Chaos Choreography (26 page)

The brightness was a momentary distraction. I uncovered my eyes and turned to the floor, already knowing what I was going to see. The blood had been notification enough, like a marquee sign leading toward horror and the grave.

Mac and Leanne were stretched out side by side, his head by her feet, her head by his. Their hands were joined in the space between them, pinned to the floor by a spike of what looked like ivory, or polished bone. Like the others, they were naked, their bodies laid bare to the unforgiving world. Runes were carved into their skin, so
deep in some places that bone glistened through the gore, blindingly white in contrast to the red around it. The runes were larger this time, more elaborate.

The others saw it, too, but it was Alice who put it into words: “They're not afraid of getting caught. Those pictures you showed me before, those were a mess, but this . . . they took their time and made sure every little detail was Just. So.” She shook her head. “This is sick.”

“What are the differences between this scene and the last?” asked Dominic. He had a high, tight note in his voice, like he was stepping back from the situation and putting it behind a glass wall, something clear enough to let him see, but solid enough to distance him. It was his Covenant training coming to the fore, and I almost envied him the ability to become divorced from the terrible things that were going on.

I had no such training. My training was less about killing and more about saving: it never let me step back. Instead, I took a step down, moving closer to the mess, and said, “Some of the runes are the same, but there are more of them, and some I've never seen before. The spike is new. That's physical evidence of what they're doing. The last two victims weren't holding hands.”

“They're not sliced down the middle,” said Malena. I glanced up at her. She was still sticking to the wall, and her transformation toward her more canine form was continuing; spikes had broken through the skin of her neck and shoulders, and her complexion was shifting toward a dusky gray. It was a slow process. She'd be able to talk for a while yet, even if she chose to keep transforming. “There's no way the killers could've gotten to their guts.”

“So we either have two ritualists, or the ritual is evolving.” I pulled out my phone and began snapping pictures. “Malena, I'm going to need you to take the overhead shots again.”

“We need that spike,” said Alice.

“We can't take it,” said Dominic. His voice was sharp.
We all turned to look at him. He shook his head, and said, “Whoever is doing this, they use the confusion charms to keep people from realizing the eliminated dancers have vanished without a trace—everyone thinks they've seen the missing people with someone else. Our killers aren't aware that they have an active opposition in the building.”

“Yet,” said Pax.

“Yet,” agreed Dominic. “Nothing stays secret forever. But if we steal that piece of ghoulish equipment, they'll realize someone knows what they've been doing. They'll change their ways. I don't think they'll stop. People like this,
monsters
like this, don't stop simply because they've been discovered. If anything, they kill faster, destroy faster, because they no longer have secrecy to protect them.”

“He's right,” said Alice. “Every snake cult I've ever seen has gotten a lot nastier once people knew for sure that they were there. It's like rattlesnakes. They're pretty good neighbors until you flip their rocks over.”

“Don't compare these people to rattlesnakes,” said Malena, and her voice was filled with the sound of bones rearranging themselves, teeth sharpening to new points. I remembered with a jolt that she and Mac were from the same season. They had danced together. He hadn't been her regular partner, but he'd been the Pax to her Anders, and now he was dead, bled out on a cold stone floor in the basement of the theater, and there was nothing she could do to bring him back.

“Rattlesnakes only bite when they have to,” Malena continued. I could hear the sorrow under the sounds of shifting now. I had just needed to figure out how to listen for it. “These people, they're biting for the fun of it. They're biting because they want to
get
something. They're not rattlesnakes. They're
monsters
.”

“You're right, and I'm sorry,” said Alice, glancing in my direction. I nodded slightly, thanking her without words. The last thing we needed was for Malena to
launch herself at my grandmother because she'd been insensitive. “We need to stop this.”

“That won't bring them back.” Malena scuttled lower on the wall, holding out her hand toward me. “Give me the phone. I'll get those pictures you want.”

“See if you can get close-ups of the spike,” I said. “If there are any carvings or anything, we need to know about it.”

Malena nodded once, closing her sharp-nailed fingers around the phone. Then she scurried off, starting her photo project.

I turned. Pax was black-eyed and shaking, staring at the pool of blood that covered the floor. “Dominic, take Pax up to the hall. The two of you need to keep an eye out, in case the people who did this come back.” And in case the smell of blood overwhelmed the Ukupani's ability to keep himself under control. I had faith in Dominic's ability to restrain Pax without hurting either of them too badly. There was one big advantage to Pax losing control, rather than Malena: if his transformation became too advanced, he'd lose the ability to breathe oxygen, and would pass out before automatically reverting to an air-breathing form. Malena would just keep going until she had more ripped-off faces for her collection.

“Thank you,” said Pax, and virtually fled back up the stairs, with Dominic following close behind him. Alice watched them go.

“Do you think the cultists will come back?” she asked, turning back to me.

“Not for a while,” I said. Malena was clinging to the ceiling now, taking overhead shots. “I think they'll leave the bodies here for a few hours, and then magic as much of the mess away as they can. There won't be any sign of what happened here by morning.”

“I see.” Alice shook her head. “I should have realized there was a confusion charm on the building. It only makes sense, given the way you described everyone else's behavior. Verity, I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. You had no
reason
to suspect.” I took another step down and crouched, trying to get a better look at the spike that held our latest victims' hands together. “I'll call home when we get back to the apartments. Daddy can FedEx us some anti-telepathy charms.”

“I have a better idea,” said Alice. “I meant it when I said we could get counter-charms from Bon. She's a routewitch, and she knows me well enough that my word is good when I tell her she'll be paid.”

“Do routewitches usually take money?” My Aunt Laura was a routewitch, but she disappeared before I was born, and I've never had that much direct dealing with them. They were mostly active on the highways and in truck stops, and those weren't places where you found many ballroom dance studios.

“They take distance,” said Alice. Her expression went briefly unreadable. “I've traveled a very long way.”

Malena dropped from the ceiling onto the stairs behind me. It was abrupt enough that I jumped as I whirled to face her, and behind me I heard the click of Alice removing the safety on her gun. There was another click as she put it back. Malena thrust the phone at me, stone-faced and slowly reverting toward her usual human form.

“Here,” she said. “Enough gore to keep a teenage boy happy. I need to shower forever. We done here, or are we gonna hang out and see if we can't murder the shit out of the people who did this?”

I hesitated. There were five of us, and I might be up for elimination next week; even apart from the need to save the lives of my fellow contestants, my own life was potentially in imminent danger. At the same time, we had no idea how many snake cultists there were, or whether they were human or something else. If we stayed, if we waited, we could be wasting five lives for a chance at saving two.

The thought was followed by a wave of guilt. Since when was my life worth more than anyone else's? Since when did I get to value my friends above the people I was
supposed to be protecting and taking care of? No. I couldn't think that way.

“Yes,” I said. “We wait.”

Hopefully, we wouldn't be waiting for nothing.

There were no other entrances to this particular basement: just the one door, leading down to the abattoir the previously innocent space had become. Malena crawled up the wall while I took to the rafters. Alice elected to wait just inside the basement door, sitting on the steps and waiting for someone to come and make her night more interesting.

Pax and Dominic were a problem. Neither of them were climbers, and we couldn't put Pax on the other side of the door with Alice unless we wanted him driven wild by the smell of blood. In the end, we'd sent Pax down the hall to hide in the curtains and watch for people who might be coming to check on their handiwork, while Dominic went outside to watch the parking lot. It wasn't a perfect solution, but this wasn't a perfect place to put together an ambush. The basement was a killing jar . . . if we could get our killers inside. Until then, they had all the hallways and hidey-holes of a very large theater at their disposal, and we needed to be careful.

I crouched in the rafters, balancing on the balls of my feet, and waited for the signal to move. Malena clung to the wall nearby. She looked calmer, and more human, than she had in the basement. She wasn't as upset by the smell of blood as Pax was. That didn't mean it hadn't been getting to her. It could be easy to forget, sometimes, how weak the human nose was when compared to most therianthropes. As a chupacabra, Malena was attuned to the smell of rot and offal. It was probably perfume to her heightened senses. Leaving her to marinate in it would still have been cruel.

“You okay?” I murmured. The theater had been
designed to muffle backstage noise as much as possible, with sound baffles in the walls and foam padding on the bottoms of the rafters. Our killers would have to be bats to hear me.

(Bats weren't off the table—the Batboy story has some real cryptid roots—but they weren't likely. None of the batlike cryptids we've found so far have been therianthropes, and I was pretty sure I would have noticed people with giant leather wings trooping around the halls.)

“Mac didn't like me,” she replied, her voice pitched as low as mine. “He said Latin ballroom was primitive and dirty when compared to ballet. I said he was a racist fuck-hole. We weren't friends, you know?”

I couldn't think of anything to say. I just nodded, hoping she could see how sorry I was from my expression. Hoping she would understand my silence.

Malena grimaced. “But, man, he could dance, and when a couple of the guys got on my case for having a funny diet—that whole ‘all-liquid, all the time' thing looked sort of like an eating disorder to them, I guess—he told them to go stuff themselves. Said I was a brilliant technician who was wasting herself on an inferior form of dance, and that I was worth twenty of them. He wasn't a
nice
guy, but he was a
good
guy, you know?”

“I do,” I said quietly. I've known my share of good guys who wouldn't know nice if it bit them in the ass. Sometimes I liked them a lot better than the alternative.

“He was a good guy,” said Malena again, almost meditatively. She went silent after that, and I let her. She was the one who'd just suffered a loss, not me. She knew what she needed better than I did.

The hallway beneath us was motionless. The stage techs were gone, and all the other dancers would be home by now. I wondered whether the charms that kept anyone from noticing when the eliminated dancers disappeared would also prevent them from noticing that Malena, Pax, and I hadn't come back. If we died here
tonight, would our friends make up stories to explain why it was perfectly reasonable that we had left our things in our apartments before quitting the show?

The thought of Anders and Lyra trying to explain the number of knives under my mattress was briefly entertaining, but only briefly. The Aeslin mice would have to find their way from Burbank to Portland if I disappeared, and while that might sound like the premise of a children's book—colony of talking, intelligent rodents travels hundreds of miles to reunite with their human protectors—the reality would be cruel, and bloody, and probably end with the deaths of all the mice who'd volunteered to accompany me. The Aeslin counted on us to protect them. I couldn't protect them if I was dead.

Seconds slithered by, piling up until they transformed into minutes. The minutes began doing the same, until I had no real sense of time; I just knew my calves ached from holding my position for so long, and that it was getting difficult to keep my eyes open. Carefully, I shifted around to plop my butt down on the rafter and dig my phone out of my pocket. It was almost midnight. We'd been waiting here for more than two hours, and nothing had happened.