“What’s the bad part?” I asked.
“A lot of people will probably get eaten on purpose. Snake gods are hungry when they rise, and if you want to keep a snake happy, you feed it.” Bon pressed her lips into a thin, hard line. “Worse yet, those runes . . . they’re not trying for one of the smaller unspeakably large snakes. This is going to summon them something enormous, and two deaths won’t be enough to fuel it. Neither will six deaths.”
“How many will be?” I asked.
“Honestly, I can’t say. But I’d guess at least ten, probably more like twelve or fourteen.” Bon’s expression turned grim as she looked around the tent. “You’ve got a lot of bodies ahead of you if you don’t figure out who’s doing this.”
Well, damn.
Twelve
“The world is going to get in the way sometimes. That’s what the world does. What you have to do, what you have to be prepared to do, is plant your feet and tell the world that you’re not going to be the one who gives ground.”
—Enid Healy
The Crier Theater, four days later
WE HAD LEFT THE FLEA MARKET—collecting Malena from a stall that sold live birds, where she’d purchased a box of pigeons which she had proceeded to suck dry in the car—and returned to the apartments with our newly-acquired weapons and our newly-heightened sense of urgency. Explaining what we’d learned about the situation to Malena while she picked feathers out of her teeth had been odd, but not odd enough to make me stop.
In the end, we were better armed and better informed, but no more aware of who was behind the situation. Dominic had dropped us off with a dire warning to be careful, and we’d slipped back into our rooms without attracting too much attention. It helped that Sunday was everybody’s free day; no one was looking for anything out of the ordinary. No one but us—and even we couldn’t find it. Even Artie hadn’t been able to work his particular brand of incredibly nerdy magic. Oh, the theater had cloud storage, but it was used solely for rehearsal footage and show recordings, not for the security in the halls.
(One good, if largely irrelevant, thing had come of his trawling through the systems: we knew for sure now that it had been Jessica, and not Reggie, who’d been in the wrong when she got dropped. It was basically useless information, but Pax had passed it on to Reggie without letting on how he knew. Reggie had been a lot more careful around Jessica since then, which was all to the good. She wasn’t quite sabotaging the other contestants. She was still enough of a snake that she should have been attracting a cult of her own.)
The days had fallen back into the same pattern of rehearsals, costume fittings, and frantic searches of the theater. Having Malena on our side meant she and Pax could constantly sniff around for signs of blood or ritual herbs. Sadly, that didn’t mean they’d been able to find anything, and by the time the night of the show arrived, we were all consumed by nerves.
Anders picked up on my anxiety—it would have been hard for him not to. He stepped up behind me while I was checking my makeup before the opening jazz number. Sasha had bent us into the shapes she wanted, and all that remained was getting through the next five minutes without breaking an ankle. Or a neck. To be honest, I was more worried about the latter.
“You okay?” he asked, looming in my mirror. He focused on my reflection with an intensity that made me borderline uncomfortable.
I didn’t let it show. He’d always been attracted to me, and he’d always taken “no” for an answer. I just had to act oblivious and things would be okay.
“Nope,” I said, using eyelash glue to secure one more rhinestone to my cheekbone. We were dancing the seasons tonight, and I was supposed to be a winter wind. A little weird, sure, but that was lyrical jazz for you: the only thing that kept it from being even weirder than contemporary was the need to keep us all contorting into shapes that the human body was never meant to achieve.
“Nerves?” he asked.
“Nerves, and family trouble.” We’d find out which dancers were in danger after the group routine. Anders might be a little too focused on me sometimes, but he was still my partner, and I still loved him as a friend. I always would.
I dropped the eyelash glue and spun around in my chair, grabbing for his hands. Anders blinked at me, surprised but not displeased.
“Poppy and Chaz rushed out of here so fast last week that I didn’t get to say good-bye,” I said. His face fell as he realized I wasn’t about to confess my undying love. I pressed on. “I don’t think either of us is going to be in danger, but I want you to promise that if we are, if either one of us gets eliminated, that you’ll stick around so we can say good-bye. Please. Promise me.”
Anders blinked again. “Dude, Val, what’s gotten into you? I expected nervous. I didn’t expect psycho.” He tried to pull his hands away, eyes widening at the strength of my grip. “Yes, okay? Yes, I promise, if either one of us gets eliminated—which isn’t going to happen—I’ll find you backstage. No matter what.”
“I’m so glad to hear that. I don’t think I could bear it if I didn’t get to say good-bye to you.” I’m not sure which of us was more surprised when I hugged him: me, or Anders.
He relaxed into my embrace after the initial stiffness, and he was smiling when he pulled away. “Here I thought you weren’t a hugger.”
“I’m not,” I said, turning back to my mirror before he could realize how uncomfortable I was. This was another of the places where my real life and my fantasy life diverged. Verity was a hugger, but Verity only hugged people who wouldn’t be surprised when they felt a gun pressing against their hip or a sheathed knife digging into their stomach. Anders had no idea how many weapons I was carrying. That had been foolish, and worse, it had been weak. I needed to be strong, now more than ever.
If I wasn’t, someone else was going to die tonight.
“Special circumstances, huh?” Anders patted me on the shoulder. “It’s going to be fine, Val. We danced like gods last week. Nobody’s going to eliminate us.”
“Hope you’re right,” I said, picking up my eyelash glue and carefully tacking one last rhinestone into place. I glittered whenever I moved. Exactly like I was supposed to.
“I’m always right and you know it,” said Anders. He opened his mouth to say more, and stopped as a long, low bong resounded through the room. A wry smile twisted his lips upward. “Ask not for whom the bell tolls . . . you ready?”
“Ready,” I said. I stood and took his arm, and he led me from the safety of my mirror to the dangerous familiarity of the stage.
Sasha might be a punk rock Tinker Bell who thought the human body came equipped with easily replaceable joints, but there was no question that she was a damn fine choreographer. The fourteen dancers still in the competition—the fourteen dancers who were still alive—flung ourselves through the routine like our lives depended on it. And they did. Even if only Malena, Pax, and I knew the danger was literal, and not just a risk of elimination, there was a very good chance that anyone who failed to dance well enough would die.
This wasn’t what I’d signed up for. I leaped into the air with the rest of the winter wind girls, and Pax snatched me before I could hit the floor, wrapping his spring-draped arms around me and lowering me to tangle around his ankles. The summer girls fell into the boys of fall, and the stage was an unending maze of motion. We were dancers. We risked our lives every day. Everyone I knew had a story about someone who’d never dance again thanks to a bad fall or a blown knee, and half of us had a story we wouldn’t tell unless it was late and we were drunk, about someone who’d misjudged their partner during a trust fall and ended up with a broken neck. Nothing was forever, nothing was real except for this moment on the stage, all of us spinning and falling and leaping and alive.
Why was it on me to keep us that way? Why did I have to be the one who’d been born into a family with so many ancestral debts to pay that we might never stop fighting? It
wasn’t fair. Even though I’d already chosen the world I belonged to—more than once—part of me just wanted to dance, and always would. And that was the part of me I’d never be able to satisfy.
The music ended. The seasons froze, fourteen dancers holding ourselves rigid in improbable positions, backs bent, hips twisted, and limbs akimbo.
Then the show’s theme music began, and Brenna Kelly strutted onto the stage, walking through the mass of dancers. We straightened and bowed to her as she passed us. She rewarded us with smiles and blown kisses, chirping, “Hello, my darlings! Wasn’t that amazing? Hurry now, go and get yourselves ready.”
That was our cue. We scattered, running back to the dressing rooms, where the wardrobe assistants were waiting to scrape the makeup off of our faces and brush enough of the hairspray out of our hair to render it malleable. We had eight minutes—only four of which would actually be broadcast—to get into our costumes for the intro. The unlucky couple that would be dancing first tonight would also have to get into their hair and makeup before they could go back out, and so the assistants swarmed over them first, giving me time to slip into the bathroom and trade my teased-up wig for one that had already been styled in victory rolls and delicate waves.
(None of my fellow dancers seemed to realize I wore a wig, except for Lyra, who’d caught me, and Pax and Malena, who’d been told. I was reasonably sure everyone from the wardrobe department knew, and just didn’t care. It made me easier to style than the other dancers, since they had one less dancer yelping every time they hit a snarl, and so they were happy to keep my secret, if only out of enlightened self-interest.)
I got out of the bathroom and plopped down in a seat, where a makeup assistant appeared and used a cloth soaked in a chemical-smelling fluid to remove the rhinestones and makeup from my face. It burned, and I wondered if I was also losing half of my epidermis. Oh, well. Sometimes you have to suffer for your art. They were finished in record time. I yanked my simple black practice dress on and strapped my shoes to my feet just as the bell rang again and the whole group of dancers stampeded for the door. The show was going on.
Since we were still in the couples phase of the show, introductions consisted of one male dancer and one female dancer running onstage and performing roughly eight seconds of steps between them. Anders and I were the first to be introduced this week, courtesy of his name’s place in the alphabet. He tapped. I grabbed his hand and used it to steady myself as I performed an impressive-looking flip that would have gotten me disqualified from any formal competition. Then we fell back, swaying rhythmically as we watched the other dancers go through their paces.
None of them looked calmer or more anxious than I expected. If any of my fellow competitors had been involved in the deaths of Poppy and Chaz, they were good at not showing it. I switched my attention to the judges as much as I could without losing my place in the rhythm. Adrian had his usual expression of faint disapproval. Lindy was smiling—although with as much Botox as she’d had, I wasn’t sure she could do anything else. The third spot at the judges’ table was occupied by a grinning Clint, clapping his hands in time to the intro music. He saw me looking and winked. I winked back, still grooving, and felt better about the show, if nothing else.
Clint genuinely liked the dancers on Dance or Die. Adrian viewed us as a path to better ratings, and Lindy seemed to hate everyone equally, but Clint was second only to Brenna in showing affection and fondness for the dancers. If he was here, the judging would be even-handed and constructive, even if everything else went horribly wrong.
“It’s your fourteen remaining dancers, America!” crowed Brenna, and we walked forward, the boys strutting, the girls sashaying, to strike our pose at the middle of the stage. The crowd cheered like so many supersized Aeslin mice. The lights beat down, hot as a summer sun, and I was home.
It was really a pity I wasn’t going to be allowed to stay there. But then, I never was.
“—hate this part, so let’s go on and get it over with,” said Brenna. She looked down the row of girls, a line of worry etched between her eyebrows. I realized with a pang that we hadn’t told her about the snake cult. Between rehearsals, Alice showing up, and our own attempts at an investigation, there hadn’t been time. How could a week not have been enough time?
Brenna was worried because she might be sending me home, and she needed to stay on my good side if she wanted an introduction to William. I was worried because whoever was eliminated tonight might be in deadly danger . . . and I hadn’t told her. She was right there, and should have been among the first to know.
What else had I missed?
“The girls in danger of elimination tonight are . . .” Brenna opened the envelope, sighed, and read, “Leanne, Malena, and Raisa. Thank you, girls. The rest of you may leave the stage.”
We filed off as she was reading off the names of the boys in danger. I lingered in the wings. Anders and I were up fourth: I had time, and I wanted to know which of the male dancers were on the bottom.
“Pax, Mac, and Will,” said Brenna, and the bottom dropped out of the world. The rest of the boys walked off.
Anders was one of the first to make it clear of the cameras. He stopped in front of me, a bleak, anxious look on his face. “Pax was never on the bottom during the first half of our season. What the hell went wrong?”
“Better dancers, tougher competition,” said Jessica, stepping from behind one of the dangling curtains. She was smirking. “Maybe you’re going to have extra room in your apartment sooner than you thought.”
The urge to slap that stupid smirk right off of her face was almost strong enough to override my common sense—but only almost. Assaulting a fellow contestant would see me eliminated on the spot, and then my friends would be defenseless.
“Not funny, Jessica,” snarled Anders.
“Hysterical,” she said, looking him dead in the eye.
“Break it up,” I said, stepping between them. “Pax isn’t going anywhere. He’s too good a dancer to have pulled the lowest number of overall votes. Now if you’ll excuse me, some of us are interested in staying in this competition.” I slid my arm through the crook of Anders’s elbow, so I was holding him close without clinging, and pulled him with me toward the dressing rooms. We separated at the last minute, him going into the men’s, me going into the women’s. We were all dancers here—none of us actually cared—but the show’s producers needed to at least pretend they were holding to Middle American standards of decency.
Someone grabbed me as soon as I was inside the room, yanking me behind a rack of costumes. I pulled the knife from my thigh holster—worn high enough that it hadn’t been visible during my flip earlier, and low enough that I wasn’t goosing myself in uncomfortable places, and don’t think that hadn’t been a learning experience—and whipped around, ready to stab my assailant in the throat.
Only the fact that Malena was even faster than I was saved us both from a very bad experience. She hissed and let go. “Stand down, Jesus! All I did was grab you!”
“Keep your voice down!” I countered, making the knife vanish back into my dress. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to grab people?”
“I didn’t expect you to respond by pulling a goddamn harpoon out of your crotch,” she snapped. “How is your boy still among the living? You should have stabbed him the first time he rolled over in bed.”
“He’s a sound sleeper.” I cast a glance over my shoulder to the costumes she’d pulled me through. They weren’t currently moving. Maybe we were going to get lucky, and no one had noticed my impromptu disappearance. I looked back to Malena. “You need to stick close to me or Pax tonight. If you can’t find us, look for Alice. I know she’s lurking around the back of the theater.”
“She’d better be. Shit, V—” Malena caught herself before she could use my real name, and continued with a, “I didn’t expect to be in the bottom this week. I thought Troy and I
danced better than this.”
“You did,” I said. “The voters make weird decisions. Now we just need to make sure that if you’re eliminated, you never go anywhere alone. Anywhere.”
“What if Pax and I both get eliminated?” Malena asked.
I grimaced. “Then we hope whoever killed Chaz and Poppy will go after the two of you, because I’m honestly not sure I can stop this if I’m the only one in the theater who knows what’s going on.”
Malena’s glare could have melted metal. “I didn’t sign up to play the bait in your little crusade.”
“No one signed on for this ‘little crusade,’ Malena. People are dying, and we’re trying to stop it.” A bong sounded, signaling the first couple to take the stage. “If you and Pax are eliminated, they’re not going to know what hit them. I still hope that doesn’t happen. I’d much rather have the two of you helping us track down our killers. Either way, I’m hoping no one dies tonight.”
“You know, when I came here, I was just hoping for a shot at the big money,” grumbled Malena. “I’m coming up on my twenty-sixth birthday. It’s time to start thinking about having kids. That’ll be a lot easier if I can actually afford them.”
“I think we all came here for that,” I said. “I know Poppy and Chaz didn’t sign up because they were hoping to get their throats slit.”
Malena looked at me gravely. “Do you think we’re going to be able to stop this?”
“Honestly, Malena, I don’t know. But we’re going to do the best we can.” That’s all we could ever do, and all my family had ever done: the best that we could. It was a real pity that even our best had never been enough to keep everyone we cared about alive.
The rest of the show passed with the kind of speed found only in tense situations and anxiety dreams. Anders and I danced our quickstep with as much enthusiasm as we could muster, but I knew I was letting him down; I was too worried about what might happen after elimination to focus on my energy and my connection with my partner. The judges knew it, too. Getting criticized and warned about potentially being in the bottom next week was painful. Having Clint look at me like I had personally disappointed him was worse.