“Did your human filmmaker tell you that?” he asked tightly. “And mind your tongue, for once. No one is meant to know the Worm’s location while he regenerates.”
Cash ignored the insult. It wasn’t as if Arkady were mistaken. A habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time was great at mealtimes when you were something that ate negative emotions, but it didn’t get you many invitesback. Cash couldn’t even blame it on the monster. A lot of it was him deciding to be a dick.
“Harry wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “Monsters are basically extinct, remember, and if they aren’t, only the plodders are left. Sasquatches and hedge witches, hex men and redcaps. If someone went into a producer’s office and pitched that the… your honored guest… was still around, they’d be laughed out of town. Why is he here, anyhow? Why isn’t he loaded onto a train home?”
“Because he’s too weak,” Arkady said bluntly. “He probably wouldn’t survive the trip. He demanded sanctuary from my mother, and if anything does happen to him, then we pay.”
The bottom dropped unhappily out of Cash’s stomach at that bit of information. That was something he shouldn’t know, that it wasn’t a good ideatoknow. He tried to move away from Arkady but got tugged back. Arkady cupped his fingers, warm and dry, around the back of Cash’s neck. He didn’t squeeze tightly enough for it count as scruffing Cash. Not quite.
“You asked,” Arkady pointed out.
“And you could have lied.”
“Would you have believed me?”
No, probably not. Arkady was a really bad liar when you knew him. That didn’t make the faint sick feeling in Cash’s stomach go away, though. The Worm had killed people for less reason than knowing his weaknesses.
“And people wonder why I don’t ask questions,” Cash muttered instead of acknowledging Arkady’s point. It would have been a good time to actually take that advice, but he glanced over his shoulder toward Kohary. “That’s whyhe’shere?”
“Well, he wasn’t invited,” Arkady said tiredly. His fingers tightened slightly around the nape of Cash’s neck. “Should I be jealous?”
“No,” Cash said with a slight shudder. It wasn’t that Kohary was more powerful than him—so was Arkady—but everyone knew what the Left Hand did for the Prodigium… and how he did it. Cash glanced sidelong at Arkady and gave in to the temptation. “Should I?”
Arkady stopped in the middle of the hall and leaned down to kiss Cash. It was rough and possessive, sharp teeth and a hungry tongue. His magic slipped into Cash’s mouth along with Arkady’s breath, sweet and heady. It seeped down his throat and into his blood until he could feel the hot golden prickle of Abascal magic stretched out like a net between his flesh and his skin.
It was a trap of sorts, but Cash knew what he was doing when he said “Deal” to an Abascal. There was a lot they could do to you without that, but once you started to barter, that was the hook in your soul. For a human it ended much the same way it did for a trout, but it was a bit more… survivable… for something whose soul was meant to die with it. It was a lot harder to extract for consumption.
More enjoyable too, at least that was Cash’s experience of the honey trap.
And the soul is still not the bit of you that he has on a line either, the monster mocked him, but lazily. Arkady’s magic wasn’t something that could sustain Cash, but like faerie food, it felt like it could. The dull nibble of a few days unfed was washed away by a thick, sated feeling.
Arkady’s fingers were buried in Cash’s hair again as he finally raised his head. His eyes were bright gold, like coins, and he looked as glutted as Cash felt.
“Maybe just stop asking stupid questions,” Arkady said in a low, rough voice. He tightened his grip and tilted Cash’s head back a little to get a good look at him. Behind him a thin woman licked her lips with a wet split tongue and fanned herself with a webbed hand at the display. “But this works. It’s my sister’s wedding, after all. I don’t want her confused about which ex you’re here for.”
Cash swallowed the assurance that she wouldn’t be. It felt like a stone in his throat, but Arkady’s ego didn’t need to be any larger. Yana had always known where she stood. It was where she preferred to be.
“If she misses it, I’m sure everyone here will tell her,” he said.
“Good.”
Arkady ruffled Cash’s hair, grabbed his hand, and headed for the stairs. Halfway up, something occurred to Cash.
“Wait,” he said as he hesitated between one step and the next. “Yana knows why I’m here, doesn’t she? She knows what’s… going on.”
Arkady glanced at the two goat-headed men at the banister, goblets of not-the-best vintage in their hands. They flinched and moved their discussion down a few steps, out of easy earshot, at least.
“Of course not,” he said. “You know what she’s like. Yana can’t keep a secret to saveyourlife.”
Yeah, Cash mused, that’s what everyone thought.
THE CAREFULLYcomposed family scene in Donna’s drawing room made Cash’s fingers itch for a camera. Donna sat in a black leather wingback chair, dressed all in pale gray silk and velvet with a delicate scrap of silvery lace pinned into her wig. The matriarch in mourning—most monster weddings did end insomeonedead, after all. On the other side of the chess game in progress, Arkady sprawled lazily in fitted leather two shades away from black, his eyes and hair bright even with his monster pushed down under his skin.
It made him look younger, his mother’s favorite son again instead of Kohary’s whatever it was Arkady actually did.
Call it the “Monsters Reception” and leave it to the viewer to pick out thewrongdetails in the background. The twisted things carved into the arms of the chairs, the fact the chess pieces were all monsters, and the candlesticks that were hands of glory—the wicks the corpse-long fingernails soaked in paraffin.
Then there was Cash, rumpled and uneasy in black as he leaned on the back of Arkady’s chair. He figured the picture would definitely make more sense without him in it.
