Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(36)

Now she stared at me. “I didn’t figure you for a sicko.”

“I’m not,” I said. “Some of those symbols look familiar. I want to send the pictures to my dad, see whether he recognizes them.” They looked a lot like the symbols William’s captors had been using when they were sacrificing virgins in his name. Not identical, but similar enough that alarms were going off at the back of my brain.

William had been the living target of a snake cult that wanted to turn him into their devoted servant before they woke him up. No, they didn’t realize what a bad idea that was, and if they had, they probably wouldn’t have cared. People who think of virgins as a renewable resource are not usually the sort of people who listen to reason. Snake cults were bad news. I’d be happier if I didn’t have to deal with one.

Malena shook her head and stuck her hands to the wall, boosting herself up Spider-Man style. She still looked mostly human. There was something unusual about her hands, and her feet were almost twice as long as they should have been, with an oddly flexible bend at the pad of the toes, but those were still morphologically possible. The orange-and-black scales unfurling along her shoulder blades and circling her wrists were harder to explain away.

She got her feet braced against the wall and scuttled along it, quick and nimble as a gecko, to thrust her hand out toward me. “Give me the phone,” she snapped.

“Get as close as you can,” I said, handing it over. Seeing her sticking to the wall like that was both disorienting and envy-inducing. If I had been able to wall-crawl, there would never have been a day when I couldn’t be found lurking on the ceiling. Never.

Malena nodded before she scuttled up the wall toward the ceiling and began snapping pictures.

I turned back to Pax. “Did anyone see you come down here?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I was talking with Malena, and everybody else went on ahead. She’s a real nice girl, you know? And I figured we should stick together, since we’re both therianthropes and all.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “Did you smell blood on any of the people who passed you? Specifically, did you smell this blood?”

He shook his head again. “No, and believe me, I would have noticed. Blood is the sort of thing that attracts my attention.” He cast another uneasy glance at the bodies, and I realized I was reading his expression wrong. It wasn’t discomfort born of squeamishness.

It was discomfort born of hunger.

“We have steaks in the fridge at home,” I said quietly. “I can keep Lyra distracted while you bolt one of them raw.”

“Can you make that two?” he asked, still looking at the bodies.

I elbowed him, pulling the motion at the last second so that he was barely grazed. “Hey, I thought humans didn’t taste good.”

“They don’t,” he said. “It’s just . . . there’s so much blood.”

“Pax, do you need to leave?” I watched him out of the corner of my eye, looking for any sign that he was about to lose control. I didn’t feel like following the discovery of two bodies with a fight against one of my best friends in this competition. I’d do it if I had to. “Malena and I have things under control here.”

“What are you going to do?”

This was the awful part. Well. The latest awful part in a long line of awful parts that had spanned most of my life. “The three of us are going to go cram ourselves into the car with Lyra and Anders, and we’re not going to tell anyone what happened here. I hate to do it, but we have to leave the bodies for the janitorial staff to find.”

“What? Why?”

I looked up. Malena was sticking to the ceiling directly over the bodies, my phone still clutched in one half-taloned hand. She was staring at me, expression aghast.

“Because you and Pax aren’t human, and I’m here under an assumed name,” I said. “I don’t think any of us wants the kind of scrutiny that comes with this sort of discovery. Maybe more importantly, at least for me, I need to get those pictures to my dad. Spending hours explaining what happened to the police is going to delay that, and someone else could get hurt.”

The janitorial staff would find and report the bodies before we had to come back to this theater. Dumping the situation on their heads was a shitty thing to do, but that didn’t change the necessity of it, or the sensibility of distancing the three of us from things as fast as we possibly could. Hopefully, Adrian had a good medical plan for his employees, and the people who found the bodies would be able to get some therapy after the fact.

Sometimes I felt like I needed some therapy after the fact. It was really too bad that was never going to happen.

“You’re cold as hell, dancing girl,” said Malena. She scuttled from the ceiling back to the wall and down to the floor, where she offered back my phone.

“I sort of have to be.” I tucked the phone into my pocket. “You didn’t panic when I walked in, so I’m assuming Pax told you I was a friend. Did he tell you why?”

“I was sort of busy hoping he wouldn’t go all SyFy Saturday on me and bite my head off,” said Malena.

“All those shark-themed monster movies are racial discrimination,” grumbled Pax. He sounded a bit more like himself, and a bit less like he was going to start licking blood off the floor. I had to take that as a good thing.