“Did you really think they’d help you?” Shanko spat. He staggered forward, his shadow loose and flapping from one heel. “Do you think they could? Even if it were in their own self-interest, it goes against everything they are. You should have embraced your human side, Cash. Maybe I can help you with that.”
He thrust a skinny, clawed hand through to grab at Cash. His fingers scraped across Cash’s breastbone, and it felt like salt poured into the raw cavity of his open chest. Pain scored down his bones, and his stomach twisted like a fist until he could taste bile and blood in the back of his throat as his monster was scraped out of him.
“You can probably live without it, you know,” Shanko said as he peered through the broken trellis. “Half-human is enough for heaven, they say. You’d finally really belong somewhere.”
Cash tried to hang on to his monster. He’d cursed it sometimes, wished it mute, but it was him. The thought of being without it, of being like Yana with just a space in you, made him cold. It didn’t work. Shanko pulled it out of him, thin and gray and vaguely amphibian, while Cash arched his back and tried to scream.
Then the monster caught on something. It hurt—a sharp tearing pain in Cash’s spine where man and monster met—but it stapled them together. Shanko tried to reel it out, his face twisted with frustration, but the line already set pulled it back.
He sucked in a breath to scream, and then Arkady was there.
The monster part of him anyhow. The flare of his aura was now a mantle of heavy leathery wings, and golden scales crawled in elegant patterns over his chest and down his thighs. Beautiful enough to stop someone’s heart. To stop Cash’s, anyhow.
“He’s mine,” Arkady said in a voice like cracked bells. He rammed his claws into Cash’s stretched, weeping wisp and tore it out of Shanko’s grip. “Find your own.”
The monster squirmed out of Arkady’s grip and scrambled back under Cash’s skin where it belonged. He flopped back onto the ground and tried to breathe through the pain. His insides felt all… misplaced… and his skin itched like he’d been lying out under the sun.
Arkady stepped over him and backhanded Shanko into the delivery truck parked outside. The metal dented in, and Shanko slumped, dazed, to the ground. To his credit it didn’t take him long to pull himself together and lash out at Arkady. Bu this time it wasn’t so easy. He might have had the advantage when he could pull Arkady out of his human skin, but that wouldn’t work when Arkady had left humanity behind.
He was a demon on a—more or less—crossroads, and no little human Hunter had a chance. Not even an undead cauled one.
Arkady tore the shield of Shanko’s meat suit away piece by piece. He tore them apart like old wood and left them to rot on the ground. Shanko lashed out with what he could grab. A tire whistled through the air where Arkady’s head had been, and the raw end of his plasm raised welts.
It wasn’t good enough. Arkady closed his claws around Shanko’s throat and lifted him off his feet. There wasn’t blood left to shed, but something thick and pallid oozed from the wounds.
“If you want freedom so much, you should have just killed yourself,” he said.
Shanko spat in his face. “I tried.”
“I’ll try harder,” Arkady promised him and tightened his grip.
Cash scrambled to his feet and nearly fell over again. “Wait,” he hissed through the wash of nausea. “Don’t kill him.”
The plea didn’t set Shanko free, but Arkady stopped closing his fist. “Why not? He betrayed my mother, betrayed the spirit of his deal, and hurt you. What value does he have now?”
Shanko cursed desperately and kicked at Arkady, his heels scraping over lean, scale-covered muscle. His despair tasted like roast beef and crackling, thick and sticky on Cash’s tongue.
“Because that’s his plan,” Cash said. Despite everything, he felt a pinch of guilt at Shanko’s accusing glare, but he ignored it. He limped over to put his hand on Arkady’s arm. It had been a long time since he saw the monster without his skin on. He’d forgotten the smell of it, the thick musk of scales mixed in with Arkady’s magic. Cash considered all the rules of decorum and class and decided to hell with it. He stepped under Arkady’s wing and leaned against his shoulder. “That’s why he took Yana. He promised your mother that he’d always protect her and her family, and you can only lie to yourself for so long. The minute the Prodigium really threatened you, he’d have to fix it. Wouldn’t you, Shanko?”
Shanko spat at him. “They’ll use you up and turn you out,” he rasped. “You should have let me kill you.”
Arkady pushed Shanko’s chin up with a clawed thumb. “If you had,” he said. “I’d have kept you alive and screaming forever. At least this way, we might kill you one day.”
He snapped Shanko’s neck, and the man went limp. It wouldn’t end him, not for long, but it shut him up.
THEY FOUNDJerome in a chest in Shanko’s room, folded double and tied with twine. He still wanted to marry Yana, which seemed to surprise her as much as anyone. It might actually be love.
Now all they had to do was fix everything else.
“If he insisted on his pound of flesh,” Donna said coldly as she examined her perfectly applied nail polish and how it matched her powder-blue mother-of-the-bride dress. She sat with Cash in the front row of seats set out in the great, curved-metal-and-glass house attached to the hotel. Lush, overgrown plants, all dark green leaves and huge, jewel-bright flowers, had been pushed over to line the walls, leaving enough tiled space for an intimate wedding ceremony, “I’d have preferred you let him carve it from closest to my heart.”
After a lot of work by her maids, she looked like a middle-aged woman who’d had a lot of work done so she could deny being middle-aged—extensive work but expensive, with the telltale signs that gave it away nothing more than subtle tension and sharpness. Donna refused to just be a middle-aged woman. She wanted her face to know that no version of her would accept a wrinkle with grace.
“And where are you keeping that these days?” Cash asked dryly.
Donna laughed and put a hand on his knee. His skin, still too tight and too tender, crawled unhappily at the contact.
“I always liked you,” Donna said. She dug her nails in enough to hurt even through his trousers, and it was at least more normal than her pleasantries. “I was going to have you killed once, of course, but I always liked you. Shanko talked me out of it, funnily enough.”
