“I’m not being a dick,” Arkady pointed out. He stopped playing with the bottle and took a drink, his throat pulled tight as he tipped his head back to swallow. When he was done, he set the bottle down and wiped his thumb over his lower lip. “Even though I’ve as much justification as you, but I’m not here to dig up the past.”
Cash looked away. That was a good thing—you could dig up the dead and make them dance, but they were still dead—but part of him didn’t want to believe it. He took a breath—the little flicker of magic had thickened the smoke-and-honey smell—and tried to focus. This wasn’t how he expected today to go. He should have been on the road to Baton Rouge by now. One of the splatter-rite streamers needed a cameraman for an exorcism on a family out in a nearby town. It wasn’t as reliable as the reality-exorcism gig, but it paid better. A week on a Netflix doc in Gramercy, exorcising some cursed workers from the petrochemical plant, would pay for El’s camp next year. Although Cash had a feeling he was going to miss out on that.
“You said you needed a favor,” Cash said. “What is it?
Arkady had been the one who wanted to talk. Now he looked cagey as he took another drink of beer.
“Madeline and I divorced,” he said. “I assumed you knew.”
“Why?”
Arkady gave him a dry look and slowly ran his thumb over the mouth of the bottle in a slow caress. It was fainter this time, the sympathetic connection weakened as the bottle settled into Arkady’s possession, but Cash felt the warmth of it. Okay, so they both knew why.
“I don’t pick at old scabs,” Cash said bluntly. “Unless it’s something El told me about after a visit to Donna, I don’t know about your life.”
Arkady actually had the balls to look annoyed. He washed the bad taste away with a drink of beer and offered it back to Cash. “It turned out we were incompatible, in a lot of ways. A dynastic alliance with no children is… not particularly dynastic.”
“Sorry.”
The corners of Arkady’s mouth twisted in a stab at humor. “Why?”
“I never wanted you to be unhappy,” Cash said as he took a drink. He couldn’t play the same tricks with sympathetic magic, but Arkady still watched his mouth like he could feel it purse against the glass.
“Then why fuck my sister?” Arkady asked, his voice deceptively lazy and definitely venomous.
Cash choked on the beer. By the time he cleared his throat, Arkady had grimaced and dismissed the question with a wave of his hand. Twelve years of practiced responses—everything from the truth to baroque likes—wasted because Cash couldn’t get a word out before the moment passed.
“I need a liar I can trust,” Arkady said as he leaned back, suddenly the businesslike Abascal son. He crossed his legs, long and lean in gray trousers, and laced his fingers together. “Someone who nobody will think twice about.”
It was meant to be cruel, and it worked because it was almost true. A low-key liar who Arkady could trust had been exactly what Donna expected of Cash when she sponsored him. It wasn’t as if his mom could afford the fees at Midnight Springs.
Cash had just been too human for it. Not to mention, at sixteen, a horny little bastard.
“Donna has other wisps working for her,” Cash said. “One of them—”
“Someone that I can trust,” Arkady repeated in a clipped voice. “Everyone currently in Donna’s employ is… suspect. They’re too close.”
“Too close to what?”
“To real monsters.”
Cash took a drink. “You’re going to need to explain,” he said. “The veiled insults aren’t really helping me follow.”
“I didn’t think they were that veiled,” Arkady said. His eyes flickered tungsten yellow with irritation, although Cash didn’t think it was entirely aimed at him. “Someone is selling information—about us, about our… business—to your colleagues. In particular, business in and around Roanoke. A redcap was nearly caught on camera at a body dump, the Black Witch of Merrimac was doorstepped outside her own house with a list of missing children and a photo of her fifty years ago, and the Worm has lost his seat on the Prodigium after a tip-off led the Jesuits to his latest… interest. He shed his human skin to escape the hunt without exposing us—left the husk for them to fish out of the river—and has to go to ground until he can grow a new one.”
There was a pause. When Cash didn’t fill it, Arkady grimaced for him.
“Say it,” he ordered.
There was A Way to couch accusations among the well-bred and horrifying, a delicate hemming that didn’t put any backs up. Cash had been dragged up, though. He knew the rules, but he could get away with pretending he didn’t.
“You know Donna did it, right?” he said. The family line had been—for centuries—that Belladonna didn’twanta seat on the Prodigium, just to live quietly with her children. Everyone knew it was a lie. The head table of the Prodigium had brought their wasted feet down on the matter and blocked her ascension. Sheownedsome minor seats outright and was owed by half the rest, but the Prodigium would never let her put her skinny ass directly on a red velvet seat. Not if they could help it, anyhow.
With a local seat suddenly empty, they might not be able to stop her, not without making their objections public rather than just… understood.
Arkady looked away, his profile sharp, the slice of his nose and the set line of his jaw. “She denies it,” he said. “To the Left Hand of the Prodigium, to the Black Witch, and to her heir’s face.”
“And she’d never risk her good name for a lie.”
