Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(46)
Here is what we know about magic:
There are people who, for whatever reason, can affect the world on a molecular level. They can convince things to appear out of thin air, open portals between places, or—yes—tear holes between dimensions. Most of the time, it’s the symbols that matter. You don’t have to be a mathematician to copy an equation, and the answer will be the same whether you did the work in real time or wrote it down from memory. Most so-called “wizards” and their ilk are working from copies of copies of copies of the original crib sheets, sketching out spells and charms that they don’t really understand. They’re not harmless, but they’re not as dangerous as they could be, either.
The problem with working from someone else’s notes is that mistakes will start creeping in, which was why Dad could tell the age of the runes we’d found carved into Poppy and Chaz. Degradation of information was inevitable . . . unless they had someone on their side who understood what they were doing. Someone who could check their math, and could, say, draw a charm to completely purge the blood from a room. A magic-user, someone for whom the use of this particular language came as naturally as Sarah’s use of math or my use of the tango.
Magic-users are pretty rare. It’s partially training and partially genetic, and both factors have suffered greatly at the hands of the Covenant. The last magic-user in our family was Grandpa Thomas, who had a small talent for elemental magic and a large talent for moving things with his mind, at least according to Grandma Alice, who—as has already been established—was not the world’s most reliable source. Still, if we assumed she was telling the truth about that, then we had a baseline for how rare the talent was, since no one in the two generations following their marriage had shown any tendency to set the curtains on fire with their minds. Two children and five grandkids, and still nothing had manifested.
For the snake cultists to have a magic-user . . . well. That wasn’t good. And that may have been the understatement of the year.
When I got back up to my own room, I curled up on my bed and sent Dominic a text, asking him to answer if he was up. My phone buzzed a few seconds later.
JUST GOT BACK FROM PATROL. THE AREA’S QUIET. NO SIGNS OF SNAKE CULT ACTIVITY. WHAT’S GOING ON?
There were so many ways to answer that question, and half of them required a flowchart. I decided to go with something from the other half, and replied, DAD SENT BACKUP. MY GRANDMOTHER’S HERE. JUST WANTED TO WARN YOU.
This time, there was a longer pause before his return message. DID SHE BRING SARAH?
He was thinking of my maternal grandmother, Angela Baker. Grandma Angela is a cuckoo, like Sarah. But she’s not a fighter, and she’s not a receptive telepath—she can project her thoughts, but she can’t pick up the thoughts of the people around her. Not so useful when what I needed was to find the people who were responsible for the murders of my cast mates.
WRONG GRANDMA, I replied. THIS IS GRANDMA ALICE.
No pause at all this time, but his next text was in all caps: ALICE HEALY?!?
PRICE-HEALY, TECHNICALLY. SHE TOOK HER HUSBAND’S LAST NAME WHEN THEY GOT MARRIED. Grandma was the traditional sort, in some ways. Mostly the ways that gave her a higher chance of getting blood in her hair.
I’M COMING OVER.
NO! I CAN’T HAVE PEOPLE COMING IN AND OUT AT ALL HOURS. WE’LL COME TO YOU. I hadn’t been planning to go anywhere tonight—I was exhausted, and we didn’t have any new information to go on—but if I needed to introduce my grandmother to my husband in order to prevent some sort of incident, I’d find a way.
I WILL EXPECT YOU INSIDE THE HOUR, was Dominic’s last text. He stopped responding after that. I should probably have been worried, but I was honestly relieved. His silence gave me time to figure out how I was going to sneak out when I wasn’t going alone.
Grandma Alice isn’t a free-runner; like most of my family, she views my tendency to throw myself off tall buildings as just short of suicidal, although—being her—she also found it sort of adorable. When your grandmother with no sense of self-preservation thinks you’re being cute, maybe it’s time to reconsider your life choices.
On the plus side, she did like to drive, although the legality of her license was questionable. She definitely knew how to hot-wire a car, since she’d tried to teach me when I was six (just one of a long series of decisions that eventually led to my father saying she wasn’t allowed to be alone with us until we turned sixteen). Between the two of us, we could probably manage to scrounge up a vehicle. I slipped my phone into my pocket, pulled a few knives from under my mattress and tucked them into my shirt, and stood. Time to get moving again.
Pax and Lyra were in the living room. He was giving her a foot rub; she had a cold cloth on her forehead. Anders was nowhere to be seen. Pax looked up at the sound of footsteps, raising his eyebrows.
“Going somewhere?” he asked.
“Just downstairs to talk to Elle,” I said. I managed a smile that didn’t look entirely ghoulish. “Don’t wait up, okay?”
“Val, wait.” Lyra sat up enough to meet my eyes. “I know I’m the one who said this was okay, but I’m worried. It’s cool that your sister’s here and all—it sucks that your family doesn’t support you—and I don’t have any problem with her squatting until the show’s over, but you already sneak out the window most nights, and now you’re going downstairs to hang out with her. Is this going to affect your work?”