Cash left her to it.
“I figure once Jon’s eighteen, I’ll just sign all that over to him.” Con the redcap was midflirt as Cash got within earshot. “Maybe head over to Scotland, kill a few farmers, and find a cave. Get back to my roots, you know?”
The troll licked salt out of a shot glass and looked amused but horny. Beads glittered in the tufts on his long ears and the matted tuft on the end of his tail as it lashed when Cash put his hand on Con’s shoulder.
“Five minutes,” Cash said. The troll scowled at him. “It’s an errand, for the Abascals.”
The troll looked a mixture of worried and impressed as they quickly backed away from the conversation. Cash had forgotten howeasyit was to move through society with Abascal patronage as a cudgel. It was a shame he couldn’t get used to it. One weekend only.
“What do you want?” Con asked as he pulled his cap down over his eyebrows and smeared fresh blood across his pale skin. It looked like he and Gert had stopped for murder on their way for mimosas. “I didn’t say anything about your kid. I’m sure she’ll dofineat monster camp with all our real, meat-eating monsters.”
He snort-laughed at his own joke.
“I went to camp too,” Cash said. “Trust me, when all your spoiled brat meat eaters cry themselves to sleep at night? Ellie will eat their souls. Don’t worry about my kid. She’ll be fine.”
From his lips, Cash thought miserably to himself, to the Mother of Monsters’ ears. Children didn’t get killed at camp anymore, but learning to stick up for yourself was a life skill the camp expected them to pick up on their own.
“What do you want, then?” Con asked. He glanced over his shoulder toward the troll and scowled as he saw a dog-headed man buy a fresh glass of salt. “Come on, man. My wife’s going to be here soon, and if she has to pick someone up for us, I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“It’s the first night of camp,” Cash said. “You’ll find someone. I heard that one of the redcaps got picked up by the cops?”
Con’s face sagged, and he glanced around. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Guess.”
“Yeah, right, well. It’s handled,” Con said. “Just like the Prodigium wanted. The guy’s going to take the fall as a human, do his time. If they give him the death penalty, it’ll be a decade, less with no appeals.”
There was nothing supernatural about a redcap kill. It was natural causes, if you considered being stabbed natural causes for a human. All they really wanted was the blood.
“How’d he get caught?”
“I don’t know,” Con said irritably. “He’s my brother, not my friend. What’s it to you, anyhow?”
Cash leaned against the bar and gestured for the bartender to refill Con’s whiskey. “I work the exorcism circuit, and I’ve heard….”
He hesitated, and Con finished the sentence for him. “Rumors?”
“Yeah.”
Con picked up his drink and gestured for Cash to follow him over to one of the black leather booths. The two goblins already there were roughly evicted so Con could squeeze in. He took his hat off and set it down on the table, where it squished against the stainless steel and left red smears on the metal.
“When my brother started to go on about it, I thought he was nuts, y’know? There was someone following him, this car he saw over and over, people going through his trash. I told him he was imagining it, that if anyone heard him talking like that, he’d end up on the wrong end of the Left Hand of the Prodigium. Some of us get like that, you know, if we stay on the edges. Too close to humans but not part of the world? Paranoid.”
“And then he got caught.”
Con rubbed a hand over his blood-matted hair and picked at the elflocked knots with blunt fingers.
“Danny’scareful,” he said. “Paranoia makes for a bad brother but a good killer. He didn’t make mistakes. Plus, I’ve heard other stuff. Gert’s nanny? She had her recycling gone through. They took away the bloodstained papers. Another guy I know, a púca, got freaked out by a dinner date. He said the guy put holy water in his glass and then tried to get him to get into a car. Sheep biting the dog, or what? I thought the Prodigium might be poking around—I heard the Worm was in town—but they do what they like, and you said the exorcists are sniffing around. Do you think someone fancies himself a… Hunter?”
He dropped his voice as he said that and laughed uncomfortably, because it was a stupid idea. Right? There hadn’t been any Hunters since the Butcher. As far as the human world was concerned, there hadn’t been any monsters since the Butcher. Notreally.A few insipid monsters left in Europe, a few inbred clans in the mountains—just enough to keep the world interesting but not enough to worry about.
Bigfoot, of course.
“Nothing like that,” Cash said. “The exorcists don’t want to play around with bloodbaths and hunts. The whole point is they win every week, except for the occasional two-parter, where they win in week two. The monsters who’ve had trouble, did they know each other?”
That would have been easy, but Con shook his head. “No. Danny was only passing through, and Gert imported the nanny from Finland. Some relative of hers she’s sponsoring. They didn’t know anyone.”
Not entirely true. There wasoneperson they all knew, but… there was no way he knew the Worm or the Black Witch. They wererealmonsters, the only one of their kind that was needed.
