Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(77)

“Me? Make fun of you? Never. I’m simply doing my best to mock your way of looking at the world, to conceal my own sudden, bone-deep terror.”

“Right.” I took a deep breath before putting on my most winsome smile, looking back to the ghoul, and asking, “I don’t suppose you have some sort of a map?”

The ghoul blinked.



They had a map. It was incomplete, missing most of the areas constructed by the hidebehinds, but it was a map, and all it cost us was the promise of eight hundred dollars and a favor to be determined later. (I would have been happier with more money and less favor. “Favors to be determined later” are the way people wind up breaking into tombs looking for the lost idols of spider gods who really just want to be left alone. To select a purposefully nonspecific example.)

“So now what?” asked Malena. She was walking on my left, keeping close. I couldn’t blame her. The ghouls had followed us out of the house and were on the lawn with Aurelie, watching us go. They weren’t the only ones. I wouldn’t have wanted to wager a guess as to how much of the neighborhood was nonhuman, expats from their private, lost community—but I was assuming it was more than just the one household. Shadows moved on front porches as we passed them, and bushes rustled in ways that implied watchers larger than the average raccoon.

“Now we head back to the theater and start searching the basements for signs of our missing people.” I couldn’t say “bodies.” Not yet. Alice was one of the most dangerous women in the world. She couldn’t be dead. It wasn’t believable.

“I’m sorry, but no,” said Dominic.

I actually stopped walking to stare at him. Malena did the same. If anything, she looked more surprised than I did.

“What did you just say?” I asked.

“I said no,” he said. “You can’t return to the theater right now.”

“Dominic, my grandmother—”

“Is a terrifying force who can take care of herself. That, or she’s no longer in a position to suffer. Either way, we need to retain access to the theater. I can get inside, but that won’t help us in the daylight.” His expression, as much as I could see it through the gloom, was grim. “You must return to the apartment. Get enough sleep to let you dance tomorrow. Both of you. I’ll go to the theater and search until the morning shift arrives. I’ll meet you out back with the map and with anything I’ve managed to learn before I go to get some rest.”

It was a good plan. It was better than “we all run around half-cocked and hope things work out for the best.” It still felt like a betrayal. “I should be there. She’s my grandmother. And we shouldn’t be splitting the party.”

“She’s my family, too, and I don’t have other commitments,” said Dominic. “Let me do this. Let me help. As for splitting the party . . . that was inevitable. I can’t exactly have a sleepover. At least this way, I’m doing something useful.”

“You heard the man,” said Malena. “I really don’t want to get eliminated. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re eight for eight in losing the people whose names come up. My plans depend on me not being dead.”

“Fine, fine,” I said. “But you’re coming back to the apartment with me before you go.”

Dominic frowned. “Why?”

“Because you’re taking some of the mice with you.”

Now it was his turn to look unhappy. “Must I?”

“Yes. You must. If anything happens to you, I need to be able to find out what.” I started walking again, forcing him to follow me if he wanted to remain in the discussion.

Malena grabbed my arm. I turned to look in her direction, and she scowled at me.

“Mice? What the hell are you talking about? I’m sleepy, too, but the sleep-dep hasn’t kicked in yet. Have you been staying up all week?”

“Oh, right, you don’t know. Malena, I have a colony of Aeslin mice living with me.” I ducked through the hole in the fence. “They remember everything they see. We should have moved them to the theater a week ago. They’ll help Dominic search the place, once we explain what we need.”

Malena’s mouth fell open, her eyebrows shooting toward her hairline like they’d just decided to secede from her face. “You’ve got to be kidding. Aeslin mice are a myth.”

“No, they’re an endangered species, and there’s nothing mythical about them.”

She turned to Dominic, apparently expecting him to side with her. Instead, he shook his head and said, “The mice are real. The mice comment on my hygiene, diet, and sleeping habits. The mice are not a myth, much as I might sometimes wish otherwise.”

“Okay, I need to get some sleep, but before that happens, I have got to see this.”

I almost laughed. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

Breaking into the apartments was easy, thanks to Alice’s lax approach to simple human things like “locking the goddamn window.” We slithered into the apartment below mine, me first, followed by Dominic, and finally Malena, who had the good sense to remain outside until she was sure the coast was clear. I motioned for her to close the window. Once it was shut—and locked, for a change, although that wasn’t going to last—I moved to the center of the room, cleared my throat, and announced, as loudly as I dared, “I seek audience.”