Chaos Choreography (4 page)

I sighed. The jury's still out on whether the Aeslin mice guilt trip us intentionally, or whether they're just really, really good at it, but the fact remains that every time we say “no,” they react like the world is ending—and there's only one way to fix it. “Meet me in the kitchen in an hour,” I said. “Cheese and cake will be provided.”

The priest looked back to me, suddenly hopeful. “May we cheer, Priestess?”

“Yes, yes, let them cheer,” muttered Dominic, not pulling his head out of the pillow. “It's not like I was going to get any more sleep this morning. What's a little cheering after a dinosaur and an alarm clock?”

“It wasn't a dinosaur,” I said automatically, before telling the mice, “You can cheer.”

The racket that went up was better than a cup of coffee for clearing my head. I blinked.

“Whoa. Um, okay. And on that note, I invoke Bedroom Privileges. Get out.”

“Yes, Priestess!” squeaked the mouse priest, now in much better spirits. The crowd dispersed with remarkable speed, vanishing under furniture and through the holes cut into the baseboards.

(If we ever tried to sell the property—which we wouldn't; Dad would burn the place to the ground before he let it leave the family—we'd have some explaining to do when the realtor saw the tiny, geometrically perfect mouse holes cut into every interior wall. In the case of long walls, like hallways or the living room, there were multiple holes, at least one every six feet. Of course, that was nothing compared to the explaining we'd have to do if the realtors decided to look inside one of those walls, and found the intricate network of stairways, portrait galleries, and rooms the Aeslin had built there, working around the insulation and wiring. Some houses have a mouse problem. We have a mouse utopia.)

Dominic left his face buried in his pillow. I planted a kiss at the back of his neck and slid off the bed, heading for the desk on the other side of the room. Getting there required me to weave around piles of boxes, which reinforced my determination to be completely moved out of this room by the end of the week. After spending a year in someone else's apartment, followed by six months in a U-Haul, I was ready to stop living out of boxes.

The power strip on the desk was connected to four phones: mine, Dominic's, and two burners. I picked up one of the burners, checked its charge, and took a deep breath before unlocking the screen and keying in the number for the production offices.

I didn't want to sit on the bed while I made the call, so I sat on the desk, crossing my legs and trying to focus on thoughts of serenity and calm.

The phone rang once; twice; three times, and I was starting to think I was calling too early in the day when there was a click and a generically pleasant female voice
said, “Adrian Crier Productions, how may I direct your call?”

I took a deep breath. When I spoke, my voice was light, breezy, and half an octave higher than it usually was: the voice of a woman whose greatest concern was figuring out how she was going to pay for a new tango costume. “Hi, this is Valerie Pryor, I got a message saying you wanted to speak with me?”

“Miss Pryor!” Suddenly, the woman on the other end of the phone sounded like she was actually invested in talking to me. That was . . . odd, and a bit disturbing. “Mr. Crier is expecting your call. Can you please hold while I check to see if he's available?”

“Sure,” I said. I'd barely finished the word when there was a click, and pleasant classical music began to play in my ear.

There was a creak from the direction of the bed. I turned to find Dominic staring at me, a bemused expression on his face. He was shirtless. I smiled and took a moment to admire the view.

Dominic is short by most people's standards, which means he's reasonable by mine, since I'm only five foot two when I'm not wearing heels. He has the kind of lean, solid build that I look for in a dance partner, thick, dark hair perfect for running my fingers through, and dark eyes that go well with the puzzled expressions he seems to wear almost constantly these days. I'd thought he was good looking even when he was a member of the Covenant of St. George and things could never have been serious between us. Now he's a free agent, and he's mine, and he's gorgeous.

There was another click. I returned my attention to the phone as a jovial British voice came on the line, exclaiming, “Valerie! As I live and breathe, it's good to hear from you, sweetheart! You were always one of my favorites, you know that, don't you darling?”

“Hi, Adrian,” I said, smiling broadly so he'd hear it in my voice. Adrian Crier was the sort of man who adored
you while you were on his good side, and wouldn't hesitate to bury you once you got on his bad side. Naturally, I'd always done my best to stay on his good side. “I missed you, too. What's going on? Why am I getting emails all of a sudden?”

“Well, darling, it's because the number we had for you wasn't ringing through anymore, and we needed to get hold of you rather desperately. Is this number on my display good? Can we call you here if we need to?”

It was an unassigned burner phone; that's why I'd used it. I'd just have to keep reloading it with minutes until whatever Adrian was asking me to do was over.

No. I frowned at myself. Until I had
turned down
whatever Adrian was asking me to do. “This is a good number for me, yes,” I said. “What's up?”

“Well, sweetheart, I don't know if you've been watching the ratings, but we're in a bit of a slump right now. People still care about dance—it's a vital part of the human emotional landscape—but they get down at heart when their favorites are eliminated, and they stop watching for a season while they get over it. Just like a breakup, wouldn't you say?”

No breakup had ever inspired me to the amount of self-destructive ice cream consumption
Dance or Die
had. I still injected a bit of awe into my voice as I replied, “I never thought of it like that, but you're so right. It's just like ending a relationship.”

“We've been commissioned for another season, thank God, but the network is starting to look a little reluctant to commit. So we were passing the old idea hat around, and Brenna came up with the best suggestion any of us had ever heard! Got a guess on what it is?”

“Um . . . reduce the number of audition shows from eight to four so you don't have to deal with the ratings drop that always comes from people getting bored and changing channels during hour two?”

A faint sharpness came into Adrian's voice. “You know how important the audition shows are to our audience, Valerie.”

“I know, I know, I love them, I watch them with my family, but I
understand
the level of technique we're seeing,” I said, trying not to sound like I was covering a mistake. Even though I technically was. “Those shows establish why the lineup looks the way it does once the season starts. I'm just saying, sometimes people come up to me and complain about how long it takes to get to the competition. So I might give up some of those shows if it meant the ratings of the rest would go up.”

“Ah,” said Adrian, sounding mollified. “I suppose that's not bad thinking, even if it goes counter to what we try to do with this program. Brenna's idea does dovetail a bit with what you've been saying, darling, in that it would replace the audition shows for this season with a pair of clip shows—and given that we've already passed the window for auditions by a good measure, it's what we're doing. I just wanted to know if you were on board. You're one of our stars, you know, even if you didn't go on to set the competition world on fire.”

“I've been busy,” I said, too relieved by the return of “darling” to his vocabulary to think about the rest. Then my brain caught up with my ears. “Wait. On board with what, Adrian? You didn't say what her idea was.”

“Oh, didn't I? Silly me. We're doing an all-star season, my dove. The top four from the past five seasons returning to duke it out and learn who America's Dancer of Choice
really
is.”

“Whoa,” I said.

“There's a quite decent prize package,” he said, wheedling. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, a feature in
Technique Magazine
, and a year's paid rent on a Manhattan flat. And the exposure, of course. It could kick your career to the next level.”

My career was over. I had walked away from it willingly, and with no intention of going back. “That's tempting, Adrian, but—”

“The other three dancers from your season are already on board. We can punt and go to the girl eliminated in the number five position, but wouldn't it be
better to bring back the dream team? Come on, sweetheart, be a peach and do it for me. Even if you don't need this, I do.”

I hesitated. My career was over . . . but that didn't mean I couldn't have one last hurrah. “Can I call you back in an hour? I need to check my schedule and have a word with my boyfriend.”

Dominic's expression darkened at the word “boyfriend.” He held up his left hand, looking exaggeratedly from me to his wedding ring and back again. I mouthed the word “sorry” at him. He scowled.

“Just don't leave us hanging any longer than that, all right, darling? I need to get this locked down. Talk to you soon.” Adrian hung up. I lowered the phone.

Dominic was still scowling. “Boyfriend? Was there a demotion in the night that I was unaware of? Because I didn't allow myself to be lectured by a woman in a skin-tight sequined jumpsuit just to be bumped back to ‘boyfriend' as soon as—Verity?” His scowl faded, replaced by concern. “What's wrong?”

I must have looked pretty distraught if he was having that reaction. I put the phone down and thought about standing, but I wasn't sure my legs would work. Better not to risk it until I had a bit more confidence. “That was Adrian Crier, the producer of
Dance or Die
. It's his baby. He has a real thing for dance education, and he basically went into reality television so he could have a dance show one day.”

“
Dance or Die
—that's the show you were on.” Dominic and I had spent a comfortable night curled up in a motel room in Colorado watching all my dance routines and solos on YouTube, with me explaining how each number had gone right—or wrong. I'd been more brutal to myself than the judging panel had ever been, but when I was done, Dominic had been there to kiss me and ask for more videos. It had been therapeutic in the extreme, and at the time, it had felt like a fitting funeral for my dance career.

Apparently not. Or maybe not, anyway; I still had to talk to some people, starting with the man in front of me.

“Yeah, that's the show I was on,” I said. “He wants to do an all-star season, with the top four dancers from the past five seasons. I was number two in my season.” Me and Lyra, the only female top two in the show's history. We'd promised to keep in touch after the show was over. I hadn't heard from her since she'd won.

Dominic's scowl lifted. “He wants you to be on television again?”

“Yeah.”

“Wouldn't that be dangerous, after . . . everything?”

“Maybe,” I admitted. Dominic and I had left New York—and he'd left the Covenant of St. George—after a Covenant strike team had arrived with the intention of checking his work and starting their purge. They'd found out about me, and hence that my family line hadn't died out after all; they'd learned that Dominic was keeping secrets, including my existence, from the organization he was supposed to be loyal to.

In the end, the only way we'd been able to escape with our lives was by having my telepathic cousin Sarah rewrite their memories, turning me into a Price imposter and Dominic into a power-mad traitor. As far as the Covenant team was concerned, both Dominic and his self-made “Price” had died in the gunfight that ended their assignment in the States.

(It had been a neat solution, but it wasn't without its costs. Sarah had never used her telepathy that way before, and the backlash hurt her. Badly. She's been recovering with my grandparents in Ohio ever since. For a while, we'd been afraid she was never going to be fully herself again. That fear had proved unfounded—she's definitely still Sarah, if less cocky and confident in her own abilities than she used to be—but it was a terrifying experience, and not one that I'm in any hurry to repeat.)

“What would the benefits be?” asked Dominic. “If you danced again, and won, would it make you restart your dance career?”

I blew out a slow breath. “I don't know,” I admitted. “I thought I was done with that part of my life, but I also
feel like . . . if I don't do this, I'll always be asking myself ‘what if,' you know? What if I'd gone back? What if I'd danced so well that they gave me a second chance at the big stage?”

“Are you good enough?” He held up a hand before I could squawk indignantly. “You're the finest dancer I've ever known, but when we met, you were dancing for three hours a day. I haven't seen you practice your footwork in weeks. Will you be able to meet your own standards on the floor?”

“Yes,” I said. This, at least, I could say with certainty. “I haven't been doing my dance practice, but the rest of my physical conditioning is still good. I'd have to vary my daily exercise routines, and really focus on my feet and hips between now and the show. That's no big deal. I'm in better shape than most dancers can even dream of—and dancers are by and large a healthy lot that spends a lot of time in motion.”

“And your Valerie identity, it's still sound?”

“No one's managed to blow it yet,” I said. “I'd have to unpack my wigs, and see about getting a few new ones, since the old ones have been in storage since my last competition. But Verity Price has never danced professionally, and we use so much makeup when I'm Valerie that she and I don't even have the same complexion. I'd basically have to pull my wig off and announce myself.” It was all very Scooby-Doo. A wig and some makeup and nobody knew my name. But it worked, and that was what mattered.