by TA Moore
Sacksful. Most of them were just spite over the disposition of a will or an attempt to ruin/mend a marriage with the cudgel of hell. There was a whole team of researchers to sift for the few that had genuine desperation worked into the weave of the paper.
“This one wasn’t crazy,” Cash said. He pulled the threads of the idea apart in his head as he worked out how he’d have done this, if he’d decided he wanted to burn down the world with him. “He knew what he wanted, he didn’t explain himself, he didn’t justify anything. It was a simple trade, money for information.”
He paused for a second as he thought about who’d have the information they’d sold so far. “And he was off. You know what people say about you? That’s how you felt about him.”
There was a small pause. Cash supposed he should feel bad, but he didn’t have time. Anna-Beth sucked in a breath that she let become a laugh.
“I’d tell you to go fuck yourself,” she said. “But when you put it that way, I know exactly who you mean. And when you put it like that, why should I tell you?”
Cash pushed himself off the wall and walked back down the hall to peer through a crack in the door. The room was chaos, full of monsters ready to head out to the hunt in heavy velvets and delicate silks. In the middle of it, Arkady stood with Yana, his hand on her shoulder as he told her something urgent. Probably not to set anything on fire. That was a problematic hobby when she was a teenager.
He didn’t have long. Tradition said the length of the Hunt predicted the duration of the marriage, so Donna was going to be miserly with the traditional head start. She might tolerate Yana’s marriage, but it wasn’t useful, and she’d want Yana to remember that.
“I’ll pay you.”
Static and a raw-throated howl made Cash jerk his head away from the phone. When he put it back to his ear, Anna-Beth was halfway through forgiving him. More or less.
“… have that than an apology,” she said. “I don’t know his name, though.”
“I’ll pay for what you’ve got,” Cash said. A humorless snigger caught in his throat as it occurred to him that if Anna-Beth gave him the wrong answer, he’d have no one to submit his expenses to. And maybe no need to worry about it, since he wouldn’t have a kid to send to camp. That pinched off the air to the brief, bitter flash of humor. He forced himself to focus. “Did you meet them?”
In the background there was a howl from the audience and an ear-piercing smash of chords. “Hold on,” Anna-Beth said. “Let me get outside. They’re starting to get loud in here.”
Two doors opened and closed, and a brief exchange with the bouncer. Cash chewed the inside of his cheek in impatience.
“Okay, mostly I spoke to him on the phone,” she said. “He was from round your way, sounded like, and a rude bastard. Called himself Mr. Kane, but that was probably an alias. He talked like he thought I gave a fuck who he was.”
Kane. Or Cain, Lilith’s first-born and the monster’s King Arthur. Definitely an alias, but a weird one for a traitor to pick.
“Mostly?”
She sighed. “I paid good money for these tickets, and I’m going to miss them pissing blood on the audience, thanks to you.”
“If you want to go back, talk faster,” Cash said coldly. It was Shanko’s voice, the flat disinterest in courtesy. He didn’t use it often, but it worked when he did. Over the phone, at least. He didn’t have the bones for it face-to-face.
“I met him once, just to feel him out,” Anna-Beth said. “I didn’t want to burn my contact, you know, send him some para-stalker who believes in the secret monster government or something.”
Cash resisted the urge to point out she should have maybe asked him some more questions, then.
“And?” he poked instead.
He could feel her shrug down the phone. “We met at that trailer park on the poor end of the island. I don’t think he lived there, but he had the keys to one of them. Just some old guy in a nice suit, probably an ex-con. He looked like he’d been beat up enough over the years.”
Cash’s throat had gone tight and dry, because he knew he was on another wild goose chase. He had to be.
“What did he smell like?” he asked anyhow.
It was a question that would have given most people pause. Anna-Beth didn’t hesitate. She answered as if it was a relief he asked. As if it made it less weird that it had stuck with her.
“Like meat,” she said. “Old meat. Not spoiled, just old.”
“Like a butcher’s shop.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s it. You know him?”
“Like you said,” Cash answered her. “He’s from my neck of the woods.”
He hung up, shoved the phone into his pocket, and went back into the great hall. It was hot. The blood of a hundred monsters was up with the thrill of the chase, and it sweated out of them into the air. A banshee, gaunt cheeks and hair the color of crayons, swung on him as he pushed by. Her hand raised to backhand him to the floor, but the fat white thing with her grabbed her arm to pull her back.
“Idiot,” it said, out of a prim, pink mouth. “He’s the Abascal boy’s now….”
The banshee glanced at Cash’s throat and then down to the dull glitter of the ring that was just—even without undoing another button—visible under his shirt. She couldn’t blanch any more—her skin was already the color and texture of old bone—but the blood drained from her eyes.
She opened her mouth, and Cash’s death squealed from her lips—somewhere far, somewhere lonely, somewhere wet. “Sorry,” the round white thing translated. “She didn’t recognize you. We are just eager for the chase.”
Her tongue flicked, long and curled as a fly’s nose, from her mouth and then back in. The banshee pushed her hands together in apology and backed away.
Cash didn’t know if it pissed him off more to belong to the Abascals again in the eyes of the world, or that on some level it felt right. Stupid human heart and asshole monster needs.
He shoved the rest of the way through the crowd to the dais where Donna perched. Her heavy overskirt had been unbuttoned and left in a puddle on the ground, revealing thin legs in tight leather and small split goat hooves instead of feet.
Donna did always leave off the feet if she could get away with it. Stubbed toes were just too much of a ridiculous indignity.
“There he is,” she said, with what might have been mistaken for warmth as Cash scrambled up to join them. “I told you he was fine. Our Casper has always been a survivor, Arkady. Like a handsome little cockroach.”
She reached out and patted his cheek with a dry, slightly too-warm hand. Not hot, just a few degrees high enough that you noticed. Cash flinched back because that was weird as hell.
“Okay, that is very disturbing,” he said. “But we can talk about it later. Where’s Shanko?”
Donna raised an eyebrow at him. “Manners, dear heart. I know you’ve seen them beaten into the slow to learn.”
“Where’s Shanko? It’s important,” he said.
Beside her the Worm chuckled. It was a thick hiss of sound, like a snake with phlegm caught in its throat. He pushed his hood back to reveal a narrow, not-quite-finished face of tender skin. His true face was just visible behind it—through it. What passed for his face, anyhow.
“Even the wisps don’t respect you now, Belladonna,” he said. “You should be grateful when Kohary comes back with the Prodigium’s weight behind him. At least an object lesson is remembered, not consigned to irrelevance.”
Donna gave him a sudden fierce look as her gracious-host mask slipped. “I know you like to be beaten, Helminth, but tonight isn’t about you, so hold your tongue,” she rasped, the burnt-meat-and-stone smell of her power suddenly thick in the air. “Or I’ll scrape you back down to the wet. If I am to be an object lesson, might as well be a colorful one, after all.”
Lust bloomed through the Worm’s aura until it was the color of fish guts.
Cash grimaced and dragged his eyes away. Some things he could do without
knowing, and what turned the Worm on was one of them.
“Madam,” Cash said, the use of her formal title—one of them—unusual enough to make both Arkady and Donna look at him. “Where’s Shanko?”
“Cash?” Arkady asked quietly.
When Cash didn’t answer him, Arkady glanced at him and then at the Worm. He grimaced unhappily but didn’t push. Donna pouted but followed his lead. She mimed unconcern as she strapped a dagger to her thigh and held out her hand to a waiting servant. The shaft of the pike slapped against her palm.
“I don’t know,” she said. “His last task of the day was to prepare the Hunter and the Hounds for the chase. Perhaps he’s still in the kennels.”
HE WASN’T, but the Hunter was.
It had been a man once. Probably a venal or a greedy one, definitely a stupid one to make the final Crossroads Deal with the likes of Donna Abascal. That was a long time ago, though, and there wasn’t much left of that man. A human soul still, pinned and displayed behind bloodshot eyes, but the body had remade itself to Donna’s service.
She gave him his hands back when he was chosen to be the Hunter tonight, roughed out a facsimile of a human face. Or one that would do, seen through a mask.
Cash didn’t think he was human enough to be sure, but maybe the delusion he’d be human again—free, because that was always promised—had been some comfort before Shanko put a railway spike through his head. Or maybe death had been a relief all on its own.
“Shanko did this?” Arkady said. He crouched down to check the Hunter was dead. The pat he gave its scarred shoulder was almost respectful, but then, he’d have his own kennel one day. “Why?”
“He took the Hunter’s place?” Cash said. He folded his arms behind his head and stalked back and forth frantically. On some level he’d recognized Shanko on the kelpie’s back, but it hadn’t clicked until Anna-Beth described the butcher’s block stink that got in your head and lingered. “Shanko’s the one who leaked information to the humans.”
Arkady straightened up easily. He looked calm as he unbuttoned his jacket and stripped it off to toss it over the harness hooks that studded the walls, but his aura had lifted like hackles.
“I worked that out,” he said sharply. “Why?”
Cash opened his mouth on the off chance the answer would fall out. It didn’t. He shook his head and admitted, “I don’t know.” Shanko was sour and foul-mouthed, gross with bitterness, but that was his nature. His loyalty to the Abascals, to his Belladonna, was centuries old, as much a part of what held him up as his bones. “Does it matter?”
It should, Cash could feel that, but Arkady just grimaced his agreement.
“In the end, I suppose not,” he said. “Whether I understand or not won’t change anything. He’ll pay or we will. I prefer him.”
So did Cash. The Abascals would still be censured for one of their household being involved, but not excessively. Monsters understood how hard it was to control your instincts, never mind someone else’s. Unless Donna confessed out of the blue to being involved, the family would survive.
Ellie would be safe.
“How’s the child?” he caught the echo of Shanko’s question from memory, the closest to kindness the old man had ever shown. Cash had thought that was real, that it meant something. Shanko was the closest thing to a dad he’d ever had.
Shitty as the cruel old bastard was at it, it still hurt to realize he was going to die.
Arkady grabbed his shoulder and squeezed it gently. “You won’t have to do it,” he said. “I promise.”
It was a monster’s kindness. Cash appreciated it, but there wasn’t time to do more than brush a quick, grateful kiss over Arkady’s knuckles.
“We need to find him,” he said.
Arkady flashed a cold, sharp smile as he took his shirt off. His skin was mottled with gold scales and bruised-smoke grays, his nails sharp and black as he shredded the heavy silk. “There is an entire hall of monsters ready to do just that. Donna has hosted a lot of weddings here, Cash, and the Hunter has always been kenneled again come dawn.”
“I know,” Cash said. He poked around in his pockets for a hair tie. Most of his clothes had one stashed away in a pocket—just in case Ellie needed an emergency braid—but of course, these predated her. The last few days, he’d felt like that kid again—sometimes—but it still felt strange to trip over the evidence. He stooped down, grabbed Arkady’s shirt instead, and pulled one of the torn ribbons out to tie his hair back. “But we have to find him before Yana does. Whatever his plan is, she’s the key. Why else do it like this?”
Arkady grimaced. They didn’t just have to find Shanko, they had to find him first… ahead of a pack of the most dangerous monsters in the US and with the Worm just waiting for his excuse.
“God damned us long ago,” Arkady said sourly as he grabbed one of the heavy leather dusters used when they had to handle the hounds. It hung stiffly off his shoulders as he dragged it on over bare skin. “You’d think he’d have stopped screwing with us by now.”
Cash could only shrug.
IT WAS a beautiful night for the chase, with damp in the air and a thick gray bank of clouds to hide the moon. Not so good to be chased, but Cash thought that maybe being caught was part of Shanko’s plan. He might have played a good game so far, but he couldn’t think he’d get away unscathed, not even if he succeeded in bringing the Prodigium down on them.
The dull drone of the emergency siren carried on the still air from the petrochemical plant down the shore. It wouldn’t do to keep everyone inside, but most people would have either battened down for the night or headed over to the mainland. A few belches of sulfur-yellow smoke from the vents and no one would question it. Over the years chemical leaks had caused a lot of people to see strange things out here.
Like monsters in their gaudiest finery, drunk as lords on the promise of blood, in full chase of a stolen groom along the shoreline. Pookas and boggarts jostled to the front of the pack against a Jersey Devil and a Black-Eyed Child on a mountain bike they’d been allowed to even the odds. They were not actually children, they just passed as them if you weren’t observant, but they were short.
It was bad form to beat the bride to the kill, but traditionally there were gifts and favors in it for anyone in the… ah… “splash zone.”
Right at the front, the bloodstained spearhead of the Hunt, Yana ran in bloody slippers through the surf.
“He’s taken what’s mine,” Yana had snapped when Cash tried to reason with her. “My husband from my arms and under my own roof. I don’t care what his plans are, I’m going to drown him like an unwanted twin.”
She refused to listen to reason. Yana didn’t care if the Abascal name was dragged through the dirt and the Abascal scions went up in smoke. She would eventually—for Ellie’s sake, and Cash needed to believe that—but not with the bit between her teeth.
Even Arkady wasn’t able to convince her to fall back and let them corral Shanko. She wanted to watch the old man squirm for his affront against her, prove that she wasn’t the Abascal to dismiss as a threat… oh, and get Jerome back. He might not be in her top five motivations tonight, but he did make the long list.
Cash wished he’d changed before he left the hotel. Despite what the old Hunter movies tried to claim, skintight leather wasn’t the best thing to run through the wilderness in. It rubbed. He sweated. Monster-bred strength and stamina was impressive among humans, but around other monsters, he was reminded he could have worked out more.
Despite the sweat that soaked him and the stitch in his side, he still managed to stay near the front of the pack. The back of the front of the pack, at least. He could see Arkady’s back from here.
Nothing much had changed around here, so he still knew the lay of the ground. He also had a wisp’s instinct for where to stand.
When your race fed by luring travelers into bogs at night, being clumsy and falling into puddles meant the Hunters got you.
Cash sprinted along the s
crubby grass near the dunes. It was uneven footing, all matted hunks of dead grass and old bottles, but it was better than lumbering through sand. The air was sharp with salt. He could feel it in his lungs as he sucked in each breath and forced it out to take another.
A grim, molten blood dripping from his one dinner-plate-size eye, cast about on the sand. Grains stuck to his slobber-wet jowls as he snorted for the scent. The other monsters jeered as they passed him or cursed him as they misjudged and slammed into the dog’s iron-muscled side. He lifted his head and turned toward the sea as Cash reached him.
… on a kelpie.
The Hunt came out of the sea like the tide and punched through the slack middle of the chase. Hounds, cut loose for the first time in years, tore at stomachs and legs with steel-crowned fangs. They fell under fists and claws, torn apart by a now-one-eyed troll or eaten whole by a rawhead in a torn party dress—but they kept coming. Shanko had emptied the kennels for tonight and lured out of their holes even the old, crust-hided favorites from Donna’s childhood. At their head the kelpie smashed through the startled monsters. Sharp teeth and heavy stone-shoed hooves cleared its path. Anyone who dodged the snakey strike of its head got hammered into the dirt by the black-clad Hunter, by Shanko, who’d always appreciated straightforward violence over grace. They dropped to the ground, and the dogs overran them, before they turned their attention to the guests still standing.
One of them, a delicate gold locket buried in the folds of her throat, slammed into Arkady. He got his arm up in time for her teeth to sink into the padded sleeve of his coat. A terrible, broken growl gargled out of her as she thrashed her heavy, muscled body violently enough to make him stumble. It was enough that the next hound that hit him put him on his back in the sand.
It didn’t matter. Even if he had been caught off guard, a couple of hounds weren’t going to do any sort of real damage to Arkady. Couldn’t do any real damage. That didn’t stop the sick wave of fear that washed over Cash at the sight of Arkady down in the sand.
