The dragon princess was probably part of Brenna’s Nest; it’s rare to have two groups of dragons in the same metropolitan area, even when it’s as big as Los Angeles. I managed a wan smile, turning my attention back to the group spokesman. “You said we needed to talk about the theater. Please. What can you tell me?”
He took a deep breath. He looked older and wearier when he let it out again, like he’d used all his energy in getting us this far. “The Crier Theater was built over a warehouse complex that used to belong to us.”
“Not just us,” interjected Aurelie’s mother. “Us, and the bogeymen, and the hidebehinds. A whole bunch of the subterranean species. We all clubbed together to build the place.”
“Note how my daughter says ‘we’ when she didn’t exist at the time. Then again, neither did I. But my grandparents were a part of the group that put up the money, back when this land was more open, and it was easier to bury such things in the bowels of the permits department.” The old ghoul heaved a sigh. “I was born there. I grew up there. I saw my first communion there, and met my wife beneath the warehouse roof. It was glorious. We’d built a world right under the noses of the humans, and we never once saw the sun when we didn’t want to.”
There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask, some of which would probably lead us down very dark roads—like “What did you eat?” Ghouls are the only obligate carnivores we know of among the hominid species, and their meat of choice is usually human. They’d been content feasting on corpses until embalming and cremation became the norm. These days, they mostly go for live prey. A lot of disappearances can be traced back to the ghoul community. Since I didn’t want to get into a fight with these people while I was asking them for help, I held my tongue.
“We owned that land fair and square. Bought it in parcels and kept it in the family for as long as we could. We even paid our taxes reliably and on the regular, which is more than most of the humans around here could be bothered to do. But they got us anyway. Said we were an ‘eyesore,’ and started chasing loopholes.” The elder ghoul’s voice turned bitter. I still didn’t know his name. That was probably intentional. Humanize the child, because she was vulnerable, and they didn’t want her getting hurt. Hold themselves apart, hold themselves back, because they were adults and could damn well defend themselves.
I hated that we lived in a world where that sort of calculation was necessary, where we could search the sky for aliens and ignore the sapient species living in our neighborhoods and shopping in our stores. Even more, I hated the fact that I was helpless to change it.
“Let me guess,” I said, as gingerly as I could. “Estate taxes?”
The ghoul nodded. “They came at us with lawyers. Said we hadn’t filed the correct paperwork for inheritance, and we’d have to come up with money if we wanted to keep our place—a lot of money, because the land had become valuable while we were squatting on it and keeping to ourselves. Taxes got them through the door, and then they found a hundred code violations that needed to be fixed, a thousand upkeep flaws that needed to be resolved. We were smart enough to know they’d just keep coming, all those clever humans and their wicked lawyers, until they had what they wanted. So we sold while we could still make a little money. Enough to resettle ourselves, even if we’d never be as comfortable, or as much at home.”
“Couldn’t you move somewhere else and start over?” asked Malena. The ghoul turned to look at her. So did Dominic and I. She flushed, but shrugged and pressed on: “There’s lots of open land in New Mexico. You could build another warehouse, or buy an old airplane hangar, and try again. Hell, there are whole cities for sale, if you know where to look. Some of them even have liquor licenses.”
“I was born in Southern California,” said the ghoul. “My daughters went to school here, met their husbands here. My wife was consigned to the Great Rot here. I don’t want to go anywhere else.”
“Neither do I,” said Aurelie’s mother. She cast what could only be described as a fond look at her father, and said, “I’m a Valley girl. This is where I’m supposed to be. Aurie may feel differently when she gets older, when she gets tired of having humans in every direction. She’ll be the one who moves to a warehouse in the desert, not me. Although I guess I’ll follow her once there are grandkids.”
“Grandchildren change everything,” said the spokesghoul.
Right. “That’s why I’m here,” I said, trying not to sound impatient, even as I stressed the words as hard as I dared. “My grandmother is missing. If you were missing, sir, don’t you think Aurelie would want to be able to go after you? I need to know about the Crier Theater. Please.”
“I’m getting there,” he said—but he didn’t sound annoyed. If anything, he sounded approving, like he’d been hoping I’d push a little harder. “They tore down our whole complex. People rejoiced. Said it was a beautification project. The people who’d bought the land built a shopping complex there. It failed—something about sabotage and rats in the walls that kept chewing the wiring—”
“You say ‘rats,’ I say ‘vindictive hidebehinds who didn’t appreciate being rendered homeless,’” interjected his daughter.
“—and the place sat empty for a good ten years,” finished her father. “We were starting to put together a plan for buying it back and making our new home in the mall when that Crier fellow swooped in with his big network bank account and bought the whole thing lock, stock, and barrel. He tore it down, and built his new theater over the bones.”
“Which explains why there are six basements,” I said. “The shopping mall wouldn’t have seen the need to fill them in, and Adrian might not even have known they were there.” Or maybe he had, and that was why there were unmarked doors in the halls. He’d left the unused spaces accessible but ignored. That was better than hiding them. Hidden things got found, after all.
The elder ghoul stared at me for a moment. Then, slowly, he said, “No.”
“No?” I asked.
“No,” he repeated. “No, there are not six basements. That was our home. Haven’t you been listening? For fifty years, we lived and died in the warehouses he tore down to build his theater.”
The warehouses had been torn down before Adrian got there, but somehow I didn’t think pointing that out was going to make me any friends just now. “What are you saying?”
“He’s saying six basements wouldn’t be enough for a community the size of ours,” said his daughter. “That place is a honeycomb. There are dozens of underground rooms. Some of them probably still have hidebehind illusions covering the doors, too. We may have all lived in the same place, but that didn’t mean they ever trusted anyone who wasn’t part of their clade.”
“Well, Verity, I’m impressed,” said Dominic. “You seem to have found the only reality show filmed atop a labyrinth. Good for you. That’s some remarkable bad decision making.”
I slanted a look in his direction. “Are you making fun of me?”
“Me? Make fun of you? Never. I’m simply doing my best to mock your way of looking at the world, to conceal my own sudden, bone-deep terror.”
“Right.” I took a deep breath before putting on my most winsome smile, looking back to the ghoul, and asking, “I don’t suppose you have some sort of a map?”
The ghoul blinked.
They had a map. It was incomplete, missing most of the areas constructed by the hidebehinds, but it was a map, and all it cost us was the promise of eight hundred dollars and a favor to be determined later. (I would have been happier with more money and less favor. “Favors to be determined later” are the way people wind up breaking into tombs looking for the lost idols of spider gods who really just want to be left alone. To select a purposefully nonspecific example.)
“So now what?” asked Malena. She was walking on my left, keeping close. I couldn’t blame her. The ghouls had followed us out of the house and were on the lawn with Aurelie, watching u
s go. They weren’t the only ones. I wouldn’t have wanted to wager a guess as to how much of the neighborhood was nonhuman, expats from their private, lost community—but I was assuming it was more than just the one household. Shadows moved on front porches as we passed them, and bushes rustled in ways that implied watchers larger than the average raccoon.
“Now we head back to the theater and start searching the basements for signs of our missing people.” I couldn’t say “bodies.” Not yet. Alice was one of the most dangerous women in the world. She couldn’t be dead. It wasn’t believable.
“I’m sorry, but no,” said Dominic.
I actually stopped walking to stare at him. Malena did the same. If anything, she looked more surprised than I did.
“What did you just say?” I asked.
“I said no,” he said. “You can’t return to the theater right now.”
“Dominic, my grandmother—”
“Is a terrifying force who can take care of herself. That, or she’s no longer in a position to suffer. Either way, we need to retain access to the theater. I can get inside, but that won’t help us in the daylight.” His expression, as much as I could see it through the gloom, was grim. “You must return to the apartment. Get enough sleep to let you dance tomorrow. Both of you. I’ll go to the theater and search until the morning shift arrives. I’ll meet you out back with the map and with anything I’ve managed to learn before I go to get some rest.”
It was a good plan. It was better than “we all run around half-cocked and hope things work out for the best.” It still felt like a betrayal. “I should be there. She’s my grandmother. And we shouldn’t be splitting the party.”
“She’s my family, too, and I don’t have other commitments,” said Dominic. “Let me do this. Let me help. As for splitting the party . . . that was inevitable. I can’t exactly have a sleepover. At least this way, I’m doing something useful.”
“You heard the man,” said Malena. “I really don’t want to get eliminated. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re eight for eight in losing the people whose names come up. My plans depend on me not being dead.”
“Fine, fine,” I said. “But you’re coming back to the apartment with me before you go.”
Dominic frowned. “Why?”
“Because you’re taking some of the mice with you.”
Now it was his turn to look unhappy. “Must I?”
“Yes. You must. If anything happens to you, I need to be able to find out what.” I started walking again, forcing him to follow me if he wanted to remain in the discussion.
Malena grabbed my arm. I turned to look in her direction, and she scowled at me.
“Mice? What the hell are you talking about? I’m sleepy, too, but the sleep-dep hasn’t kicked in yet. Have you been staying up all week?”
“Oh, right, you don’t know. Malena, I have a colony of Aeslin mice living with me.” I ducked through the hole in the fence. “They remember everything they see. We should have moved them to the theater a week ago. They’ll help Dominic search the place, once we explain what we need.”
Malena’s mouth fell open, her eyebrows shooting toward her hairline like they’d just decided to secede from her face. “You’ve got to be kidding. Aeslin mice are a myth.”
“No, they’re an endangered species, and there’s nothing mythical about them.”
She turned to Dominic, apparently expecting him to side with her. Instead, he shook his head and said, “The mice are real. The mice comment on my hygiene, diet, and sleeping habits. The mice are not a myth, much as I might sometimes wish otherwise.”
“Okay, I need to get some sleep, but before that happens, I have got to see this.”
I almost laughed. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”
Breaking into the apartments was easy, thanks to Alice’s lax approach to simple human things like “locking the goddamn window.” We slithered into the apartment below mine, me first, followed by Dominic, and finally Malena, who had the good sense to remain outside until she was sure the coast was clear. I motioned for her to close the window. Once it was shut—and locked, for a change, although that wasn’t going to last—I moved to the center of the room, cleared my throat, and announced, as loudly as I dared, “I seek audience.”
There was a long pause. Longer than normal: normally, the word “audience” would have them popping out of nowhere like a bunch of tiny rodent jack-in-the-boxes, all cheering wildly. But even talking pantheistic mice need their beauty sleep, and it was well past the hour when most of the faithful would have taken themselves off to bed.
After several minutes had ticked by, Malena flung up her hands in disgust. “This is the weirdest prank a pair of humans has ever tried to pull on me, you get that? There’s something wrong with your entire species.”
“And lo did the Violent Priestess speak unto the congregation, and she did say, ‘Ain’t Nothing Wrong with Most People which couldn’t be Fixed with a Good Smack Upside the Head,’” squeaked a small, rapturous voice from the direction of the floor. Malena jumped nearly a foot straight up. The mouse continued, unperturbed, “Then she did deliver a Good Smack Upside the Head to her husband, the God of Unexpected Situations, and All Was Well.”
Malena turned to stare at the wainscoting. The mouse, which was sitting politely with its tail tucked around its feet and its cloak slung back over its shoulders, fluffed its whiskers forward as it stared back.
“Greetings, therianthrope,” it said deferentially. Aeslin mice were remarkably canny about some things. Being polite to predators was one of them.
“Uh, mouse,” said Malena. “Mouse, talking. Talking mouse. In the apartment. There is a talking mouse.”
“Okay, it’s fun to listen to you chaining your way up to a complete sentence, but we don’t have time for this right now,” I said and knelt, holding out my hand for the mouse to scamper onto. Once it was settled on my palm I straightened, turning to present the mouse to Malena. “Malena, Aeslin mouse. Aeslin mouse, Malena. Malena is a friend, and will not eat you. Right, Malena?”
“Uh, sure,” said Malena, sounding unsettled. That was a common—and sensible—reaction to meeting an Aeslin mouse for the first time. She wasn’t screaming and running away, which put her ahead of a lot of people. “Hello, mouse.”
“Greetings, friend who will not eat me,” said the mouse. It turned to me, forcing its whiskers forward in an expression of polite curiosity. “Why do you beg audience, Arboreal Priestess? Have we displeased you in some way? For the hour is Late, and you have said, many times, that we must Let You Sleep.”
“You can hear the capital letters,” said Malena, sounding even more unsettled. “Did you notice that? It talks, and you can hear the capital letters.”
“You get used to it,” said Dominic.
“What he’s not saying is that before you get used to it, the mice make lots and lots of comments about your sex life,” I said. I focused on the mouse. “I asked for audience because I need your help. Can you wake the colony?”
The mouse looked conflicted. Normally, that would have been amusing enough to distract me from the business at hand. Normally, it wasn’t almost two o’clock in the morning, with the clock counting steadily down toward the start of rehearsals. “Why?”
“The Noisy Priestess is missing. We need to find her, but if we want to retain our access to the place where she disappeared, I need to get some sleep. Dominic is going back to the theater, and I want you and the rest of the colony to go with him.” Aeslin mice could fit in places where no human could ever go. They could escape through cracks and squeeze through holes in the foundation. And they never, ever forgot anything they saw or heard.
There was no guarantee the Aeslin eidetic memory would be enough to override the compulsion charms on the theater, but there was a chance. Given the situation, I’d take whatever chances I could find.
“You shall wake the colony and get them down here, to accompany the God of Hard Choices in Dark Places back to the theater,” I said firmly, before the mouse could work itself into a full-blown panic. “I’ll be there in the morning. You can sleep in shifts, and report whatever you find to either one of us, Malena, or Pax. You remember Pax, right?”
It was a foolish question, designed to snap the mouse out of upset into indignation. It worked exactly as intended. The mouse sat up straighter, pushing its whiskers back in pure outrage, and squeaked, “The man who is not a Man, but is also a Fish,” it said. “I know him well. We all know him well.”
“Good, then you know you can trust him,” I said, bending to set the mouse back on the floor. “Go gather the rest of the colony. Tell them it’s an emergency.”
“I go,” said the mouse, and put action to word, vanishing through a hole at the base of the wall almost faster than my eyes could follow.
I stayed where I was, crouched and looking at the empty space where the mouse had been. I was so tired. My grandmother was missing, and all I could think about was how nice it was going to be to crawl into my bed, pull the covers up over my eyes, and forget about all this for a little while.
It was a very Valerie reaction. Maybe I’d been trying to become her a little too hard, and was starting to lose track of the difference between my pretend self and my real one. Even more worryingly, maybe I was starting to forget which one was which.
A hand touched my shoulder. I looked up. Dominic was standing beside me, looking concerned.
“Get up,” he said, offering me his free hand. I took it. He pulled me to my feet. “You’ll be no good to anyone, not even yourself, without a few hours of rest and some food in you. You’re not letting your family down. If anything, by seeing to yourself, you’re proving you’re worthy of the trust they put in you. Now let me prove myself worthy of the trust you put in me.”
Chaos Choreography Page 24