He had to hunch over the last few steps out of the cave. The roots of the seagrass that grew down through the packed dirt tickled the back of his neck and the tops of his ears as he scrambled out.
The moon hung fat and heavy in the sky. It was full—a good night for werewolves and wisps. Cash wasn’t tied to the moon, but travelers were less wary on a well-lit night. They took more risks. He brushed the sand off and looked around to orient himself. It wasn’t far from the hotel. Cash could hear the faint high notes of music on the breeze if he strained his ears.
“My friends and I used to come here to party after our shifts,” Abigail said as she joined him. She shook her head to shed anything that had gotten in her hair. “We’d steal well whiskey and beer, come out here, sit on deckchairs, and pretend we were fancy bitches like Donna Abascal and her kid.”
“It’s a little more… MacGyver… than our usual hub of operations,” Harry said. “But we’re investigating monsters, Mr. Davies. If I made a mistake, we didn’t want our research to disappear with our bones.”
Shame he’d brought Cash here, then.
“Hookup or boyfriend, I’m in Arkady’s bed,” Cash said. “Why shouldn’t I tell him about you?”
Harry and Abigail traded a look for a second. Then Harry straightened his shoulders and met Cash’s eyes with a steady, earnest look from behind his spy glasses.
“Because we believe that Ilyana Abascal is about to marry a monster,” Harry said. “If it realizes that we know what it is—if her family gives it away through any change in their behavior—then only God will know what it does to her.”
Cash was lucky that poleaxed shock was an appropriate reaction to that sort of information. He gawped at Harry and then swallowed hard, a wet click in his throat from nerves.
“That’s…. That’s something from a fairy tale,” he said. “Monsters don’t marry princesses anymore, if they ever really did.”
Harry took a step closer to him. “Oh, they did,” he said. “Fairy tales are just simplified history, Mr. Davies, you know that.Beauty and the Beastwas based on a documented historical event in 1500s France, except the historical Beauty didn’t have a happy ending. Her sisters weren’t able to save her. She married the Beast, and they never saw her again.”
“I know the story,” Cash said. “And plenty of historians argue that a real girl might have disappeared, but the story was exaggerated to make it more newsworthy. Fake news isn’t new.”
Monsters had a different version again. It might not be any more true, but it was said that Beauty was the one who helped them find human skins to hide in. Some stories said it was Beauty’s skin that Donna still wore—in her memory—but the Abascals came from Italy, not France. So who knew?
“When our source contacted us earlier this year, we were skeptical too,” Harry said. “12:28 has chased a hundred stories about monsters while I’ve worked there, and maybe three of them panned out to anything—infant disappearances in five different hospitals along the East Coast in the last decade.”
“Five,” Cash said. He hoped theonlywas only audible inside his head. The Black Witch ate once a year and apparently didn’t cover her tracks like you might expect. “Jesus.”
Harry nodded grimly. “He also sent us to a woman who was under some sort of monstrous oppression, visited nightly by some creature in the form of a loved one that”—Harry flushed, the color deep enough to be just about visible under the moonlight—“sought some esoteric form of congress with her.”
Yeah, Cash had heard that about the Worm. He supposed if he lived long enough, the more unesoteric forms of congress would get a bit same-old, same-old too. Hard to imagine at the moment, with the warmth of Arkady’s skin still fresh in his memory.
“Of course, we had to get the local authorities involved,” Harry said grudgingly. “For her safety. Unfortunately, that resulted in the monster’s escape when it chose to die rather than be captured. Until the corpse is retrieved, we can’t prove whether Ms. Fennick’s ex returned from his untimely grave through magic or fraud.”
They never considered both. It was always one or the other. That was what the Prodigium was created to take advantage of—humanity’s confidence that they were the only ones who could get used to the modern world.
The Worm was Seated Prodigium, one of the ruling members of that terrible council. Cash was confident the old monster had covered his ass if anyone questioned what his dead host was doing up and walking. That made it more worrying that someone had not just a rough idea of the Worm’s schedule but an intimate knowledge of the host he’d worn. An intimate knowledge of the business of every monster in Roanoke was bad enough, but to be able to track a council member from out of town? That was the sort of information network that required money, power, and influence.
That described the Abascals. They collected secrets like some kids collected stamps, tucked away to lube the deal later. Cash would lay odds that, between the three of them, the Abascals knew a dirty secret about every monster in Roanoke—and that included him.
If Cash believed Arkady that they weren’t involved….
“Who’s your source? Are you sure this isn’t some prank to expose you?” Cash asked. “I’ve lived here my whole life, and the only secret horror story I have seen sniffed out was the contagion that spread through the Lane development.”
That had been bad enough. The contractors on the housing development had known that their housing project edged onto, not just against, the cursed land of the old asylum. They’d rolled the dice that the two-foot-wide strip of land under one house would, at worst, make the paintwork crack. Instead the curse had budded and spread out to the edges of its new boundary line, taking in every sprawling McMansion and shell-white colonial bought up by social-climbing locals.
Ten serial killers had been tracked back to a stay in those placid, character-free houses, never mind the murder-suicides and home invasions that kept the turnover of ownership ticking along. Last year a podcaster went in and was never seen again.
Yet people kept buying.
“He says he’s afraid of retribution,” Harry said. Of course. Cash’s aching head didn’t earn him any favors from the universe. “My theory is that he’s a penitent consort, but—”
“I think he’s a Hunter,” Abigail said. She traded a sharp irritated glance with Harry. “Just because the Church disbanded them doesn’t mean they went away. There are well-researched books that track their continued influence—”
“Well-researched pulp fiction,” Harry corrected her impatiently. He held up his hand to cut off any further dispute. “We will find out soon enough, either way. He’s going to be in the hotel for the wedding, and he’s promised us that he’ll unveil the monsters.”
That would, at least, get rid of the immediate threat. A hall full of unveiled monsters would leave nothing but shoelaces and contacts.
