “The room finally feels right with you back at Arkady’s shoulder. You always were practically one of the family, after all.”

  Right. Cash ducked his chin to hide the skepticis
m in his eyes. It used to drive Donna mad that he didn’t stand up straight. She threatened to pull his spine out and replace it with spoons once. That didn’t mean she didn’t consider him family, of course. Donna had threatened her own blood with worse. She’d buried more than one ambitious son, and some of them had even been dead. The implication made him wary—that she’d missed him “making the place untidy,” as she’d always snapped before she threw something.

  That and the fact she was still being nice to him. Cash could feel the tension in his shoulders, tight and itchy, as he waited for the other shoe to drop.

  “You once told me you’d sell him to the Yagas if I didn’t pass calculus.”

  Arkady made his move. It was careless, a goat-horned bishop nudged into the path of a skull-faced knight, and Donna made an annoyed sound. She liked to win. It didn’t even bother her if people let her win, but she expected them to put on a good show.

  “It was a joke, Arkady,” she said and rolled her eyes behind her froth of a veil. The bishop left the board on her next move. “What would the Yagas want with a teenage boy? The meat would be stringy.”

  Cash snorted. He shrugged an apology when Arkady turned to give him a dubious look. It wasn’t funny. Or it wouldn’t have been if Donna had trussed him up to be shipped to Moscow. That was—somehow—what made it funnier. It had been a long time since Cash had gotten to laugh at a bad thing. He missed it.

  “See?” Donna said as she picked up her wine. “A joke.”

  Arkady frowned at the board as he finally saw the trap Donna had nudged him into. Any move would doom his king. His fingers shifted between a sacrificial pawn and his gape-mouthed queen, but the doors to the room slowly creaked open before he had to decide. Shanko stepped into the room through the gap, trussed into shirt and tails that did nothing to dress up the raw-meat planes of his face.

  “Your daughter’s home,” he said.

  Even though he knew who Shanko meant, Cash felt a twinge of anticipation, as if there was a chance Ellie was going to walk through the door. Ellie was on an overnight camping trip in the mountains, and even if she got fed up and decided to hitchhike home, it would be a while before she got there.