Chaos Choreography (17 page)

“Look, if security catches me, I'll say I was squatting when the dancers arrived, and stuck around for the anonymity and free grub,” said Alice, turning back to me, like I was the one she had to convince. “I won't get you in trouble, I promise.”

“All you
do
is get people in trouble,” I said. “It's like a holy calling with you.”

Alice's eyes widened. Too late, I realized my mistake, and managed not to compound it by slapping my hand over my mouth—although it was a near thing.

Every priestess is important to the Aeslin, but they have their hierarchy. The longer a priestess has been alive, the more rituals she'll have, and the more excited the colony will be when they see her. Normally, this is balanced out by the fact that people die and their catechism ends, becoming a fixed loop in the Aeslin year. Unfortunately, Grandma Alice was too busy to settle down and get old like a normal person, and the Aeslin have been maintaining her worship for almost eighty years without a break, making her the senior priestess of our family. So far as I knew, she was the only priestess to have two separate liturgical lines. She was the Noisy Priestess when she was home and the Pilgrim Priestess when she was off looking for Grandpa Thomas, which meant she had double the usual number of rituals and catechisms focused on her. And now she was in my apartment, and I had mentioned holy callings.

We stayed frozen for several seconds, staring at each other and waiting for the cheering to begin. When it didn't—when merciful silence, broken only by the shouting from the people who were starting to gather in the courtyard, reigned—we relaxed, in the sort of familial unison that was just going to make her claim to be my sister more believable.

“Fine,” I said, more harshly than I meant to. “As long as no one's going to rat you out, you can stay.” I turned to my roommates. Maybe one of them would save me. Maybe one of them would object, and Alice would have to go stay somewhere else. I could call Brenna. Maybe there was room at the Nest for my occasionally murderous grandmother and her collection of grenades.

Instead, Lyra broke from the pack and slung her arms around my neck, pulling me into a tight, exuberant hug. “Oh,
Val
!” she squealed. “I'm so happy for you!” She
turned to Alice and said, “It's always been really upsetting to me how Valerie's family doesn't support her dancing. Your sister's a genius, you know. She's amazing, and your whole family should be coming out to watch her dance.”

“That's what I've always said.” Alice was clearly amused, eyes glinting with barely-contained mischief. “So I'm here for the rest of the season.”

“Thanks,” I said, through clenched teeth.

“Any time,” said Alice. “I'm going to take the apartment right downstairs. Give me a few minutes, and then come down to talk to me? We should catch up,
sis
.”

“Wouldn't miss it,” I said, and watched my grandmother—regularly named the most dangerous human woman in four dimensions—pick up her backpack and walk out of the living room.

Lyra hugged me again. “I changed my mind, you can have first shower. This is amazing!”

Was it my imagination, or did I hear muffled cheers from behind the couch?

It probably wasn't my imagination.

Lyra let me go. “You and your sister must have so much to catch up on!”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”

So very much . . . like murder.

“I didn't start out with a lot of family. One thing I've learned is that people who love and accept you are worth their weight in silver bullets. You hold them fast, and you never let them go.”

—Frances Brown

The Crier Apartments, privately owned by Crier Productions, about fifteen minutes later

L
YRA WAS RIGHT:
I felt better after a shower and a wig change, although my scalp still itched. I changed into a pair of yoga pants and a jogging top, rubbed a layer of Tiger Balm into my calves, and went bounding outside. There were no cameramen in evidence, giving us a rare moment of peace.

An impromptu rehearsal circle had formed at the center of the courtyard, which explained the yelling. About half the season was bending, swaying, and stretching their way through Sasha's lyrical jazz routine. Under normal circumstances, I would've felt obligated to join them. The thought made my thighs ache. Fortunately for me, I had something more pressing to attend to.

I slipped down the stairs and headed for the apartment under ours, glancing nervously around. No one looked my way. I opened the apartment door and stepped inside. Alice—who was sitting on this couch just
like she'd been sitting on ours—looked up from the rifle she was field-stripping and smiled.

“There's my girl,” she said. “Shut the door and come talk to me. It's been too long since we've had a nice talk.”

“Grandma, what are you doing here?” I shut the door. “I'm not supposed to have guests. I'm
definitely
not supposed to have guests with grenades.”

“Your father called me. Fortunately, I was in a place with phone service, or he'd have summoned your Uncle Mike.” Alice raised an eyebrow. “Far be it from me to criticize Mikey—he's a good kid—but do you think he would have fit in with your new friends better than I will?”

“You don't fit in with my new friends at all,” I protested. “They're in their twenties, and they dance for a living. You're . . . not in your twenties, and you kill things for a living.” And for food, and sometimes, I suspected, for fun. It was hard to tell with Grandma Alice. She was the only human I knew who lived primarily off-dimension, and that sort of thing had to be bad for her sense of social norms.

“No, but I look like I'm in my twenties, and I'm believable as your semi-estranged sister who wants to mend some bridges.” Alice began reassembling her rifle, still looking at me. “I know this isn't ideal, Very. I'm not here to blow your cover or get you into trouble. I'm just here to make sure that you're safe. Snake cults aren't something to mess around with.”

“I already handled a snake cult in New York,” I said.

Alice's expression turned hard. “No, you handled a bunch of amateurs who'd been lucky enough to stumble across a sleeping dragon. They were working out of the pop culture version of the snake cult bible, and they had no idea what they were doing. What kind of forces they were playing with. Do you honestly think I crossed three dimensions because I thought you couldn't handle yourself? Please. Your father sent me the pictures you took. The people you're dealing with here, the people who
killed those poor children, they have a
much
better idea of the rituals they're trying to enact.”

My knees felt suddenly weak. I allowed myself to fold to the floor, settling cross-legged as I stared at her. “You think it's going to be that bad?”

“I think some of those runes were things I'd never seen before,” said Alice. “Some of them I'd only ever seen in Thomas' notes. Even
he
didn't know what they all meant. There have been snake cults as long as there have been people, Very, and some of them had the chance to get extremely good at what they did before their neighbors sensibly rose up and slaughtered them.”

“I don't think the words ‘sensible' and ‘slaughter' belong in the same sentence,” I said.

“They do when it's that or watch your children get swallowed by a snake the size of a freight train,” said Alice. She snapped the last piece of her rifle back into place. “What did you find at the theater today?”

I shook my head, chasing off the image of snakes big enough to have their own SyFy Channel franchises. “Nothing,” I said.

She blinked.

“I mean it literally: there was nothing.” I explained the situation, from the empty basement to the lack of blood trace evidence.

By the time I finished, Alice was frowning. “You're saying an Ukupani couldn't find
any
signs that someone had been killed there?” I nodded. Her frown deepened. “Ukupani are some of the best long-range hunters in the world. They can scent a drop of blood in the water from up to a mile away. If he couldn't detect any signs of blood . . .”

“They bought a lot of bleach,” I concluded.

“No,” said Alice. “You would have been able to smell that much bleach. But there are spells and charms that absorb blood, use it to power things. Whoever drew those runes on the bodies was an actual magic-user, not just someone screwing around.”

I stared at her. “Oh,” I said, after a moment. “Crap.”

Alice nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Crap.”

Magic is real, in the sense that sometimes the world does things that can't be explained using science as we currently understand it. Magic isn't real, because once something becomes explainable, we start thinking of it as “science,” and we no longer pretend it doesn't exist. It's sort of like cryptids. Creatures that were once considered impossible and mythological become completely plausible as soon as someone figures out how to explain them. The wheel turns, and the world changes.

Here is what we know about magic:

There are people who, for whatever reason, can affect the world on a molecular level. They can convince things to appear out of thin air, open portals between places, or—yes—tear holes between dimensions. Most of the time, it's the symbols that matter. You don't have to be a mathematician to copy an equation, and the answer will be the same whether you did the work in real time or wrote it down from memory. Most so-called “wizards” and their ilk are working from copies of copies of copies of the original crib sheets, sketching out spells and charms that they don't really understand. They're not harmless, but they're not as dangerous as they could be, either.

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.

J
UST GOT BACK FROM PATROL.
T
HE AREA'
S QUIET.
N
O SIGNS OF
SNAKE CULT ACTIVITY.
W
HAT'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, D
AD
SENT BACKUP.
M
Y GRAN
DMOTHER'S HERE.
J
UST
WANTED TO WARN YOU.

This time, there was a longer pause before his return message. D
ID SHE BRING
S
ARAH?

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.

W
RONG
G
RANDMA,
I replied. T
HIS IS
G
RANDMA
A
LICE.

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

P
RICE
-
H
EALY, TECHNICALLY.
S
HE TOOK HER HUSBAND'S LAS
T 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.

N
O!
I
CAN'T HAV
E PEOPLE COMING IN A
ND OUT AT ALL HOURS.
W
E'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 I
NSIDE 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.