“She wouldn’t risk her skin for a lie,” Arkady said. He pushed his hair back from his face as he looked at Cash. “My mother is a terror in the night and a curse on the land, but when she came here, she gave the Prodigium flesh and bone, the same as all the other great old monsters of the world. If she breaks one of the Cardinal Laws,theCardinal Law, they’ll kill her. And… and besides, how? I can’t imagine her sneaking out of the manor to go and meet up with a priest in a bar to trade confidences.”
“Most shows have tip lines,” Cash said. “People call in sightings. Stuff. All she’d need was a number. Do you really believe she didn’t do it?”
Arkady hesitated—just a flicker of guiltysomethingin the tilt of his mouth before it was gone—and then nodded.
“I do,” he said. “I don’t put it past her, and she’ll shed no tears for the Worm. But if it was her, she’d have made sure he was dead.”
That was true.
Cash chewed the inside of his cheek. Part of him wanted to nope out before he got caught in the politics of it all again, but he was a monster. If someone outed him, then his coworkers would film as Winslow pinned him down and filled his eyes and his mouth with silver and salt. Then they’d come for Ellie. They’d damn her for a monster—even if she wasn’t enough of one to fight back yet—and call it a job well done when they tossed her corpse in the sea.
Monsters were selfish things. They could love and be generous, but the thought at the forefront of their mind was usually for themselves. Cash was caught off guard by the sick rush of anger that hit him at the thought of Ellie pinned down by Winslow’s bony piety and old bible. He dragged his mind away from the thought of his hands closed around Winslow’s flushed throat and scowled at Arkady.
“What do you want me to do, anyhow?” Cash asked. “The sort of people who would know the Worm’s comings and goings, his latest conquest? We don’t exactly hang out in the same places.”
The sort of people tapped to make the Worm’s visit to his latest conquest run smoothly didn’t send their spawn to camp on a bus. And they had spawn, not children.
Arkady stood up and straightened his jacket with an absentminded tug. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “They’re all going to be at the estate this weekend for a celebration and to see if Donna is going to join the Prodigium or my father in his grave. All you have to do is see who’s lying when they say they think Donna betrayed us all.”
“I don’t exactly have an invite, so how are you going to explain why I’m there?” Cash asked as he stood up. He didn’t like being loomed over. Old resentments left a bad taste on the back of his tongue, and he tried to wash it away with the last of the beer. It didn’t work. “Tell them I’m your driver?”
Arkady put his knuckle under Cash’s chin and tipped his head back.
“No, you’re going to be my date,” he said. Cash flinched at the idea. He’d rather be the help than playact that. There was a bleak satisfaction on Arkady’s face as he watched Cash’s reaction. “To my sister’s wedding. Everyone will just assume I want to ruin her day.”
Chapter Three
THERE WASa shop in Savannah that made stationery for monsters. Most of them had email—hell, most of them were on Grindr—but pixels and programs didn’t quite have the same… malevolence as vellum and ink, smooth as bloody silk.
It was a family business, the paper shop, although some of the apprentices hadn’t wanted to join the family at first.
Arkady had left the invitation propped on the coffee table, against the drained beer bottle. Glossy black ink sketched out the location and date in perfect loops, while the names of Ilyana and her new husband-to-be scored the paper in acid-gold letters. It looked obscenely unfortunate—an omen with an RSVP.
Apparently Jerome would be there, as the groom. No second name. Either Cash was meant to know already, or Donna didn’t want anyone to mention it. It was hard to tell without more context.
“Yana,” Cash said to the answering machine. “Call me.”
He hung up and tightened his grip on the phone in frustration as he fought the urge to throw it into the wall. It wouldn’t help. It just felt like it would. Cash scowled, grabbed the bag he’d packed for the Gramercy shoot, and called Tom as he headed down the hall into his bedroom.
“Family emergency,” he said as Tom answered. “I can’t make it. Get Barrows. Remind him he owes me one.”
Cash emptied the bag out on the bed. His jeans, T-shirts, and toiletries were tangled around each other. He liked the old band T-shirts—a very human interest that 90 percent of people didn’t want to talk to you about—but inconspicuous at an upper-class monster destination wedding they weren’t.
What they were, Cash realized as he dangled a TORN T-shirt from his finger and Tom yelled in his ear, was clean, though not exactly fresh. He’d shoved them in the bag about a week ago so he wouldn’t forget them, but they didn’t smell like Arkady’s skin.
“Dude, Barrows is good, but he flinches,” Tom said as he wound down from angry to annoyed. “Youdon’t flinch. Remember theDarling Demonshoot? She puked bile in the shape of a snake at you, and you didn’t even twitch. That’s what I need. Fucking steady hand.”
“Yeah, well.” Cash pulled his T-shirt over his head and tossed it at the hamper in the corner of the room. “Make do with Barrows. I can’t come.”
“Did you get a better offer?” Tom asked suspiciously. “I’ve heard rumblings there’s some big investigation being shot up in your neck of the woods.”
“From who?” Cash asked, phone tucked against his shoulder as he pulled black cotton over his head. He still smelled like Arkady, but at least it was only magic and not skin and sweat.
Tom snorted at him. “Fuck off,” he said. “You just dropped me in the shit. Why should I do you any favors?”
“I’d owe you one,” Cash said. His voice felt cold on his tongue, damp like mist as he let his power soak into it. Sometimes it worked over the phone, sometimes it didn’t. It depended on how susceptible the person on the other end was. “I could put in a good word for you with Winslow. You could follow up on that Utah story with him.”
He felt the tug as Tom took the bait, the specter of profitable respectability briefly very real for him. The Utah story, what had come out through official channels, wasn’t just sensational, it was tragic… but no one involved would talk about it. Winslow had been there, though, right in the middle of it, with his buttoned-up starched shirt and worn bible. If the good preacher vouched for Tom….
