Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(87)

That thought brought me back to our snake cultists. What about their strengths and weaknesses? Their magic-user must have been the one urging patience, and saying the spells they were using weren’t an exact science. Magic was never an exact science; only science got to use that particular label. Magic was more like cheese making than chemistry, depending frequently on “when it feels right.” When the spell felt right, they’d be able to rip a hole in the wall of the world, and their target giant killer snake would come tumbling right through.

If the male had been the group’s magic user, the female voice belonged to . . . who? A female cultist, an administrator, a lure? It wasn’t Brenna, which was still a relief, but apart from that, I had no real idea who it was or what purpose she would be serving. Lindy, maybe. Lindy never did like the dancers as much as she pretended to, and there were certainly ways that a snake cult could have appealed to her. But it was hard to imagine her willingly sacrificing her ballroom dancers to a giant snake, no matter what she’d been promised.

Alice’s thoughts had apparently kept pace with mine, because she asked, voice low, “Have any of the other dancers seemed off to you?”

“Jessica always seems off,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I think she’s murdering people. I mean, I guess she could be, but it’s . . . messy. She doesn’t like messy. Anders has been a little touchy-feely lately. He had a crush on me the first time we danced together. He could be testing the waters to see how serious I am about ‘Daniel.’”

“What about Lyra?”

I blinked. “From my season? The one who beat me? That Lyra?”

“Yes.” Alice glanced in my direction, gauging my response. “I don’t know much about the competition, but I know enough to check a roster, and your season is the only one that hasn’t lost anyone. Season five has been totally eliminated. Pax is in the clear because he’s a giant shark. You dance with Anders, which would make it hard for him to sneak around behind your back. It might not be a bad idea to take a good look at Lyra, and see what there is to see.”

“Lyra couldn’t kill anybody,” I said doggedly. “Lyra’s my friend.”

“Sweetie, if being a friend of the family made you immune to murderous impulses, no one would like us anymore.”

“No one likes us now.”

“That’s beside the point.”

The hallway ended at a steel door. It was bigger than the doors around it, with a frame that appeared to have been hammered straight into the wall. “Probably the sewer exit,” I said, and opened it.

We both stopped. We both stared. Neither of us said a word.

The room on the other side was roughly the size of the theater above—we were probably under the stage, considering the direction and distance we had traveled to get here. It was a great cavern of a room, stretching upward into the unbroken dark, lit by bulbs strung like outside Christmas lights along the walls. There was no furniture. There were no decorations.

There were only the bodies of my eight fellow dancers, arrayed at the center of the room like the spokes of a wheel. Smears on the concrete floor showed where they had been rearranged as their number grew, going from a simple cross shape to something more elaborate. Their heads were at the middle, and their hands were joined, one to another, until they formed an unbroken circle. Whatever magic had been used on them was preserving their bodies; Raisa and Graham, who were eliminated in week one, looked as freshly killed as Mac and Leanne, who’d been dead for less than a day.

Something pressed hard against my mouth. I realized it was my hand. I was crying, too, but that seemed to be of little consequence. They weren’t going to sweep this room looking for bodily fluids. The blood would obscure anything else.

Alice squeezed my shoulder. She didn’t say anything. I appreciated that. It was dangerous to stand here in the open like this, but I needed a moment to center myself. Until now, I’d been holding out the hope that the bodies we hadn’t found hadn’t existed—that maybe a few people really had been eliminated and secluded themselves, maybe triggering the idea that “hey, we can kill them without anyone noticing” in our snake cultists. But no. All eight of them were there, silent and unmoving on the floor.

“Okay.” I lowered my hand. My voice was thick with tears. I swallowed them away, squaring my shoulders, and said, “Now we can study the bodies.”

“That’s my girl,” said Alice.



We didn’t want to rush, but we didn’t want to dawdle either: with no way of knowing when our snake cultists might come back, or how many of them there were, we needed to do this in as quick and efficient a manner as possible. Much as I hated to treat my former competitors as a chore to be completed, it was the best way to take care of things. Step back, distance, separate. Do not let them be the people that I knew they once had been.

The hands weren’t sealed together; they were just joined, fingers folded over each other until they were reasonably sure of holding. Bobbi and Danny had holes in their palms that matched the ones in Mac and Leanne’s, making me suspect the ivory spike was an “every other time” thing, even if I still had no idea why. The runes on each body were subtly different, but echoed the same forms. I took pictures, lighting up the chamber further with small flashes from my phone.

“This is a food preservation spell,” said Alice, crouching next to Poppy’s body and looking critically at the edges of her wounds. “I’ve heard of it being used to preserve murder victims, usually when there was a question of whether or not the killer would be brought to justice. It keeps the meat from rotting. There’s a price, of course.”