The light began consolidating into straight lines, one about seven feet up from the floor, the others descending from its ends. I realized what it was a bare second before the middle went black and someone stumbled into the room.
The semi-spectral door continued to glow, but it wasn’t enough for me to see what I was aiming at. I took aim anyway, clicking off the safety with a swipe of my thumb. The newcomer straightened, head snapping toward the sound. Then it spoke, calm and clear and far more collected than I was feeling at the moment.
“Verity Alice Price, if you shoot me, your father is going to tan your hide.”
“Grandma?!” I started lowering my gun. Then I stopped, eyes narrowing, and took more careful aim. “Prove it.”
“For your sixth birthday I got you a ballerina Barbie and a bear trap. A real bear trap. No bear, though. Your mother thanked me for the thought, but said a real bear would have been a bit much, given you were no bigger than a whisper, and she didn’t want you getting eaten.”
“Grandma!” This time I clicked the safety back into place before lowering my pistol and shoving it into the waistband of my yoga pants. “Are you hurt? What are you doing down here? How are you down here?”
“Can I ask one?” For the first time, I heard the weariness in her tone. “Where is down here? I’ve been trying every door and egress charm I had on me, and most of them opened on dimensions you don’t want to visit. I was down to my last three options. If this hadn’t worked, I would have needed to go back to Naga for another set, and that could have taken months.”
No one in the family really understood how Grandma managed her particular brand of dimensional transit, not even Mom, who sometimes joined her on her journeys. (Mom used a more traditional blend of door-opening herbs, supplied by a Letiche she’d known since college.) Uncle Naga was involved. The rest was more than she’d ever been willing to tell us.
“We’re in the subbasement of the theater, behind a set of hidebehind illusions,” I said. “I got a map from those ghouls you’re renting the garage from.”
“How did they—”
“The theater was built on the top of their old home, and Adrian didn’t bother to fill in the underground levels. I don’t think he realized most of them were here. Not all the rooms are on the map, and some of the ones that are have illusions blocking the door.”
There was a prickling on the front of my shirt as the Aeslin mouse accompanying me ran back up to my shoulder, clung, and jubilantly cried, “Hail and welcome! Hail to the return of the Noisy Priestess, who was missing, but not on Pilgrimage!”
“Hello, mouse.” Alice managed to inject a note of warmth under the exhaustion in her tone. “Thank you for helping my granddaughter look for me.”
“It was an Honor,” said the mouse, virtually vibrating with joy.
The light from the wall guttered and went out, leaving us in darkness. There was a pause before Alice asked, “Do you have a flashlight?”
“No, but I have a door.” It had been long enough since the footsteps in the hall had passed that I wasn’t worried about running into their owners—and if I did, well. I wasn’t outnumbered anymore. Even exhausted, Alice was worth her weight in pissed-off badgers.
Opening the door flooded the room with light from the hallway. I squinted. Alice walked forward until she was standing beside me, her own eyes narrowed against the glare.
“This isn’t hidebehind work,” she said. “The construction is pure bogeyman.”
“It was a composite community,” I said. I was trying not to stare.
The tattoos on her left shoulder were gone. Not covered in dirt, or scarred—cutting a charmed tattoo could sometimes release whatever effect it had been designed to contain—gone. The skin was smooth and clean, like it was never tattooed in the first place. There were clear places on her arm as well, cutouts shaped like birds or eels or strange, twisty things from the bottom of the sea.
Alice saw me looking and smiled wryly. “I told you, I’ve been burning charms as fast as I could. It leaves a mark.”
“I always wondered how you got your tattoos to change.” It was an inane comment. It was the best I could do in the moment.
“They’re one-use only, and they don’t do subtle; whoever grabbed me didn’t come with a damn glowing door,” said Alice. She looked around the hall, expression calculating. “How far underground are we? And what time is it? There were some temporal distortions in there.”
I didn’t want to ask what that meant for her—how long she’d been trying to get back to us, or how long it had been since she’d slept. Those were questions for later. “It’s Friday morning. Around eleven, I think? You only went missing last night.”
“Thank heaven for little favors,” she said.
The mouse on my shoulder, not to be outdone, proclaimed gleefully, “HAIL!”
“That, too,” said Alice.
“As for how far underground we are, I went down two flights of stairs, each about twenty feet long. So we’re deep enough to be a problem if an earthquake hits. And there’s more.” I took a quick breath, gathering my thoughts, before I launched into a summary of what I’d overheard while I was hiding in the room where Alice had emerged.
When I was done, she was frowning, and so was I. Another thought had occurred while I was speaking, and this one was unsettling, to say the least. “Grandma, if you were trying all night to get back to us, how is it you came through in the room I was actually in? That seems like a pretty big coincidence.”
“Coincidence is just another word for an accident that doesn’t kill you,” said Alice. “My transit charms are set to drop me as close as possible to a family member, if there’s one in the area I’m traveling to. It wouldn’t do me any good to finally find the dimension where your grandfather is and wind up on a different continent, now would it?”
Reminding her that Grandpa Thomas wasn’t likely to be anything more than bones and memory by this point didn’t seem like a good idea. I just nodded.
“As to why I came out down here . . .” Alice’s frown deepened, turning pensive. “Which direction did you say they came from?”
We walked down the hallway side by side, pausing only so I could set the Aeslin mouse on the floor near a convenient break in the wall. It scampered off to locate the rest of the colony and pass on the news that Alice had been found. They would keep searching the theater for confusion charms and signs of what the snake cult was up to, but they’d do a better job if they weren’t consumed by worry for the family’s senior priestess.
The difference in our stride was almost startling. We were roughly the same height, but where I stalked, she prowled, like she was daring something to jump out and have a go at her. It was the difference between a brawler and a technician, and while I wouldn’t have wanted to meet her in a dark alley, I was reasonably confident that in a real fight, I would have been able to get out of the way before she could lay a finger on me. Give her a gun or a blunt instrument, and the tides would turn in her favor. Everyone had their own strengths and weaknesses.
That thought brought me back to our snake cultists. What about their strengths and weaknesses? Their magic-user must have been the one urging patience, and saying the spells they were using weren’t an exact science. Magic was never an exact science; only science got to use that particular label. Magic was more like cheese making than chemistry, depending frequently on “when it feels right.” When the spell felt right, they’d be able to rip a hole in the wall of the world, and their target giant killer snake would come tumbling right through.
If the male had been the group’s magic user, the female voice belonged to . . . who? A female cultist, an administrator, a lure? It wasn’t Brenna, which was still a relief, but apart from that, I had no real idea who it was or what purpose she would be serving. Lindy, maybe. Lindy never did like the dancers as much as she pretended to, and there were ce
rtainly ways that a snake cult could have appealed to her. But it was hard to imagine her willingly sacrificing her ballroom dancers to a giant snake, no matter what she’d been promised.
Alice’s thoughts had apparently kept pace with mine, because she asked, voice low, “Have any of the other dancers seemed off to you?”
“Jessica always seems off,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I think she’s murdering people. I mean, I guess she could be, but it’s . . . messy. She doesn’t like messy. Anders has been a little touchy-feely lately. He had a crush on me the first time we danced together. He could be testing the waters to see how serious I am about ‘Daniel.’”
“What about Lyra?”
I blinked. “From my season? The one who beat me? That Lyra?”
“Yes.” Alice glanced in my direction, gauging my response. “I don’t know much about the competition, but I know enough to check a roster, and your season is the only one that hasn’t lost anyone. Season five has been totally eliminated. Pax is in the clear because he’s a giant shark. You dance with Anders, which would make it hard for him to sneak around behind your back. It might not be a bad idea to take a good look at Lyra, and see what there is to see.”
“Lyra couldn’t kill anybody,” I said doggedly. “Lyra’s my friend.”
“Sweetie, if being a friend of the family made you immune to murderous impulses, no one would like us anymore.”
“No one likes us now.”
“That’s beside the point.”
The hallway ended at a steel door. It was bigger than the doors around it, with a frame that appeared to have been hammered straight into the wall. “Probably the sewer exit,” I said, and opened it.
We both stopped. We both stared. Neither of us said a word.
The room on the other side was roughly the size of the theater above—we were probably under the stage, considering the direction and distance we had traveled to get here. It was a great cavern of a room, stretching upward into the unbroken dark, lit by bulbs strung like outside Christmas lights along the walls. There was no furniture. There were no decorations.
There were only the bodies of my eight fellow dancers, arrayed at the center of the room like the spokes of a wheel. Smears on the concrete floor showed where they had been rearranged as their number grew, going from a simple cross shape to something more elaborate. Their heads were at the middle, and their hands were joined, one to another, until they formed an unbroken circle. Whatever magic had been used on them was preserving their bodies; Raisa and Graham, who were eliminated in week one, looked as freshly killed as Mac and Leanne, who’d been dead for less than a day.
Something pressed hard against my mouth. I realized it was my hand. I was crying, too, but that seemed to be of little consequence. They weren’t going to sweep this room looking for bodily fluids. The blood would obscure anything else.
Alice squeezed my shoulder. She didn’t say anything. I appreciated that. It was dangerous to stand here in the open like this, but I needed a moment to center myself. Until now, I’d been holding out the hope that the bodies we hadn’t found hadn’t existed—that maybe a few people really had been eliminated and secluded themselves, maybe triggering the idea that “hey, we can kill them without anyone noticing” in our snake cultists. But no. All eight of them were there, silent and unmoving on the floor.
“Okay.” I lowered my hand. My voice was thick with tears. I swallowed them away, squaring my shoulders, and said, “Now we can study the bodies.”
“That’s my girl,” said Alice.
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 o
pportunity 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.”