Cash glanced over her head. Arkady was slouched back against the hood of the Porsche, arms crossed and legs stretched out in front of him as he waited. The man was 75 percent leg, and the rest was just shoulders and lean waist.
The last time Cash gave Arkady a chance, it didn’t end well. Okay, so it had technically, eventually, ended in El—who was pretty cool. But before that it was mostly screaming, bloodshed, and curses. Cash had enough of that at work.
El pouted at him.
“I’ll see what he wants,” he said reluctantly. “Only because you asked.”
She grinned up at him and bobbed up on her toes to kiss his cheek. “You’re awesome.”
“How come you never remember that when I’m not doing what you want?”
She shrugged and blinked innocently at him. “It’s a mystery.”
It was time to go. The proctors came off the bus and checked the kids’ wrists as they clambered up the steps. Nobody wanted some kid who thought he was going to fat camp or music camp or whatever getting on the wrong bus.
Not again.
Cash stood with his hands in his back pockets and waited until the bus turned the corner at the end of the street. The other parents chatted to each other, planning murder and mimosas now they didn’t have to play human for the kids for two weeks.
Hehadpromised.
Cash turned and trudged across the lot to where Arkady waited for him, the dark wings of his aura mantled with smugness. Most people’s auras shifted shape with the wind and were mottled, scabbed with bad intentions, or shot through with milky streaks of unexpected kindness. Arkady’s aura was purple-black, the color of a fresh bruise, and hung from his shoulders like wings.
“What?” Cash asked as he lifted his hand to shade his eyes against the sun.
Arkady slid his sunglasses down his nose and looked at Cash over the top of them. It was hard not to start in surprise. The last time Cash had looked into—at—Arkady’s eyes, they’d been the color of dark honey. Now they were faded down to citrine yellow streaked with pale amber—humanity so thin that, in the right light, you could probably see through it.
“Most people start with ‘Good to see you again,’” Arkady noted. “Or ‘Thanks for burning one of your last days in the sun to see your niece off,’ or even just ‘Hello’ to kick things off.”
Cash tapped his wrist. “I’ve things to do, money to make, and men to fuck,” he said. “So ‘what’ is all you get. What?”
Arkady pushed his hair back from his face with one hand, fingers buried in the golden-brown waves.
“I need you to do something for me,” he said. “For the family. It’s important.”
“Oh,” Cash said. “I see. No.”
“What?”
“No,” Cash repeated. He knew Arkady didn’t hear it often, so he used it in a sentence. “Fuck you, no.”
He turned his back on Arkady’s expression of offended confusion and headed to his car. Even riding on the cloud of hurt feelings and wafer-thin pride, he was a little surprised he made it. Last time he’d told Arkady no, he’d just been dragged by the collar to the car and shoved headfirst into the back seat.
Maybe they’d both grown up.
Or maybe he’d gotten faster.
Chapter Two
OR ARKADYjust drove a faster car.
Cash pulled up outside his house and scowled at the Porsche parked in front of his garage. More people needed to have rejected Arkady in his life. Maybe then he’d be able to deal with it better.
Because you were so good at that, a cynical little voice in Cash’s head sneered at him. He sucked in his breath in surprise at how much that stung, like an old scab picked off raw skin. The pain was flat and salty as he swallowed it, like the taste of blood. It sucked that he wasn’t immune to his own monster and that it was a dick.
Fine. It wanted to see him reject Arkady? Watch and learn.
The monster pushed against his bones, cold and thin and dubious. They weren’tseparate. It wasn’t like the whole “bad wolf and good wolf” parable where human Cash and monster Cash had to fight to see who survived. The monster was more like… an appetite with opinions. It was part of him, but they weren’t always in lockstep about what to do.
