Chaos Choreography

by Seanan McGuire

  Then the plesiosaur opened its mouth, made a horrifying keening noise, and darted toward us, moving fast enough to constitute a clear and present danger. I yelped, jumping out of the way. Dominic was a dark blur against the bushes as he raced for safety. The plesiosaur’s jaws snapped shut where I’d been standing only a moment before.

  “Not friendly,” I said, in case Dominic had somehow managed to miss the memo.

  “Oh really? Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “There’s no need for sarcasm,” I called. In the distance, Dominic snorted.

  The plesiosaur pulled back for another strike. I braced myself to jump again. The thing couldn’t stay in the reservoir, that was for sure, and I didn’t want to leave when there was a chance it might eat a jogger or something, but I wasn’t ready to kill it, either. There’d been no reports of it hurting anyone. There hadn’t even been any conclusive sightings, prior to me and my flashlight. It was just an innocent prehistoric reptile, doing what came naturally for innocent prehistoric reptiles.

  The head snapped forward again. I jumped backward this time, using my momentum to turn the motion into a handspring. It was showy and pointless, but a girl’s got to stay in practice somehow, and besides, it wasn’t like we were in a lot of danger as long as we didn’t hold still. The plesiosaur was cranky and snappy, but it couldn’t leave the water. Well. I didn’t think it could leave the water. It probably couldn’t leave the water.

  I decided to stay a little farther back from the water.

  “Is there a plan? Or are you just going to keep jumping about like a startled cat?” Dominic’s voice came from behind me. He must have gotten through the bushes and worked his way around to avoid the plesiosaur.

  “Those bushes are like half blackberry bramble,” I said.

  “I’m aware,” said Dominic.

  “I have a plan,” I said, tensing as the plesiosaur pulled back. “I’m going to wear it out, and when it submerges, I’m going to find out who thought it was okay to store their giant lizard in the city reservoir, and we’re going to have a little talk.”

  “There will still be a plesiosaur in the reservoir,” said Dominic.

  Sometimes he was so practical it made me want to scream. “That’s why God invented U-Haul rentals,” I said. The plesiosaur lunged. I leaped. From the blackberry bushes, Dominic swore. I allowed myself to smile. He was learning the dangers of questioning me.

  Not that he had much left to learn. Dominic and I met in New York, where I’d been spending a year working as a professional ballroom dancer and he was doing the prep work for a purge by the Covenant of St. George. Naturally, we hit it off right away. He hit me with a snare, and then I hit him with my stunning wit and cheerful willingness to shoot him until he stopped squirming. It wasn’t your classic Hollywood meet-cute—more of a standoff with the cryptid population of Manhattan hanging in the balance—but we’d been able to make things work. Mostly because he was a nice guy, under all that Covenant brainwashing, and he had the common sense to find me mad cute, which meant he was also a smart guy.

  “Please tell me you’re not planning to put the dinosaur in the back of a U-Haul.” There was a pleading note in Dominic’s tone, like he couldn’t believe those words had left his mouth in that order. “The company is still angry with us over the last U-Haul you rented.”

  “I am a constant source of enlightenment and delight, and it’s a plesiosaur!” I chirped, and jumped again.

  Two things happened then: three flashlights clicked on at the edge of the path along the reservoir, and a voice shouted, “Hey! What are you doing over there?”

  “Oh, great, civilians,” I muttered.

  Most people don’t believe in monsters. Sure, the general public enjoys a good scare. Somebody makes a movie about a cursed videotape or a haunted doll, and they’re right in the front row, shoveling down popcorn and screaming happy screams when somebody’s guts hit the floor. That’s not the same as believing. Some things we have to hide from science, waiting for the day when people will be ready to deal with the idea of talking mice or fish with fur. Other things science hides from itself, because no one really wants the night to be dark and filled with monsters. That era has passed.

  The trouble is, nobody gave the monsters—better described as “predatory cryptids,” since “monster” is sort of insulting—the memo. They exist, and when given the opportunity, they happily eat people who don’t believe in them. This brought me back to the civilians running down the path in our direction, heedless of the fact that at the end of their jog, they were going to be facing a lot of teeth.

  “Dominic,” I hissed.

  “I’m on it,” he said. The bushes rustled, and he appeared a few yards down the path, running toward the flashlights.

  “I married Batman,” I said fondly. The plesiosaur struck. I yelped, barely jumping out of the way in time.

  “Stop harassing Nemo!” wailed an unfamiliar voice.

  The plesiosaur turned toward it, neck stretching into a curve I could only describe as curious. Really tame snakes sometimes assumed that position. So did snakes that were thinking about turning something into a new source of protein. I gave serious, if rapid, thought to launching myself at the plesiosaur. I wasn’t wearing anything I couldn’t get wet, and it might keep somebody from being eaten.

  Then the words sunk in. “Wait. Nemo?” I turned to look in the same direction as the plesiosaur. “You named it?”

  The owners of the flashlights kept running. Dominic grabbed one by the shoulders, hauling the figure to a halt, but the other two got past him, becoming visible. Both were in their early twenties, at best; they might have been in their teens. One was faster than the other. He reached me first, and shoved me hard enough that I actually stumbled. His companion ran for the edge of the reservoir, where the plesiosaur was bowing its head to meet her.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded, going in to shove me again.

  Right. I’d been startled before, but no way was he putting his hands on me a second time. I grabbed his wrist, spinning hard to the side and twisting as I went, until I wound up behind him with his arm bent at an angle that wasn’t quite going to dislocate his shoulder. Well, probably not. If he moved, all bets were off.

  He made a guttural keening noise, surprisingly low for the amount of pain he was almost certainly in. His companion turned from the act of stroking the plesiosaur’s nose, her eyes gone wide with shock. He’d dropped his flashlight when I grabbed him. It was spinning, illuminating different parts of the scene.

  “Hi,” I said brightly, giving the girl my best camera-ready smile. “Who feels like explaining what the hell is going on? I’ll give you a hint: it’s probably not your friend here. He’s sort of got other things to worry about.” I gave his arm another squeeze. He moaned again.

  “What are you doing?” The girl stepped forward, putting herself between me and the plesiosaur. “Let Charlie go! He didn’t do anything to you!”

  “Uh, wrong,” I said. “He shoved me. Didn’t anybody ever teach him that it’s rude to lay hands on a lady?”

  Dominic came walking down the path, dragging another young woman by the arm. She had long brown hair, and looked like the sort of girl I was used to finding on my sister’s roller derby team. Too bad she wasn’t on my sister’s roller derby team. Antimony would have known about the plesiosaur if that had been the case, and we wouldn’t be standing here now.

  “Please, we’re not hurting anything,” said the second girl. “We didn’t expect to see your flashlights, and we sort of panicked. Please, let us go.”

  “Were you expecting to see the plesiosaur?” I asked.

  “Nemo’s not a dino—” protested the first girl. Then she caught herself, and blinked, and said, “Um, yes. He’s ours.”

  “I’m sorry. Maybe I got something in my ear when your friend here shoved me,” I said.
“Did you just say the plesiosaur was yours?”

  Dominic released the second girl, who rocked back and forth for a moment, torn between rushing to defend her prehistoric reptile and going to the aid of her much more modern, if not much more evolved, companion. In the end, the plesiosaur won, and she fled to stand next to the other girl, blocking “Nemo” from our deadly attentions.

  “Yes,” snapped the first girl. “Nemo’s ours, and he’s never hurt anybody, and no one would believe you anyway, so you should just go. You hear me? Get out of here and go.”

  “Since we weren’t doing anything but being near the reservoir when Nemo decided to pop his head out and start trying to bite my head off, I think you may be wrong about whether he’s ever hurt anybody,” I said. It was hard to sound gentle while I had their friend in an armlock. I leaned forward, murmuring in his ear, “Are you going to shove me again?”

  “No, I swear,” he whimpered.

  I let him go. He ran to his friends, cradling his arm and staring at me fearfully.

  “You must have done something,” said the first girl. “Nemo wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “Nemo has a fifteen-foot neck, which means he’s a pretty big boy,” I said. “Have you been dumping tadpoles in the reservoir to feed him?” They didn’t answer me. They didn’t need to. Their guilty expressions were answer enough. “There are a lot of frogs in there, so I’m going to wager that Nemo doesn’t eat frogs. They probably taste funny. So he ate all the fish in the reservoir—alas for the free-range goldfish population—and then he probably moved on to small mammals. There sure were a lot of missing pet fliers up at the mouth of the trail, did you notice?”

  No missing kid fliers. Not yet. That was a small blessing. Things like Nemo were miracles of endurance and evolution, but they couldn’t be allowed to go around eating children.

  The newcomers blanched. The second girl looked faintly sick. She must have been an animal lover, not just a plesiosaur fan.

  The first girl leaned up to wrap her arms around Nemo’s head. The plesiosaur endured her affections surprisingly well for a prehistoric reptile. “I don’t care,” she said. “He’s not hurting anything, and we’re not going to let you hurt him.”

  I sighed. “We’re not going to hurt him. But we might be able to help you save him. Or did you think you could keep him in the reservoir forever?”

  The trio exchanged glances. Finally, the first girl asked, “Save him how?”

  Girl #1’s name was Kim; girl #2 was Angie. The boy was Charlie. All three were students at the local community college, and had gone on an archaeological dig in Kansas the summer before. They’d fallen through a false floor in one of the caverns, and into a moist, warm chamber, where there’d been a nest mounded with leathery, football-sized eggs. Being scientists, they had naturally been fascinated, and being primates, they had naturally dealt with this fascination by stealing an egg from the edge of the nest.

  “We thought it would be an old fossil with a remarkably well-preserved eggshell, but when we put it through the X-ray, we realized it was alive,” said Kim, stroking Nemo’s snout, as if to reassure herself that it was okay to tell us this. “So we smuggled it home in one of the specimen cases, and at the end of the summer, it hatched into Nemo here. My beautiful boy.”

  The plesiosaur nuzzled her cheek. Kim laughed. Angie gave her a look that made it clear that Nemo wasn’t the only one who wanted to be nuzzling her. Kim didn’t notice. I felt like I was seeing their entire relationship in microcosm, and I didn’t want anything to do with it.

  “When did you decide to put your pet in the reservoir?” I asked.

  All three of them looked guilty. It was like I’d flipped a switch. Charlie spoke, saying, “It was my idea. Nemo was growing so fast, and we were afraid somebody was going to find him at the school. But nobody comes up to the reservoir.”

  “Nobody except joggers, and teenagers, and homeless people looking for a place to camp, and birders, and whatever the ‘I like to look at butterflies’ equivalent of birders is . . .” I let my voice trail off, looking at the trio. They seemed to be grasping the seriousness of their situation.

  “Oh,” said Kim, in a small voice.

  “Yeah, ‘oh.’ You’re lucky no one’s been eaten yet. Which, let me tell you, is not a situation that’s going to last. Between the way Nemo went for me, and the fact that someone is eventually going to tell the city about the reservoir being full of frogs, it’s only a matter of time.” I folded my arms. “We don’t even know how big he’s going to get. You really want to see your pet on the news, being gunned down by a SWAT team? Because that’s what’s going to happen.”

  “We didn’t know what else to do,” protested Kim. “You startled him, he’s never been aggressive with any of us, he wouldn’t really . . . wouldn’t really eat people.”

  “And it’s not like we can move him,” added Charlie. “We brought him here in the back of a pickup truck. He’s bigger than my pickup truck now. We couldn’t move him even if we had a place to move him to.”

  “The reservoir is fresh water,” I said. “Can he handle saltwater, or is he purely a lake monster?”

  I used the word “monster” on purpose, and was pleased to see all three of them flinch, Kim most of all. “He doesn’t like saltwater,” said Kim stiffly. “It tickles his nose. But he can handle it if he has to.”

  “What’s his temperature range?”

  “Good.” Kim continued to rub Nemo’s snout as she spoke, apparently calming both of them. “He doesn’t seem to mind the cold much, although it slows him down some. I’m sorry, but who are you people? Why are you asking us all these questions?”

  “We’re cryptozoologists, and we’re here to solve your problem,” I said, and smiled.

  They didn’t smile back.

  Six phone calls later—including one to Uncle Mike, who wasn’t thrilled about being woken up in the wee hours of the morning just so I could talk to Aunt Lea—we had the solution.

  “My dad’s coming over with an old dump truck that can be filled with water,” I said, tucking my phone into my pocket. “Kim, you’ll ride with Nemo. Dad’s going to take you upriver to an isolated spot where you should be good for a week or so while we get some old friends of ours to turn around and come back to Portland. The Campbell Family Carnival has a tank large enough for an adult plesiosaur. They’ll be able to transport him—and you, we’re not leaving you out of this—to the Cascades, where you can find him a suitable lake. Something deep and full of fish and not popular with boaters.”

  “Why are you doing this?” asked Angie. “What’s in it for you?”

  “One more plesiosaur in the world,” I said. “That’s pretty cool. Can I get a picture? My brother’s gonna be pissed that he missed this.”

  “Sure,” said Kim, looking bewildered.

  “Awesome.” I pulled my phone out again. “Dominic, hit the lights?”

  He sighed and pulled out his flashlight, shining it on us as I backed up and held out my phone. “Say Cretaceous,” I said, and snapped the selfie.

  All in all, not the worst night.

  Two

  “Love what you do. Even if it’s not what you thought you’d be doing when you were a kid, love what you do. Eventually, it’s going to kill you, and it would be a real pity if you died doing something you hate.”

  —Evelyn Baker

  A small survivalist compound about an hour’s drive east of Portland, Oregon

  THE SUN WAS DOWN and the house was dark when we pulled up to the gate. Dad was going to be out a lot later than we were: he was transporting Nemo the plesiosaur, Nemo’s human friends, and a few hundred gallons of water upriver, and that took time. We’d be lucky to see him before lunch.

  Dominic politely averted his eyes while I punched in the current security code. He’s family now—he’s even planning to change his last name to “Price,
” since it’s not like he can go around using “De Luca” without attracting Covenant attention—but that doesn’t mean he’s been cleared to have full access to the house. My argument with the parents is ongoing. If Dominic is going to be living with us, he needs to be able to get into the bugout room, almost as much as he needs to be able to go to the grocery store without an escort.

  Dominic says he’s willing to wait until he earns their trust. I say they’re punishing him, and by extension, me, for getting married by an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas, rather than having a fancy ceremony for everyone in the family to attend and pass judgment on.

  My parents have no respect for the classics.

  (To be fair, they’re correct in assuming that Dominic and I got married the way we did in order to make it harder for them to reject him out of hand. We also did it because we really wanted to get married, and we were passing through Vegas on the way to Portland anyway, so why not? No Las Vegas wedding is complete without a chupacabra dressed as Elvis asking if you’re planning to love, honor, obey, and finish eating your banana sandwich.)

  We slipped through the front door and crossed the living room to the kitchen, where not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. At this hour of the morning, most of the Aeslin were asleep, and the ones that weren’t would be preparing the temples for the day ahead. Our family colony of polytheistic mice kept a very strict calendar of religious observances, one that included every day of the year, as well as a few days they had shoehorned in there, just to get a bit of extra worshipping in. It must have been exhausting, being an Aeslin mouse.

  Once the kitchen door was closed, I sighed, sagged against the counter, and asked, “What are your feelings on breakfast? We need to eat something before we go to bed, or we’re going to wake up gnawing on each other.”

  “Waffles,” said Dominic, opening the freezer and producing a familiar yellow Eggo box. “No effort. No cleanup. Good delivery mechanism for peanut butter.”