“You’ll make new friends,” Cash said. “Horrible ones.”
“Not. Appealing.”
“Yeah, well.” Cash pulled a folded sheet of paper from down the side of the passenger seat and shook it out one-handed. The horned-mountain logo of Medicine Springs Camp was slashed across the top of the page. It was an effort to blend in, but it looked more like somewhere you sent special, murderous delinquents than a normal summer camp. And, well… accurate, but not the look the Prodigium wanted. “Make the most of it. You’re going. Just think, your friends will be cleaning up horse crap, and you’ll be learning the skills to excel in the corporate world.”
“Like what?”
Cash pinned the list to the steering wheel with one hand as he pulled out of the drive. The call blitzed static for a second as it switched to the car’s onboard system.
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “Disposing of bodies. Cut me some slack here, okay? I’m going to grab the… last… things on the list and get home. Now go get some sleep. You’re going tomorrow. It’s not optional.”
Silence dragged out long enough that Cash thought Ellie had hung up. Then she cleared her throat.
“What if I’m not good at being a monster?” she asked in a small voice. “What do they do then?”
Cash hesitated. He knew the answer. It had never helped him much.
“El, you’re twelve,” he said. “No one expects you to be Grendel’s mom right out the gate. Just be yourself, but cooler.”
His reward for that was an abrupt disconnection. Cash sighed. As he headed to Home Depot, he tried to convince himself it would be fine. He’d gotten through it, and Ellie was more monster than he was.
That would be enough.
EL HUGGEDher backpack to her chest as she got out of the car and watched wide-eyed as sixty kids milled around the two black buses parked outside the school. Some of them knew each other from previous years and clustered together to catch up, as though they wouldn’t be on the bus for three hours. Others butted up against each other like adolescent bantams as they jostled to decide who was top dog.
“They just look human,” El muttered to Cash as he joined her.
“That’s the point,” he reminded her. “The humans wiped us all out, remember? The last monster was the Beast of Boston, and they drowned him in salt and sank him in the bay. As far as they’re concerned, and we want to keep it that way.”
The Prodigium did, anyhow. Cash didn’t necessarily disagree—his breed’s traditional haunt was bogs and moors, where you got very bad Wi-Fi and no laundry—but it wasn’t as if anyone had asked him anyhow.
El rolled her eyes at him. “I knowthat,” she snarked. “I listen. Grandma used to tell me about the Beast.”
“She probably knew him,” Cash said. As he nudged her toward the bus, he added under his breath, “That’s probably why he gave himself up to the Church.”
“I heard that,” El said primly. “Grandma hasn’t killed everything she ever loved, Cash.”
“The only evidence for that is you,” Cash pointed out as he ruffled her hair. “Ready?”
A counselor in a bright yellow sweatshirt smiled at them as they approached, her pen poised over a clipboard. A dozen deaths hung around her shoulders, black rents torn in her aura. They twitched like a fox’s tail as El approached her, and her smile was long and sharp.
“Hello. New girl?” she asked.
El nodded and shifted her backpack awkwardly over her shoulder so she could pull the much-folded permission slip out of her pocket. It was initialed, pocketed, and replaced with a yellow strip of paper to glue around her wrist.
“Don’t worry,” the fox-kin killer reassured El as she put a hand on her shoulder. She winked one bright dark eye. “It’ll be great. We’re going to have a body farm this year, but keep that under your hat. I’m not supposed to tell yet.”
Ellie took a step toward the bus, then turned and tackled Cash. She pressed her face against his chest as she hugged him desperately, her backpack dangling uncomfortably over his arm.
He ignored thetchof a passing dowager and hugged Ellie back. She was all bones and smelled of lavender soap, toothpaste, and whatever perfume her human friends had decided was “the best” this month.
For a second he tasted panic in his throat—that he’d gotten it wrong, raised her tobehuman, not just to pass, that maybe he should have left her with her grandmother.
“If I get killed,” Ellie muttered against Cash’s T-shirt, “just remember I didn’t want to go.”
She peeled herself off him and stepped back, his T-shirt still pinched in her fingers as if she was going to take him with her. The smile she gave him was halfhearted. Then she looked over his shoulder and brightened up like someone had flipped a switch.
“Uncle Arkady,” she crowed with delight as she broke away from Cash. All her fears about camp appeared to be forgotten. The bag dropped to the ground with a thud as she darted away. “I didn’t know you were coming!”
