Chapter Seventeen
THIS HADbeen his hunting grounds as a kid. It wasn’t as impressive a maze as the estate the Abascals had cultivated under the island, but it had provided. And not just for him.
The trailer park was easy prey, and some things needed easy. Most of them hung out near the heart of the park, around what could be a crossroads if you squinted at it. It made them feel more at home. Besides, the sea might not usually bother monsters, but the tides pulled at spirits.
“Stop running,” Shanko yelled as he shoved his way between the trailers. He waved an arm and flattened the fence and a handful of faded decorative flamingos on the lawn in front of him with a swipe of flesh. “Just come and take what’s coming to you. I still like you, boy. I’ll make it quick.”
Cash spared the breath to spit on the ground as he ran. He reached up and wiped the blood off his neck in a messy swipe that left his fingers covered in it. That would help. He slapped the sides of the trailers as he sprinted along, the metal rough as he smeared it with blood.
Hey.He rattled the spiritual bars on his way through, loud and noisy and offensively alive.Wake up. Come out. Help me.
Something sighed and poked a squid-fox face out through the wall of a battered trailer. It blinked blearily at Cash and yawned, and a fat worm turned tongue wriggled between its lips. Something else stretched and chuckled under a car, thorny black toes and twenty bloody fingertips just visible between the tires.
Spirits and ghosts. The dead and the never technically alive. Not exactly the cream of the crop out here—it was the old, the decrepit, the not-really-that-good-at-shit generally—but there were a lot of them. Fingers with too many joints slotted through lattices, and eyeballs on thin stems wriggled up through holes in the ground.
Eh?
What?
That wisp boy wants help.
The cacophony of muttered conversation filled his head with bagpipes and wailing cats as he staggered to a stop in front of the office. His lungs burned, and the stitch in one side jabbed through his spine to reach the other set of ribs. The oldest thing that lived there opened the door and looked out. It was jammed into the body of Mrs. Park, a tiny elderly Korean woman in house slippers and yoga pants. Most of it didn’t fit. A great fat slug of flesh scuttled frantically along behind her.
No one was entirely sure how much Mrs. Park knew about her squatter. She had to have noticed she was too old to really be alive, but it seemed rude to ask. Her grandchildren never questioned it when they visited.
The old spirit—old and mean enough to be a real demon if it didn’t live in a grandmother in a trailer park—angled its head so it could peer at him with one raw-meat eye through her slightly parted lips.
“Why,” it rumbled thoughtfully, “should we?”
Cash sunk down onto his knees and stared up at it. It was a good question. Humans might think monsters and spirits were one and the same, but they didn’t think so.
“For the Prodigium,” he said.
The thing scratched itself with Mrs. Park’s hand. Or scratched Mrs. Park with its hand. “Fuck them.”
It started to close the door, and Shanko’s laugh was thick and smug.
“Did you really think they’d help you?” he asked.
Cash braced his hands on his thighs and leaned forward over the ache in his ribs.
“I can get you on TV,” he said.
Those were the magic words. Every spirit in that place wanted to hit it big as the next reality-rite star, thought that all they needed was their fifteen minutes to take a one-way ride from here to the big leagues.
The lure of it dragged them out of their lairs. They huffed cold, sour blasts of air as they lurched, crawled, and lunged at Shanko. His eyes went wide in surprise as they mobbed him. Beaks sawed at the snotty strings of plasm that held him together. Thin things of bone and twigs clung to the hammer-lumps of his flesh and drooled on it to make it bubble and rot. One thing got a finger in his mouth and pulled, the flesh of his cheek brittle enough to crumble as it stretched. Another crawled into his shadow and picked at his heels with bony, needle fingers to unstitch it.
If Shanko were a monster, it would have worked. Same went if he’djustbeen human.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t exactly either, and that gave him an advantage.
He pulled at the spirits with ruined hands and pinned them down in the dirt with his heel on the back of their necks. Scripture didn’t work for him anymore, but it wasn’t as if he was up against Legion or one of the big hitters. He tore them apart in shreds and chunks until they gave up and scuttled away back into the dark.
Better to be a small fish in a puddle than undone. It wasn’t as if they had an afterlife to look forward to.
Cash glanced up at the Old Thing in Mrs. Park. It shrugged at him. “She only watches K-dramas anyhow,” he said. “So we don’t care.”
It went back inside and closed the door after it.
