Chaos Choreography (33 page)

A knife, ribbon-thin and sharp enough to gleam in the light from Alice's candle, slid out of his sleeve as he raised his arm to his throat. With a single decisive motion, he sliced lengthwise, and his flesh parted in a river of red. I shouted, a wordless exclamation of dismay, still moving toward him.

Then Alice's arms were around my waist, yanking me away from the arterial spray. She was faster than I had
been, maybe because she'd caught on more quickly than I had: she got me clear without a drop of blood hitting my clothing.

“You have to go back upstairs,” she said, pulling me back even further. “You can't be covered in blood, or people are going to ask questions.”

“
You're
covered in blood,” I said, pulling away. She let me go, and I turned to face her. “Won't that raise questions?”

There wasn't that much blood on her when I actually looked, and what there was matched her tank top almost perfectly. She could easily write it off as grease stains or mud. I'd never really stopped to think about my grandmother's wardrobe choices. Suddenly, they were starting to make a terrible kind of sense.

“I'm planning to sneak out the back door as soon as I collect the mice, since I can't be here during the day,” she said, tone calm and level. “I need a shower and some sleep. I'll drop the mice back at the apartment, do what needs to be done, and then get my bike and go to check in with Dominic. We need to find Bon.”

“For the counter-charms, right.” The reality of what just happened was starting to sink in. My heart was hammering against my ribs, and my stomach was filled with sour churning. I wasn't going to throw up—I was too much of a professional for that—but oh, I wanted to. “Grandma, that man just killed himself rather than let us question him. What the hell are we in the middle of?”

“He mentioned his severance package. Bogeymen are all about commerce and contracts. The snake cult probably offered him enough money for keeping their secrets that it was worth his life to get that payout.” Alice looked over my shoulder, back to the bogeyman. Her expression softened. “Poor man didn't have a choice. If the contract terms were strict enough, he could have found himself in the position of needing to die or provide an additional sacrifice from his own family. No bogeyman patriarch would be willing to do that if there was any other way.”

“Fuck.”

Alice nodded. “Yes.”

This snake cult wasn't playing softball. Whatever they wanted, whatever they were hoping to achieve, there was no body count too big to make it happen. We were the only ones who were standing in their way . . . and I still had to get back to rehearsal.

Sometimes life just isn't fair.

“Heroes save everyone. Heroes sacrifice themselves for the sake of people they've never met. We're not heroes. We're never going to be. But if that means we make it home alive, I'm all right with that.”

—Alice Healy

The Be-Well Motel, about seven hours later

D
OMINIC ANSWERED T
HE DOOR
when I knocked, taking in my bedraggled appearance and spiky hat-hair (well, technically, “wig-hair,” but that had a confusing connotation) without comment. He opened the door wider, letting me inside. The smell of Chinese takeout assaulted my nostrils a beat before the mice started cheering.

“I thought you were dropping the mice at the apartment,” I said.

Alice, who was sitting cross-legged on the room's single bed with a carton of shrimp fried rice in her hand, smiled brightly. “They decided they'd rather come with me for Chinese food and debriefing.”

“They're
Aeslin mice
,” I said. “They would rather do
anything
that involves food.”

“HAIL! HAIL THE WISDOM OF THE ARBOREAL PRIESTESS!” exulted the mice.

“See?” I said. Dominic was waiting patiently nearby. I turned and leaned up to give him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Hi.”

“Hi,” he replied. “Did the remainder of rehearsal go well?”

“This week's group number is a hip-hop piece set to ‘Dragula,' so yes if you like being screamed at to be a better vampire, and no if you're not comfortable doing a dance routine where six of the people have wooden stakes in their hands. Somebody's going to get impaled.” I walked over to investigate the Chinese food. “Lyra isn't speaking to me because of the whole ‘ditching her for Malena' thing, Anders is telling everybody they have to be nice to me because my grandmother is dying, and Brenna should be here in about twenty minutes, so I can fill her in on what we found under the theater.”

“You mean Malena,” said Alice.

“No, I mean Brenna,” I said. “She's the show's host, and she's part of the local Nest. She needs to know what's going on. Also, the people I heard talking in the subbasement confirmed that she wasn't part of the snake cult, which makes her one of the safest potential allies we have left.” The salt-and-pepper prawns were gone, except for a single piece of chitin and a few slices of pepper. I made a sad face.

Dominic tapped me on the shoulder. I turned, and he presented me with a fresh carton of prawns. “I know how much you enjoy the cockroaches of the sea,” he said. “Alice was just explaining her plan to find Bon.”

“She won't be at the flea market, but she won't have gone far, either,” said Alice. “We need to figure out where the routewitches camp in this area, and Bon will be there.”

“Which gets us the counter-charms, got it,” I said, sitting down on the floor and opening my Chinese food. “It's Friday. The show—and elimination—is next Thursday. We need to find these snake cultists and stop them before that happens.”

“On the plus side, we know they're not going to kill anybody before then,” said Alice. “The only bodies we found in that room were people you knew.”

“Oh, yay: only my friends are in danger.” I didn't want to be hungry. My stomach grumbled, and I picked up a
pair of chopsticks. “I have rehearsal tomorrow. If that's when you're visiting Bon, I won't be able to come with you. Or we could wait until Sunday and just go see her at the flea market.”

“I was hoping to be able to pick up the charms on Sunday, if she doesn't have something already prepared,” said Alice. “There's a chance she'll need a little time, and I want us to have them before we go back to the theater Monday morning.”

“We'll need them for Pax and Brenna, as well as the three of us and Malena,” I said. Putting it that way, I actually felt pretty good about the team we were assembling. I couldn't ask Brenna to fight for us—dragon princesses weren't exactly set up for dealing a lot of damage, and she couldn't beat anybody to death with her spike-heeled shoes—but I wanted her to understand what was going on around her. Having a good source of inside information couldn't hurt anything. It might help.

“That's going to cost,” cautioned Alice.

“That's why we have credit cards.”

“Routewitches don't take money for things like this. They take . . . distance. Distance traveled, distance seen.” Alice sighed and plucked at her shirt. It was another tank top, this one dusky gray. “The shirt I was wearing earlier might work. I went through a lot of dimensions trying to get back to here, and I was wearing it the whole time. That's got to have a little oomph behind it.”

“I am glad, I think, that no one in my immediate family was ever a witch,” said Dominic, in the slow, careful way he used when he was trying not to offend someone, but knew it might be unavoidable. “It seems very complicated, and like there are a great many rules to be learned and then avoided.”

“You're not wrong,” I said.

Alice opened her mouth to speak, and froze as there was a knocking at the window. It was light, more a rapping than anything else. We all turned.

“Okay, first person who whispers ‘nevermore' is getting kicked,” I said.

The rapping came again.

“I'll answer that, shall I?” said Dominic. He walked over to the window, pushing his duster back to expose the hilt of the knife I'd given him for our six-month anniversary. And people say romance is dead.

He unlatched the window and eased it upward, shoulders tense as he prepared for the worst. What he got was Malena's head appearing in the opening, upside-down.

“It is windy as shit and it smells like diapers out here,” she said. “I'm coming in.”

“By all means,” said Dominic, letting go of his duster as he stepped to the side. “I assume coming uninvited through motel windows is a point of chupacabra etiquette, and I should applaud your manners while shaming myself for my ignorance.”

“Nah, I'm just rude,” said Malena, swinging herself in through the window. Her hands and feet—both bare—were twisted into claws, covered with tiny black-and-orange scales. Spikes had broken through the skin of her shoulders, and pushed up the fabric at the back of her tube top in a disconcerting way. She saw me looking and shrugged, looking almost sheepish. “This is as far as I can go before my face starts getting weird and my tail starts popping out. It's actually a little uncomfortable to stop here, but it's better than getting shot for a monster when I start knocking on windows.”

“Right,” I said.

“Is that Chinese food?” asked Malena, changing subjects. Her hands and feet shifted back to the human norm, scales replaced by smooth brown skin, as the spikes on her back retracted. In a matter of seconds, no one could have ever guessed that she'd been the monster at our window. That was the trick with chupacabra: they hid in plain sight, except when they didn't want to.

“Malena, why are you here?” I asked. It was a little past seven o'clock in the evening: while she could probably have made a large portion of her trip in the sewers, clinging to the walls to keep her pants clean, she would still have needed to walk aboveground at least partway.
The risk of being seen didn't seem to balance the reward of free Chinese food.

(Although for a dancer, it might come close. When we're working, we're like teenage boys: constantly hungry, and willing to go to great lengths for a free meal. Forget saying “hey kid, go into this cave and bring back the magic lantern for me.” You'd have much better luck with “hey kid, go into this cave, there's an unguarded buffet.”)

“Because I figured you were going to try cutting me out of things about now, and while I should probably be down with that—I mean, hello, opportunity
not
to rush headlong into certain danger? Sign me up—I'm really not.” Malena bared her teeth. “Mac was one of mine. Now he's dead. Whoever's doing this needs to pay. Plus Brenna was on her way over, and she was willing to give me a ride once I showed her my claws.”

Which meant Brenna now knew that Malena was a chupacabra. That was a relief: it meant I didn't need to worry about blowing Malena's cover. As a human, it wasn't my place to run around outing cryptids who didn't want to be revealed.

Malena wasn't done. She turned to Alice, frowning, and asked, “Where the fuck did you go? You scared the shit out of all of us.” She sounded affronted, like scaring her was some great and profound crime against the laws of nature. Maybe it was. I didn't know much about chupacabra culture, but I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that it was based on firm principles of “don't freak out your neighbor, save that for the humans.”

“Somebody who could open masked portals grabbed me from behind, and the next thing I knew, I was in another dimension,” said Alice. She made it sound perfectly reasonable, like this was the sort of thing that happened every day, and was no more problematic than breaking a nail.

Dominic didn't take it quite so calmly. He stood up straighter and asked, “How could you tell?”

“The air.” We all looked at her blankly. Alice shrugged.
“Most Earth-type dimensions have a breathable atmosphere. Getting access to the ones that don't is surprisingly hard. The spells have all these countermeasures and protections built in and anyway, you can't do it without more prep than my attackers had. They just shunted me to the nearest place they had access to, which hadn't had an industrial revolution on the continent corresponding to North America yet. Everything smelled and tasted different. You develop a palate for that sort of thing once you've been dealing with it for long enough.”

Malena was the first to speak: “Lady, you need better hobbies.”

“I knit,” said Alice.

There was a knock at the door. I put my carton of shrimp down and moved to open it, letting a flustered-looking Brenna into the increasingly cramped motel room.

“Sorry I'm late to the party,” she said. “I had to circle a few times before I found a parking space.”

“There's a garage across the street,” said Malena.

Brenna shrugged out of her coat, expression unrepentant. “It charged five dollars an hour. That's highway robbery, and I'd never be able to explain the expense to my sisters. They're only all right with the size of my car because the studio pays for half my gas, and we can use it on our Costco runs.”

Dragons bought in bulk. Of course they did. If there was something that could be done to pinch a penny, they would do it, and so well that it made human coupon clippers weep and beg to learn their secrets. I closed the door.

“How much did Malena tell you?” I asked.

“Just that she wanted a ride,” said Brenna.

I looked to Malena. She shrugged. “I figured you were going to do the debrief and I didn't want to take the bus. I'm intrinsically lazy.”

“Right.” I took a deep breath. Brenna
loved
her dancers. This was going to suck. But the best way to deal with it was quickly. Turning to Brenna, I said, “All the dancers
who've been eliminated are dead. There's a snake cult operating inside the building, and they've been using the eliminated couples as sacrifices to try and manifest their god.”

Brenna blinked. She didn't say anything.

“I have pictures of the bodies, if you don't believe me. Please, try to believe me. You don't want to see these.” I didn't want to have seen them, and I had a lot more experience with death than Brenna did. She was a sheltered dragon princess from an established Nest. There was a good chance she'd never seen a dead body in her life.

Finally, she spoke. “You can't be serious,” she said, voice quavering. “We would have noticed.
I
would have noticed. They're my babies. You're all my babies.”

“The snake cult has confusion charms tucked all over the theater,” said Alice. “Once someone was added to the forgetting portion of the spell, you would have just stopped caring. It's not your fault.”

“Who the hell are you, anyway?” Brenna rounded on Alice, appearing to notice her for the first time.

“It's cool, Brenna, she's my grandmother—that never stops sounding weird.” I shook my head. “Brenna Kelly, meet Alice Price-Healy. Grandma, meet Brenna. No one is stabbing, shooting, or immolating anyone in this hotel room.”

“Please,” added Dominic. “I have to sleep here.”

“HAIL!” rejoiced the mice. “HAIL THE LACK OF STABBING, SHOOTING, AND FLAME!”

I wasn't sure whether they couldn't pronounce “immolation,” or whether it just hadn't fit into their chant. It wasn't worth arguing about. Besides, I had something else to worry about: Brenna, who was staring, open-mouthed, at the colony. This was the usual response to the mice, especially from people who hadn't been warned about them in advance.

We just didn't have time for it. “Yes, they're Aeslin mice, yes, they're supposed to be extinct, and yes, they're with me,” I said, before she could say anything. “They're
good at keeping other people's secrets, although most family secrets do sort of tend to get worked into the colony's religious rites. Please don't shout.”