“No.”
“Then they’re enemies.” He tucked the stained square of cloth back into his pocket and shoved the trolley back into motion. “I’ll get the list after I deal with the cook, have it sent up to your room. If there’s anyone likely to cause a scene if you catch the bouquet, let me know and I’ll make sure they know better.”
Now that Cash thought about it, that might not hurt. Two birds, one stone.
“Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate that.”
“Why don’t you fuck Arkady, then,” Shanko grunted. “It might put him in a better mood.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Cash said dryly. They reached the heavy metal doors to the kitchen. Cash paused as Shanko pushed them open with one shoulder and braced them on his heel. The crackle of the fire was loud enough that Cash raised his voice. Something unidentifiable and multilimbed dragged heavy chains across the floor from the counters to the ovens. “Hey, you hear of anything weird going on? In the city?”
“The Abascals welcomed you back into the fold,” Shanko said. He always sounded bitter. His voice was scratchy with old disappointments. Maybe it was a bit sharper when he said that. Cash had sucked as a servant, burned his bridges on the way out, and yet here he was, back on the good linen. Yet all Shanko’s years of good service had kept him right where he was—because he didn’t have a pretty mouth and good bones. Cash could hardly object to any resentment there. Shanko snorted and dragged the trolley backward into the kitchen with him. “And the Worm has curled up under our feet until he regrows a human skin. Don’t know who I’d have expected Donna to skin and wear more—you or him. Yet here you both are, under the same rock. Maybe I should send him the guest list too.”
The trolley wheels bumped over the door frame, and the door scraped along the side as it slowly swung shut.
Cash stared at the scarred metal as he took in that bit of information. It made his brain ache, and the little part of him that was still a stupid, cocky asshole twitched to “go and see.” As if the Worm were a tourist landmark to take a selfie at #atleasthediedquick.
He resisted that urge. The Worm being here explained what Donna and Arkady had been doing over dinner. Although not why Arkady hadn’t told Cash about it. He might not have thought it was relevant, or he wanted to keep it a secret.
Cash could just ask, but…. He was good at lies, and Arkady wasn’t. Not once you knew him, anyhow. Before Cash asked any questions, he wanted to be really sure he wanted to know the answers.
Something shrieked in the kitchen, high-pitched and shocked through the heavy doors. Cash jumped and remembered to move on before he got pressed back into service. He doubted Shanko would care whether Cash called himself staff or not if an extra set of hands were needed. Last time Cash’d gone in there, the chef wanted to cut his finger off to see if wisp tasted like fish or fowl.
He strode briskly away from the door and headed out into the guest parts of the underground.
“UGH, EUROPE,”the thin woman with the see-through pallor sighed as she flicked thin, matted strings of hair back from her face with long fingers. Her aura was puffed up around her like a balloon, stretched so thin with her desire to impress that it had gone translucent in spots. “It’s just changed so much from the old days. Nothingsmellsanymore. Don’t you miss that? That real, ripestinkof human meat?”
She licked wet lips at the thought, a glimpse of fishhook teeth just visible. Her need prickled on Cash’s tongue with a familiar acidic undertaste. All she wanted was everything—raw meat, fresh-carved respect, anyone her eye fell on under her—and it was sharp enough to make Cash’s stomach clench in sympathy.
He could eat.
Cash plucked a square of golden pastry and… what was probably?… some sort of fish smear off a passing tray. He popped it into his mouth whole. The pastry crumbled into thick, buttery flakes on his tongue, and the salt hit the back of his throat with the brackish gene-memory of a marsh.
The reminder made his hands itch, even though it was only treated salt that made his monster shrivel like a dosed slug. He scratched between his knuckles even though he knew it wouldn’t do any good. The irritation was buried under layers of skin, down near the bone.
He scored another glass of thin wine from a passing server—even after all these years of legal drinking, it still felt like he’d gotten away with something—and moved on through the crowd. The siren wanted too much, too single-mindedly, to focus on one thing long enough to set up contact with a production team. Two days into the plot, she’d have gotten hungry and eaten her catspaws instead of talking to them.
Water monsters were suckers for immediate gratification. Look at Cash. He hadn’t even given Arkady thechanceto seduce him. In fact to an outsider,Cashmight look like the seducer.
Again.
He sipped the wine and wandered through the crowd. The occasional pop of interest/curiosity/spite when someone recognized him tasted like boba in watered-down green tea—a pop of something thick, sweet, and then gone. A flicker of interest in Arkady Abascal’s bit of rough, but it was only for a second. Then they focused back on their own concerns.
The uneasy weight of a fresh meal in the red-skinned yara-ma-yha-who’s stomach, the outline of a shoulder and a hand still visible against the thin skin of the Australian’s distended gut, and the vague, moonlit memories of…before.The regret was like cotton candy—the same sort of disappointment you felt over a meal you hadn’t savored at the time.
Cash left the man to his fig syrup and moved on.
A rail-thin sin-eater, his face all bones and shadows, waved an empty glass in Cash’s face. Half-melted ice cubes rattled in the bottom like dice. “Another whiskey, boy,” he said, voice loud and self-conscious. Then he laughed and glanced at the woman with him for approval. “It’s the bastard’s father. Sorry, I thought you were a server. I mean, youwereof course.”
He was all self-satisfaction as he imagined the moment he’d share that bon mot with Madeline.The wisp was crushed, the sin-eater imagined saying as he took Madeline’s hand,I think he went away to cry.
As if she’d care. She was a spiteful monster, but not a particularly petty one, by all accounts.
“Don’t worry about it,” Cash said with an easy, empty smile. “I thought you were a monster. I mean, you know, a real one.”
A sort of liver-colored scald crawled up the sin-eater’s throat and into his cheeks.That, in case anyone wondered, was what crushed looked like. It wasn’t about how scathing the insult was, it was delivering it at just the right moment to puncture whatever idea they’d coddled.
“Fuck you,” the sin-eater spat. “Whore.”
