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.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I muttered. “Something’s wrong.”
“What do you mean?” asked Malena. She twisted her head at an angle that a human spine would have been hard-pressed to achieve, narrowing her eyes. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“That’s what’s wrong. Grandma’s not an ambush predator. She should have gotten bored by now.” And she hadn’t. The basement door was still closed; Alice had yet to make her reappearance. “Something’s wrong.”
I pressed my knees together, lifting my weight up onto the heels of my hands. Then, without a pause to think about what I was doing, I pushed myself forward, off the rafter and into free-fall.
The descent was exactly what I needed to clear my head, and as I fell, I felt the sleepiness slip away, leaving me awake, alert, and plummeting. The first two were good things: the third, I’d been counting on. Spreading my arms so that I was swan-diving toward the rapidly approaching floor, I snagged one of the guide ropes used to hoist things up into the rafters, pulling myself in and looping my arms around it so as to maximize my drag without ripping all the skin off of my hands. My speed of descent dropped by more than half. I hooked a foot around the rope, and suddenly I was sliding as gracefully as a fireman down a pole.
I tightened my grip on the rope when I was a foot or so above the ground, bringing myself to an abrupt and relatively painless halt. Unwinding my foot from the rope took a second longer—long enough for Malena to race down the wall and step onto the floor, shaking away her lingering reptilian attributes with a rattle of spines that were there when the noise began and gone when it finished.
“What the fuck?” she demanded.
“Gravity and I have an agreement,” I said. “I treat it with respect, and it doesn’t smear me across the nearest flat surface.” The basement door seemed larger now that I was on a level with it—larger, and more dangerous. I took a deep breath, stepped forward, and turned the knob.
The stairs on the other side were empty.
The place where Alice should have been was unoccupied. I stared at it for a moment, trying to process what I wasn’t seeing. Then I bent and touched the concrete. It was cool. She’d been gone for a while.
There was a rustling sound behind me as Malena stepped closer. I didn’t turn. “Go find Dominic and Pax,” I said tightly. My hand found the butt of my gun almost without my consciously deciding to draw it. If Alice was missing . . .
My paternal grandmother was one of the deadliest people I knew. The rest of us were good, but she was the result of Covenant training and techniques combined with decades of doggedly pursuing traces of her lost husband across a hundred hostile dimensions. For our attackers to have taken her without making a ruckus was almost as unbelievable as it was terrifying.
“What are you going to do?” asked Malena.
I looked at the stairs, stretching down into the dark, and swallowed. There was really only one thing I could say, much as I disliked it.
“I’m going to find my grandma.”
Fourteen
“I don’t figure I’ll have a headstone. I don’t honestly figure I’ll have a grave. Just a dark spot on the ground somewhere, and the knowledge that when it mattered, I wasn’t good enough. I guess I never really was.”
—Alice Healy
The Crier Theater, descending a flight of stairs down into the dark, like that isn’t the worst idea ever
I WALKED DOWN THE STAIRS, taking my time, sure with every step that this would be the one where my foot found my grandmother’s body. The door was open behind me, providing enough light that I wasn’t worried about missing a step and falling, but not enough light for me to see what was ahead.
“Grandma?” I didn’t dare shout. I could still hiss, calling down into the dark in the hopes that if she was wounded, she would hear me and respond.
There was no answer.
My foot hit level ground. I squinted my eyes shut as I felt along the wall for the light switch, finally clicking it on to reveal . . . absolutely nothing.
The bodies were gone. The blood was gone. Alice was gone. There was no sign that anything bad had ever happened in this room; it was just a gray box with a few folding chairs against the walls, too out of the way and inconvenient to be used even for storage. I stayed where I was for several seconds, staring in disbelief at the emptiness.
“Grandma?” I whispered.
The room, in the way of empty places with high ceilings, bounced my voice back at me. Not enough to form a true echo, but enough to make sure I knew I was absolutely, unquestionably alone.
That was the final straw. I launched myself at the nearest wall, shoving the folding chairs aside as I scrabbled at the concrete, looking for a crack, a seam—anything to betray the presence of a hidden door or secret passageway. I was willing to accept that we were up against people who could use magic to clean a room without leaving a trace. I was a lot less willing to accept that they could somehow get into and out of that room without using the door.
If they were capable of teleportation, we were fucked, and I was going to find a safer line of work. Like naked alligator training at the Gatorland amusement park over in Florida.
I’d just knocked over the last row of folding chairs when someone grabbed my elbow. I whirled, free hand already cocked back and ready to swing. My eyes registered Dominic’s presence in the nick of time, and I halted with my fist barely an inch from his nose.
He raised an eyebrow. I stared at him, panting and panicked. He let go of my elbow. I lowered my hand.
“What happened?” he asked, and his voice was soft enough to make me feel even worse about nearly punching him. He was clearly trying not to startle me more than he already had.
There’s a special sort of awful feeling that comes with making your husband look at you like you’re some sort of dangerous animal. Up until that moment, I had never fully experienced it. After that moment, I could have gone a long, long time without feeling it again.
“Blood’s gone,” I said. I straightened, hearing footsteps on the stairs, and looked over in time to see Pax making an appearance. That was good. The less I had to explain later, the better off we were going to be. “Bodies are gone. Alice is gone. There has to be a hidden door. They can’t be teleporting. That takes a ridiculous amount of power. Someone would have noticed.”
“No, but perhaps they can be manipulating the stone, or using a dimensional rift,” said Dominic. “There are more ways to be secretive than I care to consider. The first bodies were found in a different underground room, were they not? How many such rooms does this establishment have?”
I paused. “I don’t know,” I admitted, after a moment’s thought. “One basement-level room is weird enough in California. Two . . . this place could be half belowground for all I know.” Belowground . . . I smiled.
Dominic nodded approvingly. Pax took a step back. Apparently, my smile wasn’t as reassuring as I’d always thought it was.
“You’ve put a piece in its place, and now you’re calm enough to tell me about it,” said Dominic. “Pray, do, and do not make me worry about you and your missing family.”
“She’s your family, too, remember; marriage has a lot to answer for,” I said. “We’re underground. This is earthquake country, and we’re underground. That’s not the sort of construction decision you make on a whim. Adrian built this place. Either he did a lot of excavation that would have looked weird to his network sponsors, or he built on top of something that already existed. Malena!”
Malena’s head appeared at the top of the basement door. From the angle, she was clinging to the wall again, hanging upside down. I didn’t know enough about chupacabra to know whether that was normal for her species, or whether it was something uniquely Malena.
“What?” she asked, shouting down the stairs rather than descending.
“Got it,” she said, and vanished again.
I turned back to the boys. “We’re going to check all the rooms that could share a wall, or even a corner, with this one. And then we’re going to go talk to some friends of my grandmother’s about colonialism.”
Pax looked baffled. Dominic, who was more accustomed to the way my brain worked, smiled, utterly content with this turn of events. I was in motion now. As anyone who’s ever worked with dancers could tell you, that was when I was at my most dangerous.
We didn’t find any traces of Alice—or any blood—nearby. We did find four more underground rooms, one of which was only accessible by going through a door hidden in the back of a janitor’s closet. Dominic and I had been forced to go into that one alone: both Malena and Pax had wrinkled their noses at the smell of the cleaning chemicals on the shelves, and refused to go any farther until we confirmed that something was actually down there.
Nothing was down there. Nothing but spiders and concrete and the faint scent of mold. Most of the underground rooms had been like that: perfectly squared corners, perfectly smooth walls, and wasted storage space. The ones that did have things stored in them seemed almost haphazard—folding chairs in the room where we’d found the bodies, a few pieces of old stage equipment in another, and some sad-looking costumes in a third. The stairs were an obstacle, sure, but given how over-packed all of the aboveground storage rooms were, I would have expected the crew to have been bleeding off more of the excess. So why weren’t they?
Dominic and I returned to ground level, where a quick glance at my phone confirmed that it was coming on one in the morning. “All right, here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “Dominic, no one knows your face. Go hail us a cab. That way, if Adrian has anyone watching the theater, he won’t see one of us doing it. We’re all going to ride back to the apartments, and then Dominic and I are going to go see some friends of my grandmother’s.”
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