“For the first time in her life, my motherisinnocent,” Arkady said.
Kohary glanced down at his feet, as if he expected the devil himself to come up in protest at that slur. Cash had as well.
“Or at least, not involved,” Arkady said with a flicker of tired amusement.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kohary said. “The Worm has wanted this excuse for a long time. Your mother has gone unchecked for too long, and he is… concerned… about her ambitions.”
“Who isn’t?” Arkady asked.
“What will happen?” Cash asked. “To her family. To my daughter?”
Kohary looked at him for a moment. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “At best, she’ll be made the Prodigium’s ward.”
Cash swallowed. His throat hurt, and something he suspected was guilt scraped at the back of his ribs. That wasn’t abesthe could accept, and that meantworstwas going to be terrible. He had already known that, which was why he should have focused on who did this. Maybe he did love Arkady, but Ellie was his daughter, and she had to come first.
“For what it’s worth, I believe you,” Kohary said. “Your mother is hardly part of the human world. How would she even get in contact with some human TV show? But it doesn’t matter. The Prodigium keeps order. Not justice. Once the—”
The doleful toll of bells interrupted Kohary. He paused as he cocked his head to listen and then shrugged the rest of his apology as he put his hand on Arkady’s shoulder.
“Your sister’s marriage might be short, but I hope it’s happy,” he said.
Then the gates were dragged open—the scrape of iron-shod wood as it dragged through the ruts in the stone somehow caught up into the music—and the Abascal Hounds bayed their way into the party. All bones and pale hide, with bloodshot human eyes in overlong Saluki hound heads, they tore into any monster not quick enough to get out of their way.
It should have grabbed Cash’s attention—it was certainly meant to—but his mind had grabbed on to something else. HowwouldDonna get in touch with Harry, or whoever had passed the story up to Harry? How would any of the Prodigium’s old sour monsters? It wasn’t like they could look it up.
Behind the Hounds, the Hunter came, hunched over the weed-slimed neck of the kelpie as they galloped through the gates. A bone mask hid his face, yellowed and crusted with lichen, and a hangman’s rope dangled from one hand. The monsters laughed, gasped, and shoved their way out of his path as he goaded the horse forward. Cash lost his grip on Arkady as the crowd surged again to watch the Hunter snare his prey. He lost sight of him too as well-dressed things shouldered him out of their way and toward the back of the press.
Cash let it happen. He dragged his fingers through his tangled hair as the Hunter, Jerome tossed over his thighs, charged out of the hall.
Shit.
Cash had asked the wrong question.
Chapter Fifteen
“WHAT?” ANNA-BETHsaid—yelled—down the phone. The dissonant screech of death metal vocals made the line fracture with static bursts. “Did who ask?”
Cash pressed back against the wall. The roughly carved stone was cold through the thin fabric of his shirt, and the knobbly edges jabbed into his shoulders and spine. He could hear the excited yelps of the wedding party as they got Yana ready for the chase to get her groom back. It wouldn’t take long before they spilled out onto the shore.
“Anyone.” He tasted salt on his tongue and wiped his nose on his sleeve again. A troll had caught him across the nose with the end of her tail, the tuft braided and banded in gold. He wasn’t sure if his nose was bleeding or the skin had split. “Forget who asked about local horrors. Didanyonewant to know who to contact with a big story?”
Anna-Beth blew air out between her lips on the other end of the line “People ask all the time, Cash,” she said. “Everyone’s got a granny with a cursed puppet or a spirit in the sink that they wanna get on TV. How many ‘for reasons unbeknownst I have found myself cursed’ letters does Winslow get a week?”
Sacksful. Most of them were just spite over the disposition of a will or an attempt to ruin/mend a marriage with the cudgel of hell. There was a whole team of researchers to sift for the few that had genuine desperation worked into the weave of the paper.
“This one wasn’t crazy,” Cash said. He pulled the threads of the idea apart in his head as he worked out howhe’dhave done this, if he’d decided he wanted to burn down the world with him. “He knew what he wanted, he didn’t explain himself, he didn’tjustifyanything. It was a simple trade, money for information.”
He paused for a second as he thought about who’d have the information they’d sold so far. “And he wasoff.You know what people say about you? That’s how you felt about him.”
There was a small pause. Cash supposed he should feel bad, but he didn’t have time. Anna-Beth sucked in a breath that she let become a laugh.
“I’d tell you to go fuck yourself,” she said. “But when you put it that way, I know exactly who you mean. And when you put it like that, why should I tell you?”
Cash pushed himself off the wall and walked back down the hall to peer through a crack in the door. The room was chaos, full of monsters ready to head out to the hunt in heavy velvets and delicate silks. In the middle of it, Arkady stood with Yana, his hand on her shoulder as he told her something urgent. Probably not to set anything on fire. That was a problematic hobby when she was a teenager.
He didn’t have long. Tradition said the length of the Hunt predicted the duration of the marriage, so Donna was going to be miserly with the traditional head start. She might tolerate Yana’s marriage, but it wasn’tuseful, and she’d want Yana to remember that.
“I’ll pay you.”
