“Just don’t leave us hanging any longer than that, all right, darling? I need to get this locked down. Talk to you soon.” Adrian hung up. I lowered the phone.
Dominic was still scowling. “Boyfriend? Was there a demotion in the night that I was unaware of? Because I didn’t allow myself to be lectured by a woman in a skin-tight sequined jumpsuit just to be bumped back to ‘boyfriend’ as soon as—Verity?” His scowl faded, replaced by concern. “What’s wrong?”
I must have looked pretty distraught if he was having that reaction. I put the phone down and thought about standing, but I wasn’t sure my legs would work. Better not to risk it until I had a bit more confidence. “That was Adrian Crier, the producer of Dance or Die. It’s his baby. He has a real thing for dance education, and he basically went into reality television so he could have a dance show one day.”
“Dance or Die—that’s the show you were on.” Dominic and I had spent a comfortable night curled up in a motel room in Colorado watching all my dance routines and solos on YouTube, with me explaining how each number had gone right—or wrong. I’d been more brutal to myself than the judging panel had ever been, but when I was done, Dominic had been there to kiss me and ask for more videos. It had been therapeutic in the extreme, and at the time, it had felt like a fitting funeral for my dance career.
Apparently not. Or maybe not, anyway; I still had to talk to some people, starting with the man in front of me.
“Yeah, that’s the show I was on,” I said. “He wants to do an all-star season, with the top four dancers from the past five seasons. I was number two in my season.” Me and Lyra, the only female top two in the show’s history. We’d promised to keep in touch after the show was over. I hadn’t heard from her since she’d won.
Dominic’s scowl lifted. “He wants you to be on television again?”
“Yeah.”
“Wouldn’t that be dangerous, after . . . everything?”
“Maybe,” I admitted. Dominic and I had left New York—and he’d left the Covenant of St. George—after a Covenant strike team had arrived with the intention of checking his work and starting their purge. They’d found out about me, and hence that my family line hadn’t died out after all; they’d learned that Dominic was keeping secrets, including my existence, from the organization he was supposed to be loyal to.
In the end, the only way we’d been able to escape with our lives was by having my telepathic cousin Sarah rewrite their memories, turning me into a Price imposter and Dominic into a power-mad traitor. As far as the Covenant team was concerned, both Dominic and his self-made “Price” had died in the gunfight that ended their assignment in the States.
(It had been a neat solution, but it wasn’t without its costs. Sarah had never used her telepathy that way before, and the backlash hurt her. Badly. She’s been recovering with my grandparents in Ohio ever since. For a while, we’d been afraid she was never going to be fully herself again. That fear had proved unfounded—she’s definitely still Sarah, if less cocky and confident in her own abilities than she used to be—but it was a terrifying experience, and not one that I’m in any hurry to repeat.)
“What would the benefits be?” asked Dominic. “If you danced again, and won, would it make you restart your dance career?”
I blew out a slow breath. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I thought I was done with that part of my life, but I also feel like . . . if I don’t do this, I’ll always be asking myself ‘what if,’ you know? What if I’d gone back? What if I’d danced so well that they gave me a second chance at the big stage?”
“Are you good enough?” He held up a hand before I could squawk indignantly. “You’re the finest dancer I’ve ever known, but when we met, you were dancing for three hours a day. I haven’t seen you practice your footwork in weeks. Will you be able to meet your own standards on the floor?”
“Yes,” I said. This, at least, I could say with certainty. “I haven’t been doing my dance practice, but the rest of my physical conditioning is still good. I’d have to vary my daily exercise routines, and really focus on my feet and hips between now and the show. That’s no big deal. I’m in better shape than most dancers can even dream of—and dancers are by and large a healthy lot that spends a lot of time in motion.”
“And your Valerie identity, it’s still sound?”
“No one’s managed to blow it yet,” I said. “I’d have to unpack my wigs, and see about getting a few new ones, since the old ones have been in storage since my last competition. But Verity Price has never danced professionally, and we use so much makeup when I’m Valerie that she and I don’t even have the same complexion. I’d basically have to pull my wig off and announce myself.” It was all very Scooby-Doo. A wig and some makeup and nobody knew my name. But it worked, and that was what mattered.
Dominic nodded. “Valerie Pryor, of course, is not married to me.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s why I called you my boyfriend when I was talking to Adrian. I didn’t want to have to explain to him why I didn’t send him an invitation to the wedding. Not that he would have come, and not that there was actually a wedding, but you know what I mean.”
“Miraculously enough, I do know what you mean,” said Dominic. “Your approach to the English language is like a virus, and after long exposure, I’ve contracted a great deal of it. I may, by this point, be incurably afflicted.”
I stuck my tongue out at him. Dominic laughed before sobering, sitting up a little straighter in the bed. He shouldn’t have been capable of looking that grave while half-naked, but somehow, he managed it.
“Do you want this?” he asked.
I hesitated before saying, “Yes. Maybe it’s selfish and maybe it’s stupid, but . . . yes. I do.”
“Then that means you must do the show, unless someone can raise a truly novel and valid argument against it,” he said.
I blinked.
Dominic continued, “I know you. I love you, but that doesn’t preclude understanding what a gloriously stubborn creature you are. If you don’t do this, you’ll forever be wondering whether you made the right choice when you became a fulltime monster negotiator rather than staying on the stage. The universe doesn’t offer this manner of opportunity to just anyone, and I’d rather not watch you abuse yourself with ‘what-ifs’ when the chance to answer them all is right in front of you.”
“If I win, I get a year’s free rent on a studio apartment in New York,” I said. “Is that safe?”
“There’s been no Covenant movement in that direction. New York is a large city. You would be living as a redhead. I could bleach my hair and take a job at the Freakshow. I’m sure Ryan would enjoy the challenge of teaching me how to make a proper martini,” said Dominic. “We would make it work.”
The imagine of Ryan—the Freakshow’s tanuki bartender, a tall, friendly, half-Japanese man with a waheela girlfriend and a perpetually sunny disposition—teaching Dominic to make cocktails was almost enough to make me start laughing. “You think so?”
“I’ve yet to encounter an obstacle we cannot surmount when working together, save for possibly the mice,” said Dominic. “I really think so.”
“Great.” I unfolded my legs and slid off the desk. “Let’s go see if Dad’s back. I need to talk to my parents.”
Dominic raised both eyebrows, giving me a meaningful look. I glanced down. I was wearing a sports bra and a pair of dance shorts, having simply stripped off my outerwear before collapsing into bed. Dominic, naturally, wasn’t wearing anything.
“Oh,” I said. “Let’s get dressed first.”
“What a wonderful idea,” said Dominic, and slid out of bed.
Yup. Definitely naked.
“New plan,” I said. “Let’s have sex first.”
Dominic grinned.
Three
“Anyplace can be a stage. All you have to do is make yourself the
spotlight, and shine.”
—Frances Brown
A small survivalist compound about an hour’s drive east of Portland, Oregon
THE REST OF THE HOUSE WAS AWAKE by the time we made it out of the room. There was no single thing that made it apparent that sleep time was over—nobody ran a flag up a pole or played the bugle—but there was a soft, almost indefinable difference in the air between a wakeful house and a sleeping one.
We descended the stairs to the living room, me in front, Dominic a step behind. Antimony was curled up in the corner of the couch, laptop balanced on her knees, noise-blocking headphones covering her ears, and eyes glued to a roller derby video. I stepped into her peripheral vision and waved. She glanced at me and jerked her chin upward in the briefest of possible motions. I mimed removing headphones. She frowned and shook her head “no.” I mimed removing headphones again, this time more forcefully. Antimony heaved a sigh so heavy that it seemed to come all the way from her toes and pressed “pause” on her video before pulling the headphones down to hang around her neck.
“What?” she demanded.
“Family meeting,” I said.
“Is this about the Nessie you had Dad move last night? Because he sent me video. Pretty thing. Wish I’d been there. Meeting over, nice talking to you, have a wonderful day.” She started to turn back to her laptop.
“No, it’s not about the plesiosaur,” I said, before she could put her headphones back on. “But it is about a project that might get me and Dominic out of the house for two months or so.”
Antimony perked up. “Really? Aw, but I like Dominic.” She put her laptop on the cushion next to her, unplugging the headphones and leaving them around her neck like an odd fashion statement. “Family meeting it is. Mom and Dad are in the kitchen making waffles for the mice.”
“Are they also making waffles for the humans?” asked Dominic hopefully.
I gave him an amused look. “Didn’t you just inhale an egg and toaster waffle sandwich like, four hours ago?”
“Yes, but if I’m not permitted sufficient sleep, I’ll have to bolster myself with additional meals. It’s the only way to keep me functional until you allow me a full night’s rest.” Dominic managed to make this sound reasonable, like he wasn’t asking for anything more than he deserved.
Antimony rolled her eyes. “Um, ew, all right? Keep it in your bedroom.” She turned and stalked off toward the kitchen.
Dominic blinked. “What did she think I meant? I was talking about how late we were out last night dealing with the plesiosaur. She shouldn’t have expected to see us before noon.”
“I know, honey,” I said, giving him an affectionate pat on the arm. “Let’s go get you some waffles.”
This seems like a good time to take a second to explain the Price family.
See, up until five generations ago, we were good, obedient members of the Covenant of St. George, an organization I’ve mentioned a few times, dedicated to wiping out all “unnatural” life on the planet. The Covenant defines “unnatural” as “not appearing on the Ark,” which is both narrow and arbitrary, since no one’s ever heard of an actual list of what may or may not have been on a boat that may or may not have existed. My great-great-grandparents, Enid and Alexander Healy, quit the Covenant and moved from England to Michigan when they realized how arbitrary it was. Since they had a lot of guns, the Covenant mostly left them alone after that.
Note the word “mostly.” My grandfather, Thomas Price, was sent to Michigan to check on the Healys several decades later, where he promptly met and fell in love with Enid and Alexander’s granddaughter, Alice. They got married and had two kids, he got sucked into a hole in the fabric of reality, and she dove in after him. Just your ordinary love story, right?
Alice and Thomas’ daughter, Jane, married Theodore Harrington, a nice incubus with surprisingly pure intentions. They have two kids, Elsinore and Arthur—my cousins Elsie and Artie. We get along, mostly.
Alice and Thomas’ son, Kevin, married Evelyn Baker, my mother, who’s sweet, friendly, and was raised by her adoptive parents in Columbus, Ohio. Her mother, Angela, is a cuckoo, the same sort of telepathic cryptid as Sarah. Her father, Martin, is a Revenant, a sort of amalgam of resurrected people parts. Or, as I like to call them, Grandma and Grandpa. Since cuckoos and Revenants can’t have children—something about cuckoos being giant telepathic wasps who just look like humans, and Revenants being, y’know, partially dead—they adopted all three of their kids. Mom came from a human orphanage; Uncle Drew had been orphaned by a gas leak in the bogeyman community where his parents lived. Cousin Sarah joined the family much later, when Grandma found her in a storm drain. Totally normal, right?
Anyway, Kevin and Evelyn—aka, “Mom and Dad”—had three kids. My big brother Alex, was currently finishing up an assignment in Ohio and would be home inside of the year; my little sister Antimony, who had yet to leave home, and had become weirdly territorial about her spot on the couch; and me. Our family tree was more of a bush, but it was a really stubborn bush, like a blackberry bramble. We stuck together, even when we didn’t like each other much, and we refused to be uprooted.
Anyone who tried was going to learn all about our thorns.
Dad was extracting a waffle from the waffle maker when Dominic and I entered the kitchen. Mom was sitting at the table, a cup of coffee in one hand and a newspaper in the other. She likes to get her news the old-fashioned way, since it’s hard to donate a website to the mice to shred as bedding. These are the adjustments necessitated by sharing your home with a colony of talking rodents.
They looked up and smiled at the sound of our footsteps, although Mom’s expression was more guarded. She was raised by cryptids, and didn’t consider herself human until well after her marriage and move to the West Coast. For me to come home with a former member of the Covenant of St. George was, well . . .
Again, there were multiple reasons we stopped in Vegas to get married before continuing on to Portland. Mom not burying Dominic in the backyard was one of them.
“I didn’t expect to see you up and about for a few hours,” said Dad, putting the waffle he’d just finished down on a plate on the counter. The mice waiting there hoisted the plate onto their shoulders and marched away with it, stopping in front of the microwave, where they began hacking it into more portable pieces.
“You’re one to talk,” I said, walking over to give Mom a kiss on the temple. “You weren’t home yet when we went to bed.”
“Your father decided pulling an all-nighter was better than being groggy during his conference call with the university,” said Mom.
“Ah,” I said, understanding.
“Want waffles?” asked Dad.
“Please,” I said, and sat.
Holding down a normal job while serving the cryptid community can be difficult bordering on impossible, since there’s no way of predicting what kind of time will be required to, say, transport a plesiosaur from the city reservoir to a safer spot upriver. Some of us get around it by taking jobs within the cryptid community—Mom is basically a mobile first aid station, providing advice, medical care, and carefully researched remedies to anyone who needs her. Others find jobs that don’t require rigid hours. Dad is known throughout the academic community for his skill with ancient languages and ability to translate virtually anything. The academic community doesn’t know he accomplishes his linguistic feats by consulting with species who never allowed the languages in question to die out, and none of us see any reason to enlighten them. He gets paid, his presence on the books makes it easier to explain how the power stays on when people get nosy, and everything is fine.
(As a whole, our family doesn’t want for funds. Grateful cryptids who don’t place much value on human money have made substantial donations over the years. Dragons tend to pay in gold, which is always nice, and Aunt Lea is an Oceanid, which means sunken treasure. Between her
and the finfolk, we could have been comfortable forever just thanks to things other people lost in the ocean. But there’s “not wanting for funds” and then there’s “being able to stay under the radar of the IRS.” We’re all more than willing to work occasionally, if it keeps the taxmen from our door. Nobody wants to negotiate an audit.)
Dad dished out waffles, bowls of strawberries, and—yes—more bacon, which Dominic promptly claimed in the name of the bottomless pit he called a stomach. Dad looked amused by this, and went to the fridge to get more. Feeding three growing, athletic teenagers had left both my parents with a very relaxed attitude about second helpings.
I waited until Dad had joined us at the table with another plate of bacon and a waffle of his own before I cleared my throat and said, “I had an interesting phone call this morning.”
“Oh?” asked Mom.
“The producers of Dance or Die are doing an all-star season. They want the top four dancers from the last five cycles, which means they want me.” I looked between my parents, trying to figure out what they thought of this idea. “They’re going to start filming in Hollywood in six weeks.”
“You can’t be serious.” I twisted in my seat. Antimony was behind me, headphones still around her neck, a disapproving expression on her face. “You said you were done. You said you weren’t dancing anymore.”
“Yeah, but that was before they asked if I wanted to compete again.” I twisted further, trying to meet her eyes. “This is a huge opportunity for me, and it’s going to look weird if I don’t show up when everyone else does. Which is a bigger risk of exposure? Going on TV one more time, or triggering a bunch of ‘whatever happened to . . .’ junkies to come looking for me?”
“Yes, but, dear . . . what if you win?” Mom sounded genuinely concerned. I glanced back to her. “Artie managed to get into their computers last time, and he said you only lost by about a hundred votes. People love you when you dance for them. What if they decide that this time, they should give you the prize you deserve?”