Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(35)

Pax nodded tightly. “I noticed it when I was walking Malena out to her car. You know she’s a chupacabra, right?”

“I suspected.” Chupacabra were oddly drawn to ballroom dance. Or maybe not that oddly—ballroom dance is awesome. “Did she smell the blood, too?”

“Yeah,” he said. He ran a hand back through his hair. “She’s still here. It’s cool if we cram in five people for the ride home, right? Because we told the season three driver she was going to be riding back with us.”

It wouldn’t be the worst thing we’d done to one of the studio drivers. Lyra could deal. “That should be fine. Where is she?”

Pax gave me an inscrutable look. “She’s with the blood. It seemed . . . safer, than leaving me with it.”

“Good call,” I said, and gave his arm a reassuring squeeze, more grateful than ever for his vomit-based excuse. Lyra would have flipped her lid if she’d seen me touching her partner, and no amount of explaining would have calmed her down. She wanted him bad, and there was no way to explain that she was never going to get what she wanted. Not this time.

We walked down the hall to an unmarked door, one of the dozens dotting the theater walls. I’d never noticed it before, despite its proximity to the changing rooms. It was propped ajar with a chunk of concrete, keeping it from closing and possibly locking itself. It was also heavy as hell, which went with the fact that it was apparently made of solid metal. Pax took hold of the edge and wrenched it open.

“Thanks,” I murmured.

“Don’t mention it,” he said.

The stairs on the other side of the door were metal. They creaked and groaned with every step as we made our descent. I would have been worried about falling, but the rail was bolted solidly to the wall, and Pax had long enough arms that even if the steps dropped out from under us, he’d be able to grab the rail while I grabbed him. We were going to be fine.

Then we reached the bottom, and I realized we were the only ones who were going to be fine.

Malena was crouched in one corner, her spine bent in a curve that would hurt most humans, but which looked utterly natural for her. She had her hair pulled up in a high, sloppy ponytail, revealing the spikes starting to break through her skin. The flesh around them looked inflamed. There was no blood. All the blood was reserved for the two people on the floor.

“Aw, damn,” I said, stopping on the last stair.

Malena’s head snapped up. She didn’t say anything. Neither did Pax. All of us were silent, looking at the mess in front of us. The mess that had, until recently, been two of our fellow contestants.

Poppy and Chaz had been stripped naked and stretched out so that her feet were next to his head. Their arms were outstretched, creating a sort of box with their bodies. It was a very deliberate positioning. I pulled out my phone and took a picture of it. This was the sort of thing that needed to be studied at more length.

Malena flinched back from the flash, hissing under her breath.

“Sorry,” I said distantly. It was difficult to fully commit to an emotion. I needed to stay a bit removed, because I needed to keep my wits, when all I really wanted to do was scream and run back up the stairs. Verity was trained for this sort of thing. Valerie wasn’t, and I’d been living almost exclusively as Valerie for four long, relaxing weeks. My instincts were scrambled.

Speaking of instincts . . . “Pax, can you tell if they were both human? Are both human, I guess. You don’t stop being human when you die.” Not unless something reanimated you, which was less a change of species and more a change of status.

Pax inhaled. Then he nodded. “Both were human. Before you ask, no, I can’t tell you whether it was a human that attacked them. I only smell blood from two sources.”

“Same,” said Malena curtly.

“Okay,” I said, and went back to looking at the bodies.

They had been slit open, a long red line running from the hollow of their throats to slightly below their navels. If there was anything . . . missing, I couldn’t tell; the flaps of skin were closed, just bloody. There didn’t appear to have been any facial or genital mutilation. This had been a ritual killing, but the ritual was one I didn’t recognize. The person or persons who had killed them had smeared blood in a wide circle around the pair, painting it directly onto the concrete floor. The edges were obscured by the blood that had continued to pour from the bodies, and any subtle markings that might have been there had already been lost forever.

The markings on the bodies, on the other hand, had not been washed away, because they weren’t painted on. Someone had carved strange runes and symbols into their flesh, slicing all the way down to bone in some places. The carving appeared to have been done after the pair was dead: those wounds hadn’t bled.

“I swear we found them like this,” said Pax.

“I believe you,” I said. “Malena, how did you get over there without stepping in the blood?” I couldn’t see a clear path to where she was crouching.

“I can stick to walls,” she said, her tone challenging. For the first time, I noticed her feet were bare.

Good. “Can you take pictures while you’re sticking to the walls?”

Malena narrowed her eyes at me. “Yes.”

I knew her tone. It was the voice of someone who expected me to regard them as both other and lesser because they weren’t human. Normally, I would have taken the time to reassure her, to try to explain I wasn’t going to judge. Under the circumstances, I needed my attention where it was. “Great. Come get my phone. I need you to get as close as you can—get directly above them, if your ‘sticking to things’ powers extend to the ceiling—and take pictures. As many pictures as you can. Zoom in, get all the details.”