Shanko chuckled, the sound thicker in his throat as it crawled around in the dimness. He gave Cash a casual cuff around the back of the head. The clip of heavy bones and thick knuckles against Cash’s skull rattled his brains and made him stagger, but if Shanko had meant it, Cash would have been out for the count.
“Be careful,” Shanko said, his voice dropping back to something almost human. “Belladonna knows you’re here, and she’s said nothing of it—not to her son, not to me, not even to her hounds.”
Shit.
Chapter Five
NOTHING HADchanged since Cash left.
It would have been creepy if there had been anything personal there to start with. Cash looked around the room in search of something he’d left or a gap he could fill with a memory. But nope. He’d lived here for five years, and even the pictures on the wall had been chosen by someone else.
Of course—Cash eyed the heavy black wood adjoining door—he hadn’t really lived here, had he. It had just been somewhere to put his clothes.
He kicked the bed frame. “Still there?” he asked.
An eye rolled out from under the bed, attached to a long braid of sinew. The pupil was a small, fang-lined mouth that mashed aimlessly at the air.
“Where would I go?” it whined miserably in a voice like a thousand gnats that drilled directly into whatever part of Cash’s brain handled self-pity. A sort of sick, confusing misery retched into Cash’s throat for a second and made his heart falter before his monster got in the way of it. “I’mbits. Not even all of them. A housekeeper vacuumed up a toe.”
“You shouldn’t litter,” Cash said. “And I’m back for a couple of days, so you need to shift. I can’t sleep through you crying all night.”
A hand, disarticulated and clumsily strung back together in no particular order, crap-crawled from under the bed. It splayed flat on the floor and dragged itself out, lungs splayed like wings as it wheezed and burped.
When parents told children there was no monster under the bed, they were telling the truth. Ghosts, on the other hand, loved it under there.
“I live here,” it whinged. “Why should I have to leave?”
“You don’t live,” Cash said. “Youdomoan all night long.”
It had picked up an extra eye from somewhere—not human, maybe one of the guests’ pets had died—and it leveled all three on him reproachfully.
“I wasmurdered,” it reminded him. “Chopped up fordogs.Evicted.You never even sleep in here.”
“Times change,” Cash said. “And it’s only for the weekend.”
It groaned, fluttered smoke-stained lungs, and laboriously took flight to wobble drunkenly through the ceiling. Splintered ribs hung under it like a daddy longlegs’ pencil-stroke limbs and rattled against each other as it moved.
Spirits—like the one at the Stevens’s house—were free agents… usually. The gravitational well of a human’s bad deeds could trap them in places or people, but they could usually break free eventually. Ghosts were the wrecked bits of souls not up to the commute to heaven or hell.
Most of them were screaming bags of frustrated rage, driven to avenge the slights that ended their mortal lives, even when they didn’t have enough of themselves to know what those slights were. They either succeeded in that or an exorcist moved them on. It was different if they were killed by a monster. Then they got left where they died.
The hotel had maybe a dozen official ghosts, like bag-of-bones there, that had stitched themselves together into something like sentience. Then regretted it. Being a ghost sucked.
Cash dumped his bag onto the now unoccupied bed.
“Are you waiting for me to come to you?” he asked.
A low, whiskey-rough chuckle came from the other room, through the door that led to Arkady’s quarters.
“That would be a change, wouldn’t it,” Arkady drawled.
Cash rolled his eyes. Power—whether it was money or monstrosity—warped people’s ideas of how the world worked. Arkady had gotten Cash all the way out to the island, but he was put out that Cash wouldn’t go the last five feet.
As if he was the one who did all the running. Ever. In anything. Even when they’d been together.
“Fine.”
Cash pulled his camera out of the bag and stalked over to the door. Then he hesitated as he reached for the handle. It would be…weird… if it were locked. He didn’t know if it would matter or not or what it would mean if it did, but it would definitely be strange.
