Donna finally selected Medusa from her side of the board and moved her forward.
“You can sit, Casper,” she said as she positioned the queen neatly on her square. “You aren’t Arkady’s aide these days.”
Goose bumps prickled along Cash’s arms as he shook his head and tightened his grip on the back of the chair.
“I’m fine here,” he said. “I’m used to it.”
Donna smiled at him, fishhook teeth behind glossy red lips. Her eyes were still and dark as a bog, with the same sucking bottom. Cash found that rather lovely, of course, but it was still dangerous.
“So are we,” she said. “The room finally feels right with you back at Arkady’s shoulder. You always were practically one of the family, after all.”
Right.Cash ducked his chin to hide the skepticism in his eyes. It used to drive Donna mad that he didn’t stand up straight. She threatened to pull his spine out and replace it with spoons once. That didn’t mean shedidn’tconsider him family, of course. Donna had threatened her own blood with worse. She’d buried more than one ambitious son, and some of them had even been dead. The implication made him wary—that she’d missed him “making the place untidy,” as she’d always snapped before she threw something.
That and the fact she was still being nice to him. Cash could feel the tension in his shoulders, tight and itchy, as he waited for the other shoe to drop.
“You once told me you’d sell him to the Yagas if I didn’t pass calculus.”
Arkady made his move. It was careless, a goat-horned bishop nudged into the path of a skull-faced knight, and Donna made an annoyed sound. She liked to win. It didn’t even bother her if peoplelether win, but she expected them to put on a good show.
“It was ajoke, Arkady,” she said and rolled her eyes behind her froth of a veil. The bishop left the board on her next move. “What would the Yagas want with a teenage boy? The meat would be stringy.”
Cash snorted. He shrugged an apology when Arkady turned to give him a dubious look. It wasn’t funny. Or it wouldn’t have been if Donna had trussed him up to be shipped to Moscow. That was—somehow—what made it funnier. It had been a long time since Cash had gotten to laugh at a bad thing. He missed it.
“See?” Donna said as she picked up her wine. “A joke.”
Arkady frowned at the board as he finally saw the trap Donna had nudged him into. Any move would doom his king. His fingers shifted between a sacrificial pawn and his gape-mouthed queen, but the doors to the room slowly creaked open before he had to decide. Shanko stepped into the room through the gap, trussed into shirt and tails that did nothing to dress up the raw-meat planes of his face.
“Your daughter’s home,” he said.
Even though heknewwho Shanko meant, Cash felt a twinge of anticipation, as if there was a chance Ellie was going to walk through the door. Ellie was on an overnight camping trip in the mountains, and even if she got fed up and decided to hitchhike home, it would be a while before she got there.
His heart still sank a little when Yana blew into the room.
“Mama,” Yana said happily as she bounced over the thick, stained carpet. She stooped down and kissed the air just above Donna’s dry, smooth cheek. Her hand braced on the back of the chair, and she whispered something through her smile into Donna’s ear. It was too low to hear, but it was mean enough that Donna’s eyes flickered mercury-flat for a second. Before she could retaliate, Yana had already pulled away and turned to look at Arkady. “And you. Mylittlebrother. How well you look, after everything.”
They glared at each other.
Yana looked like Arkady, enough that no one had ever questioned their family connection. The line of the nose was the same, and they had the same fox-amber eyes. But where Arkady was all gold and honey, Yana was old bones and blood. Her skin was a thick creamy white, the color of powdered bone, and her hair and lips were the exact same scarlet red. She looked vivid, as vivacious as Donna had reputedly been as a young woman, before she learned that fear worked even better than charm.
Except there was nothing to Yana but the skin she’d been born with. No power under her thick human skin, no monster restless in her bones. She wasn’t human—there wasn’t enough of her for that—but she’d never age into anything other than what she was right now.
She was a walking, manicured coffin for the monster she might have been. Monstrous enough for the Prodigium, but not for herself.
Cash cleared his throat.
“Yana,” he said.
Her eyes flicked up from Arkady, and she finally registered that Cash was there. She smiled with quick, surprising sweetness and clapped her hands together. “Casper! You made it,” she said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t.”
“You didn’t invite me.”
She shrugged that off as unimportant as she bounced around the chair to throw her arms around him. Her hair was wiry as a horse, and she smelled of gas and fresh blood.
“Is Baby here?”
“Ellie.”
She snapped her fingers behind his ear and tutted. “That’s it. Why did I haveJoin my head?”
