Chaos Choreography

by Seanan McGuire

  The problem with working from someone else’s notes is that mistakes will start creeping in, which was why Dad could tell the age of the runes we’d found carved into Poppy and Chaz. Degradation of information was inevitable . . . unless they had someone on their side who understood what they were doing. Someone who could check their math, and could, say, draw a charm to completely purge the blood from a room. A magic-user, someone for whom the use of this particular language came as naturally as Sarah’s use of math or my use of the tango.

  Magic-users are pretty rare. It’s partially training and partially genetic, and both factors have suffered greatly at the hands of the Covenant. The last magic-user in our family was Grandpa Thomas, who had a small talent for elemental magic and a large talent for moving things with his mind, at least according to Grandma Alice, who—as has already been established—was not the world’s most reliable source. Still, if we assumed she was telling the truth about that, then we had a baseline for how rare the talent was, since no one in the two generations following their marriage had shown any tendency to set the curtains on fire with their minds. Two children and five grandkids, and still nothing had manifested.

  For the snake cultists to have a magic-user . . . well. That wasn’t good. And that may have been the understatement of the year.

  When I got back up to my own room, I curled up on my bed and sent Dominic a text, asking him to answer if he was up. My phone buzzed a few seconds later.

  JUST GOT BACK FROM PATROL. THE AREA’S QUIET. NO SIGNS OF SNAKE CULT ACTIVITY. WHAT’S GOING ON?

  There were so many ways to answer that question, and half of them required a flowchart. I decided to go with something from the other half, and replied, DAD SENT BACKUP. MY GRANDMOTHER’S HERE. JUST WANTED TO WARN YOU.

  This time, there was a longer pause before his return message. DID SHE BRING SARAH?

  He was thinking of my maternal grandmother, Angela Baker. Grandma Angela is a cuckoo, like Sarah. But she’s not a fighter, and she’s not a receptive telepath—she can project her thoughts, but she can’t pick up the thoughts of the people around her. Not so useful when what I needed was to find the people who were responsible for the murders of my cast mates.

  WRONG GRANDMA, I replied. THIS IS GRANDMA ALICE.

  No pause at all this time, but his next text was in all caps: ALICE HEALY?!?

  PRICE-HEALY, TECHNICALLY. SHE TOOK HER HUSBAND’S LAST NAME WHEN THEY GOT MARRIED. Grandma was the traditional sort, in some ways. Mostly the ways that gave her a higher chance of getting blood in her hair.

  I’M COMING OVER.

  NO! I CAN’T HAVE PEOPLE COMING IN AND OUT AT ALL HOURS. WE’LL COME TO YOU. I hadn’t been planning to go anywhere tonight—I was exhausted, and we didn’t have any new information to go on—but if I needed to introduce my grandmother to my husband in order to prevent some sort of incident, I’d find a way.

  I WILL EXPECT YOU INSIDE THE HOUR, was Dominic’s last text. He stopped responding after that. I should probably have been worried, but I was honestly relieved. His silence gave me time to figure out how I was going to sneak out when I wasn’t going alone.

  Grandma Alice isn’t a free-runner; like most of my family, she views my tendency to throw myself off tall buildings as just short of suicidal, although—being her—she also found it sort of adorable. When your grandmother with no sense of self-preservation thinks you’re being cute, maybe it’s time to reconsider your life choices.

  On the plus side, she did like to drive, although the legality of her license was questionable. She definitely knew how to hot-wire a car, since she’d tried to teach me when I was six (just one of a long series of decisions that eventually led to my father saying she wasn’t allowed to be alone with us until we turned sixteen). Between the two of us, we could probably manage to scrounge up a vehicle. I slipped my phone into my pocket, pulled a few knives from under my mattress and tucked them into my shirt, and stood. Time to get moving again.

  Pax and Lyra were in the living room. He was giving her a foot rub; she had a cold cloth on her forehead. Anders was nowhere to be seen. Pax looked up at the sound of footsteps, raising his eyebrows.

  “Going somewhere?” he asked.

  “Just downstairs to talk to Elle,” I said. I managed a smile that didn’t look entirely ghoulish. “Don’t wait up, okay?”

  “Val, wait.” Lyra sat up enough to meet my eyes. “I know I’m the one who said this was okay, but I’m worried. It’s cool that your sister’s here and all—it sucks that your family doesn’t support you—and I don’t have any problem with her squatting until the show’s over, but you already sneak out the window most nights, and now you’re going downstairs to hang out with her. Is this going to affect your work?”

  It was such a reasonable question, about such an unreasonable situation, that it was all I could do not to start laughing. Instead, I forced my smile to get a little wider, and said, “With my sister here, maybe I won’t feel the need to sneak out as much. I’ll be fine, Lyra. I’ve never gotten so little sleep that I couldn’t dance the next day.”

  “I know. But I want it to come down to the four of us again, you know? Let’s prove we were the best season, and take home the grand prize for ourselves.”

  “Easy for you to say,” grumbled Pax good-naturedly. “You already won once.”

  “Lo says the audience probably won’t vote for one of the previous winners to take it all again,” I said. “Something about the perception that their favorites got robbed. So if it came down to the four of us, I think your chances would be really good, Pax.”

  “Let’s get there and see,” said Lyra. She closed her eyes and lay back down, wiggling her toes as a signal for Pax to continue the massage. “Just be careful.”

  “I will,” I said, and let myself out of the apartment.

  As was customary on a night following a Sasha rehearsal, the party in the courtyard had devolved into quiet conversation and people working the kinks out of each other’s shoulders, calves, and feet. There was nothing sexual about it. Massage might be an erotic thing for some people, but for dancers, it was a necessity of life, keeping our muscles from rebelling in the middle of the night and reducing us to wobbling knots of pain. No one looked my way as I padded down the stairs and let myself into the apartment that Alice had claimed as her own.

  She was gone. The living room was spotless, giving no sign that my grandmother, or her gear, had ever been there. I stopped in the doorway, blinking.

  Then I realized I could smell cookies.

  “Gra—Elle?” For all I knew, she had company, and I didn’t want to need to explain why I was calling my sister—my apparently younger sister, and don’t think that didn’t make my head hurt—“Grandma.”

  “In here, sweetie,” she called, from the direction of the kitchen.

  I stuck my head in, and sure enough, she had produced a practical white apron and a pair of oven mitts from her cavernous backpack and was baking chocolate chip cookies. This seemed somehow natural and completely bizarre at the same time. So I asked the most pressing question I could think of:

  “Where did you get the eggs?”

  “The nice thing about this dimension—apart from the gravity; you should never take gravity for granted, dear, you never know when it’s going to be taken away from you—is the availability of things called ‘grocery stores.’” Alice opened the oven and pulled out a cookie sheet covered in perfect, golden brown cookies. She’d been baking cookies for decades, and had somehow mastered the arcane art of getting the exact right ratio of chocolate chips to dough.

  My mouth watered. I swallowed, frowned, and said, “You’re supposed to be keeping a low profile. How is baking cookies keeping a low profile?”

  “I’m going to make noise by being in here: it’s inevitable,” she said, beginning to transfer the cookies to a cooling rack with a spatula. I was starting to wonder w
hether her backpack was so large because she carried a full pastry kitchen with her at all times. “This way, if someone hears the noises coming from the apartment that always smells like cookies, they’ll be more likely to assume that I’m harmless, and not kick the door in. Plus, cookies make excellent bribes. Especially fresh-baked cookies.”

  “Some of the dancers are gluten-free and vegan,” I said.

  Alice looked at me blankly.

  “It’s a whole new world, Grandma,” I said. “Dominic wants to meet you.”

  “Dominic—that’s your boyfriend, yes? Your father told me about him. He seemed to think I’d be angry because you’d started dating someone from the Covenant.” Alice shook her head, a small smile painting her lips. “As if I’m in any position to judge? Your grandfather was still officially a member when I fell in love with him.”

  “I hope that non-judgment extends a little past ‘boyfriend,’” I said. “I married him.”

  Alice blinked. “You did what?”

  “I married him. We went to Las Vegas, and got married.” I braced myself for the shouting that was sure to follow.

  Instead, she picked up a plate of cookies from the counter and thrust it in my direction. “Oh, darling, that’s wonderful! Congratulations to you both. Have a cookie.”

  It was my turn to blink. I picked up a cookie automatically, asking, “You’re not mad?”

  “That you eloped? Sweetheart, at your father’s wedding, I punched the mother of the bride in the face so hard that she took out half a row of chairs when she fell over. I wasn’t invited to your aunt’s wedding, but I understand the groom’s side of the family caused more than enough commotion. The last peaceful ceremony in our family was mine, and it was only peaceful because the priest performed it in Thomas’ living room, for an audience of Aeslin mice and spiders.” Alice shook her head. “Marriage is a sacred bond. I think where it gets screwed up is when we try to include everybody else. Did you take his name?”

  “He’s taking mine. His family is dead, and the Covenant sort of disowned him.”

  “That’s nice.” Alice produced a Ziploc baggie from her baking supplies and began filling it with cookies. “So he’s in town, and he wants to meet me? That’s good. We should probably come up with some sort of plan of attack before the killers show up again.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, and took a bite of my cookie, to give me a second before I had to say anything more. It was a great cookie. I love my grandmother’s cookies. But she was right. We needed a plan, and we needed one five minutes ago. I swallowed and said, “I don’t think it was a coincidence that the two eliminated dancers were killed right after the end of the show. They’re sort of the definition of ‘won’t be missed for a few days.’ Everyone assumes they were embarrassed and left immediately, or got swept away by the producers. Whoever they have waiting for them back at home will assume they’re sad and going radio silent for a day or two.”

  Alice looked momentarily wistful. “It must be nice to have the sort of life where a few days of radio silence doesn’t mean that something has gone horrifically wrong.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. I knew that sort of life existed. I’ve never had the chance to have one, and neither had she. “I checked the Twitter feeds for the dancers who’ve been eliminated. There’s been some activity, but it all feels . . .” I stopped, struggling for the words that would explain the impression I’d gotten from their pages.

  “Like camouflage?” offered Alice.

  “Yeah,” I said, relieved. “It’s all generic. ‘Sad to be eliminated, glad to be home,’ and ‘good luck to the remaining dancers.’ No personal messages. Nothing like ‘oh, I love you’ or ‘vote for my friends this week.’ It feels static and wrong.”

  “So maybe they didn’t make it home at all,” said Alice. “Can people tell lies on these ‘feeds’?”

  “Grandma, if I try to teach you about Facebook and social media, we’re going to be here all night,” I said. “Just believe me when I say you can’t trust anything you read on the Internet until you confirm it.”

  “Fair enough,” said Alice. “Now what?”

  “Now we get moving before Dominic freaks out and decides we’ve gone off to fight something without him.” I’d feel better once I’d seen him, and verified with my own eyes that he was all right—and that my grandmother wasn’t going to kill him for being Covenant. Alice’s sense of family responsibility was sometimes second only to her protective streak, and she did not like the Covenant. Given the way they’d treated Grandpa Thomas, I couldn’t exactly blame her for that. I just didn’t want her taking it out on my husband.

  “I’ll get my keys,” said Alice, tossing me the baggie of cookies as she walked out of the kitchen.

  I trailed after her. “Keys?”

  “To the motorcycle I bought,” she explained. She grinned at my expression. “Sweetie, I know you want to grow up to be Batgirl, and I think that’s a very respectable life choice, but I’m an old lady. I might break a hip if I tried traveling the way that you do.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, with a snort. I considered reminding her that Batgirl had traveled via motorcycle for most of her career, and that calling me “Catwoman” might be more accurate—or better yet, Spider-woman—but decided I had more important things to focus on. “You bought a motorcycle? From whom?”

  “Someone who was selling a motorcycle,” she said. “I had money. She wanted it. She had a motorcycle. I wanted it. Some things are universal. I don’t know what I’m going to do when people stop believing in newspaper ads. I can’t keep up with the Internet and all those gadgets you kids use to keep in touch.” She stepped into the back bedroom. The curtains were open, providing a clear view of the empty parking lot behind the apartment complex.

  “I can never tell if you’re joking when you say things like that,” I said.

  “That’s the intention,” she replied, and opened the window.

  We slithered through the narrow opening and out into the warm night air, which smelled of hydrangeas and exhaust fumes. Alice led me across the lot to a hole in the fence. She squeezed through, and I followed, onto a narrow, weedy cul-de-sac where the houses were more rundown than anything that had been visible from the fence’s other side. A little girl with grayish skin was sitting in the yard of the nearest house, playing tea party with her dolls. She went still when she saw us.

  Alice said something in what sounded mostly like French. The little girl brightened, nodded, and flashed a sharp-toothed smile before she went back to her party. I gave my grandmother a questioning look.

  Alice smiled. “I rented a part of their garage for the bike. I just told her I was the weird day-walker who paid her grandfather enough for her new doll, and everything was fine.”

  “I thought ghouls liked to live in secluded places when they couldn’t live underground,” I said. “You know, abandoned houses near cemeteries and slaughterhouses.”

  “Would you want to raise a child near a cemetery or a slaughterhouse?” asked Alice.

  She gripped the bottom of the garage door and hauled upward. I moved to help, and she shot me a grateful look as the door slid up, revealing a garage packed stem to stern with boxes, piles of yard equipment, and old, tangled Christmas lights. A space had been cleared off to one side, the scrapes in the dirt on the floor showing how quickly the job had been done. There was a motorcycle parked there, old and battered but still sturdy-looking, like it had been driven a long way to get here, and was more than ready to drive back.

  “There she is,” said Alice. “California has helmet laws, right?”

  “Right,” I said uneasily. I’ve never been a big fan of motorcycles. They seem like an even faster route to a horrible death than the usual cars. “I like helmets. They’re like exoskeletons for your skull. Please tell me you have helmets.”

  “I have helmets,” said Alice. She reached into the pil
e of boxes, withdrawing two brown lumps that looked like they came from roughly the same era as the bike itself. Privately, I resolved to walk home. “Don’t make that face. They’re not cute, but they’re street-legal, and they’ll protect your head. Not that I’m planning to have an accident. Road rash isn’t my idea of a good time.”

  “Grandma, your idea of a good time involves gutting things.”

  “True enough,” said Alice, apparently unoffended. “Blood is good for your hair, and internal organs are good for your skin. Put your helmet on, and don’t talk back.”

  I rolled my eyes, pulled off my wig, and put the helmet on.

  The little ghoul girl was still playing tea party when the motorcycle came zooming down the driveway, my grandmother leaning forward to reduce our wind drag, me clinging to her for dear life. The little ghoul raised a hand in a wave. To my dismay, Alice returned it. I hugged her tighter, and she laughed, and drove on into the night.

  Crossing the city was easier on a motorcycle than on foot, even for me. Alice seemed to have at least a basic understanding of traffic laws—she understood they existed, and she understood she didn’t like them, but if everyone else was playing by the rules, she should pretend to care. She only broke a few speed limits and drove on the sidewalk for about six blocks during a particularly nasty patch of traffic. Apart from that, she was a model citizen.

  I still kept one eye on her rearview mirrors, waiting for the red-and-blue lights to start behind us. We were wearing helmets, but that was where our dalliance with being responsible drivers ended, and I had no faith that whatever license she was using would stand up to any sort of scrutiny . . . or hadn’t expired thirty years ago.