Chaos Choreography

by Seanan McGuire

  “He’s going to cut you,” said the other bogeyman, lip curling upward. “Enough talk. Killing now.”

  “Works for me,” said Alice, and her eyes were suddenly bright, and her hands were suddenly holding a pair of pistols. My own hands were full of knives.

  The bogeymen had time for one wide-eyed “oh, shit” moment before we were in motion, and the fight was joined.

  There are jokes about bringing a knife to a gunfight—or the other way around—but the truth is that sometimes it’s the right thing to do. I charged the one with the shotgun while Alice advanced on the one with the knives. She was straight-backed and calm, firing three shots before my target had the time to pull the trigger even once. Her target howled.

  I was preoccupied with my target, who was taking aim at the center of my chest. It would have been a good shot if he’d been dealing with someone who hadn’t been training for speed and flexibility since grade school. I saw the tendons in his hands twitch as he pulled the trigger, and dropped into a split as the thunder of his shot split the air where I’d been standing. I flung two knives while he was racking his second shell. They struck him in the knees, and he joined his partner in screaming.

  “You know, there was a joke I thought you’d make that you skipped,” I said, rolling off the floor and running at him. He was standing, but barely; his knees had buckled when the knives hit. He must have had some training. There was no other way he could be on his feet after that.

  Just before I hit him I pulled back, smiled brightly, and said, “I expected you to say that no one was going to hear us scream.” Then I punched him in the throat. He made a strangled choking noise and fell backward, landing on the concrete like a sack of wet laundry.

  There were no more gunshots coming from my grandmother’s side of the fight. I turned to find her standing over the body of the knife-fighter, a petulant look on her face.

  “I broke mine,” she said, only half apologetically. She raised her head. “Is yours in any shape to be questioned? Because mine isn’t.”

  “I think so,” I said, nudging the fallen bogeyman with my toe. He groaned slightly. “He’s alive.”

  “Great.” Alice made a gesture with her hands. The guns vanished back into her clothing, returning to whatever complicated holster she had hidden under her red tank top. All the women in my family were experts at making our weapons disappear, and most of the techniques I knew had been invented by her. She was a pioneer in the field of concealed violence. “Let’s get these boys out of here before their bosses come back.”

  In the end, the most logical thing had been to carry both bogeymen—the living and the dead—down the hall to the room where Alice had made her appearance. As far as we could tell, it wasn’t in use by our snake cultists, and while it was dark, the day Alice didn’t have a candle somewhere on her person was the day I lost all faith in humanity.

  Her bogeyman had leaked as we carted it down the hall, her holding the torso—where the bullet holes were—and me taking the legs. Alice and I used the body to prop my bogeyman up in a sitting position while she went back to mop up the spillage. I lit her candle and sat cross-legged on the floor, waiting for the survivor to wake up.

  Seconds ticked by. The door opened behind me. “Is he awake?” asked Alice.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Sorry I killed mine,” she said—and she did sound apologetic. “I get a little enthusiastic sometimes.”

  “I know, Grandma. At least you didn’t use a grenade.” Scraping bogeyman off the walls and ceiling would have been a lot of work, and would have been necessary if we’d wanted to keep our presence in the underground complex a secret. Not fun.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t think it was appropriate.”

  The bogeyman groaned. I leaned forward, pressing my palms into the floor and beaming at him. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was my smiling face. He groaned again.

  “Hi,” I said cheerfully. “Who are you working for?”

  He scrabbled backward, stopping when his hand hit the body of his companion. His eyes went wide, and he froze, like a scared rabbit in front of an oncoming car. I kept smiling.

  “See, here’s the thing,” I said. “Right now, you’ve got some nasty damage to your knees—that probably hurts, huh? I mean, knives are meant to hurt people, that’s what they’re for—but that’s all the damage we’ve done. To you. Your friend, he’s pretty dead. I hope he wasn’t too important to you. My grandmother gets upset when people come at me with knives.”

  The bogeyman cast an alarmed glance at Alice. His already grayish complexion, which looked sallow and strange by the candlelight, got even paler as he put two and two together. There weren’t many people my age who could go around claiming someone who looked younger than them was their grandmother. If I could . . .

  “We didn’t have a chance to introduce ourselves before,” I said. “Hi. I’m Verity Price. That’s my grandmother, Alice Price-Healy, standing over there. You know, the one who killed your friend.”

  “Oh, God,” moaned the bogeyman.

  “What? Didn’t your bosses tell you there were monsters in the dark when they left you alone down there?” I leaned closer still, shifting more of my weight onto my hands. “Tell us what you know, and we’ll let you live. Don’t tell us, and we’ll find a way to make you tell us. You probably wouldn’t enjoy that very much.”

  “He could be into pain, dear,” said Alice. “It’s not nice to judge.”

  “Sorry, Grandma,” I said. I smiled at the bogeyman again. “Sorry. Sometimes I get carried away, too.”

  “I’m not telling you anything,” spat the bogeyman. “You think my life is worth more than my severance package? Bullshit. You Price girls think you’re so smart, like you can fix everything just because you’ve got some big human savior complex, but you can’t. You’re not everywhere, and where you’re not, we have to find ways to handle things for ourselves.”

  “Severance package?” I asked blankly.

  “Verity, grab him,” said Alice. She sounded alarmed enough that I moved, lifting my hands off the floor and lunging for his wrists.

  I was close. I wasn’t close enough. I’d been so focused on intimidating that I hadn’t thought about restraint—and why would I have needed to? We’d taken his shotgun away. He was injured and outnumbered. There was no chance that he was going to hurt either one of us.

  He wasn’t trying to hurt one of us.

  A knife, ribbon-thin and sharp enough to gleam in the light from Alice’s candle, slid out of his sleeve as he raised his arm to his throat. With a single decisive motion, he sliced lengthwise, and his flesh parted in a river of red. I shouted, a wordless exclamation of dismay, still moving toward him.

  Then Alice’s arms were around my waist, yanking me away from the arterial spray. She was faster than I had been, maybe because she’d caught on more quickly than I had: she got me clear without a drop of blood hitting my clothing.

  “You have to go back upstairs,” she said, pulling me back even further. “You can’t be covered in blood, or people are going to ask questions.”

  “You’re covered in blood,” I said, pulling away. She let me go, and I turned to face her. “Won’t that raise questions?”

  There wasn’t that much blood on her when I actually looked, and what there was matched her tank top almost perfectly. She could easily write it off as grease stains or mud. I’d never really stopped to think about my grandmother’s wardrobe choices. Suddenly, they were starting to make a terrible kind of sense.

  “I’m planning to sneak out the back door as soon as I collect the mice, since I can’t be here during the day,” she said, tone calm and level. “I need a shower and some sleep. I’ll drop the mice back at the apartment, do what needs to be done, and then get my bike and go to check in with Dominic. We need to find Bon.”

  “For th
e counter-charms, right.” The reality of what just happened was starting to sink in. My heart was hammering against my ribs, and my stomach was filled with sour churning. I wasn’t going to throw up—I was too much of a professional for that—but oh, I wanted to. “Grandma, that man just killed himself rather than let us question him. What the hell are we in the middle of?”

  “He mentioned his severance package. Bogeymen are all about commerce and contracts. The snake cult probably offered him enough money for keeping their secrets that it was worth his life to get that payout.” Alice looked over my shoulder, back to the bogeyman. Her expression softened. “Poor man didn’t have a choice. If the contract terms were strict enough, he could have found himself in the position of needing to die or provide an additional sacrifice from his own family. No bogeyman patriarch would be willing to do that if there was any other way.”

  “Fuck.”

  Alice nodded. “Yes.”

  This snake cult wasn’t playing softball. Whatever they wanted, whatever they were hoping to achieve, there was no body count too big to make it happen. We were the only ones who were standing in their way . . . and I still had to get back to rehearsal.

  Sometimes life just isn’t fair.

  Eighteen

  “Heroes save everyone. Heroes sacrifice themselves for the sake of people they’ve never met. We’re not heroes. We’re never going to be. But if that means we make it home alive, I’m all right with that.”

  —Alice Healy

  The Be-Well Motel, about seven hours later

  DOMINIC ANSWERED THE DOOR when I knocked, taking in my bedraggled appearance and spiky hat-hair (well, technically, “wig-hair,” but that had a confusing connotation) without comment. He opened the door wider, letting me inside. The smell of Chinese takeout assaulted my nostrils a beat before the mice started cheering.

  “I thought you were dropping the mice at the apartment,” I said.

  Alice, who was sitting cross-legged on the room’s single bed with a carton of shrimp fried rice in her hand, smiled brightly. “They decided they’d rather come with me for Chinese food and debriefing.”

  “They’re Aeslin mice,” I said. “They would rather do anything that involves food.”

  “HAIL! HAIL THE WISDOM OF THE ARBOREAL PRIESTESS!” exulted the mice.

  “See?” I said. Dominic was waiting patiently nearby. I turned and leaned up to give him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” he replied. “Did the remainder of rehearsal go well?”

  “This week’s group number is a hip-hop piece set to ‘Dragula,’ so yes if you like being screamed at to be a better vampire, and no if you’re not comfortable doing a dance routine where six of the people have wooden stakes in their hands. Somebody’s going to get impaled.” I walked over to investigate the Chinese food. “Lyra isn’t speaking to me because of the whole ‘ditching her for Malena’ thing, Anders is telling everybody they have to be nice to me because my grandmother is dying, and Brenna should be here in about twenty minutes, so I can fill her in on what we found under the theater.”

  “You mean Malena,” said Alice.

  “No, I mean Brenna,” I said. “She’s the show’s host, and she’s part of the local Nest. She needs to know what’s going on. Also, the people I heard talking in the subbasement confirmed that she wasn’t part of the snake cult, which makes her one of the safest potential allies we have left.” The salt-and-pepper prawns were gone, except for a single piece of chitin and a few slices of pepper. I made a sad face.

  Dominic tapped me on the shoulder. I turned, and he presented me with a fresh carton of prawns. “I know how much you enjoy the cockroaches of the sea,” he said. “Alice was just explaining her plan to find Bon.”

  “She won’t be at the flea market, but she won’t have gone far, either,” said Alice. “We need to figure out where the routewitches camp in this area, and Bon will be there.”

  “Which gets us the counter-charms, got it,” I said, sitting down on the floor and opening my Chinese food. “It’s Friday. The show—and elimination—is next Thursday. We need to find these snake cultists and stop them before that happens.”

  “On the plus side, we know they’re not going to kill anybody before then,” said Alice. “The only bodies we found in that room were people you knew.”

  “Oh, yay: only my friends are in danger.” I didn’t want to be hungry. My stomach grumbled, and I picked up a pair of chopsticks. “I have rehearsal tomorrow. If that’s when you’re visiting Bon, I won’t be able to come with you. Or we could wait until Sunday and just go see her at the flea market.”

  “I was hoping to be able to pick up the charms on Sunday, if she doesn’t have something already prepared,” said Alice. “There’s a chance she’ll need a little time, and I want us to have them before we go back to the theater Monday morning.”

  “We’ll need them for Pax and Brenna, as well as the three of us and Malena,” I said. Putting it that way, I actually felt pretty good about the team we were assembling. I couldn’t ask Brenna to fight for us—dragon princesses weren’t exactly set up for dealing a lot of damage, and she couldn’t beat anybody to death with her spike-heeled shoes—but I wanted her to understand what was going on around her. Having a good source of inside information couldn’t hurt anything. It might help.

  “That’s going to cost,” cautioned Alice.

  “That’s why we have credit cards.”

  “Routewitches don’t take money for things like this. They take . . . distance. Distance traveled, distance seen.” Alice sighed and plucked at her shirt. It was another tank top, this one dusky gray. “The shirt I was wearing earlier might work. I went through a lot of dimensions trying to get back to here, and I was wearing it the whole time. That’s got to have a little oomph behind it.”

  “I am glad, I think, that no one in my immediate family was ever a witch,” said Dominic, in the slow, careful way he used when he was trying not to offend someone, but knew it might be unavoidable. “It seems very complicated, and like there are a great many rules to be learned and then avoided.”

  “You’re not wrong,” I said.

  Alice opened her mouth to speak, and froze as there was a knocking at the window. It was light, more a rapping than anything else. We all turned.

  “Okay, first person who whispers ‘nevermore’ is getting kicked,” I said.

  The rapping came again.

  “I’ll answer that, shall I?” said Dominic. He walked over to the window, pushing his duster back to expose the hilt of the knife I’d given him for our six-month anniversary. And people say romance is dead.

  He unlatched the window and eased it upward, shoulders tense as he prepared for the worst. What he got was Malena’s head appearing in the opening, upside-down.

  “It is windy as shit and it smells like diapers out here,” she said. “I’m coming in.”

  “By all means,” said Dominic, letting go of his duster as he stepped to the side. “I assume coming uninvited through motel windows is a point of chupacabra etiquette, and I should applaud your manners while shaming myself for my ignorance.”

  “Nah, I’m just rude,” said Malena, swinging herself in through the window. Her hands and feet—both bare—were twisted into claws, covered with tiny black-and-orange scales. Spikes had broken through the skin of her shoulders, and pushed up the fabric at the back of her tube top in a disconcerting way. She saw me looking and shrugged, looking almost sheepish. “This is as far as I can go before my face starts getting weird and my tail starts popping out. It’s actually a little uncomfortable to stop here, but it’s better than getting shot for a monster when I start knocking on windows.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Is that Chinese food?” asked Malena, changing subjects. Her hands and feet shifted back to the human norm, scales replaced by smooth brown skin, as the spikes on her bac
k retracted. In a matter of seconds, no one could have ever guessed that she’d been the monster at our window. That was the trick with chupacabra: they hid in plain sight, except when they didn’t want to.

  “Malena, why are you here?” I asked. It was a little past seven o’clock in the evening: while she could probably have made a large portion of her trip in the sewers, clinging to the walls to keep her pants clean, she would still have needed to walk aboveground at least partway. The risk of being seen didn’t seem to balance the reward of free Chinese food.

  (Although for a dancer, it might come close. When we’re working, we’re like teenage boys: constantly hungry, and willing to go to great lengths for a free meal. Forget saying “hey kid, go into this cave and bring back the magic lantern for me.” You’d have much better luck with “hey kid, go into this cave, there’s an unguarded buffet.”)

  “Because I figured you were going to try cutting me out of things about now, and while I should probably be down with that—I mean, hello, opportunity not to rush headlong into certain danger? Sign me up—I’m really not.” Malena bared her teeth. “Mac was one of mine. Now he’s dead. Whoever’s doing this needs to pay. Plus Brenna was on her way over, and she was willing to give me a ride once I showed her my claws.”

  Which meant Brenna now knew that Malena was a chupacabra. That was a relief: it meant I didn’t need to worry about blowing Malena’s cover. As a human, it wasn’t my place to run around outing cryptids who didn’t want to be revealed.

  Malena wasn’t done. She turned to Alice, frowning, and asked, “Where the fuck did you go? You scared the shit out of all of us.” She sounded affronted, like scaring her was some great and profound crime against the laws of nature. Maybe it was. I didn’t know much about chupacabra culture, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it was based on firm principles of “don’t freak out your neighbor, save that for the humans.”

  “Somebody who could open masked portals grabbed me from behind, and the next thing I knew, I was in another dimension,” said Alice. She made it sound perfectly reasonable, like this was the sort of thing that happened every day, and was no more problematic than breaking a nail.