“Sold.” I took the box and peered inside. There were four waffles remaining. Miraculously, that was also the number of slots on our family-sized toaster. I dropped them in. “We need something else. This is insufficient waffles.”
“Oh, no. This is not your territory.” Dominic’s hands closed on my shoulders, pulling me back before I could start investigating the contents of the fridge. “Go sit down. I will figure out breakfast.”
“But I want to help,” I protested.
“The last time you scavenged for breakfast, we wound up with leftover pizza omelets.” Dominic pushed me toward the table. “That’s not a meal. That’s a punishment for bad behavior. I’ll make something intended to be eaten by humans, and I’ll bring it to you, and then we can go to bed.”
“Fine.” I grabbed a laptop off the counter and sulked away. Dominic watched me go, shaking his head fondly. He knew I hadn’t really wanted to win; I knew he enjoyed the fight. Of such little understandings are a solid relationship built.
I dropped my butt into a seat and opened the laptop. Each of us in the family has our own computer—how else could we have ever felt comfortable looking at porn?—but there are always a few loaner machines floating around, courtesy of Antimony’s constant equipment upgrades and Artie’s equally constant glee at nuking their contents and turning them into helpful shells. We don’t use the spares for anything secure. They’re still extremely convenient when, say, I want to check my email without going upstairs to my bedroom.
(Not that my bedroom was particularly livable at the moment. We were in the process of prepping the guesthouse out back for me and Dominic. It meant we wouldn’t be as well-equipped for actual guests, but I didn’t care if it meant having a bathroom we wouldn’t need to share with my younger sister. Half my things were in boxes, and the remaining half were strewn across the room like there’d been some sort of localized explosion. It was all going to be worth it when we didn’t have to cram ourselves into a twin bed every night. I loved the man, but I was starting to feel like one of us needed to remove an arm before either of us would be able to sleep comfortably.)
Dominic muttered and rattled around the kitchen while the laptop loaded my settings. When it was done, I pulled up my email, skimming the subject lines to see if anything needed my immediate attention. Nothing did. The thing about being in the family business is that you never really strike out as an independent contractor: you’re always going to be running things through the central clearing house that is your older relatives. I’d been able to find problems that needed fixing without their help while I was in New York, but I wasn’t in New York anymore. I was back in Portland, back in the place where people remembered me as a three-foot-tall moppet running to her ballet recital, and when they had problems, they took them to my dad or my Aunt Jane. Not to me.
I sighed and clicked over to Valerie’s email. Valerie was my mundane alter ego, a redheaded Latin ballroom specialist who never had to worry about getting blood out of sequins or whether it was appropriate to go clubbing after beating the crap out of a ghoul. Valerie was half my imaginary friend and half my imaginary self. She slept in when she wanted to. She danced every day. Most importantly, she lived her life on her terms, with no one telling her who she had to be or what she had to love.
There was a time when all I wanted was to find a way to become Valerie, even if it meant leaving Verity behind. I would’ve missed my family, but I had every faith we’d have been able to find a way to be together, even once I was no longer considered a Price. I would have been dancing. For me, on some level, that would have been enough . . . at least for a while.
It could never have been enough forever, which was why when the choice was actually put in front of me—be a cryptozoologist, and help people, or be a professional dancer, and never do the work I’d been raised to do ever again—I’d made the only choice I really could. I’d put Valerie aside and become Verity for good.
That didn’t mean I’d deleted Valerie’s email account. For one thing, Valerie had been a beloved contestant on Dance or Die, one of the few reality competitions completely based on skill, instead of relying on how much drama the contestants could stir up to amuse the producers. If she’d disappeared completely, it would have been a scandal and something for people to investigate. The official story was that she was taking a year off from teaching dance in Manhattan while she put her head back together. I maintained her Facebook fan page and answered her email. Eventually, it would all taper off, more than it already had, and Valerie would be able to rest in peace.
That was the idea, anyway. I skimmed the subject lines in her inbox, opening the messages that looked interesting. Most were reports from the fan page. A few pieces of spam, as always, had managed to slither past the filters. One of my old dance buddies was asking whether there was any chance I’d be attending a competition in Kansas, since he needed a partner, his having decided to get pregnant. Another dancer I used to compete with wanted to know if it was true that I’d snapped my leg like a twig doing one of my, quote, “stupid jumps.” And the producers of Dance or Die wanted to know about my availability.
Wait. What?
I opened the email again, forcing myself to read slowly this time. The producers of Dance or Die were interested in knowing whether I was in “fighting shape” and available for a project to begin in six weeks, and last up to two months after that.
“Two months,” I muttered. “That’s the length of a competition season.”
“What?” asked Dominic.
“Uh.” I twisted to look at him. He was frying something on the stove; I sniffed the air. Bacon. He was making me bacon. My aggravating, wonderful, ex-Covenant husband, who had no real idea what the dance part of my life entailed, was making me bacon.
“I need to set the alarm when we go to bed,” I said. “I need to make a phone call.”
The Dance or Die production offices were located in Burbank, California, which meant we were at least in the same time zone, even if Southern California should really be considered a whole other world. They opened at nine. The alarm went off at eight fifty-five, almost three hours after Dominic and I had finally crawled into bed.
Dominic made an unhappy noise and attempted to burrow deeper into his pillow, lacing his hands together behind his head like he could somehow convince the noise that he’d already surrendered and no longer needed to be tormented. I leaned over him to slap the alarm off, only to find myself facing a veritable sea of mice. They covered the floor beside the bed, looking up at me with wide and hopeful eyes.
“What?” I hissed. Realizing my mistake, I hurriedly added, “And do not hail me, Dominic is trying to sleep.”
“Failing,” came Dominic’s woeful comment, voice muffled by his pillow.
The mice looked somewhat deflated. A small voice from the back of the crowd peeped a soft “Hail,” and was shushed by the mice around it. I raised an eyebrow. The leader of this merry band—identifiable by the fact that it was wearing a fancy cloak made of braided doll hair—stepped forward, motioning for the rest to be quiet.
“Hail to Verity, the Arboreal Priestess, bride to the God of Hard Choices in Dark Places,” it squeaked. “Today begins the great feast of Dammit, Enid, Where Is That Girl, I Know She Tells You When She’s Sneaking Out. We have come to beg a re-creation.”
I was still partially asleep, and it took me a moment to remember which holiday they were talking about. “Wait—isn’t this the one where Grandma Alice got lost in the woods for almost a whole day, and then wound up at Grandpa Thomas’ house for the first time?”
The mice nodded vigorously, and this time there were multiple soft, forbidden “hails” from the center of the crowd.
“Sorry, guys.” I shook my head. “I normally like a good romp around the woods as much as the next girl, but I have some work I need to do today. Work that can’t be done from a tree. Go ask Antimony, I’m sure she??
?d be happy to.”
“The Precise Priestess said, upon your return home, ‘Oh, Thank God, At Least With Barbie Back In The House, I Won’t Have To Do Every Single Ritual,’” said the lead mouse, fanning out its whiskers. “Was she so wrong?”
Aeslin mice have an eidetic memory for everything they see and hear, and it’s against their religion to misquote their gods—i.e., us. Which meant Antimony was definitely at the end of her patience. Also that she had definitely called me “Barbie.” I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. “She wasn’t wrong, no, but I can’t do it today,” I said. “I have to make some phone calls, and you know the cell service in the woods sucks. It’s important. Sorry. I’ll do the next one.” None of the rituals were actually dangerous for the humans the mice recruited to act them out. Sometimes slimy, and occasionally embarrassing, but the mice would never hurt us. They loved us too much for that.
“As you say, Priestess,” said the head priest, ears drooping.
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 r
est 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.