A tall, painfully thin woman waited for Cash outside the club as he pulled into the white-marble horseshoe-curved drive. Her hair was so shiny it looked wet, and when she smiled, she had braces on her uneven teeth. Ena Caldwell. Her mother, Keiko, owned the country club, but she’d worn out her humanity before she even moved to the US. Cash had never met them, but people talked.
“I think that’s far enough,” Ena said as Cash got out of the car. “If the Abascals have business in the Book and Candle, they send Shanko, not some… pretty little gift basket.”
“Well, it’s his day off,” Cash said. “I’m looking for a huldra, Gret, and her redcap friend.”
Ena pulled an annoyed face andscuttledforward, black “legs” extended from her milk-pale sac of an aura, to grab Cash’s shoulder. Her fingers dug down toward bone as she squeezed.
“I don’t need wisp trash at my club, fucking my guests,” she hissed as she leaned down toward him. “Or picking out their secrets like whelks from the shell. Bad for business. Now I told you—”
She stopped midthreat and snapped her mouth shut. The click of her teeth was audible, and her nose twitched as she sniffed the stink of Abascal power that still clung to Cash’s skin and breath.
Cash peeled her hand off his shoulder. “The huldra?” he said. “And I’ll tell Shanko you missed him today. He’s always got an eye out for a new lady friend.”
Ena made a sour face and pulled her hand out of Cash’s grip as she backed away.
“I meant no disrespect,” she said stiffly. “The Abascals don’t usually have truck with your kind.”
Strangely enough, that still sounded like disrespect. Cash’s monster drummed at his ribs in response to the insult, but he let it pass. Ena could wrap him up in a bow and liquify him over days if she wanted, and Cash wasn’t interested in the time it would take to return the favor… although it would be easy.
He couldfeelthe water nearby. It wasn’t the still, drowning pools wisps favored, but it still cozened at him. Time and cold patience would be all it would take. The water would back him up….
Ena hissed at him, a flash of something black and hairy behind her human teeth. “I’ll rip your tongue out of your head, wisp,” she warned. “The Abascals have no use forthat.”
“You’d be surprised,” Cash said dryly.
It took a second and then Ena caught up. She put her nose in the air and waved her hand brusquely at his car.
“Parkthatin back where no one can see it,” she said. “And don’t linger. Servants get to obey orders, not enjoy the amenities. Gert and her friend are at the bar.”
She stalked off. Cash moved the car. No need to be a dick about it.
CASH HADjust seen half the monsters in the bar at the camp drop-off. A few of them raised a hand to wave him over to their tables, invitations that caught Cash by surprise. He guessed that not socializing with his own kind was on him, not them. That or they’d seen him talking to Arkady. He preferred that explanation.
Uncomfortable, Cash dodged the overtures and pushed his way through the crowd.
A werewolf, Gucci shirt split at the seams over heavy muscles, chewed on a bloody bone like a rib at a party and sipped nightshade with a fancy umbrella in it. He was deep in conversation with a naked hairy woman who dripped a steady stream of water into a puddle around her Louboutins.
Most monsters didn’t bother with real human lives unless they had kids—when you had to get human food for them and send them to human schools and teach them to use computers—but they all still had topassday-to-day. That was the Prodigium’s rule if you wanted to live in a city where the prey was fat and the Wi-Fi accessible, instead of being banished to a damp cave in the woods.
There were maybe a handful of places in Roanoke where monsters could socialize without masks. Most of them were pretty low-key—a bar that kept a back door open after hours or an empty warehouse with blacked-out windows where the cops didn’t bother to answer noise complaints anymore.
The Book and Candle was for monsters who still wanted people to know they were doing very well in the human world.
As the owner gestured grandly, Cash ducked under a segmented arm and found himself at the barstool next to Gert. She flinched when she recognized him and nearly choked on a cherry in her drink.
“Look, I didn’t know you were the girl’s father,” she said quickly, as she dabbed at the front of her dress with a napkin. “But I didn’t say anything that other people aren’t saying where you can’t hear them. No one understands why Donna didn’t… act before anyone got attached to the girl. Not like she’s never eaten a baby before.”
One of her cluster of wannabe socialites giggled through green teeth as she leaned between them to grab a handful of nuts. “Man, who amongst ushasn’teaten a baby?Right?”
“You have more human in you than Ellie does,” Cash said coldly.
“I’m not an Abascal,” Gert said. “It’s just… not right. If they can’t stay pure, how can the rest of us keep ourselves apart?”
Cash glanced at her extensions and the glittery designer necklace around her hollow neck. “The struggle goes on,” he said dryly. Without the lash of his magic behind it for bite, Gert missed the jab and nodded sagely. Cash clamped down on his monster and glanced around the bar. “Actually, I need to talk to your redcap friend?”
“Ohhhh,” Gert said, eyes wide. She waggled her finger down the bar, toward the end where the stocky redcap chatted to an even stockier troll. “He’s down there, but he doesn’t like them… little.”
She smiled slyly at him with thick red lips as she reached back to pluck a black earwig from her rotted-out back. It wriggled as she crunched into it.
