by TA Moore
He stepped out of the tangle of protoplasm and cured flesh, arms spread in display. It did not make him look any better. He was a dried-out thing, all tendon and withered skin. His fingers were curled into his palms, stitches on his arms stark where they’d sliced the tendons and closed the wounds, and old, old bruises stained his face gray and grainy. It was a striking look for a monster. Unique.
Except he wasn’t.
Cash glanced at Arkady again, his monster half yanked out of his skin and flopping around like a gaffed fish. It had been Shanko who’d told him that story, about the awful things a cauled Hunter could do to a monster.
“What did Donna promise you?” Cash asked.
“That if I kept her safe, we’d be together forever,” Shanko said. “I thought she meant we’d be lovers. Instead I’m her dog.”
“Yeah,” Cash said. “That’s something you should have nailed down right from the start.”
Shanko showed his teeth. “Yes,” he said. “But you don’t, do you, Cash? Not when it’s love.”
“Especially then,” Cash said.
“And who taught you that?” Shanko asked with a flicker of pride that faded back to frustration. He pulled the heavy slabs of meat back in around him, slotted over his arms and ribs like a jigsaw. It looked… sweaty. “Not that you ever did anything you were told, like keeping your head down and staying out of their business. If you’d done that, you might have survived this.”
Behind him, in the unnaturally black doorway, Yana staggered out onto the steps. Her hair was torn and her dress stained with blood. She looked ill and thin, hollow as a bell. Wild eyes fixed on Shanko’s back, and she grimaced, her pale lips pulled back from bloody teeth.
“Go suck my mom’s crusty tit,” she spat as she swung a frying pan in a short, vicious arc. The rim of it caught Shanko right across the side of his head. Despite what he’d just seen, Cash expected the sick crack of bone and brain. Instead, the thick knots of flesh just dented as the pan was buried in it. It was still enough to distract Shanko as Yana wrenched the pan and swung again. “Run, you idiot. Go!”
Cash went. He spun on his heel and took off at a run through the narrow avenue between the trailers. Behind him Shanko screamed with rage, and something hit the side of the trailer with a loud thunk. Cash tried not to think about what it was.
He focused on his feet instead as he followed a mental map nearly two decades old. It was just lucky for him that this place had struck on a winning combination early—rent cheap, buy cheaper, rent to the desperate—and didn’t waste money on change. Cash swung around the mailbox in a concrete tub at the end of the Fernyal trailers. It used to be a flamingo, but they’d changed it to a seahorse at some point. From the taste of the house, the Fernyal mother—all harsh Presbyterian features and a well of horrifying, bubbling anger—had died, but her daughters had filled it with more despair.
The monster grabbed a snack of it on the way by, just threads between its teeth and a shot of teenage anger about cheerleaders.
Cash ducked across the street on a diagonal and nearly ran into a new trailer. So some things had changed. He hit the ground and scrambled under it, the axle too close and too greasy for comfort, to the glimpse of open space on the other side.
Behind him glass broke, and then a car alarm went off. He could hear the wheeze of a man not built to run on the road behind him. Shanko went around the trailer rather than through it.
“I would have spared you,” Shanko yelled. “You’re human enough to dodge the Hunt.”
That was the voice of someone who’d never lived with humans. Cash jumped over a low fence and squirmed between the overgrown roses that crawled over the two trailers. He lost some skin—and really wished he’d changed his outfit before this started—but stretched his head start out a few seconds more. The Church might start with the Worms and the Abascals of the monster world if they were exposed, but they’d work their way down. Eventually, once they really had wiped out all their hidden predators, it would be people like Anna-Beth on the pyre. Just odd, not quite comfortable.
Cash would have had his throat cut on camera by Winslow long before that. The network would call it The Monster Within or Our Friend, the Monster and posthumously make him way more important than a contract employee.
No back pay, though.
That was okay. They had just given Cash an idea, although he’d started this race with no plan other than to give Yana and Arkady time to recuperate.
Cash pulled his monster up into his throat, “That’s why you didn’t just turn the Abascals in,” he said. His breath was pale and bright as it left his mouth, and it carried the sound away from him on flickers of pale blue flame. Wisp tricks. The thrown words wouldn’t fool Shanko for long, but they might give Cash just a few more seconds. “Because you promised you’d save Donna. No time limits apply.”
“Save her and love her forever,” Shanko said bitterly. Something smashed against a trailer, hard enough to shake it on its brick foundations, as he followed the voice. “I threw that in as a freebie, like a fool. She thought I’d be her slave forever, but love curdles like milk, given enough time. And given enough time, you find the loopholes.”
“Like the fact that the Prodigium have never trusted Donna,” Cash said. He hushed a Jack Russell tied up in the kennel out back of Jimmy Frank’s trailer on the way by. It couldn’t be the same dog—it would be damn near thirty now—but it looked the same as it warned him off with a low growl. “So really, by exposing them you were, what, doing her a favor? Protecting her against any future moves against her?”
Somewhere in the park, a door cracked open and a woman yelled out, “Fuck sake, take it inside!” before she slammed it again.
One.
Cash edged down the narrow strip between the trailers.
Two.
Three.
And… fuck. A slab of meat punched through the trellis someone had put up, bits of stick and flowers stuck to the gray creases, and Shanko stepped through ahead of him.
“Wisp tricks,” Shanko said contemptuously. “You think I’ve never seen them before?”
Cash threw himself backward, landed hard on the ground, and rolled under a trailer. A cold, slimy something grabbed at his leg, but he kicked back blindly and scrambled loose.
He crawled out the other side and ran.
Chapter Seventeen
THIS HAD been his hunting grounds as a kid. It wasn’t as impressive a maze as the estate the Abascals had cultivated under the island, but it had provided. And not just for him.
The trailer park was easy prey, and some things needed easy. Most of them hung out near the heart of the park, around what could be a crossroads if you squinted at it. It made them feel more at home. Besides, the sea might not usually bother monsters, but the tides pulled at spirits.
“Stop running,” Shanko yelled as he shoved his way between the trailers. He waved an arm and flattened the fence and a handful of faded decorative flamingos on the lawn in front of him with a swipe of flesh. “Just come and take what’s coming to you. I still like you, boy. I’ll make it quick.”
Cash spared the breath to spit on the ground as he ran. He reached up and wiped the blood off his neck in a messy swipe that left his fingers covered in it. That would help. He slapped the sides of the trailers as he sprinted along, the metal rough as he smeared it with blood.
Hey. He rattled the spiritual bars on his way through, loud and noisy and offensively alive. Wake up. Come out. Help me.
Something sighed and poked a squid-fox face out through the wall of a battered trailer. It blinked blearily at Cash and yawned, and a fat worm turned tongue wriggled between its lips. Something else stretched and chuckled under a car, thorny black toes and twenty bloody fingertips just visible between the tires.
Spirits and ghosts. The dead and the never technically alive. Not exactly the cream of the crop out here—it was the old, the decrepit, the not-really-that-good-at-shit generally—but there were a lot of them. Finge
rs with too many joints slotted through lattices, and eyeballs on thin stems wriggled up through holes in the ground.
Eh?
What?
That wisp boy wants help.
The cacophony of muttered conversation filled his head with bagpipes and wailing cats as he staggered to a stop in front of the office. His lungs burned, and the stitch in one side jabbed through his spine to reach the other set of ribs. The oldest thing that lived there opened the door and looked out. It was jammed into the body of Mrs. Park, a tiny elderly Korean woman in house slippers and yoga pants. Most of it didn’t fit. A great fat slug of flesh scuttled frantically along behind her.
No one was entirely sure how much Mrs. Park knew about her squatter. She had to have noticed she was too old to really be alive, but it seemed rude to ask. Her grandchildren never questioned it when they visited.
The old spirit—old and mean enough to be a real demon if it didn’t live in a grandmother in a trailer park—angled its head so it could peer at him with one raw-meat eye through her slightly parted lips.
“Why,” it rumbled thoughtfully, “should we?”
Cash sunk down onto his knees and stared up at it. It was a good question. Humans might think monsters and spirits were one and the same, but they didn’t think so.
“For the Prodigium,” he said.
The thing scratched itself with Mrs. Park’s hand. Or scratched Mrs. Park with its hand. “Fuck them.”
It started to close the door, and Shanko’s laugh was thick and smug.
“Did you really think they’d help you?” he asked.
Cash braced his hands on his thighs and leaned forward over the ache in his ribs.
“I can get you on TV,” he said.
Those were the magic words. Every spirit in that place wanted to hit it big as the next reality-rite star, thought that all they needed was their fifteen minutes to take a one-way ride from here to the big leagues.
The lure of it dragged them out of their lairs. They huffed cold, sour blasts of air as they lurched, crawled, and lunged at Shanko. His eyes went wide in surprise as they mobbed him. Beaks sawed at the snotty strings of plasm that held him together. Thin things of bone and twigs clung to the hammer-lumps of his flesh and drooled on it to make it bubble and rot. One thing got a finger in his mouth and pulled, the flesh of his cheek brittle enough to crumble as it stretched. Another crawled into his shadow and picked at his heels with bony, needle fingers to unstitch it.
If Shanko were a monster, it would have worked. Same went if he’d just been human.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t exactly either, and that gave him an advantage.
He pulled at the spirits with ruined hands and pinned them down in the dirt with his heel on the back of their necks. Scripture didn’t work for him anymore, but it wasn’t as if he was up against Legion or one of the big hitters. He tore them apart in shreds and chunks until they gave up and scuttled away back into the dark.
Better to be a small fish in a puddle than undone. It wasn’t as if they had an afterlife to look forward to.
Cash glanced up at the Old Thing in Mrs. Park. It shrugged at him. “She only watches K-dramas anyhow,” he said. “So we don’t care.”
It went back inside and closed the door after it.
“Did you really think they’d help you?” Shanko spat. He staggered forward, his shadow loose and flapping from one heel. “Do you think they could? Even if it were in their own self-interest, it goes against everything they are. You should have embraced your human side, Cash. Maybe I can help you with that.”
He thrust a skinny, clawed hand through to grab at Cash. His fingers scraped across Cash’s breastbone, and it felt like salt poured into the raw cavity of his open chest. Pain scored down his bones, and his stomach twisted like a fist until he could taste bile and blood in the back of his throat as his monster was scraped out of him.
“You can probably live without it, you know,” Shanko said as he peered through the broken trellis. “Half-human is enough for heaven, they say. You’d finally really belong somewhere.”
Cash tried to hang on to his monster. He’d cursed it sometimes, wished it mute, but it was him. The thought of being without it, of being like Yana with just a space in you, made him cold. It didn’t work. Shanko pulled it out of him, thin and gray and vaguely amphibian, while Cash arched his back and tried to scream.
Then the monster caught on something. It hurt—a sharp tearing pain in Cash’s spine where man and monster met—but it stapled them together. Shanko tried to reel it out, his face twisted with frustration, but the line already set pulled it back.
He sucked in a breath to scream, and then Arkady was there.
The monster part of him anyhow. The flare of his aura was now a mantle of heavy leathery wings, and golden scales crawled in elegant patterns over his chest and down his thighs. Beautiful enough to stop someone’s heart. To stop Cash’s, anyhow.
“He’s mine,” Arkady said in a voice like cracked bells. He rammed his claws into Cash’s stretched, weeping wisp and tore it out of Shanko’s grip. “Find your own.”
The monster squirmed out of Arkady’s grip and scrambled back under Cash’s skin where it belonged. He flopped back onto the ground and tried to breathe through the pain. His insides felt all… misplaced… and his skin itched like he’d been lying out under the sun.
Arkady stepped over him and backhanded Shanko into the delivery truck parked outside. The metal dented in, and Shanko slumped, dazed, to the ground. To his credit it didn’t take him long to pull himself together and lash out at Arkady. Bu this time it wasn’t so easy. He might have had the advantage when he could pull Arkady out of his human skin, but that wouldn’t work when Arkady had left humanity behind.
He was a demon on a—more or less—crossroads, and no little human Hunter had a chance. Not even an undead cauled one.
Arkady tore the shield of Shanko’s meat suit away piece by piece. He tore them apart like old wood and left them to rot on the ground. Shanko lashed out with what he could grab. A tire whistled through the air where Arkady’s head had been, and the raw end of his plasm raised welts.
It wasn’t good enough. Arkady closed his claws around Shanko’s throat and lifted him off his feet. There wasn’t blood left to shed, but something thick and pallid oozed from the wounds.
“If you want freedom so much, you should have just killed yourself,” he said.
Shanko spat in his face. “I tried.”
“I’ll try harder,” Arkady promised him and tightened his grip.
Cash scrambled to his feet and nearly fell over again. “Wait,” he hissed through the wash of nausea. “Don’t kill him.”
The plea didn’t set Shanko free, but Arkady stopped closing his fist. “Why not? He betrayed my mother, betrayed the spirit of his deal, and hurt you. What value does he have now?”
Shanko cursed desperately and kicked at Arkady, his heels scraping over lean, scale-covered muscle. His despair tasted like roast beef and crackling, thick and sticky on Cash’s tongue.
“Because that’s his plan,” Cash said. Despite everything, he felt a pinch of guilt at Shanko’s accusing glare, but he ignored it. He limped over to put his hand on Arkady’s arm. It had been a long time since he saw the monster without his skin on. He’d forgotten the smell of it, the thick musk of scales mixed in with Arkady’s magic. Cash considered all the rules of decorum and class and decided to hell with it. He stepped under Arkady’s wing and leaned against his shoulder. “That’s why he took Yana. He promised your mother that he’d always protect her and her family, and you can only lie to yourself for so long. The minute the Prodigium really threatened you, he’d have to fix it. Wouldn’t you, Shanko?”
Shanko spat at him. “They’ll use you up and turn you out,” he rasped. “You should have let me kill you.”
Arkady pushed Shanko’s chin up with a clawed thumb. “If you had,” he said. “I’d have kept you alive and screaming forever. At least this way, we mi
ght kill you one day.”
He snapped Shanko’s neck, and the man went limp. It wouldn’t end him, not for long, but it shut him up.
THEY FOUND Jerome in a chest in Shanko’s room, folded double and tied with twine. He still wanted to marry Yana, which seemed to surprise her as much as anyone. It might actually be love.
Now all they had to do was fix everything else.
“If he insisted on his pound of flesh,” Donna said coldly as she examined her perfectly applied nail polish and how it matched her powder-blue mother-of-the-bride dress. She sat with Cash in the front row of seats set out in the great, curved-metal-and-glass house attached to the hotel. Lush, overgrown plants, all dark green leaves and huge, jewel-bright flowers, had been pushed over to line the walls, leaving enough tiled space for an intimate wedding ceremony, “I’d have preferred you let him carve it from closest to my heart.”
After a lot of work by her maids, she looked like a middle-aged woman who’d had a lot of work done so she could deny being middle-aged—extensive work but expensive, with the telltale signs that gave it away nothing more than subtle tension and sharpness. Donna refused to just be a middle-aged woman. She wanted her face to know that no version of her would accept a wrinkle with grace.
“And where are you keeping that these days?” Cash asked dryly.
Donna laughed and put a hand on his knee. His skin, still too tight and too tender, crawled unhappily at the contact.
“I always liked you,” Donna said. She dug her nails in enough to hurt even through his trousers, and it was at least more normal than her pleasantries. “I was going to have you killed once, of course, but I always liked you. Shanko talked me out of it, funnily enough.”
Cash felt various shades of bad. There was still some guilt, but then he remembered the horror stories that Shanko had told him about… Shanko, it turned out… as a kid. He wondered how much the cursed Hunter had enjoyed that fear.
