This Broken Wondrous World (19 page)

He looked so relieved, I almost felt bad for him.

“Thanks, cousin,” he said.

“Good-bye, Henri. I'll see you soon.”

Then I went to the back of the van to help Claire with the luggage.

“I would've punched him,” she said.

“I know. So I'm a sap. Where's Mozart?”

“Saying good-bye to his girl,” said Claire.

I peered around the corner and saw Maria and Mozart kissing.

“Brilliant, isn't it?” said Claire. Then, “Oi! Wolfie! Give her tongue back! We've got a plane to catch, yeah?”

“That's what I love about you,” I said. “So sentimental.”

She winked at me. “If you and I started snogging every time we felt like it, we'd never get anything done.”

“What is this ‘snogging' you speak of? Some sort of foreign ritual?” I dropped the bag I was holding and pulled her in close so that her stomach and hips pressed against mine. “You may have to show me. Extensively.”

“Bloody Casanovas, the lot of you,” she said, pulling my hands from her waist and putting a bag in each one. “Thank god one of us has a practical mind.”

Closing Night

W
HEN WE ARRIVED
at New York's JFK airport, Mozart insisted we take a cab. The subway would have been a lot cheaper, but he wanted to get to The Show as quickly as possible. Claire and I exchanged looks, but neither of us said anything. I'd never seen him this anxious before, or this willing to spend money.

An hour later we were shooting across 42nd Street toward Times Square. It was around two a.m., so traffic was minimal. Claire and I sat in the back, while Mozart sat up front and hassled the cab driver every time he disagreed with the route. Then he had the driver drop us off a few blocks from the theater.

“We
are
going to the theater, right?” Claire asked as the cab drove off.

“Yeah.” Mozart's gray eyes were narrowed almost to slits now, and they glinted in the streetlights. “My gut tells me something bad is waiting for us. I want to be able to see it before we're on top of it.”

“What do you mean, something bad?” I asked. “What could possibly be bad at The Show? I mean, other than its normal badness.”

Mozart looked at me for a second like he was going to say something, but then he just shook his head and started walking
toward the theater. Claire and I followed behind, lugging our suitcases.

We were a block away when he held up his hand and we jerked to a stop.

“What is
with
him?” Claire hissed to me under her breath.

“Shut it,” growled Mozart. He started moving forward again, but slowly, like he was stalking prey. “Look.”

The front of the theater was dark, but that was normal this late at night. It took me a minute or two to see what Mozart's wolf eyes had already picked up. The Show marquee was gone from the entrance. Those ridiculous, so-old-they-looked-retro posters had been torn down, the glass casing smashed. And even worse, there was yellow
CRIME SCE
NE DO NOT CROSS
tape stretched across the doors.

“What—” I started to say, but Mozart's head snapped around and he glared at me so hard that the rest of the sentence stuck in my throat.

He pointed to the alley along the side of the theater and mouthed
stage door
. We both nodded and followed him slowly around the side, through the unlit alley to the plain metal door halfway down. Mozart pulled out a key and unlocked the door. The three of us slipped inside the dark theater and closed the door behind us.

It was pitch black inside, but I knew this room well. It was where my dad usually sat after The Show to deal with humans who wanted to come in to meet cast members.

“It's okay to talk here. I'm not getting any fresh scents.”

“What you do mean, no fresh scent?” I asked. “For how long?”

“Days.”

“How can there not have been anyone here for days? It's the stage door entrance on a Saturday.”

“No idea yet. Anybody got a light?”

“Can't Vi light up a bit?” asked Claire.

“Oh, yeah, of course.” I pulled out the phone. “Vi?”

“What's going on?” Vi asked, her anime face pinched into a frown.

“Something is seriously wrong,” I said. “Can you give us a little light?”

“Sure.”

The phone display flared up bright white.

“How's that?” she asked.

“Great. It's—” I stopped and stared at the dark blotches on the wall.

“Blood,” said Mozart.

“No,” I said. “No way. It can't be—”

“Boy!” Mozart's voice cracked like a slap across the face. “I need you to stay calm. Don't make any assumptions, don't jump to conclusions. We will figure this out. I promise you. But we can only do that if we keep our heads.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I'm okay.”

“Good,” said Mozart. “Now, Vi, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” said Vi.

“Is there any way for you to connect to the security system?”

“I could, but it's all been powered down. In fact, it seems like the entire building is dark.”

Mozart walked over to the wall switch and toggled it up and down. “Power's been completely cut from the building. Any ideas how we can get a look at the security camera footage?”

“We could pull the drive from the server where the video footage is stored,” I said. “Assuming it hasn't been corrupted, I could install it in another machine somewhere else that has power.”

“You know where the server is?” Mozart asked.

“Of course,” I said. “It's in the storage closet behind the box office. Mom and I were the ones who installed it. Mom . . .” Then I started to think about where Mom might be. What might have happened to her—

“Hey,” said Mozart. “Stay with us. You hear me? I need you right now, Boy.”

I nodded.

“I'm going to nose around, see what other info I can pick up. You and Claire get that drive and meet me back here. Ten minutes.”

“Got it.”

Mozart shifted into a wolf and slipped quietly out of the room, leaving his clothes behind in a pile.

“Come on,” said Claire. “Let's go.”

We walked slowly through the hallways, using Vi as a little flashlight. I tried to take in all the details without letting them really hit me. I tried to imagine I was disconnected as I saw broken bits of furniture, spots of blood, and the small holes in the walls that suggested gunfire.

It was only a few minutes later when we reached the lobby, but it felt like hours. And the lobby was even more of a mess than the hallways. It looked like small explosions had taken chunks out of the floor. The box office walls had been smashed in, and there were chunks of glass everywhere. The storage closet behind the box office was completely blocked by debris.

“I'll lift it up,” I said. “You see if you can crawl under and pull the server box.”

Claire nodded.

I crouched down with my back against the pile, shoved my hands under, and slowly stood up. Claire dropped to the ground and looked under.

“There's a big metal thing in the way,” she said.

“The server rack,” I said.

“It looks like it tipped over.”

“Can you see the server? Is it damaged?”

“Doesn't look like it, but I can't get at it. The opening is too narrow for me.” She looked up at me. “Sophie could reach it.”

“Your call,” I said. “But either way, make it quick. I can't hold this stuff up forever.”

“I think you could use some Sophie time, anyway,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

But then her body started to shift so I just concentrated on holding up the pile.

A minute later Sophie was cinching up her pants and tightening the laces on her shoes.

“It's like wearing boxes on my feet.”

“Hey, Soph,” I grunted. “Any time now. Would be great.”

“Right, sorry.” She ducked down and slipped under the debris. “This box thingie?”

“Yeah.”

“Do I need the cables and such?”

“No.”

“Good, because it's a rats' nest back here.”

I heard the sound of metal scraping on metal. A moment later, Sophie popped out holding the server in her hands.

“You can let it go,” she said.

I eased the pile back down, then rubbed my aching fingers for a moment. “All right, let's see if the drive is intact.” I took the server from her. I didn't have a screwdriver so I just cracked open the casing.

“Shit,” I said.

“What?” said Sophie.

“The drive. It's gone.”

“You mean destroyed?”

“No, I mean gone. Vanished.” I stared down at the empty server casing. “Along with every fucking member of the company.”

I shouldn't have said that. Because saying it made it completely real in a way I had been trying hard to avoid. Because saying it forced me to admit to myself that I had no idea where my parents and Ruthven and Charon and Laurellen and everyone else was. For all I knew, they were dead.

I heard the server crash to the ground, but it sounded distant, drowned out by the sudden pounding in my temples. My vision started to tunnel and I couldn't seem to catch my breath.

“Boy?” Sophie's voice came from far away. “You look really pale. Are you fee . . .”

I dropped to the ground, still trying to get air into my lungs. I looked down and saw that my big, stitched hands were shaking.

Sophie sat down next to me. She pulled my head down to her chest and stroked my hair and just said, “Boy, it's okay, you're okay,” over and over again. Finally, my heart started to slow down and I was able to get my breathing under control.

“I . . . I think I just had a panic attack,” I said.

“Are you feeling better now?”

“A little.”

“Listen, we don't know anything for certain yet.”

“I know.”

“Isn't there some sort of escape hatch down into the trowe caverns you told me about once?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “In Ruthven's office closet.”

“Maybe that's where everyone went.”

The door to Ruthven's office lay on the floor in splinters. It looked like it had been blown right off its hinges. Inside, the
lone desk was intact, but the drawers had all been emptied. The closet door was open and the floor piece that covered the escape hatch was gone. The hole that led down into the ground was rimmed with black char marks.

“The ladder's destroyed,” I said. “And I think it's about a twenty-foot drop straight down to the bottom.”

“Maybe if we had a rope . . .” said Sophie.

“That's assuming the tunnel's even still intact. It looks like they dropped some explosives down there.”

“So people might be trapped down there?”

I shook my head. “There's an evacuation tunnel. The trowe used it to get people out before I blew up Vi and most of the theater. I think it goes under the river and comes out somewhere in Jersey.”

“I'll bet a lot of people got out through the tunnel, then.”

I stared down at the hole. “Yeah.”

Sophie put her small hand in mine. “We should probably go. Mozart is waiting for us. Maybe he found something.”

We went back to the stage door entrance. Mozart was already back in human form and dressed. He raised an eyebrow when he saw Sophie.

“Hey, Wolfie,” she said.

“Any luck?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Someone got to it before we did.”

He grunted. “Whoever did this, they had firepower, and they knew what they were doing. We need a place to regroup and figure out our next steps before we walk into something bigger than we're ready to handle.”

“Where can we go?” I asked.

“I have an old friend up in Harlem. She'll take us in for a night or two. She's kind of known for that—offering a temporary
shelter for wayward monsters. We might even find some of the others there.”

IT WAS ALMOST
sunrise by the time we got to Harlem. As Sophie and I numbly followed Mozart down 110th Street, I felt like I'd gone so far past the point of exhaustion that I could have slept anywhere. All my worries and questions about what had happened to my parents, Ruthven, and the others still swirled around in my brain, but at the moment, all I could really concentrate on was putting one foot in front of the other.

“So, who's this friend of yours?” asked Sophie. She sounded only slightly more alert then I was.

“Felicia,” he said. “Just a heads-up, she's a zombie.”

“What?” I suddenly felt a lot more awake. “We're staying with a zombie? Aren't you worried she'll eat our brains or something?”

“The whole eating-brains thing was just a Hollywood invention,” he said. “So was the rotting corpse idea.”

“Then . . . they're not actually dead?” asked Sophie.

“Oh, no, they're definitely dead. And Felicia does have a certain . . . smell that takes a little getting used to. She's not much of a conversationalist, either. But you won't find a more generous monster in the world. I wouldn't have made it past my first week as a werewolf if it hadn't been for her.”