Cash stamped his feet into his boots and left the laces to drag as he answered the door. The woman outside pushed in past him without any invitation.
Anna-Beth Fennway wasn’t entirely human, but mostly. She didn’t need to be invited inside, she could cross running water, and neither silver, crosses, nor iron made her blister. All she’d gotten from whatever monster had fucked her great-great granny, was that she had a faintly off-putting air about her.
That and an instinct for the unwholesome. She worked as a spotter for most of the local reality-rite shows, with a folder of possessed houses and demonically influenced souls. Nobody liked her, but they were happy to pay her.
It was never enough, and she always had a paranoid suspicion that there was worse in the world that she hadn’t found yet.
There was, of course. But just because you were right didn’t mean you weren’t paranoid.
“Hey,” she said as she glanced nervously around the room. Her attention lingered on the TV. “What do you want, Cash? I gave Winslow his pick of couples last week.”
He pulled an envelope of cash out of his pocket and handed it to her. She picked the flap up with her thumbnail and flicked through worn-edged notes. Her chapped lips pursed as she whistled soundlessly.
“Okay. What do you want?” she repeated, less impatiently and more suspiciously.
Cash left the door open a crack. “Has anyone paid you to follow someone in particular over the last few months?” he asked. “Go through their trash. See who they associated with. Anything like that?”
Anna-Beth frowned and tucked the envelope of cash into a pocket.
“If they did, would I tell you?” she asked. “That’s not how you get work.”
“I don’t need to know who,” Cash said. “Just if anyone has.”
Paranoia tasted like tea made with limescale-heavy water. It was almost comforting, but there was a chalky undertone that lingered. Cash’s meal of choice was despair—meaty enough to chew as he supped it—but he could use this.
Anna-Beth zipped her jacket up to her collarbones.
“No,” she said. “I heard the rumors too, figured that someone would at least hit me up for a couple of hot zones? Nothing. None of the other stringers in town have had a sniff either. If there’s someone shooting in town, they already know what they’re looking for.”
That was what Cash was afraid of. It wouldn’t exactly be good news that the humans had pierced the Prodigium’s veil of mundanity on their own, but it wouldn’t beCash’sproblem. If it was just some researcher who was here to look for the monster under the bed, they’d have ended up at Anna-Beth’s door. Or her at their door.
Roanoke didn’t have the most dense monster demographic in the country—that was New York, despite the rent—but monsters had been here since before the first settlers “disappeared.” It had been one of the first places to bend the neck to the Prodigium—two things that weren’t unrelated. They were integrated, and there were no unusual clusters of disappearances or spikes of violence for someone to track.
For someone to just turn up in town and hit pay dirt? They had to have insider knowledge, and if it wasn’t from a stringer? Then Arkady was right.
“My number’s in the envelope,” Cash said. “If you hear anything, let me know?”
Anna-Beth patted her breast pocket to make the cash rustle. “Unless they pay me more,” she said with a thin smile. It was as good as a promise. She liked Cash; he was one of the few people she didn’t make uncomfortable. “I’ll have a sniff around, ask the usual suspects if they’ve heard anything. If I find anything out, are you going to be in town?”
“Close enough,” Chase said. “My ex invited me to my other ex’s wedding.”
Anna-Beth raised her eyebrows at that. She reached up and tapped her finger against her neck. “Which of them gave you those?”
Cash’s hand flew up to his neck. The skin felt hot under his fingers, and he stalked over to the mirror to peer into it. Hickeys dappled his throat from under his ear down to his collarbone, red-and-blue blotches stark and soft-edged against his pale skin.
Arkady’s teeth on his neck, sharp kisses chewed into his flesh.
“The asshole,” Cash said.
IT WASfunny how perspective changed a place. Cash had grown up on the north side of the island in a trailer with one bedroom and a view of the refineries out his window. Even the despair around there was junk food—empty calories with no real bite.
Even though there were no walls and the house was literally on wheels, it had been a prison.
Back then Cash had aspired to be Shanko. Everyone on the island, monster or human, was afraid of the tough old man in the black suit. They paid him their debts, they asked him for favors, and he drove around the island in a black Jeep he had other people clean for him. Cash’s ambitions hadn’t been able to imagine anything more than that.
Until one day Shanko had driven him up the long drive to the Abascal Hotel and Spa, all crushed-white-shell gravel and spiked slate roofs, and Cash had realized this was it. This was freedom—from the low-grade ache in his bones as his monster chewed on him for food, from the hand-me-downs that never fit in the crotch or the pits, from everything—and all he needed to do was be what they wanted.
Shame he’d fucked that up, really. It would have been an easy life. Half-human had always been too human for Cash’s own good, especially where his stupid cock was concerned.
