Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(90)
“He could be into pain, dear,” said Alice. “It’s not nice to judge.”
“Sorry, Grandma,” I said. I smiled at the bogeyman again. “Sorry. Sometimes I get carried away, too.”
“I’m not telling you anything,” spat the bogeyman. “You think my life is worth more than my severance package? Bullshit. You Price girls think you’re so smart, like you can fix everything just because you’ve got some big human savior complex, but you can’t. You’re not everywhere, and where you’re not, we have to find ways to handle things for ourselves.”
“Severance package?” I asked blankly.
“Verity, grab him,” said Alice. She sounded alarmed enough that I moved, lifting my hands off the floor and lunging for his wrists.
I was close. I wasn’t close enough. I’d been so focused on intimidating that I hadn’t thought about restraint—and why would I have needed to? We’d taken his shotgun away. He was injured and outnumbered. There was no chance that he was going to hurt either one of us.
He wasn’t trying to hurt one of us.
A knife, ribbon-thin and sharp enough to gleam in the light from Alice’s candle, slid out of his sleeve as he raised his arm to his throat. With a single decisive motion, he sliced lengthwise, and his flesh parted in a river of red. I shouted, a wordless exclamation of dismay, still moving toward him.
Then Alice’s arms were around my waist, yanking me away from the arterial spray. She was faster than I had been, maybe because she’d caught on more quickly than I had: she got me clear without a drop of blood hitting my clothing.
“You have to go back upstairs,” she said, pulling me back even further. “You can’t be covered in blood, or people are going to ask questions.”
“You’re covered in blood,” I said, pulling away. She let me go, and I turned to face her. “Won’t that raise questions?”
There wasn’t that much blood on her when I actually looked, and what there was matched her tank top almost perfectly. She could easily write it off as grease stains or mud. I’d never really stopped to think about my grandmother’s wardrobe choices. Suddenly, they were starting to make a terrible kind of sense.
“I’m planning to sneak out the back door as soon as I collect the mice, since I can’t be here during the day,” she said, tone calm and level. “I need a shower and some sleep. I’ll drop the mice back at the apartment, do what needs to be done, and then get my bike and go to check in with Dominic. We need to find Bon.”
“For the counter-charms, right.” The reality of what just happened was starting to sink in. My heart was hammering against my ribs, and my stomach was filled with sour churning. I wasn’t going to throw up—I was too much of a professional for that—but oh, I wanted to. “Grandma, that man just killed himself rather than let us question him. What the hell are we in the middle of?”
“He mentioned his severance package. Bogeymen are all about commerce and contracts. The snake cult probably offered him enough money for keeping their secrets that it was worth his life to get that payout.” Alice looked over my shoulder, back to the bogeyman. Her expression softened. “Poor man didn’t have a choice. If the contract terms were strict enough, he could have found himself in the position of needing to die or provide an additional sacrifice from his own family. No bogeyman patriarch would be willing to do that if there was any other way.”
“Fuck.”
Alice nodded. “Yes.”
This snake cult wasn’t playing softball. Whatever they wanted, whatever they were hoping to achieve, there was no body count too big to make it happen. We were the only ones who were standing in their way . . . and I still had to get back to rehearsal.
Sometimes life just isn’t fair.
Eighteen
“Heroes save everyone. Heroes sacrifice themselves for the sake of people they’ve never met. We’re not heroes. We’re never going to be. But if that means we make it home alive, I’m all right with that.”
—Alice Healy
The Be-Well Motel, about seven hours later
DOMINIC ANSWERED THE DOOR when I knocked, taking in my bedraggled appearance and spiky hat-hair (well, technically, “wig-hair,” but that had a confusing connotation) without comment. He opened the door wider, letting me inside. The smell of Chinese takeout assaulted my nostrils a beat before the mice started cheering.
“I thought you were dropping the mice at the apartment,” I said.
Alice, who was sitting cross-legged on the room’s single bed with a carton of shrimp fried rice in her hand, smiled brightly. “They decided they’d rather come with me for Chinese food and debriefing.”
“They’re Aeslin mice,” I said. “They would rather do anything that involves food.”
“HAIL! HAIL THE WISDOM OF THE ARBOREAL PRIESTESS!” exulted the mice.
“See?” I said. Dominic was waiting patiently nearby. I turned and leaned up to give him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he replied. “Did the remainder of rehearsal go well?”
“This week’s group number is a hip-hop piece set to ‘Dragula,’ so yes if you like being screamed at to be a better vampire, and no if you’re not comfortable doing a dance routine where six of the people have wooden stakes in their hands. Somebody’s going to get impaled.” I walked over to investigate the Chinese food. “Lyra isn’t speaking to me because of the whole ‘ditching her for Malena’ thing, Anders is telling everybody they have to be nice to me because my grandmother is dying, and Brenna should be here in about twenty minutes, so I can fill her in on what we found under the theater.”