It must have knocked him over. He didn’t remember that. The slab hit him in the chest, and then he was on his back, lungs tight as he stared up at the cloudy sky through watering eyes.
Bag of Bones. Bones and Flesh.
The monster jibbered at him in a panic. Wisps weren’t fighters, and Cash probably had more humanity left than either of them expected. Enough to still be in love.
“Pathetic,” Shanko spat. “Look at you. They used you up and cast you out, cast youoverfor someone new and fresh. Yet you still come crawling when they snap their fingers.”
He didn’t sound angry, just upset. His voice was thick and wet, as if he had to choke back tears.
Cash rolled over and propped himself up on his elbow. He spat blood onto the dry gray grass and wiped his mouth on his shoulder.
“What business is it of yours who I fuck?” he asked. His monster crawled up his throat and took over his tongue, because even if it got them killed, it wanted to draw blood. “You aren’t my dad.”
This time it was a fat slice of salted thigh, gray and hard with rind, that smashed a dent into the ground just next to Cash’s head.
“Shut up,” Shanko yelled, a crack in his voice. “You always had a smart mouth. No one could beat it out of you, scare it out of you. I thought that you were… different, but they just fucked you loyal, didn’t they? Everything they did to you, stuff you don’t evenknowthey did to you.”
Cash wiped dirt off his face and scrambled to his feet. He glanced over at Arkady. The great leathery wing that had jutted out of his spine had been folded away again, although the skin bulged oddly around it, but a thick shoulder and a long writhe of tail still squirmed naked and tender in the air. It looked like a man trying to get a too-small shirt on.
“I might be an idiot, Shanko,” Cash said. “But I’m an idiot with my eyes open. No one did anything to me that I wasn’t willing to have done. Hell, I was usually the one who started it.”
Shanko stalked toward him. His stolen flesh dragged along with him, heavier than the little bits of eye and rat that bag of bones cannibalized from other ghosts.
“They seduced you, ruined you, used you,” he said. “I tried to protect you—”
“You did not.”
The flash of anger that spat out of Cash’s mouth caught both of them by surprise. Cash had never held any grudge against Shanko for not protecting him, because why should he. But the idea that the old man was patting himself on the back over some imaginary virtue raised his hackles. Shanko hesitated at the rejection, his peat-mummy leathery face creased in confusion before he recovered.
“I chose you, not them. It was me who took you away from this shithole.” He gestured violently around him at the trailers. “I could have killed you if I wanted—who’d have stopped me, but I took you to the Abascals. I told Donna that you had potential.”
“And what, it was for my own good?” Cash snorted at him. He took a step back, trying to—adjust the kid’s memory of the space to an adult’s legs. “You did what you were told to do, Shanko. Don’t get me wrong, you did a good job of it, but what the hell have I got to do with any of this?”
Shanko backhanded with a side of his stolen flesh and slammed Cash through the low fence he’d shuffled toward. This time Cash managed to dodge most of the impact. He landed on his ass, a sharp pain in his ribs, but managed to drag himself back to his feet.
“I did all this for you,” Shanko said. “Or for us both, but because of you. Everything we gave to them over the years, everything we cut out to offer to them on a silver fucking platter, and they don’t care. You had a chance to go when the boy got married. To be whoever you wanted, to live your own life, and they couldn’t bear that, could they? The Abascals. Even if they didn’t want you anymore, even if you weren’t useful, they have to keep you on the hook. To know that when they snapped their fingers you’d come back. But do you know what I found out, Cash? The child isn’t even yours. A decade you’ve spent raising another Abascal cuckoo for them, some passing monster’s brat. So. Do you still want to stop me? Or are you going to let me bring them down?”
“Ellie’s my daughter,” Cash said. He ignored Shanko’s attempt to interrupt. “She’s not my blood, but I knew that.”
Yana’s tears burned her own skin. Her face had been raw when Cash stumbled over her in one of Donna’s underground gardens. Two miserable people who couldn’t—ever—have what they wanted and the sort of deal that put a hook through your heart.
“I wish it were mine,” Cash had said of the newt that had landed in Yana’s stomach and screwed her life. “It would be easier.”
Maybe she should have hesitated, but she didn’t. That this would hurt Arkady as well as solve her problem, only made it better. “Deal,” Yana had hissed, her hands tight around his as her nails drew blood. “You can’t take it back now.”
She might only be the human coffin for Donna’s real daughter, but a dead monster was still a monster. The deal took. Cash had never slept with Yana, never even kissed her, but when Ellie was born, she was his. Her jaw looked like his, her smile could be pasted on Cash’s face and no one would notice, and she had the hunger of a wisp. Once she was old enough for her monster to come into her own, that might change, but she’d still be his daughter. Cash was the one who’d sat up with her and learned algebra for her, and he wasn’t going to let someone else take over when it got easy just because ofgenetics.
That was a human obsession.
“It was a lie,” Cash said. “But it was my lie, Shanko.”
Shanko blinked dry red-rimmed eyes in confused doubt. “You… you knew? No. If she wasn’t yours, why would you take her, give up everything to raise some other monster’s by-blow? You’re just lying to protect them.” He nodded in agreement with himself, the rise and fall of his voice almost hypnotic. “That was what I taught you to do, but it won’t work this time. The Abascals took us, and they used us up, boy. Look at me!”
He stepped out of the tangle of protoplasm and cured flesh, arms spread in display. It did not make him look any better. He was a dried-out thing, all tendon and withered skin. His fingers were curled into his palms, stitches on his arms stark where they’d sliced the tendons and closed the wounds, and old,oldbruises stained his face gray and grainy. It was a striking look for a monster. Unique.
Except he wasn’t.
Cash glanced at Arkady again, his monster half yanked out of his skin and flopping around like a gaffed fish. It had been Shanko who’d told him that story, about the awful things a cauled Hunter could do to a monster.
