Chaos Choreography (14 page)

“Good call,” I said, and gave his arm a reassuring squeeze, more grateful than ever for his vomit-based excuse. Lyra would have flipped her lid if she'd seen me touching her partner, and no amount of explaining would have calmed her down. She wanted him bad, and there was no way to explain that she was never going to get what she wanted. Not this time.

We walked down the hall to an unmarked door, one of the dozens dotting the theater walls. I'd never noticed it before, despite its proximity to the changing rooms. It was propped ajar with a chunk of concrete, keeping it from closing and possibly locking itself. It was also heavy as hell, which went with the fact that it was apparently made of solid metal. Pax took hold of the edge and wrenched it open.

“Thanks,” I murmured.

“Don't mention it,” he said.

The stairs on the other side of the door were metal. They creaked and groaned with every step as we made our descent. I would have been worried about falling, but the rail was bolted solidly to the wall, and Pax had long enough arms that even if the steps dropped out from under us, he'd be able to grab the rail while I grabbed him. We were going to be fine.

Then we reached the bottom, and I realized we were the only ones who were going to be fine.

Malena was crouched in one corner, her spine bent in a curve that would hurt most humans, but which looked utterly natural for her. She had her hair pulled up in a high, sloppy ponytail, revealing the spikes starting to
break through her skin. The flesh around them looked inflamed. There was no blood. All the blood was reserved for the two people on the floor.

“Aw, damn,” I said, stopping on the last stair.

Malena's head snapped up. She didn't say anything. Neither did Pax. All of us were silent, looking at the mess in front of us. The mess that had, until recently, been two of our fellow contestants.

Poppy and Chaz had been stripped naked and stretched out so that her feet were next to his head. Their arms were outstretched, creating a sort of box with their bodies. It was a very deliberate positioning. I pulled out my phone and took a picture of it. This was the sort of thing that needed to be studied at more length.

Malena flinched back from the flash, hissing under her breath.

“Sorry,” I said distantly. It was difficult to fully commit to an emotion. I needed to stay a bit removed, because I needed to keep my wits, when all I really wanted to do was scream and run back up the stairs. Verity was trained for this sort of thing. Valerie wasn't, and I'd been living almost exclusively as Valerie for four long, relaxing weeks. My instincts were scrambled.

Speaking of instincts . . . “Pax, can you tell if they were both human? Are both human, I guess. You don't stop being human when you die.” Not unless something reanimated you, which was less a change of species and more a change of status.

Pax inhaled. Then he nodded. “Both were human. Before you ask, no, I can't tell you whether it was a human that attacked them. I only smell blood from two sources.”

“Same,” said Malena curtly.

“Okay,” I said, and went back to looking at the bodies.

They had been slit open, a long red line running from the hollow of their throats to slightly below their navels. If there was anything . . . missing, I couldn't tell; the flaps of skin were closed, just bloody. There didn't appear to have been any facial or genital mutilation. This had been
a ritual killing, but the ritual was one I didn't recognize. The person or persons who had killed them had smeared blood in a wide circle around the pair, painting it directly onto the concrete floor. The edges were obscured by the blood that had continued to pour from the bodies, and any subtle markings that might have been there had already been lost forever.

The markings on the bodies, on the other hand, had not been washed away, because they weren't painted on. Someone had carved strange runes and symbols into their flesh, slicing all the way down to bone in some places. The carving appeared to have been done after the pair was dead: those wounds hadn't bled.

“I swear we found them like this,” said Pax.

“I believe you,” I said. “Malena, how did you get over there without stepping in the blood?” I couldn't see a clear path to where she was crouching.

“I can stick to walls,” she said, her tone challenging. For the first time, I noticed her feet were bare.

Good. “Can you take pictures while you're sticking to the walls?”

Malena narrowed her eyes at me. “Yes.”

I knew her tone. It was the voice of someone who expected me to regard them as both other and lesser because they weren't human. Normally, I would have taken the time to reassure her, to try to explain I wasn't going to judge. Under the circumstances, I needed my attention where it was. “Great. Come get my phone. I need you to get as close as you can—get directly above them, if your ‘sticking to things' powers extend to the ceiling—and take pictures. As many pictures as you can. Zoom in, get all the details.”

Now she stared at me. “I didn't figure you for a sicko.”

“I'm not,” I said. “Some of those symbols look familiar. I want to send the pictures to my dad, see whether he recognizes them.” They looked a lot like the symbols William's captors had been using when they were sacrificing virgins in his name. Not identical, but similar enough that alarms were going off at the back of my brain.

William had been the living target of a snake cult that wanted to turn him into their devoted servant before they woke him up. No, they didn't realize what a bad idea that was, and if they had, they probably wouldn't have cared. People who think of virgins as a renewable resource are not usually the sort of people who listen to reason. Snake cults were bad news. I'd be happier if I didn't have to deal with one.

Malena shook her head and stuck her hands to the wall, boosting herself up Spider-Man style. She still looked mostly human. There was something unusual about her hands, and her feet were almost twice as long as they should have been, with an oddly flexible bend at the pad of the toes, but those were still morphologically possible. The orange-and-black scales unfurling along her shoulder blades and circling her wrists were harder to explain away.

She got her feet braced against the wall and scuttled along it, quick and nimble as a gecko, to thrust her hand out toward me. “Give me the phone,” she snapped.

“Get as close as you can,” I said, handing it over. Seeing her sticking to the wall like that was both disorienting and envy-inducing. If I had been able to wall-crawl, there would never have been a day when I couldn't be found lurking on the ceiling. Never.

Malena nodded before she scuttled up the wall toward the ceiling and began snapping pictures.

I turned back to Pax. “Did anyone see you come down here?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I was talking with Malena, and everybody else went on ahead. She's a real nice girl, you know? And I figured we should stick together, since we're both therianthropes and all.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “Did you smell blood on any of the people who passed you? Specifically, did you smell
this
blood?”

He shook his head again. “No, and believe me, I would have noticed. Blood is the sort of thing that attracts my attention.” He cast another uneasy glance at the bodies,
and I realized I was reading his expression wrong. It wasn't discomfort born of squeamishness.

It was discomfort born of hunger.

“We have steaks in the fridge at home,” I said quietly. “I can keep Lyra distracted while you bolt one of them raw.”

“Can you make that two?” he asked, still looking at the bodies.

I elbowed him, pulling the motion at the last second so that he was barely grazed. “Hey, I thought humans didn't taste good.”

“They don't,” he said. “It's just . . . there's so much blood.”

“Pax, do you need to leave?” I watched him out of the corner of my eye, looking for any sign that he was about to lose control. I didn't feel like following the discovery of two bodies with a fight against one of my best friends in this competition. I'd do it if I had to. “Malena and I have things under control here.”

“What are you going to do?”

This was the awful part. Well. The latest awful part in a long line of awful parts that had spanned most of my life. “The three of us are going to go cram ourselves into the car with Lyra and Anders, and we're not going to tell anyone what happened here. I hate to do it, but we have to leave the bodies for the janitorial staff to find.”

“What? Why?”

I looked up. Malena was sticking to the ceiling directly over the bodies, my phone still clutched in one half-taloned hand. She was staring at me, expression aghast.

“Because you and Pax aren't human, and I'm here under an assumed name,” I said. “I don't think any of us wants the kind of scrutiny that comes with this sort of discovery. Maybe more importantly, at least for me, I need to get those pictures to my dad. Spending hours explaining what happened to the police is going to delay that, and someone else could get hurt.”

The janitorial staff would find and report the bodies
before we had to come back to this theater. Dumping the situation on their heads was a shitty thing to do, but that didn't change the necessity of it, or the sensibility of distancing the three of us from things as fast as we possibly could. Hopefully, Adrian had a good medical plan for his employees, and the people who found the bodies would be able to get some therapy after the fact.

Sometimes I felt like
I
needed some therapy after the fact. It was really too bad that was never going to happen.

“You're cold as hell, dancing girl,” said Malena. She scuttled from the ceiling back to the wall and down to the floor, where she offered back my phone.

“I sort of have to be.” I tucked the phone into my pocket. “You didn't panic when I walked in, so I'm assuming Pax told you I was a friend. Did he tell you why?”

“I was sort of busy hoping he wouldn't go all SyFy Saturday on me and bite my head off,” said Malena.

“All those shark-themed monster movies are racial discrimination,” grumbled Pax. He sounded a bit more like himself, and a bit less like he was going to start licking blood off the floor. I had to take that as a good thing.

“Yes, they are, and that was a sensible concern, Malena,” I said. I held my hands where she could see them and be certain I wasn't reaching for a weapon, as I said, “My name isn't Valerie Pryor. It's Verity Price.”

Slowly, Malena blinked. “Verity
Price
.”

“Yes.”

“As in, you're a Price.”

“Yes.”

“I don't suppose you're secretly the granddaughter of
Vincent
Price, and you're just hiding your celebrity pedigree?”

She sounded so hopeful that I sort of hated to let her down. Sadly . . . “No. I'm the daughter of Kevin Price. I'm a cryptozoologist. Sorry about that.”

“Oh, great. ‘I'm just going to go on reality television again, no big deal,' she said, right before she wound up in a room with two corpses, a hungry shark-man, and a
member of the Covenant of St. George
.” Malena shook her head. “I should've stayed in the desert.”

“I don't belong to the Covenant,” I protested. “My family quit generations before I was born. I'm on your side, and that's why I'm saying we need to get out of here. We can read about this on the Internet tomorrow.” And I could wait a few days before bribing someone for the autopsy results. That would tell me how worried I needed to be.

I was pretty sure that I needed to be
extremely
worried.

Cramming five people into one of the town cars supplied for our use was easy once we put Pax in the front seat. He had the longest legs. More importantly, he was still light-headed from all the blood he'd been inhaling, and by putting him closer to the air conditioning, I hoped he could clear his head a little.

The party was raging in the courtyard when we got to the apartments—and I do mean raging. The celebration after the eliminations was always loud, enthusiastic, and guaranteed to leave more than a few dancers to face the next morning with hangovers. But we'd made it through another cruel cut, and the urge to rejoice was strong. Anders and Lyra tumbled out of the car already cheering and pumping their arms in the air. They took off running, leaving me, Pax, and Malena to watch them go.

“I don't think I can do this,” said Malena, as the car drove away behind us.

“You have to, if you don't want to blow your cover,” I said. “Pax and I will go up to the apartment so he can bolt a steak and I can contact my family. You're going to head for the party and watch to see whether anyone is behaving oddly.”

Malena turned to stare at me. “What the hell makes you think I'm helping you with this? I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That doesn't mean I've been recruited.”