Chaos Choreography (32 page)

We didn't want to rush, but we didn't want to dawdle either: with no way of knowing when our snake cultists might come back, or how many of them there were, we needed to do this in as quick and efficient a manner as possible. Much as I hated to treat my former competitors as a chore to be completed, it was the best way to take care of things. Step back, distance, separate. Do not let them be the people that I knew they once had been.

The hands weren't sealed together; they were just joined, fingers folded over each other until they were reasonably sure of holding. Bobbi and Danny had holes in their palms that matched the ones in Mac and Leanne's, making me suspect the ivory spike was an “every other time” thing, even if I still had no idea why. The runes on each body were subtly different, but echoed the same forms. I took pictures, lighting up the chamber further with small flashes from my phone.

“This is a food preservation spell,” said Alice, crouching next to Poppy's body and looking critically at the edges of her wounds. “I've heard of it being used to preserve murder victims, usually when there was a question of whether or not the killer would be brought to justice. It keeps the meat from rotting. There's a price, of course.”

“There's always a price,” I muttered, and took another series of pictures.

“These bodies are probably covered in a
shell
of frustrated bacteria by now. Don't touch them, and we're washing our hands as soon as we get out of here.”

That was enough to make me glance away from my phone. “What? Why?”

“Because I don't want to explain to your father why I let you melt, that's why.” Alice stood, moving away from the bodies. “Take your pictures, and then let's get out of here. I feel the strong need to bathe myself in bleach.”

“. . . oh.” Magic didn't supersede the natural world: it just modified it for a while, making some things more possible and other things less likely. Preserving flesh beyond the usual rot-by date would mean keeping the bacteria that would normally be breaking it down at bay.
Not destroying it—not unless you wanted the flesh to be preserved forever. Which brought me to my next question: “How do people eat things they've preserved with these spells if they're always covered in flesh-eating bacteria?”

“There's another set of spells you can use to break the seal when you're ready. Sort of a low-grade local sterilization. It's still not what I'd call
safe
, but it's better than what you'd get if you decided to lick the contents of your pantry.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Grandma, that's gross.”

“Maybe so, but it's true.” Alice stepped daintily over Poppy's legs, walking back over to me. “Do you have all the pictures you need?”

“Yes.” I looked around one last time. The bodies of the dead seemed to look at me accusingly. I should have saved them. Maybe not all of them—I couldn't have known anything was wrong when Raisa and Graham had died—but the more recent deaths were absolutely on my head. I just needed to make sure there weren't going to be any more. “Dad should be able to narrow down the school of magic from what we've got so far.”

“Good; let's get out of here.” Alice started for the door. I followed her.

We were halfway there when it slammed shut and two shadows peeled away from the walls, resolving into rangy male bogeymen in dark jeans and button-down shirts. One of them was holding a pair of knives. The other had a sawed-off shotgun. Both grinned, showing their teeth in what was probably meant to be a threatening display. We were petite human women in a room full of corpses, after all. By all rights, we should have been terrified.

Too bad we'd never been very good at doing what by all rights we should have done.

“You're not going anywhere,” said one bogeyman. The other didn't say anything: he just kept grinning, which was either intended to freak us out, or . . . no, he didn't look like a naturally jubilant person. He was trying to freak us out.

“Oh?” asked Alice. Her voice was suddenly an octave higher, filled with the sort of confusion I was used to hearing from first-year dance students. She sounded like she only had two brain cells left, and they were engaged in a fight to the death over who got to pick today's shade of eyeliner. “Are you sure? Because I thought we were going over there.”

She pointed to the door. Her hand was empty. Anyone who'd ever met her would have recognized that as a final opportunity for escape. If they backed down now, Grandma might not feel obligated to kill them.

The bogeyman with the shotgun racked a shell into position. “We were hired to keep this room secure. We'll get paid extra for the pair of you. You're pretty. Our boss might like your corpses for his little art project.”

“Oh, wow, how much do you know about the sculpture?” I made my eyes big and round, trying to project innocence in his direction as hard as I could. I was better at coquettish banter than I was at seeming like butter wouldn't melt in my mouth, but it was worth a try. I couldn't let Alice have all the fun. “It's really avant-garde. Like, is that real meat?”

“Those are human bodies, bitch, and you're going to join them,” replied the bogeyman.

Alice and I exchanged a look.

“Sexist,” I said.

“Speciesist,” she said.

“Asshole,” I said.

“Agreed,” she said.

“Eyes front while I'm killing you,” snapped the bogeyman, who'd been looking increasingly confused throughout this exchange. Apparently, his targets weren't supposed to banter.

Here's the thing about chatting when you're expected to shut up and let yourself be attacked: if you do it carelessly, it can get you gutted. But if you do it well, before things get bad, it can put your enemies so far off-balance that they don't know what to do next. It's confusing and difficult and problematic. Spider-Man is a master of the
art of the battlefield quip. Since he's fictional, the rest of us have to make do with a blank expression and a perky comment about the size of the enemy's knives.

“Gosh, mister, did you know that your knives look really sharp?” I asked, turning my attention to the silently grinning bogeyman. He was starting to look a little white around the eyes, like we'd deviated so far from the script that he no longer knew where to begin. “I mean,
really
sharp. You could probably cut yourself if you're not careful.”

“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.