Chaos Choreography

by Seanan McGuire

  Praise for the InCryptid novels:

  “The only thing more fun than an October Daye book is an InCryptid book. Swift narrative, charm, great world-building . . . all the McGuire trademarks.”

  —Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “[Half-Off Ragnarok is] slightly over-the-top fun, a genuinely entertaining good time, [and] an urban fantasy that, despite the title, isn’t about the imminent end of the world.”

  —Tor.com

  “Seanan McGuire’s Discount Armageddon is an urban fantasy triple threat—smart and sexy and funny. The Aeslin mice alone are worth the price of the book, so consider a cast of truly original characters, a plot where weird never overwhelms logic, and some serious kickass world-building as a bonus.”

  —Tanya Huff, bestselling author of The Future Falls

  “It would seem that McGuire’s imagination is utterly boundless. The world of her InCryptid series is full of unexpected creatures, constant surprises and appealing characters, all crafted with the measured ease of a skilled professional, making the fantastic seem like a wonderful reality. The shifting focus of the series [in Half-Off Ragnarok] to a different member of the engaging and consistently surprising Price family is a resounding success, offering a new look at some well-loved characters and a new world of interesting beasts and mysteries to explore.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Exciting . . . McGuire creates a sense of wonder and playfulness with her love for mythology and folklore, weaving together numerous manifestations of a single theme. Her enthusiastic and fast-paced style makes this an entertaining page-turner.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “While chock full of quality worldbuilding, realistic characters, and a double helping of sass, at its core, Half-Off Ragnarok is a book about judging others according to stereotypes, how nurture can overcome nature, and the importance of family.”

  —The Ranting Dragon

  “Discount Armageddon is a quick-witted, sharp-edged look at what makes a monster monstrous, and at how closely our urban fantasy protagonists walk—or dance—that line. The pacing never lets up, and when the end comes, you’re left wanting more. I can’t wait for the next book!”

  —C. E. Murphy, author of Raven Calls

  DAW Books presents the finest in urban fantasy from Seanan McGuire:

  InCryptid Novels

  DISCOUNT ARMAGEDDON

  MIDNIGHT BLUE-LIGHT SPECIAL

  HALF-OFF RAGNAROK

  POCKET APOCALYPSE

  CHAOS CHOREOGRAPHY

  SPARROW HILL ROAD

  October Daye Novels

  ROSEMARY AND RUE

  A LOCAL HABITATION

  AN ARTIFICIAL NIGHT

  LATE ECLIPSES

  ONE SALT SEA

  ASHES OF HONOR

  CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

  THE WINTER LONG

  A RED-ROSE CHAIN

  ONCE BROKEN FAITH *

  *Available September 2016 from DAW Books

  Copyright © 2016 by Seanan McGuire.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by Aly Fell.

  Cover design by G-Force Design.

  Interior dingbats created by Tara O’Shea.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1720.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.

  eBook ISBN: 9781101602423

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Version_1

  For Will, who has felt the sting of reality television and lived to tell the tale.

  CONTENTS

  Praise for the InCryptid novels

  Also by Seanan McGuire

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Family Tree

  Dance or Die Dramatis Personae

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Price Family Field Guide to the Cryptids of North America

  Playlist

  Acknowledgments

  Dance or Die

  Dramatis Personae:

  The Judges:

  Adrian Crier, executive producer

  Lindy O’Toole, ballroom expert

  Clint Goldfein, choreographer

  Our Host:

  Brenna Kelly

  The Dancers:

  Season 1: Reggie (hip-hop, winner), Jessica (contemporary), Poppy (ballroom), and Chaz (jazz).

  Season 2: Lyra (jazz, winner), Valerie (ballroom), Anders (tap), and Pax (contemporary).

  Season 3: Mac (ballet, winner), Emily (contemporary), Malena (ballroom), and Troy (hip-hop).

  Season 4: Lo (ballroom, winner), Ivan (ballroom), Will (contemporary), and Raisa (hip-hop).

  Season 5: Graham (contemporary, winner), Danny (ballroom), Leanne (contemporary), and Bobbi (jazz).

  Dancer, noun:

  1. A person who dances.

  Destiny, noun:

  1. The inevitable or irresistible course of events.

  2. The inescapable future.

  3. See also “screwed.”

  Prologue

  “Children know who they’re meant to become. It’s on us to see to it that they live long enough to get there.”

  —Enid Healy

  The Dance or Die stage, live finale, Los Angeles, California

  Three years ago

  “WHEN WE TOOK THE STAGE at the start of this season, twenty dancers stood before you, ready to dazzle you with their talent, strength, and personalities. We’re down to two, America: the two dancers you have voted all the way to the end.” The show’s host, Brenna Kelly, towered over the remaining contestants. She was taller than either of them in her stocking feet, and her fondness for sky-high heels when on stage meant that she currently had almost six inches on Lyra and eight inches on Valerie.

  The girls clung to each other’s hands, heads bowed, as the lights and glitter swirled around them. Standing at the center of the stage was so bright it felt like standing on the sun. Valerie’s thighs ached so badly she was almost shaking. The li
ve finale had opened with the top four doing a complicated jazz number, and had continued from there, never letting up, never relenting. She’d been allowed to rest when the eliminated dancers returned to the stage to perform the judges’ favorite routines from the season, but even then, she’d been changing costumes, doing warm-up exercises, doing whatever it took to stay limber and ready to go. She couldn’t afford to miss a beat. Not now, not even with the votes already cast and the outcome already determined.

  The show was called Dance or Die. If she didn’t win, there was a good chance that Valerie Pryor—dancer, redhead, innocent human with no connection to the cryptozoological world—was going to die, or at least cease to exist as more than a dead link on the show’s Wikipedia page. She’d been created as a mask, intended to prove that the woman who wore her was good enough to leave the family business and forge her own future, complicated and difficult as it might be. Valerie had fought her way through auditions, grueling rehearsals, backstage drama, and she’d done it all to stand right where she was, breathing in this moment.

  She was grateful for the lights, even as they blinded her. Their glare meant she couldn’t see the audience. Week after week, her fellow contestants had pointed out people in the crowd, mothers and fathers and siblings and lovers. She never had. When the judges asked if she had anyone there to cheer her on, she’d only ever shrugged and said her family didn’t support her dancing. The lie ached. Her family supported her more than she could ever have asked. Without their support, she wouldn’t have been allowed to craft her Valerie persona and audition in the first place . . . but supporting her career didn’t mean they could risk being seen on camera. Every week she’d danced for the families of strangers. She’d never danced for her own.

  Lyra’s hand was sweaty, her fingers like twigs that clutched and bore down on Valerie’s palm until it hurt. Valerie didn’t snatch her hand away. That would have looked bad, and petty, and the camera wouldn’t miss a second of it. The camera would make sure everyone knew she was a sore loser, and any chance she might have had at a career would be damaged past repair.

  Brenna stopped talking. The clip reel music started. A hush fell over the crowd, and Valerie and Lyra obediently turned to watch their season’s highlights play out on the jumbo flat-screen monitors. It was eerie. Valerie knew she was the girl with the red hair and the coquettish smile—she’d been living the part long enough to recognize her reflection—but it still felt like watching a stranger, someone who happened to share her footwork and her tendency to fling her left hand dramatically forward. She could see her flaws more easily when they were coming through a stranger. She could also see her merits. And she was good. Really, really good.

  Please, she thought, as the clip reel wound to an end and the audience erupted in cheers (which were only slightly orchestrated by the show’s producers; this was reality television, after all). Please let me win, please let me keep being Valerie, please let this be my life from now on. Please let me be the first one in my generation to get out. Please.

  “The time is here: we’ve kept you waiting long enough. Are you nervous, my darling girls?” Brenna cast a sincere smile toward both Valerie and Lyra. “You’ve both been amazing. No matter what this envelope says, you’re both winners to me.”

  Valerie forced a smile. She’d never felt so small, or so certain that everything was about to change. One way or the other, everything was about to change.

  “All right. Here we go. The votes are in, and America’s Dancer of Choice is . . .”

  Please, thought Valerie, and closed her eyes.

  “. . . Lyra!”

  The crowd went wild. Lyra’s hand was pulled from Valerie’s as she covered her mouth and began to sob. Valerie turned to hug her, feeling like her entire body—her body, which had always listened so well to her commands, carrying her through so much—had gone numb.

  “Congratulations,” she whispered. She wasn’t sure Lyra heard her. The other woman was too busy grinning through her tears, and being handed a bouquet of red roses bigger around than her chest, and then one of the stagehands was there, helping Valerie back, out of the spotlight, out of the way.

  Valerie Pryor closed her eyes. Verity Price opened them. It had been fun to be someone else for a little while. She’d even allowed herself to hope it might be forever. But nothing was forever, was it? Valerie Pryor was just a mask she’d been wearing, and now . . .

  Now she had work to do.

  One

  “If at first you don’t succeed, try again with a bigger gun.”

  —Alice Healy

  The bank of the main civic reservoir, in the middle of the night, Portland, Oregon

  Now

  TOO MANY EYES TO COUNT watched us from the surface of the reservoir. Every time I swept my flashlight across the water, I found another two or three dozen pairs glowing in the darkness. All of them were focused on the flashlight, which meant all of them were focused on us. Way to make a girl feel loved.

  “Forgive me for stating the obvious, but we’re outnumbered,” murmured Dominic. He wasn’t holding a flashlight. His hands were empty, for now. If something moved, so would he, and given how many knives he could conceal in his leather duster—which may have been cool fifteen years ago; now it was just a weird, if practical, affectation—he wouldn’t have any trouble fighting it off.

  “Yup,” I agreed, continuing to play my flashlight across the water. Eyes, eyes, eyes. Everywhere eyes. I ran down the checklist in the back of my head, trying to find something they could belong to that wasn’t a sudden and inexplicable infestation of swamp hags. Swamp hags don’t belong in city reservoirs. Adults don’t move between territories very often, and the size of the eyes I was seeing implied an infestation of adolescents. Which made no sense at all. They would’ve had to be carried here, and who the hell thought that was a good idea? Why—

  A bullfrog’s sonorous croak split the air. I blinked twice before I burst out laughing, earning myself a sidelong look from Dominic.

  “What is so funny?” he asked.

  “We’re here because Artie heard a rumor about ‘something weird at the reservoir,’ right?” A nod. “And we both assumed the eyes were the weird thing, hence your comment about us being outnumbered.” Another nod. I grinned. “The only thing that’s wrong here is how many frogs are swimming in the drinking water. Somebody should probably tell the city.”

  “Frogs.”

  “Yup. Frogs.” I picked up a rock and lobbed it toward a cluster of eyes. The cluster scattered. Several plump bullfrog bodies were briefly visible in the flashlight beam. The rest of the eyes didn’t budge. I lowered my flashlight. “They get hypnotized by the light—hence the staring. They’re an invasive species, but they’re not our problem.”

  Something splashed a little farther out in the reservoir.

  “Ah, Verity,” said Dominic.

  “People introduced them all over the country, sometimes by mistake, sometimes on purpose, and sometimes because they were trying to feed the family manticore,” I said. “Manticore are surprisingly chill about eating amphibians. You’d think the whole ‘cold blood’ thing would be a problem, but you’d be wrong.”

  “Verity, I must insist,” said Dominic.

  “Insist on what?” I turned to face him, the beam of my flashlight striking his chest and illuminating his face. He had his serious expression on, the one that implied an asteroid was about to smack into the planet and wipe out all human life, thus sparing him the indignity of putting up with it for one minute more. It used to piss me off when he made that face. These days I find it funny as hell. Nobody fights harder for the survival of the people around him than Dominic, and it’s not his fault he sounds like a stuffed shirt half the time.

  He is a man of many excellent qualities, which is why I married him.

  “I must insist you look back at the water.” He was starting to sound faintly stran
gled. That wasn’t normal. It probably wasn’t good. I turned my flashlight back toward the reservoir.

  The light gleamed off the scales of a long, slender column that stretched from the water to some unseen higher point. Mouth suddenly dry, I played the light upward, confirming that a) the column was a neck, and b) the neck belonged to something carnivorous in the long-necked plesiosaur family.

  “Oh,” I said. “Well. Will you look at that?”

  Like the frogs, the plesiosaur seemed fascinated by my light. Unlike the frogs, the plesiosaur had a head at least two feet long, and a mouth that bristled with sharp, flesh-ripping teeth. I’d been a lot happier when it was just frogs.

  “That is a dinosaur,” said Dominic. “I . . . I admit, I was not expecting a dinosaur.”

  “Technically it’s not a dinosaur, it’s a plesiosaur,” I said. “I think. Probably. I don’t feel like getting closer so I can find out, do you?” Plesiosaurs, and things like them, are the purview of my brother Alex, who likes reptiles and amphibians and other creatures he can’t reasonably have a conversation with. Unfortunately, Alex was in Ohio, and had not accompanied us on the night’s adventure. I’m the urban cryptid girl. My job involves talking to things that can talk back, and as far as I knew, plesiosaurs didn’t fall under that umbrella.

  Maybe I was being hasty. I cleared my throat, pasted on my most reasonable-looking smile, and called, “Hello, the plesiosaur! Would you like to have a nice chat about what you’re doing in our reservoir?”

  My name is Verity Price; I’m a cryptozoologist. That means that sometimes my life includes shouting at extinct genera of reptiles. My life is weird.

  The plesiosaur cocked its head, looking for all the world like an enormous iguana. For a moment, I thought maybe this was going to work out for the best. The plesiosaur would reveal a heretofore unsuspected intelligence, and explain in small, pleasant words how it had wound up in the Portland reservoir, and how I could get it out before the authorities noticed.