“There was a time you’d have been all for that,” he joked. Fear almost made him run off at the mouth. “Getting old, Arkady? Or just not that into me anymore?”
“I won’t be if you have no nose,” Arkady snapped. He shoved Cash roughly back, nearly onto his ass, and slapped a hound out of the air with a clawed hand. “I like you pretty, Casper.”
Was it more stupid to be afraid your pure-blood-monster lover might be hurt or to get flustered in the middle of a fight because he said you were pretty? As long as you kept your nose, at least, Cash reminded himself as he punched one of the hounds in the throat. It gagged and choked, eyes bulged out in surprise as it went down.
Another, muzzle furred with gore and hair, lunged at Arkady from the back of a pissed-off werewolf. A split tongue slavered between its sharp teeth as he snarled out something that could have been a word. Or the hound just thought it was.
The carved ivory tip of Donna’s spear stabbed through that open mouth and into the hound’s throat. It spat blood as she hoisted it upright, dangled it for a second like a gory flag, and then flicked it away into the dunes. Half her face was gone, the hard work of her maids shredded, and the horribly beautiful face underneath was twisted with anger.
She looked… like an Abascal—a demon—beautiful and stomach-turning all at once. Cash’s monster wanted to follow at her heels, and his humanity wanted to run and never stop. His smart mouth split the difference.
“I think that’s the first time I’ve seen someone yeet a hound,” he said.
He didn’t expect Donna to know what he meant, but she gave him a dry look. “Elliewillbe proud,” she said.
A stray bit of skin dangled from her eyebrow. She picked it off and flicked it away, then wiped her bloody face on her sleeve as she scanned the beach. The guests had gotten over their surprise at the tables being turned and whooped with glee at the taste of something new.
Donna’s eyes weren’t golden like Arkady’s. The one exposed was black and fringed with thick, rustling lashes, but the flicker of fear that flashed through it was oddly human.
“Where’s Yana?” she said. Where’s my daughter?”
Chapter Sixteen
GONE.
Her bloodied slippers were left behind, the satin ripped to pieces and full of sand, but no sign of her. Cash swore as he looked around. The hot red hunger of the wedding guests burned the back of his tongue like cinnamon as they split up to chase the stolen couple and the hounds that scattered into the night. Whoops and shrill thin howls cut through the silence as they headed into the town.
“Someone congratulated me on my most successful soiree to date,” Donna said dryly as she stabbed the spear into the dirt to clean it. “Apparently expectations are high for the ceremony tomorrow. I don’t know what would be worse, the truth coming out or having to think of a way to top this.”
Arkady, the sleeve of his leather duster pierced and torn, gave his mother a rare, openly sour look.
“How about your daughter’s corpse found floating in the sea?” he asked. “Where does that rank in what’s worse?”
Donna braced a hoof against a half-buried rock and yanked her spear out of the ground. She ran her thumb along the head of it to check for chips.
“That would obviously come under ‘the truth coming out,’” she said. “And if I wanted her dead, I’d have done it myself.”
“Would you?” Arkady asked.
“Of course. I brought her into the world with my own hands, and I’ll do the same if I need her out of it,” Donna said. “Humans disparage kin-slayers, Arkady, but monsters know it’s the least you can do for your own blood. Cash understands; he’s a father.”
They both looked at him.
“Oh, yeah, no,” he said. “I’m either too human or too common to get that.”
Donna inclined her head slightly. “Or both,” she said, as though it were a concession she’d generously made just for him. “But you’ll see. One day.”
He hoped not.
“Where would he go?” Arkady asked.
It took Cash a moment to realize the question was for him. He shook his head and shrugged.
“Ask Donna,” he said. “He’s served her for centuries.”
Donna spat in the sand. It bubbled and stank, a thick gray fizz, as it melted the grains into a pebble of dark sea glass. If a human found it, supposedly, they could look through it and see past glamours and into the future. The future, almost always, involved them being killed by the Prodigium, so… that part might be made up.
“I tell him what to do,” she said. “We don’t… converse. Arkady’s right. Of everyone, you were closest to him. Where would he go, Caspari?”
