Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(71)

The stairs on the other side were empty.

The place where Alice should have been was unoccupied. I stared at it for a moment, trying to process what I wasn’t seeing. Then I bent and touched the concrete. It was cool. She’d been gone for a while.

There was a rustling sound behind me as Malena stepped closer. I didn’t turn. “Go find Dominic and Pax,” I said tightly. My hand found the butt of my gun almost without my consciously deciding to draw it. If Alice was missing . . .

My paternal grandmother was one of the deadliest people I knew. The rest of us were good, but she was the result of Covenant training and techniques combined with decades of doggedly pursuing traces of her lost husband across a hundred hostile dimensions. For our attackers to have taken her without making a ruckus was almost as unbelievable as it was terrifying.

“What are you going to do?” asked Malena.

I looked at the stairs, stretching down into the dark, and swallowed. There was really only one thing I could say, much as I disliked it.

“I’m going to find my grandma.”





Fourteen




“I don’t figure I’ll have a headstone. I don’t honestly figure I’ll have a grave. Just a dark spot on the ground somewhere, and the knowledge that when it mattered, I wasn’t good enough. I guess I never really was.”

—Alice Healy

The Crier Theater, descending a flight of stairs down into the dark, like that isn’t the worst idea ever

I WALKED DOWN THE STAIRS, taking my time, sure with every step that this would be the one where my foot found my grandmother’s body. The door was open behind me, providing enough light that I wasn’t worried about missing a step and falling, but not enough light for me to see what was ahead.

“Grandma?” I didn’t dare shout. I could still hiss, calling down into the dark in the hopes that if she was wounded, she would hear me and respond.

There was no answer.

My foot hit level ground. I squinted my eyes shut as I felt along the wall for the light switch, finally clicking it on to reveal . . . absolutely nothing.

The bodies were gone. The blood was gone. Alice was gone. There was no sign that anything bad had ever happened in this room; it was just a gray box with a few folding chairs against the walls, too out of the way and inconvenient to be used even for storage. I stayed where I was for several seconds, staring in disbelief at the emptiness.

“Grandma?” I whispered.

The room, in the way of empty places with high ceilings, bounced my voice back at me. Not enough to form a true echo, but enough to make sure I knew I was absolutely, unquestionably alone.

That was the final straw. I launched myself at the nearest wall, shoving the folding chairs aside as I scrabbled at the concrete, looking for a crack, a seam—anything to betray the presence of a hidden door or secret passageway. I was willing to accept that we were up against people who could use magic to clean a room without leaving a trace. I was a lot less willing to accept that they could somehow get into and out of that room without using the door.

If they were capable of teleportation, we were f*cked, and I was going to find a safer line of work. Like naked alligator training at the Gatorland amusement park over in Florida.

I’d just knocked over the last row of folding chairs when someone grabbed my elbow. I whirled, free hand already cocked back and ready to swing. My eyes registered Dominic’s presence in the nick of time, and I halted with my fist barely an inch from his nose.

He raised an eyebrow. I stared at him, panting and panicked. He let go of my elbow. I lowered my hand.

“What happened?” he asked, and his voice was soft enough to make me feel even worse about nearly punching him. He was clearly trying not to startle me more than he already had.

There’s a special sort of awful feeling that comes with making your husband look at you like you’re some sort of dangerous animal. Up until that moment, I had never fully experienced it. After that moment, I could have gone a long, long time without feeling it again.

“Blood’s gone,” I said. I straightened, hearing footsteps on the stairs, and looked over in time to see Pax making an appearance. That was good. The less I had to explain later, the better off we were going to be. “Bodies are gone. Alice is gone. There has to be a hidden door. They can’t be teleporting. That takes a ridiculous amount of power. Someone would have noticed.”

“No, but perhaps they can be manipulating the stone, or using a dimensional rift,” said Dominic. “There are more ways to be secretive than I care to consider. The first bodies were found in a different underground room, were they not? How many such rooms does this establishment have?”

I paused. “I don’t know,” I admitted, after a moment’s thought. “One basement-level room is weird enough in California. Two . . . this place could be half belowground for all I know.” Belowground . . . I smiled.

Dominic nodded approvingly. Pax took a step back. Apparently, my smile wasn’t as reassuring as I’d always thought it was.

“You’ve put a piece in its place, and now you’re calm enough to tell me about it,” said Dominic. “Pray, do, and do not make me worry about you and your missing family.”

“She’s your family, too, remember; marriage has a lot to answer for,” I said. “We’re underground. This is earthquake country, and we’re underground. That’s not the sort of construction decision you make on a whim. Adrian built this place. Either he did a lot of excavation that would have looked weird to his network sponsors, or he built on top of something that already existed. Malena!”