“You’d have to promise me you were going to be serious,” Clint said, and his voice was solemn, and his eyes were grave. “I know how good you are, Valerie. Sometimes I think you don’t. Sometimes I think this is all just a game to you.”
“I promise, I don’t think of this as a game.” He twirled me gently out. I automatically scribed a wide arch in the air with my hand before spinning back in again, returning to our frame. My body knew the way, even if my mind wanted nothing more than to get away from here and back to my mission. “Everything I do, I do as seriously as I possibly can.”
Clint nodded. “That was what I was hoping to hear. You could be one of the great ones, Valerie. We could be talking about the things you did for dance for the next fifty years. Don’t throw that away.”
He stopped dancing. So did I. Then, without another word, he took his hand from my waist, raised our joined hands to his lips, and kissed my knuckles. Then he turned and walked away, leaving me alone on the stage.
Thirteen
“There’s no crime in missing the shot. The only crime is being too damn slow to take it.”
—Frances Brown
The Crier Theater, four seconds later
I STAYED PUT FOR A COUNT OF TEN, watching to see if Clint would come back. He didn’t. I turned and bolted for the wings, heading for where I’d left Malena and the others.
The show had been over for long enough that the halls were deserted: even the technicians, janitors, and countless production assistants who could usually be counted on to lurk in unexpected places were gone, leaving me free to run. I sped up, grabbing a corner with my left hand in order to slingshot myself around it, only to stop dead as my momentum carried me straight into Dominic’s chest. He was close enough to my height that my head hit him in the throat, and he staggered backward, closing his arms around me in an effort to stabilize himself.
I didn’t pull away, even though every instinct I had said not to let myself be trapped. Instead, I leaned to the side, and we hit the wall with a thud that resounded all the way through my spine.
“What the hell, Ve—” Dominic caught himself before he blurted out my real name. He frowned instead, and demanded, “Where were you? We’ve been looking everywhere!”
“Didn’t look on the stage,” I said, and ducked out of his arms, stepping backward. “Where is everyone else?”
“Trying to find our eliminated contestants,” he said. “Pax thought they were with Malena. Malena thought they were with you. Alice thought they were with anyone but her.”
“So we’ve lost them.” Which meant that they were probably dead. I swallowed the urge to stomp my foot, and simply asked, “How the hell did we lose them?”
“Leanne left the girls’ changing room to use the restroom, and didn’t come back; Mac never made it to the changing room at all,” said Dominic. “Perhaps more interesting is the question of why no one finds this strange.”
That stopped me. “What?”
“Pax asked Troy—the other male dancer from Mac’s season, who you would think might feel some camaraderie or responsibility for the man—where Mac was. Troy looked confused and reminded Pax that Mac had been eliminated.” Dominic’s expression was grim. “I know the dance world can be cutthroat and cruel, but you’ve always led me to believe there was slightly more compassion in it.”
“There usually is,” I said. Sarah’s brand of telepathy wasn’t the only way of changing people’s minds. There were compulsions, illusions, all manner of charms that could be cooked up by your local witch or Letiche—and in a city like Burbank, where everything was available for the right price, finding someone who’d cook you a charm without asking questions wasn’t hard. Assuming their pet magic-users hadn’t done it themselves. “We need to find the others.”
“We split up to look for the missing contestants.”
“I get that, and it was a smart move given the information available at the time, but I’m telling you we need to find the others.” I shook my head, feeling the bobby pins holding my wig in place dig into my scalp. “Something’s making people not care about the disappearances. Do we want to risk Pax or Malena going missing, knowing that nobody’s going to give a shit?”
Dominic’s eyes widened. Then he nodded. “This way,” he said, and turned to run.
He was only a few inches taller than me, but that was enough to give him a longer stride. That was a good thing, since otherwise there was no way he’d have ever been able to keep up with me. Dominic was in good shape. He trained hard and worked harder. I was a dancer and a fighter whose only chance of survival was rooted in speed, and I’d been training nonstop for the past three weeks. Really, the only surprise was that I was less than ten feet ahead of him by the time I hit the last corner between us and the hallway leading to the basement.
Alice and Pax were there, standing in front of the open door. Alice had a pistol in her hand, holding it low against her hip, as if that would keep her from getting in trouble if theater security came around the corner and saw her with the gun. I slid to a stop and looked up at the same time. Malena was anchored to the wall some twelve feet up, her feet bent at an inhuman angle.
“Where have you been?” demanded Alice. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
“Dominic said the same thing, and I don’t think you have,” I said. “I was on the stage with Clint. Half the hallways in this place would have led you straight there. I think someone’s messing with us. Malena!”
“What?” The voice drifted down from above, not accompanied by the chupacabra. She was in hunting mode. It would take her a while to shake that off.
That was good. I needed her in hunting mode. “Go to the top of the wall and start looking for anything that seems like it doesn’t belong there. Dried flowers or herbs or stones.”
“What?” Now she just sounded confused.
Alice, on the other hand, looked horrified. “Memory charms.”
“Or confusion charms,” I said. I looked up again. Malena hadn’t moved. “Come on. We need this if we’re going to find them.”
“You need my foot up your butt,” she muttered, and skittered away, moving with a fluid, insectile grace completely at odds with her still mostly human appearance.
Content that she was trying, I turned to Alice and Pax. “Do either of you remember going to look for me, or did you just assume it had happened?”
“Pax and Malena told me they’d gone looking,” said Alice.
“I looked,” said Pax.
“As did I,” said Dominic.
“Okay, where?” I asked.
Silence followed.
“That’s what I thought. Look: my family’s spent so much time around cuckoos and Lilu and other things that scramble your head that we’re a little resistant. Not immune, but . . . we do okay.” I shook my head. “If I don’t remember looking for people I couldn’t find, and Alice doesn’t remember looking for people she couldn’t find, but we’re all mysteriously losing track of the folks we’re supposed to be keeping our eyes on? Someone is messing with us.”
“Does this fit the bill for something that doesn’t belong?” asked Malena, just before a bundle of dried flowers wrapped with a string of stone beads hit the floor. Pax jumped. Alice slanted a narrow-eyed glare up at the rafters.
“Yes, it does,” I said, as I moved to pick up the bundle. The flowers were thin and fragile, but they’d been red before they were dried; hints of color still showed on the petals. I sniffed, and was rewarded with a dusty, venomous sweetness. “I think these are resurrection lilies.”
“The stone is howlite,” said Dominic. I glanced at him. He continued, “We used to carry disks of the stuff when it was thought we might be going into an area containing a cuckoo. There was no proof it helped us to remember ourselves, but the thought was that any protection, however scant, was better than none.”
“Howlite is supposed to be calming,” said Alice. “It reduces stress, anger—all the things I live by.”
“And resurrection lilies are used in a lot of memory charms,” I said. “Someone’s looping memory in the halls. Keeps us from noticing when we lose track of people, keeps us from realizing that we’re wasting time doing things we don’t have to. This is bad.”
“We can get counter-charms from Bon,” said Alice.
“That’s not going to save Mac and Leanne,” I said.
She didn’t have an answer for that. Sadly, neither did anybody else.
Malena searched the rafters and found six more howlite and resurrection lily charm bundles. Once they were all collected, she slipped out through one of the high windows, on the theory that if we got the charms out of the building, we’d have a better chance of finding our missing people. (They weren’t powerful enough to make her forget what they were while she was actually touching them. As for the wisdom of having her move them, rather than destroying them . . . if we didn’t find Mac and Leanne, we could put the charms back and hopefully keep the people who’d created them from realizing how much we knew, at least for a while longer. Especially since we didn’t know anything useful. We had enough bits and pieces to be a danger to ourselves, but not enough to be a danger to anyone else.)
Dominic made a small, startled sound. I turned to see him blinking, looking suddenly confused. Pax looked much the same.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I never went looking for you; I found you by mistake,” he said, expression turning horrified. “I was angry with Malena for refusing to come off the wall, and stalked away. I all but ran into you after that—before, I would have gone to my grave swearing I’d sought you, and failed to find you anywhere.”
“Welcome to the wonderful, terrible world of memory charms,” I said. “It’s all right. I wasn’t hurt, and you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No,” he said. “It most certainly is not all right, and we’ll be discussing this later, at length. Right now, we need to find your missing dancers.” He turned and stalked away, heading down the hall toward the stage.
A hand touched my shoulder as I watched him go. I looked behind me. There was Pax, frowning deeply.
“You know, if you don’t want to discuss this with him later, he can’t make you.”
I blinked before I realized what he was implying, and burst out laughing. It was a relief, almost, to feel like laughing again, even though I knew the situation was dire. “No, no, nothing like that, Pax, I swear. He’s just worried, and he didn’t get a lot of coping mechanisms when he was a kid. I promise, he only wants to talk to me. And maybe make out with me. A lot.”
“If you’re sure . . .”
“I’m sure. Now come on, you’re the Ukupani. Do you smell blood?”
Pax closed his eyes and breathed deeply. As he did, he went perfectly still, becoming a statue of a man. Nothing moved except his chest, and once his lungs were full, even that stopped. He was motionless as only a predator could be, carved from stone and ready to return to life the moment his prey was within range.
Then he opened his eyes and pointed down one of the side halls. “Blood,” he said, voice suddenly thick with hunger and longing. “So much blood.”
We ran. Malena would just have to catch up with us once she was back in the theater. I had faith that she could; Pax was great for following the smell of blood, but Malena was a distance hunter, and she could follow the smell of us.
The hall ended at a closed door. I was the first to reach it, followed by Alice and Dominic, with Pax bringing up the rear. We all stopped, hesitating as we looked at it.
“Anyone know where this leads?” I asked.
Silence told me no one did.
“Great,” I said. Producing three throwing knives from the waist of my pants, I signaled for the others to be quiet before leaning forward and turning the knob with my free hand. The door swung inward, revealing a flight of stairs leading down into the dark. My nose was nowhere near as sensitive as Pax’s, but it didn’t need to be.
The smell of blood was strong enough that I could pick it up on my own.
“Come on,” I said, and reached through the door, feeling around for a light switch. There wasn’t one. Bracing myself against the potential for things to go terribly, incredibly wrong, I started down the stairs. The others followed.
It was impossible for us to descend silently into the dark. We had to hunt for our footing, and the stairs were metal; our footsteps clanked, not every time, but often enough to alert whatever might be lurking below to our presence. Something scraped on the wall above my head.
I decided to risk it. “Malena, find the light,” I hissed.
The scraping intensified, moving away. I realized my mistake and covered my eyes a split second before the lights came on, bathing the room in burning light. Behind me, Dominic made a small, disapproving sound. Alice said a bad word in what sounded like Latin, identifiable as profanity only in its inflection. Pax didn’t say anything.
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 sec
ret 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.