Cash started to deny it, but he realized he was wrong before he got the first word out. Hedidknow where Shanko had gone.
Probably. A hunch was a lot to prop all their lives up on, but it was why he was there.
“The trailer park,” he said. “Where I grew up. He’s there.”
He was ready to justify the answer, but it turned out there was no need. Donna nodded her shredded head as if he’d agreed with her.
“Go,” she told Arkady. “I’ll round up the hounds and make sure our guests don’t get overexcited. The last thing we want is to resolve this and have Kohary call down judgment on us because a hound was taken by the dogcatcher or some idiot was caught peeping through curtains.”
Arkady scowled but silently extended a hand toward Cash. The casual curve of his fingers made Cash’s twitch for contact, but he hesitated as he realized that….
Oh, that was how they would travel.
HE’D PUKEDhere before. Cash was almost certain of that. He emptied out a party’s worth of finger food onto a woody hydrangea, the bile in his throat hot with stomach acid and wine. Arkady’s wings made a soft, papery sound as he folded them back under his skin.
“Are you done?” he asked. His voice was impatient, tight with angry concern, but the hand he put on the back of Cash’s neck was gentle.
It wasn’tflight—not like birds did and people, including minor monsters, always dreamed about. There was nothing graceful or natural about it, nothing fun. It was just fast and forceful, like a punch to the air. Cash had never opened his eyes during a trip, not when he was a kid and not now.
His monster wanted to snigger, but it rolled belly-up with reflected nausea in his gut. It served it right.
“I hate that,” Cash said as he straightened up. “We could have taken a car.”
Arkady ignored the complaint as he looked around. His slightly confused expression made Cash realize that it was the first time he’d come here. Cash had always been willing to remind people of where he’d come from back then, but only on his terms. He hadn’t actually brought anyone down here, not served his mom up to them. And what other reason could an Abascal have for being here? Rich monsters, like rich people, rarely ate their dinner out of tin cans.
“This way,” Cash said. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and broke into a tired jog through the maze of half-planned “streets” and cul-de-sacs that governed the layout of the trailers. The sound of TVs or radios turned up loud filtered through a few of the thin sheet-metal walls—someone too tired, poor, or stubborn to evacuate—but none of them came out to see what was going on. They knew better after a lifetime.
His mom’s old trailer was still on the lot. He paid for it for a few years after she died, but after Ellie, he’d let go of that bit of sentiment in favor of baby food. Yet nothing had changed. The stubbornly optimistic daffodils still grew in big, colorful plastic pots along with the weeds, and the scrape of red where he’d crashed his trike into the side of one when he was a kid was still there.
“Cash,” Arkady said. He put his hand on Cash’s shoulder and squeezed roughly. “Whatever happens—”
Cash took a deep breath. The air smelled like it always had—of sea-salt, grease, and despair—a lot like greasy burgers. “If you’re going to be all noble and say you won’t stand between me and Yana getting together, you can stick it up your ass.”
Arkady dragged him back a step so Cash was pressed against his chest. His breath was hot against Cash’s ear, that particular wet, blood-hot huff of a predator’s mouth, as he said, “I wasn’t going to say it, and I wouldn’t do it. Yana had her chance with you, with Ellie, and she didn’t take it. She doesn’t get another one.”
It shouldn’t have helped—what did it matter who was going to fuck who in the middle of this—but it did. Something in Cash’s chest unknotted, warm and loose and even slightly horny, and he let himself lean against Arkady for a second.
“So what were you going to say?”
“You’ve spoiled the moment,” Arkady told him with a kiss to Cash’s ear to soften his dry tone. “It can wait until tomorrow. Stay behind me.”
He pushed Cash behind him and climbed up the rickety steps to the door. It was already open a crack. That could be an invitation, or the crappy lock had finally given up the ghost. Cash shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet and clenched his hands into fists, nails sharp against his palm.
“You knew we’d find you, Shanko,” Arkady said calmly. He pushed the door open with one hand and cocked his head to look inside. It was black as a cave or the kennels under the hotel—too dark for inside the trailer, even with the thin curtains pulled and taped together. Cash started to say something but hesitated, because it was Arkady. What could Shanko even do to him? “That’s why you took Yana in the middle of the Hunt. We’d have no choice. What do you want? Why do this after years of loyalty?”
In the dark, Shanko laughed—a thick, mushy sound. “And what the fuck has it got me?”
“Exactly what you asked for,” Arkady pointed out calmly. He pushed the door open all the way. “Yana?”
The door slammed back on him. It nearly caught his fingers in the jamb.
“Run, you idiot!” Yana screamed.
Arkady threw his shoulder against the door instead and threw himself inside. It was like he hit a wall and bounced off. He flew backward and crashed onto the ground, taking out one of the daffodil pots with his shoulder. Blood, black in the moonlight, dripped from his nose and mouth, and his monster, all greasy gold scales and leather wings, bulged through his skin in painful torsion. Arkady screamed, and the monster did too, voices out of sync by a second as he arched his back in agony.
“You should have listened to her,” Shanko said as he stepped out of the trailer. Or most of him. The gray, lumpen figure that Cash had known for most of his life—bogeyman and then boss—had fallen apart. Thick slabs of flesh hung off and dragged behind, a wasted skeleton of a man in mildewed funereal best. Mushroom-pale skin was pulled tight over his bony face, and his eyes were a faded, bleached-out yellow. “It would have given you a few more days.”
Cash started toward Arkady, and Shanko swung his arm up. The heavysleeveof meat that had covered his scrawny arm flew out on the end of a thin, snotty cord of plasm and hit Cash in the chest like a hammer.
