by TA Moore
He darted between the fighting monsters, dodged the snarl of hounds and the occasional wildly unaimed swing of a panicked tentacle, and grabbed one of the hounds on top of Arkady by the scruff. Loose, clammy skin folded between his fingers and pulled tight around the hound’s throat as he hauled on it.
“Off,” he yelled as he braced his feet in the shifting sand. The old command words that Shanko had taught him, back when he was sent down to scrub out the pens for being smart, bubbled to the top of his mind. “Madra. Off.”
The hound made a confused sound at the familiar command. It didn’t obey, but it loosened its grip enough for Arkady to get his knee up and kick it off him. He scrambled to his feet and yanked the other hound off his arm. Skin came with it, enough that Cash saw a glimpse of the actual hard-scaled flesh under the rind of meat.
“If you weren’t my grandmother,” Arkady snarled through sharp teeth as he held the hound up, “I’d have you skinned to mend my coat.”
He tossed the hound back into the fight and gave Cash a quick, furious look. “Don’t do that again,” he snapped. “I want you to kiss my wounds better, not be stuck with you laid up in bed for a week.”
Cash smirked.
“There was a time you’d have been all for that,” he joked. Fear almost made him run off at the mouth. “Getting old, Arkady? Or just not that into me anymore?”
“I won’t be if you have no nose,” Arkady snapped. He shoved Cash roughly back, nearly onto his ass, and slapped a hound out of the air with a clawed hand. “I like you pretty, Casper.”
Was it more stupid to be afraid your pure-blood-monster lover might be hurt or to get flustered in the middle of a fight because he said you were pretty? As long as you kept your nose, at least, Cash reminded himself as he punched one of the hounds in the throat. It gagged and choked, eyes bulged out in surprise as it went down.
Another, muzzle furred with gore and hair, lunged at Arkady from the back of a pissed-off werewolf. A split tongue slavered between its sharp teeth as he snarled out something that could have been a word. Or the hound just thought it was.
The carved ivory tip of Donna’s spear stabbed through that open mouth and into the hound’s throat. It spat blood as she hoisted it upright, dangled it for a second like a gory flag, and then flicked it away into the dunes. Half her face was gone, the hard work of her maids shredded, and the horribly beautiful face underneath was twisted with anger.
She looked… like an Abascal—a demon—beautiful and stomach-turning all at once. Cash’s monster wanted to follow at her heels, and his humanity wanted to run and never stop. His smart mouth split the difference.
“I think that’s the first time I’ve seen someone yeet a hound,” he said.
He didn’t expect Donna to know what he meant, but she gave him a dry look. “Ellie will be proud,” she said.
A stray bit of skin dangled from her eyebrow. She picked it off and flicked it away, then wiped her bloody face on her sleeve as she scanned the beach. The guests had gotten over their surprise at the tables being turned and whooped with glee at the taste of something new.
Donna’s eyes weren’t golden like Arkady’s. The one exposed was black and fringed with thick, rustling lashes, but the flicker of fear that flashed through it was oddly human.
“Where’s Yana?” she said. Where’s my daughter?”
Chapter Sixteen
GONE.
Her bloodied slippers were left behind, the satin ripped to pieces and full of sand, but no sign of her. Cash swore as he looked around. The hot red hunger of the wedding guests burned the back of his tongue like cinnamon as they split up to chase the stolen couple and the hounds that scattered into the night. Whoops and shrill thin howls cut through the silence as they headed into the town.
“Someone congratulated me on my most successful soiree to date,” Donna said dryly as she stabbed the spear into the dirt to clean it. “Apparently expectations are high for the ceremony tomorrow. I don’t know what would be worse, the truth coming out or having to think of a way to top this.”
Arkady, the sleeve of his leather duster pierced and torn, gave his mother a rare, openly sour look.
“How about your daughter’s corpse found floating in the sea?” he asked. “Where does that rank in what’s worse?”
Donna braced a hoof against a half-buried rock and yanked her spear out of the ground. She ran her thumb along the head of it to check for chips.
“That would obviously come under ‘the truth coming out,’” she said. “And if I wanted her dead, I’d have done it myself.”
“Would you?” Arkady asked.
“Of course. I brought her into the world with my own hands, and I’ll do the same if I need her out of it,” Donna said. “Humans disparage kin-slayers, Arkady, but monsters know it’s the least you can do for your own blood. Cash understands; he’s a father.”
They both looked at him.
“Oh, yeah, no,” he said. “I’m either too human or too common to get that.”
Donna inclined her head slightly. “Or both,” she said, as though it were a concession she’d generously made just for him. “But you’ll see. One day.”
He hoped not.
“Where would he go?” Arkady asked.
It took Cash a moment to realize the question was for him. He shook his head and shrugged.
“Ask Donna,” he said. “He’s served her for centuries.”
Donna spat in the sand. It bubbled and stank, a thick gray fizz, as it melted the grains into a pebble of dark sea glass. If a human found it, supposedly, they could look through it and see past glamours and into the future. The future, almost always, involved them being killed by the Prodigium, so… that part might be made up.
“I tell him what to do,” she said. “We don’t… converse. Arkady’s right. Of everyone, you were closest to him. Where would he go, Caspari?”
Cash started to deny it, but he realized he was wrong before he got the first word out. He did know where Shanko had gone.
Probably. A hunch was a lot to prop all their lives up on, but it was why he was there.
“The trailer park,” he said. “Where I grew up. He’s there.”
He was ready to justify the answer, but it turned out there was no need. Donna nodded her shredded head as if he’d agreed with her.
“Go,” she told Arkady. “I’ll round up the hounds and make sure our guests don’t get overexcited. The last thing we want is to resolve this and have Kohary call down judgment on us because a hound was taken by the dogcatcher or some idiot was caught peeping through curtains.”
Arkady scowled but silently extended a hand toward Cash. The casual curve of his fingers made Cash’s twitch for contact, but he hesitated as he realized that….
Oh, that was how they would travel.
HE’D PUKED here before. Cash was almost certain of that. He emptied out a party’s worth of finger food onto a woody hydrangea, the bile in his throat hot with stomach acid and wine. Arkady’s wings made a soft, papery sound as he folded them back under his skin.
“Are you done?” he asked. His voice was impatient, tight with angry concern, but the hand he put on the back of Cash’s neck was gentle.
It wasn’t flight—not like birds did and people, including minor monsters, always dreamed about. There was nothing graceful or natural about it, nothing fun. It was just fast and forceful, like a punch to the air. Cash had never opened his eyes during a trip, not when he was a kid and not now.
His monster wanted to snigger, but it rolled belly-up with reflected nausea in his gut. It served it right.
“I hate that,” Cash said as he straightened up. “We could have taken a car.”
Arkady ignored the complaint as he looked around. His slightly confused expression made Cash realize that it was the first time he’d come here. Cash had always been willing to remind people of where he’d come from back then, but only on his terms. He hadn’t actually brought anyone down here, not served his mom up to th
em. And what other reason could an Abascal have for being here? Rich monsters, like rich people, rarely ate their dinner out of tin cans.
“This way,” Cash said. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and broke into a tired jog through the maze of half-planned “streets” and cul-de-sacs that governed the layout of the trailers. The sound of TVs or radios turned up loud filtered through a few of the thin sheet-metal walls—someone too tired, poor, or stubborn to evacuate—but none of them came out to see what was going on. They knew better after a lifetime.
His mom’s old trailer was still on the lot. He paid for it for a few years after she died, but after Ellie, he’d let go of that bit of sentiment in favor of baby food. Yet nothing had changed. The stubbornly optimistic daffodils still grew in big, colorful plastic pots along with the weeds, and the scrape of red where he’d crashed his trike into the side of one when he was a kid was still there.
“Cash,” Arkady said. He put his hand on Cash’s shoulder and squeezed roughly. “Whatever happens—”
Cash took a deep breath. The air smelled like it always had—of sea-salt, grease, and despair—a lot like greasy burgers. “If you’re going to be all noble and say you won’t stand between me and Yana getting together, you can stick it up your ass.”
Arkady dragged him back a step so Cash was pressed against his chest. His breath was hot against Cash’s ear, that particular wet, blood-hot huff of a predator’s mouth, as he said, “I wasn’t going to say it, and I wouldn’t do it. Yana had her chance with you, with Ellie, and she didn’t take it. She doesn’t get another one.”
It shouldn’t have helped—what did it matter who was going to fuck who in the middle of this—but it did. Something in Cash’s chest unknotted, warm and loose and even slightly horny, and he let himself lean against Arkady for a second.
“So what were you going to say?”
“You’ve spoiled the moment,” Arkady told him with a kiss to Cash’s ear to soften his dry tone. “It can wait until tomorrow. Stay behind me.”
He pushed Cash behind him and climbed up the rickety steps to the door. It was already open a crack. That could be an invitation, or the crappy lock had finally given up the ghost. Cash shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet and clenched his hands into fists, nails sharp against his palm.
“You knew we’d find you, Shanko,” Arkady said calmly. He pushed the door open with one hand and cocked his head to look inside. It was black as a cave or the kennels under the hotel—too dark for inside the trailer, even with the thin curtains pulled and taped together. Cash started to say something but hesitated, because it was Arkady. What could Shanko even do to him? “That’s why you took Yana in the middle of the Hunt. We’d have no choice. What do you want? Why do this after years of loyalty?”
In the dark, Shanko laughed—a thick, mushy sound. “And what the fuck has it got me?”
“Exactly what you asked for,” Arkady pointed out calmly. He pushed the door open all the way. “Yana?”
The door slammed back on him. It nearly caught his fingers in the jamb.
“Run, you idiot!” Yana screamed.
Arkady threw his shoulder against the door instead and threw himself inside. It was like he hit a wall and bounced off. He flew backward and crashed onto the ground, taking out one of the daffodil pots with his shoulder. Blood, black in the moonlight, dripped from his nose and mouth, and his monster, all greasy gold scales and leather wings, bulged through his skin in painful torsion. Arkady screamed, and the monster did too, voices out of sync by a second as he arched his back in agony.
“You should have listened to her,” Shanko said as he stepped out of the trailer. Or most of him. The gray, lumpen figure that Cash had known for most of his life—bogeyman and then boss—had fallen apart. Thick slabs of flesh hung off and dragged behind, a wasted skeleton of a man in mildewed funereal best. Mushroom-pale skin was pulled tight over his bony face, and his eyes were a faded, bleached-out yellow. “It would have given you a few more days.”
Cash started toward Arkady, and Shanko swung his arm up. The heavy sleeve of meat that had covered his scrawny arm flew out on the end of a thin, snotty cord of plasm and hit Cash in the chest like a hammer.
It must have knocked him over. He didn’t remember that. The slab hit him in the chest, and then he was on his back, lungs tight as he stared up at the cloudy sky through watering eyes.
Bag of Bones. Bones and Flesh.
The monster jibbered at him in a panic. Wisps weren’t fighters, and Cash probably had more humanity left than either of them expected. Enough to still be in love.
“Pathetic,” Shanko spat. “Look at you. They used you up and cast you out, cast you over for someone new and fresh. Yet you still come crawling when they snap their fingers.”
He didn’t sound angry, just upset. His voice was thick and wet, as if he had to choke back tears.
Cash rolled over and propped himself up on his elbow. He spat blood onto the dry gray grass and wiped his mouth on his shoulder.
“What business is it of yours who I fuck?” he asked. His monster crawled up his throat and took over his tongue, because even if it got them killed, it wanted to draw blood. “You aren’t my dad.”
This time it was a fat slice of salted thigh, gray and hard with rind, that smashed a dent into the ground just next to Cash’s head.
“Shut up,” Shanko yelled, a crack in his voice. “You always had a smart mouth. No one could beat it out of you, scare it out of you. I thought that you were… different, but they just fucked you loyal, didn’t they? Everything they did to you, stuff you don’t even know they did to you.”
Cash wiped dirt off his face and scrambled to his feet. He glanced over at Arkady. The great leathery wing that had jutted out of his spine had been folded away again, although the skin bulged oddly around it, but a thick shoulder and a long writhe of tail still squirmed naked and tender in the air. It looked like a man trying to get a too-small shirt on.
“I might be an idiot, Shanko,” Cash said. “But I’m an idiot with my eyes open. No one did anything to me that I wasn’t willing to have done. Hell, I was usually the one who started it.”
Shanko stalked toward him. His stolen flesh dragged along with him, heavier than the little bits of eye and rat that bag of bones cannibalized from other ghosts.
“They seduced you, ruined you, used you,” he said. “I tried to protect you—”
“You did not.”
The flash of anger that spat out of Cash’s mouth caught both of them by surprise. Cash had never held any grudge against Shanko for not protecting him, because why should he. But the idea that the old man was patting himself on the back over some imaginary virtue raised his hackles. Shanko hesitated at the rejection, his peat-mummy leathery face creased in confusion before he recovered.
“I chose you, not them. It was me who took you away from this shithole.” He gestured violently around him at the trailers. “I could have killed you if I wanted—who’d have stopped me, but I took you to the Abascals. I told Donna that you had potential.”
“And what, it was for my own good?” Cash snorted at him. He took a step back, trying to—adjust the kid’s memory of the space to an adult’s legs. “You did what you were told to do, Shanko. Don’t get me wrong, you did a good job of it, but what the hell have I got to do with any of this?”
Shanko backhanded with a side of his stolen flesh and slammed Cash through the low fence he’d shuffled toward. This time Cash managed to dodge most of the impact. He landed on his ass, a sharp pain in his ribs, but managed to drag himself back to his feet.
“I did all this for you,” Shanko said. “Or for us both, but because of you. Everything we gave to them over the years, everything we cut out to offer to them on a silver fucking platter, and they don’t care. You had a chance to go when the boy got married. To be whoever you wanted, to live your own life, and they couldn’t bear that, could they? The Abascals. Even if they didn’t want you anymore, even if you weren’t use
ful, they have to keep you on the hook. To know that when they snapped their fingers you’d come back. But do you know what I found out, Cash? The child isn’t even yours. A decade you’ve spent raising another Abascal cuckoo for them, some passing monster’s brat. So. Do you still want to stop me? Or are you going to let me bring them down?”
“Ellie’s my daughter,” Cash said. He ignored Shanko’s attempt to interrupt. “She’s not my blood, but I knew that.”
Yana’s tears burned her own skin. Her face had been raw when Cash stumbled over her in one of Donna’s underground gardens. Two miserable people who couldn’t—ever—have what they wanted and the sort of deal that put a hook through your heart.
“I wish it were mine,” Cash had said of the newt that had landed in Yana’s stomach and screwed her life. “It would be easier.”
Maybe she should have hesitated, but she didn’t. That this would hurt Arkady as well as solve her problem, only made it better. “Deal,” Yana had hissed, her hands tight around his as her nails drew blood. “You can’t take it back now.”
She might only be the human coffin for Donna’s real daughter, but a dead monster was still a monster. The deal took. Cash had never slept with Yana, never even kissed her, but when Ellie was born, she was his. Her jaw looked like his, her smile could be pasted on Cash’s face and no one would notice, and she had the hunger of a wisp. Once she was old enough for her monster to come into her own, that might change, but she’d still be his daughter. Cash was the one who’d sat up with her and learned algebra for her, and he wasn’t going to let someone else take over when it got easy just because of genetics.
That was a human obsession.
“It was a lie,” Cash said. “But it was my lie, Shanko.”
Shanko blinked dry red-rimmed eyes in confused doubt. “You… you knew? No. If she wasn’t yours, why would you take her, give up everything to raise some other monster’s by-blow? You’re just lying to protect them.” He nodded in agreement with himself, the rise and fall of his voice almost hypnotic. “That was what I taught you to do, but it won’t work this time. The Abascals took us, and they used us up, boy. Look at me!”
