Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(70)
I crouched in the rafters, balancing on the balls of my feet, and waited for the signal to move. Malena clung to the wall nearby. She looked calmer, and more human, than she had in the basement. She wasn’t as upset by the smell of blood as Pax was. That didn’t mean it hadn’t been getting to her. It could be easy to forget, sometimes, how weak the human nose was when compared to most therianthropes. As a chupacabra, Malena was attuned to the smell of rot and offal. It was probably perfume to her heightened senses. Leaving her to marinate in it would still have been cruel.
“You okay?” I murmured. The theater had been designed to muffle backstage noise as much as possible, with sound baffles in the walls and foam padding on the bottoms of the rafters. Our killers would have to be bats to hear me.
(Bats weren’t off the table—the Batboy story has some real cryptid roots—but they weren’t likely. None of the batlike cryptids we’ve found so far have been therianthropes, and I was pretty sure I would have noticed people with giant leather wings trooping around the halls.)
“Mac didn’t like me,” she replied, her voice pitched as low as mine. “He said Latin ballroom was primitive and dirty when compared to ballet. I said he was a racist f*ck-hole. We weren’t friends, you know?”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just nodded, hoping she could see how sorry I was from my expression. Hoping she would understand my silence.
Malena grimaced. “But, man, he could dance, and when a couple of the guys got on my case for having a funny diet—that whole ‘all-liquid, all the time’ thing looked sort of like an eating disorder to them, I guess—he told them to go stuff themselves. Said I was a brilliant technician who was wasting herself on an inferior form of dance, and that I was worth twenty of them. He wasn’t a nice guy, but he was a good guy, you know?”
“I do,” I said quietly. I’ve known my share of good guys who wouldn’t know nice if it bit them in the ass. Sometimes I liked them a lot better than the alternative.
“He was a good guy,” said Malena again, almost meditatively. She went silent after that, and I let her. She was the one who’d just suffered a loss, not me. She knew what she needed better than I did.
The hallway beneath us was motionless. The stage techs were gone, and all the other dancers would be home by now. I wondered whether the charms that kept anyone from noticing when the eliminated dancers disappeared would also prevent them from noticing that Malena, Pax, and I hadn’t come back. If we died here tonight, would our friends make up stories to explain why it was perfectly reasonable that we had left our things in our apartments before quitting the show?
The thought of Anders and Lyra trying to explain the number of knives under my mattress was briefly entertaining, but only briefly. The Aeslin mice would have to find their way from Burbank to Portland if I disappeared, and while that might sound like the premise of a children’s book—colony of talking, intelligent rodents travels hundreds of miles to reunite with their human protectors—the reality would be cruel, and bloody, and probably end with the deaths of all the mice who’d volunteered to accompany me. The Aeslin counted on us to protect them. I couldn’t protect them if I was dead.
Seconds slithered by, piling up until they transformed into minutes. The minutes began doing the same, until I had no real sense of time; I just knew my calves ached from holding my position for so long, and that it was getting difficult to keep my eyes open. Carefully, I shifted around to plop my butt down on the rafter and dig my phone out of my pocket. It was almost midnight. We’d been waiting here for more than two hours, and nothing had happened.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I muttered. “Something’s wrong.”
“What do you mean?” asked Malena. She twisted her head at an angle that a human spine would have been hard-pressed to achieve, narrowing her eyes. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“That’s what’s wrong. Grandma’s not an ambush predator. She should have gotten bored by now.” And she hadn’t. The basement door was still closed; Alice had yet to make her reappearance. “Something’s wrong.”
I pressed my knees together, lifting my weight up onto the heels of my hands. Then, without a pause to think about what I was doing, I pushed myself forward, off the rafter and into free-fall.
The descent was exactly what I needed to clear my head, and as I fell, I felt the sleepiness slip away, leaving me awake, alert, and plummeting. The first two were good things: the third, I’d been counting on. Spreading my arms so that I was swan-diving toward the rapidly approaching floor, I snagged one of the guide ropes used to hoist things up into the rafters, pulling myself in and looping my arms around it so as to maximize my drag without ripping all the skin off of my hands. My speed of descent dropped by more than half. I hooked a foot around the rope, and suddenly I was sliding as gracefully as a fireman down a pole.
I tightened my grip on the rope when I was a foot or so above the ground, bringing myself to an abrupt and relatively painless halt. Unwinding my foot from the rope took a second longer—long enough for Malena to race down the wall and step onto the floor, shaking away her lingering reptilian attributes with a rattle of spines that were there when the noise began and gone when it finished.
“What the f*ck?” she demanded.
“Gravity and I have an agreement,” I said. “I treat it with respect, and it doesn’t smear me across the nearest flat surface.” The basement door seemed larger now that I was on a level with it—larger, and more dangerous. I took a deep breath, stepped forward, and turned the knob.