“What did Donna promise you?” Cash asked.
“That if I kept her safe, we’d be together forever,” Shanko said. “I thought she meant we’d be lovers. Instead I’m her dog.”
“Yeah,” Cash said. “That’s something you should have nailed down right from the start.”
Shanko showed his teeth. “Yes,” he said. “But you don’t, do you, Cash? Not when it’s love.”
“Especially then,” Cash said.
“And who taught you that?” Shanko asked with a flicker of pride that faded back to frustration. He pulled the heavy slabs of meat back in around him, slotted over his arms and ribs like a jigsaw. It looked… sweaty. “Not that you ever did anything you were told, like keeping your head down and staying out of their business. If you’d done that, you might have survived this.”
Behind him, in the unnaturally black doorway, Yana staggered out onto the steps. Her hair was torn and her dress stained with blood. She looked ill and thin, hollow as a bell. Wild eyes fixed on Shanko’s back, and she grimaced, her pale lips pulled back from bloody teeth.
“Go suck my mom’s crusty tit,” she spat as she swung a frying pan in a short, vicious arc. The rim of it caught Shanko right across the side of his head. Despite what he’djustseen, Cash expected the sick crack of bone and brain. Instead, the thick knots of flesh just dented as the pan was buried in it. It was still enough to distract Shanko as Yana wrenched the pan and swung again. “Run, you idiot. Go!”
Cash went. He spun on his heel and took off at a run through the narrow avenue between the trailers. Behind him Shanko screamed with rage, and something hit the side of the trailer with a loud thunk. Cash tried not to think about what it was.
He focused on his feet instead as he followed a mental map nearly two decades old. It was just lucky for him that this place had struck on a winning combination early—rent cheap, buy cheaper, rent to the desperate—and didn’t waste money on change. Cash swung around the mailbox in a concrete tub at the end of the Fernyal trailers. It used to be a flamingo, but they’d changed it to a seahorse at some point. From the taste of the house, the Fernyal mother—all harsh Presbyterian features and a well of horrifying, bubbling anger—had died, but her daughters had filled it with more despair.
The monster grabbed a snack of it on the way by, just threads between its teeth and a shot of teenage anger about cheerleaders.
Cash ducked across the street on a diagonal and nearly ran into a new trailer. Sosomethings had changed. He hit the ground and scrambled under it, the axle too close and too greasy for comfort, to the glimpse of open space on the other side.
Behind him glass broke, and then a car alarm went off. He could hear the wheeze of a man not built to run on the road behind him. Shanko went around the trailer rather than through it.
“I would have spared you,” Shanko yelled. “You’re human enough to dodge the Hunt.”
That was the voice of someone who’d never lived with humans. Cash jumped over a low fence and squirmed between the overgrown roses that crawled over the two trailers. He lost some skin—and really wished he’d changed his outfit before this started—but stretched his head start out a few seconds more. The Church might start with the Worms and the Abascals of the monster world if they were exposed, but they’d work their way down. Eventually, once they really had wiped out all their hidden predators, it would be people like Anna-Beth on the pyre. Just odd, not quite comfortable.
Cash would have had his throat cut on camera by Winslow long before that. The network would call itThe Monster WithinorOur Friend, the Monsterand posthumously make him way more important than a contract employee.
No back pay, though.
That was okay. They had just given Cash an idea, although he’d started this race with no plan other than to give Yana and Arkady time to recuperate.
Cash pulled his monster up into his throat, “That’s why you didn’t just turn the Abascals in,” he said. His breath was pale and bright as it left his mouth, and it carried the sound away from him on flickers of pale blue flame. Wisp tricks. The thrown words wouldn’t fool Shanko for long, but they might give Cash just a few more seconds. “Because you promised you’d save Donna. No time limits apply.”
“Save her and love her forever,” Shanko said bitterly. Something smashed against a trailer, hard enough to shake it on its brick foundations, as he followed the voice. “I threw that in as a freebie, like a fool. She thought I’d be her slave forever, but love curdles like milk, given enough time. And given enough time, you find the loopholes.”
“Like the fact that the Prodigium have never trusted Donna,” Cash said. He hushed a Jack Russell tied up in the kennel out back of Jimmy Frank’s trailer on the way by. It couldn’t be the same dog—it would be damn near thirty now—but it looked the same as it warned him off with a low growl. “So really, by exposing them you were, what, doing her a favor? Protecting her against any future moves against her?”
Somewhere in the park, a door cracked open and a woman yelled out, “Fuck sake, take it inside!” before she slammed it again.
One.
Cash edged down the narrow strip between the trailers.
Two.
Three.
And… fuck. A slab of meat punched through the trellis someone had put up, bits of stick and flowers stuck to the gray creases, and Shanko stepped through ahead of him.
“Wisp tricks,” Shanko said contemptuously. “You think I’ve never seen them before?”
Cash threw himself backward, landed hard on the ground, and rolled under a trailer. A cold, slimysomethinggrabbed at his leg, but he kicked back blindly and scrambled loose.
He crawled out the other side and ran.
