“We need to find him,” he said.
Arkady flashed a cold, sharp smile as he took his shirt off. His skin was mottled with gold scales and bruised-smoke grays, his nails sharp and black as he shredded the heavy silk. “There is an entire hall of monsters ready to do just that. Donna has hosted a lot of weddings here, Cash, and the Hunter has always been kenneled again come dawn.”
“I know,” Cash said. He poked around in his pockets for a hair tie. Most of his clothes had one stashed away in a pocket—just in case Ellie needed an emergency braid—but of course, these predated her. The last few days, he’d felt like that kid again—sometimes—but it still felt strange to trip over the evidence. He stooped down, grabbed Arkady’s shirt instead, and pulled one of the torn ribbons out to tie his hair back. “But we have to find him before Yana does. Whatever his plan is, she’s the key. Why else do it like this?”
Arkady grimaced. They didn’t just have to find Shanko, they had to find him first… ahead of a pack of the most dangerous monsters in the US and with the Worm just waiting for his excuse.
“God damned us long ago,” Arkady said sourly as he grabbed one of the heavy leather dusters used when they had to handle the hounds. It hung stiffly off his shoulders as he dragged it on over bare skin. “You’d think he’d have stopped screwing with us by now.”
Cash could only shrug.
IT WASa beautiful night for the chase, with damp in the air and a thick gray bank of clouds to hide the moon. Not so good to bechased, but Cash thought that maybe being caught was part of Shanko’s plan. He might have played a good game so far, but he couldn’t think he’d get away unscathed, not even if he succeeded in bringing the Prodigium down on them.
The dull drone of the emergency siren carried on the still air from the petrochemical plant down the shore. It wouldn’t do to keep everyone inside, but most people would have either battened down for the night or headed over to the mainland. A few belches of sulfur-yellow smoke from the vents and no one would question it. Over the years chemical leaks had caused a lot of people to see strange things out here.
Like monsters in their gaudiest finery, drunk as lords on the promise of blood, in full chase of a stolen groom along the shoreline. Pookas and boggarts jostled to the front of the pack against a Jersey Devil and a Black-Eyed Child on a mountain bike they’d been allowed to even the odds. They were not actually children, they just passed as them if you weren’t observant, but they were short.
It was bad form to beat the bride to the kill, but traditionally there were gifts and favors in it for anyone in the… ah… “splash zone.”
Right at the front, the bloodstained spearhead of the Hunt, Yana ran in bloody slippers through the surf.
“He’s taken what’s mine,” Yana had snapped when Cash tried to reason with her. “My husband from my arms and under my own roof. I don’t care what his plans are, I’m going to drown him like an unwanted twin.”
She refused to listen to reason. Yana didn’t care if the Abascal name was dragged through the dirt and the Abascal scions went up in smoke. She would eventually—for Ellie’s sake, and Cash needed to believe that—but not with the bit between her teeth.
Even Arkady wasn’t able to convince her to fall back and let them corral Shanko. She wanted to watch the old man squirm for his affront against her, prove that she wasn’t the Abascal to dismiss as a threat… oh, and get Jerome back. He might not be in her top five motivations tonight, but he did make the long list.
Cash wished he’d changed before he left the hotel. Despite what the old Hunter movies tried to claim, skintight leather wasn’t the best thing to run through the wilderness in. It rubbed. He sweated. Monster-bred strength and stamina was impressive among humans, but around other monsters, he was reminded hecouldhave worked out more.
Despite the sweat that soaked him and the stitch in his side, he still managed to stay near the front of the pack. The back of the front of the pack, at least. He could see Arkady’s back from here.
Nothing much had changed around here, so he still knew the lay of the ground. He also had a wisp’s instinct for where to stand.
When your race fed by luring travelers into bogs at night, being clumsy and falling into puddles meant the Hunters got you.
Cash sprinted along the scrubby grass near the dunes. It was uneven footing, all matted hunks of dead grass and old bottles, but it was better than lumbering through sand. The air was sharp with salt. He could feel it in his lungs as he sucked in each breath and forced it out to take another.
A grim, molten blood dripping from his one dinner-plate-size eye, cast about on the sand. Grains stuck to his slobber-wet jowls as he snorted for the scent. The other monsters jeered as they passed him or cursed him as they misjudged and slammed into the dog’s iron-muscled side. He lifted his head and turned toward the sea as Cash reached him.
… on a kelpie.
The Hunt came out of the sea like the tide and punched through the slack middle of the chase. Hounds, cut loose for the first time in years, tore at stomachs and legs with steel-crowned fangs. They fell under fists and claws, torn apart by a now-one-eyed troll or eaten whole by a rawhead in a torn party dress—but they kept coming. Shanko had emptied the kennels for tonight and lured out of their holes even the old, crust-hided favorites from Donna’s childhood. At their head the kelpie smashed through the startled monsters. Sharp teeth and heavy stone-shoed hooves cleared its path. Anyone who dodged the snakey strike of its head got hammered into the dirt by the black-clad Hunter, by Shanko, who’d always appreciated straightforward violence over grace. They dropped to the ground, and the dogs overran them, before they turned their attention to the guests still standing.
One of them, a delicate gold locket buried in the folds of her throat, slammed into Arkady. He got his arm up in time for her teeth to sink into the padded sleeve of his coat. A terrible, broken growl gargled out of her as she thrashed her heavy, muscled body violently enough to make him stumble. It was enough that the next hound that hit him put him on his back in the sand.
It didn’t matter. Even if he had been caught off guard, a couple of hounds weren’t going to do any sort of real damage to Arkady. Couldn’t do any real damage. That didn’t stop the sick wave of fear that washed over Cash at the sight of Arkady down in the sand.
He darted between the fighting monsters, dodged the snarl of hounds and the occasional wildly unaimed swing of a panicked tentacle, and grabbed one of the hounds on top of Arkady by the scruff. Loose, clammy skin folded between his fingers and pulled tight around the hound’s throat as he hauled on it.
“Off,” he yelled as he braced his feet in the shifting sand. The old command words that Shanko had taught him, back when he was sent down to scrub out the pens for being smart, bubbled to the top of his mind. “Madra. Off.”
The hound made a confused sound at the familiar command. It didn’t obey, but it loosened its grip enough for Arkady to get his knee up and kick it off him. He scrambled to his feet and yanked the other hound off his arm. Skin came with it, enough that Cash saw a glimpse of the actual hard-scaled flesh under the rind of meat.
“If you weren’t my grandmother,” Arkady snarled through sharp teeth as he held the hound up, “I’d have you skinned to mend my coat.”
He tossed the hound back into the fight and gave Cash a quick, furious look. “Don’t do that again,” he snapped. “I want you to kiss my wounds better, not be stuck with you laid up in bed for a week.”
Cash smirked.
