Kohary smiled coldly. He had very green eyes, so opaque you could hardly see the monster underneath.
“Trust me,” Kohary said in a soft, rough voice. “Socially is the only time a monster sees me. My professional visits are… brisk.”
And the monster ended up dead. Cash took his hand back before it got too clammy for either of them to ignore.
“I guess that’s reassuring,” he said. Kohary looked at him curiously. It was probably the first time thatanythingabout him was described as “reassuring.” Cash showed his teeth as his nerves insisted that his survival required him to be an ass. “That you’re here for the finger food, not our fingers.”
Kohary waited a second—long enough for Cash’s mouth to go sand dry—and then laughed. It was a pleasant sound, low and warm, and his eyes crinkled at the corners like he meant it. Behind him a spirit dropped out of the curtain treatment. It twitched on the floor, stunned, and the scavenged bits of it evaporated into grease and dust.
“At least not yet, anyhow,” he said. “I’m surprised Arkady didn’t tell you to expect me.”
Cash considered the ball-pinching idea that he might have stepped on the fucking Left Hand of the Prodigium’s toes… or fingers, he supposed… when he kissed Arkady. He hoped someone would lie to Ellie about how he’d died, or at least why.
“No,” he said, his voice thin in his throat.
“The Prodigium isn’t just a soulless council of monsters and demons. We’re a family, and we attend family events,” Kohary said dryly. He took a drink of wine and looked away from Cash as he scanned the room. After a moment he glanced back at Cash and snorted. “It was a joke. You can laugh.”
“I knew that,” Cash said. Or at least he’d thought it was an option, although his throat had not been confident enough to take a risk. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I’m trying to imagine you turning up at the hospital with a baby gro. It’s not easy.”
“I do gift cards.”
“Good choice.”
“Arkady is my finger on the pulse of Roanoke,” Kohary said. That was news. Cash tried not to look like he’d been caught off guard, or not any more than he already did. Kohary looked him up and down. “And you’re his wisp. You’re prettier than his wife.”
Cash raised an eyebrow. “I have met Madeline,” he said. “I know that’s not true.”
Madeline had the sort of personality you expected to find under a rock—which wasn’t a drawback when you were a monster—but she was beautiful. It was a weapon, of course, but just because it had a cutting edge didn’t make it unreal.
The candlelight glowed fitfully in the wine with sparks of luminescence as Kohary took a sip. He wiped the moisture off his lip with his thumb, the black spike tattoo on the webbing very dark and sharp-edged. “I prefer humans.”
Cash flushed. He wasn’t sure if that was an insult or a come-on, or which was more disturbing.
“Half-human,” he said.
If that, by now. He’d always be half-human born, and every monster who didn’t like him would throw it in his face, but it didn’t really matter once you survived your childhood.Ifyou did. The camps had judged him monster enough, and the wisp in his bones ate his mask thinner every year.
Live long enough, and he’d be as wary of the sun as Arkady. That was the dream, he supposed, but sometimes he thought he’d miss it once it was gone—like a pulled tooth, the empty socket always some sort of surprise.
“Half’s enough. More than that, and they don’t… like it.”
Once, when Ellie was still a toddler, she’d put a cockroach in her mouth. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, since she put everything in her mouth, but Cash had still nearly gagged. For the first time, he thought he must know what it felt like, as the question “Like what?” tried to scramble up his throat.
He didn’t want to know, but his monster desperately did. It was an asshole.
“Of course, I suppose you were already in the area,” Cash said. It wasn’tsafeground, but it was safer. At least it was only casual murder under his feet, not the question of whether what Kohary did in bed was more or less esoteric than the Worm. “I’d heard you were here about that redcap who got caught, although redcaps seem below your pay grade.”
“Who told you that?”
“Camp drop-off gossip,” Cash said promptly.
Kohary snorted, but it was a lie that was hard to poke holes in. A good 75 percent of every Prodigium scandal in the last century had started as drop-off gossip. Evolution—or the devil—might have designed most monsters to be solitary predators, but parents needed to unwind over liquor.
“Fine,” Kohary said. “Don’t worry about me, wisp, or my business. You’ve enough of your own to keep you busy. It can’t be easy to watch your ex get married.”
“You should know.”
The words slipped out of Cash’s mouth—which had apparently decided to unlink itself from his brain. He felt himself blanch, his face cold except for hot spots on his temples and tongue, as Kohary turned to look at him.
