Except hiscockhadn’t really been the problem, had it? Hiscockhad always been happy with what it got out of the deal.
For a second Cash held his breath, a trickle of pain tangy as a penny on his mental palate as he waited for the body blow. That was the truth, but only half of it. His head was full of silence. In the end, the truth only hurt once. A lie that mattered could be picked open a hundred times.
When Cash knew that, you’d think he’d acknowledge he was lying to himself. He didn’t, though, he never did.
These days the estate looked like a trap. A pretty one, with amazing beds, but still just another cage.
Cash pulled up around the back of the hotel and tucked his battered old Dodge into a space in the staff parking lot, between Shanko’s new black Jeep and a shiny blue Porsche with a child’s car seat in the back. It would have been satisfying to pull his junker up front and watch a valet’s face curdle, but he didn’t want to be stuck here. Not any more than he already was.
He grabbed his bag from the back and headed toward the worn concave steps down to the hotel’s back door. It opened before he got to it, and Shanko loomed up to block the way in.
Monsters were vain things. Most of them clung to their youth and human beauty for as long as they could—decades, centuries—until they could collapse directly into a grotesque old age. Shanko, for all ten-year-old Cash had thought he was an old man, was solidly middle-aged. His hair was short and dense on top of a heavy, sallow face.
There was always a faint smell of old meat around him, worked into the fibers of his shirts and suits. Not the hot, sweet copper stink of fresh meat, but dried flesh.
Old bones and dusty marrow. No one knew what Shanko was. He was just Donna’s grubby left hand, her loyal dog for a few centuries at least. There were more than a few portraits of Donna, powdered and pomaded in lace and bloody velvet, with Shanko in the background hard at work with the bits left over.
“I should have drowned you like a rat when you were still small enough to fit in the bucket,” Shanko said with contempt. “Do you really think you can fuck your way back into Arkady’s favor?”
Cash was two steps up. The few inches of height put him eye to eye with Shanko, close enough, anyhow.
“What makes you think I haven’t already?” he asked.
Shanko spat at his feet. The wad of phlegm was thick as chewed gristle. “Because he doesn’t stink of bog water and regret,” he said. “And you ain’t limping.”
Cash snorted out a laugh despite himself. “Still a comedian, old man,” he said.
Shanko scowled at him from under thick eyebrows that looked as if he’d carved them straight from a cow’s hide.
“I gotta do something to break the tension,” he said. “Otherwise people just throw themselves at my fucking feet. The girl at camp?”
Shanko didn’t bother to learn names, or at least admit he had, until people turned eighteen and their monsters fit under their skins. Before that, what was the point?
“Yeah, first year,” Cash said. “She was worried she wouldn’t make any friends—”
“She’s an Abascal,” Shanko interrupted dismissively. “Friends are for people who can’t buy or bully minions.Youhave friends.”
“And you have neither,” Cash pointed out.
Shanko stiffened slightly as the jab slipped past the usual toothless cruelty and caught him on the raw. He scowled at the sting, a horrible knot of heavy flesh on his face, but accepted it as his due. Sometimes he needed a reminder that Cash wasn’t an indentured servant anymore and that the Abascals had handed him Ellie like she was a castoff for the charity box before they realized they could love her.
“I got a picture this morning,” Cash said. “She’s settling in okay.”
He pulled his phone out and showed Shanko the picture. It turned out a smile didn’t look any better than a scowl on his broad face.
“Good girl,” Shanko said. He stepped back and gestured for Cash to come in. “Arkady said to put you in your old room, in the family’s wing.”
“I don’t suppose you’d care if I asked to be put somewhere else?”
“I’d think you were an ungrateful little bastard,” Shanko said as Cash squeezed past him. He closed the door behind him and threw the corridor into pitch blackness. His voice scraped ominously out of the darkness, wet as flesh on the back of Cash’s neck. “Just like you always were. It’s a better room than mine, bog-haunt. I sleep down here, with Belladonna’s hounds.”
“You should take that up with Human Resources.”
“I’m not human.”
Cash shrugged and started forward. The darkness faded around him, watered down by a thin pearl-gray film of light as his eyes kindled. It would be hard to lure someone off the beaten path to drown them in a bog if they lost sight of you in the dark. He’d never seen it himself, but Ellie said he looked like a skull nightlight.
“Call PETA, then,” Cash suggested. “What did those dogs do to deserve listening to you fart all night?”
