Chaos Choreography (27 page)

“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.”

“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 D
OWN 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.

“We need to look for more underground rooms. There's a chance Alice is in one of them.” I didn't think she would be, but now that I was starting to put together
the etchings and outline of a plan, I was going to see it through.

“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.”

“Nope,” said Malena.

I raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“I said, nope. Nuh-uh. Not going to happen. Because from where I'm standing, it sounds like you just said ‘hey, other half of the party, we're officially in a horror movie now, so how about you two go off on your own, don't worry, nothing bad will happen.'” She smiled tightly, and her teeth were sharp as rocks protruding from the desert floor. “My mama didn't raise no fools. We ate them. I'm sticking with you.”

“Malena is right about safety in numbers, but I'll go back to the apartment anyway,” said Pax. “Anders and Lyra need someone to keep an eye on them, and if you're not there when Lyra wakes up, she'll assume you went for a run or something. If I'm not there, she'll decide we're having an affair. I don't want to have that fight with her. Do you?”

“Not in this lifetime or any other,” I said, suppressing a shudder. Lyra was a good friend, and always had been. But between her crush on Pax and the need to keep certain aspects of my life secret from her, sometimes she seemed like just one more obstacle—an obstacle that had to be placated from time to time, to keep her from feeling like she was being replaced.

Valerie didn't have those problems. Valerie was just another dancer, and anything she needed to hide would be mundane and understandable. Sometimes I envied Valerie, even though I knew that her life was simple only because she didn't actually exist. Maybe that was always the secret to a simple life. Reality was the complicating factor.

“Meet me at the back of the theater,” said Dominic, disappearing through the nearest exit. We waited a count of thirty before following him.

The night outside was as dark as Burbank ever got.
The sky was painted with soft orange light from the streets below it, and illuminated billboards rose above the buildings at irregular intervals, disrupting any decent stretch of shadows. Batman would have taken one look at the cover available here and vanished right back to Gotham, never to venture forth again.

I loved it so. If only it hadn't been connected to so many things that weren't worth the effort it took to keep on loving them.

“All this cloak and dagger security is cute, but I'm not sure it's necessary,” said Malena as we walked toward the back corner of the theater to wait for Dominic and the cab. “Those confusion charms you found are going to have people convinced that they saw us half a dozen times over the course of the night.”

“Yes and no,” I said. “They can make people suggestible, and they can falsify general memories, but they're all here, at the theater. If Lyra decided I was sneaking around with Pax, a bunch of memory charms wouldn't be able to convince her otherwise. She'd use that to explain why she wasn't concerned when she couldn't find me. Really powerful memory charms could rewrite a lot more, but none of us would be going to rehearsal. We'd decide we'd already been, and go hang out in the lobby.” Dancers loved to dance. Dancers loved to move. Dancers loved the moment where a new routine came together and the whole world made sense. But no dancer, ever, had loved being shouted at by a choreographer who couldn't believe the arrogant stupidity of the dancers they had to work with. Each and every one of us would skip it if we could.

Malena nodded thoughtfully. “So they have to split the middle. Powerful enough that we don't notice when things are out of place, but weak enough that they don't disrupt the show. Do you think it could be one of the choreographers? They like it when we come to rehearsal.”

“I know it's not one of us; I know it's not Brenna,” I said. “That's about where my knowledge runs out.”

“How do you know it's not Brenna?” asked Pax. “She's close enough to the dancers that any of us would follow her into a dark corner without thinking twice. She's tall, too. Strong. She could probably subdue most of the dancers on this show without a problem.” He didn't add that he was one of the few dancers too strong for her to take down. He didn't need to.

I was too busy gaping at him to point that out. He'd just identified one major flaw in our intelligence gathering: namely, the fact that protecting the status of the various cryptids I knew had been so drummed into me for so long that I'd never thought to ask whether they knew each other. “I know because Brenna asked me for help the first night of the show,” I said. “She and her sisters need me to broker an introduction to the dragons of New York for them.”

There was a moment of stunned silence as Pax and Malena worked through the implications of this statement. Then they exploded, both of them speaking at once.

“—can't be serious, there's no way in hell that Brenna Kelly is—”

“—she's too
nice
to be a dragon princess, it doesn't make any—”