“This was just a… misunderstanding.”
“You thought I was a monster,” Cash said. A lifetime of conditioning made his neck prickle as he said that out loud, as if he expected the left hand of the Prodigium to drop from the ceiling to flatten him. “Then you hit me on the head and dragged me… what… down to the shore? Into the woods? That’s one helluva misunderstanding. You know this is Roanoke, right? Not some backwoods Appalachian shack in the mountains.”
For the first time, he felt a solid hit of emotion from the man. Excitement. “You’d be surprised,” he said. There was something familiar about the way he said that, the cadences that his voice fell into as he pulled Cash to his feet. “This area has always been a hub of infernal activity. Abor, a fault line in the world where evil can peek through. You know that. It’s why a third of exorcism programming in the US is made within a hundred miles of this spot.”
“Like I said, we never run out of subjects,” Cash said. “You work for 12:28, right?”
“I do. I’m an assistant director. Harry Treadwell,” the man said as he stepped around and crouched down to collect Cash’s cards from the floor. “Abigail is a local hire.”
His voice was dry as dust. Abigail didn’t seem to notice as she grinned, her lips dark in the dim light.
“I worked here when I was a teenager,” she said. “I grew up on the South End—”
“Me too,” Cash said absently. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but he supposed it was to be cruel when Abigail flushed and glared at him.
“Well, I guess every generation, one of us gets out,” she said cattily. “Although I guessyou’venever worked for 12:28.”
Cash had not. That was 70 percent lack of opportunity and 30 percent choice. It had never seemed worth the risk.
Somewhere between splatter-rite and reality exorcisms lay the respectable ground of paranormal investigation. 12:28 had followed an exorcism for a year, through every unpleasant puking, cursing, scabbing moment of it. Rumor had it the spirit involved had found the experience so intense it had actually been truly exorcised, not just cut free of the honeypot of the house, which only happened in two out of ten cases. Three years ago they’d uncovered the Hairy Secret of Candle Hollow, and tracked a dozen local suicides back to a reclusive family who lived up by the mines.
In Cash’s expert opinion, the Cannock Clan had just enough monster in them to make them outcasts, but the suicides had been more down to the fact that Candle Hollow was a dead-end place to live. No one asked him, and the Cannocks had been driven out of town after the production crew left.
It was a Jesuit-run show, which would fit Harry and his hard-rind aura. Holy men and philosophers were always hard to read… real ones, at least. Fake ones were like a large print pamphlet. But in a professional believer, all the time spent thinking about the meaning of the universe/secrets of God muddied up the want-take-have of the lizard brain.
“So what? Roanoke gets a lot of wannabe Witches of Endor and possessions,” he said. “That’s common knowledge. It isn’t worth an exposé on prime time.”
Harry held out Cash’s wallet, the cards piled neatly on top. “It wouldn’t be,” he said. “But we recently received actionable information that there’s a more… concrete… threat present here. When you started to pay attention to me, I thought perhaps you were part of it. I may have overreacted.”
Cash grimaced and touched the back of his head. His hair was spiked with blood, and there was a knot the size of an egg on his skull—a freshly boiled egg from how hot it felt across his fingers.
“With a bat,” he said. “I should sue.”
“That’s your right.”
They all knew it wouldn’t do him any good. Harry would just claim he was an ordained cleric in fear of his immortal soul, and all Cash would get for his trouble would be an official expression of regret. Even if Harry had killed him, all he’d get would be a slap on the wrist and a month in a religious retreat.
“You thought I was a monster, though?” Cash said. He tried to sound the right level of skeptical—somewhere between blasé and theatrically shocked. “At a spa? Do you think they’re here for a hot-stone massage?”
“Maybe it reminds them of hell,” Abigail said snidely. Her aura sagged around her shoulders like a baggy sweater, threaded with gray in disappointment as the adrenaline spilled out of her. “Come on, Harry. An hour ago you thought he was some sort of incubus. Now you want to spill your guts?”
Cash swallowed a nervous laugh at that misidentification. A wisp was to an incubus what the flu was to the bubonic plague. The first might kill you, if you didn’t take the right precautions, and the second was an unholy contamination that hadn’t been seen since the Middle Ages.
“He kind of needs to convince me to hold my tongue,” Cash pointed out. He slotted his cards back into his wallet and tucked it into his back pocket. “Hard to do an undercover investigation when the owner’s boyfriend is howling about his cracked skull.”
“Boyfriend, is it?” Harry said mildly. “I thought you said he was just a hookup.”
Cash shrugged. He ignored the faint, weird satisfaction he felt when he used the term. Whether he looked it or not, he was thirty-two years old, and definitely too old to get silly over the idea he had a “boyfriend.” Especially since he didn’t.
“I bet if I stagger in covered in blood, he’ll temporarily upgrade so I don’t sue him,” Cash said tartly. He paused as a wash of nausea hit him and he struggled to stay on his feet. His humanity was still thick enough not to blister under salt, but he was still allergic to it. Under his nail beds and behind his eyelids itched in irritated reaction, and his monster felt dry and thirsty around his bones. “Look, this sounds like bullshit to me. I buy there’s still monsters in the world, but they’re out in the woods or deadheading the rails for easy prey. They aren’t at a spa. So I’m going to go, and you can deal with hotel security.”
He stalked out of the puddle of light and felt his way through the dimly lit cave toward the faint sound of the ocean. Instincts strained for him torun, to go to ground somewhere wet and dark until the holiness passed on by, but he reined it in.
“We can’t let him leave!” Abigail hissed. There was a rattle of metal on plastic that made Cash’s head throb with the reminder of whatever they’d whacked him with. “The hotel will kick us out. The last thing they want is to become the Monster Spa.”
There was a tight edge to Harry’s voice that suggested he’d lost his patience with his coworker. “We aren’t the fucking Inquisition, Abigail. We can’t kidnap people. Or murder them. Put that down. Down.” Something hard hit the ground with spiteful force, and Harry raised his voice. “Mr. Davies. Wait.”
Cash turned around but didn’t stop. He walked backward a few steps, the sand lumpy underfoot as he glanced from the bat to Harry. “Outside,” he said.
