Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(93)

We just didn’t have time for it. “Yes, they’re Aeslin mice, yes, they’re supposed to be extinct, and yes, they’re with me,” I said, before she could say anything. “They’re good at keeping other people’s secrets, although most family secrets do sort of tend to get worked into the colony’s religious rites. Please don’t shout.”

“Aeslin mice,” said Brenna, and for a moment, she smiled. “I never thought I’d see the day. We live in a glorious time, Verity. A glorious, glorious time.”

“A glorious time filled with corpses,” said Malena, bringing the mood in the room crashing back to the ground. Brenna’s smile faltered before fading altogether.

She turned back to me. “Are you telling me the truth?”

“I am,” I said, with a quick nod. “I’m so sorry. The confusion charms must have been there from the start of the season. We might not know what was happening to the eliminated dancers even now, if it hadn’t been for Pax catching the scent of blood on his way to the car.”

“They’re cleaning up after themselves so completely that even I can’t smell anything after they vacate a room,” said Malena.

“I think I may know how,” said Alice. We all turned to look at her. “If their magic-user has the equations for dimensional shifts, they could easily be moving the bodies to a nearby level of reality, then leaving the blood behind when they take the rest of the body to a permanent resting place.”

“The f*ck you say?” said Malena.

Alice leaned over and picked up my abandoned carton of prawns. “This is one thing. If I dumped it out on the bed—which I won’t do, Dominic, so there’s no need to give me that look—would it still be one thing, or would it become many things?”

“That’s semantics,” said Brenna.

“That’s magic,” said Alice. “I could use a spell to shift ‘Verity’s order of salt-and-pepper prawns’ into another dimension, and then use another spell to shift just the carton, or the carton and its contents, back. It’s all in how you word it. The whole topic honestly makes my head hurt, but that’s why I’m the blunt instrument. Thomas was always the scalpel.”

Bringing my family history into an already tense situation wasn’t going to do any of us any good. Quickly, before someone could ask who Thomas was, I said, “So we have eight dead dancers, we have confusion charms all over the theater, and we have a magic-user or users good enough at what they do that they can move people and corpses into other dimensions without a lot of prep work.” That last statement earned me some blank looks. I explained: “Even if they came prepared to move the bodies, they wouldn’t have been expecting Alice. Since she didn’t come back covered in blood, I’m assuming she was placed in a different dimension than all that blood they’ve been moving around. That means a magic-user who can access multiple dimensions, without having put in a lot of prep work toward doing it.”

“That doesn’t necessarily imply a lot of strength,” said Alice. “They could be very good at doing one specific thing. It’s our bad luck that the thing in question is basically a fight-ender when used correctly. It’s hard to punch something that’s in a different dimension altogether.”

“This gets better and better,” I said. “Next up, they actually summon the snake god, and we have to deal with it.”

“That might be true,” said Brenna hesitantly. “They can’t let the show make it to the finale. They just can’t.”

Malena and I stared at her, matching expressions of dawning horror on our faces. Alice and Dominic looked confused.

“I’m missing something,” said Alice. “What am I missing?”

“The finale is where they crown America’s Favorite Dancer,” I said. “The judges and the top four always get to pick their favorite routines from the rest of the season, and then those dancers come back and perform them one more time.”

“If all the eliminated dancers are dead, they won’t be able to have a reunion show,” said Brenna. “It would make people notice the disappearances. Either these people expect to have their snake god by then . . .”

“Or they’re going to disappear if they haven’t succeeded by the time the call is going out for people to return,” I said. “So we’re looking at what, we hit the top four and a bunch of people just disappear? That’s still a lot of deaths between here and there. It has to stop.”

“They’re killing based on the elimination cycle, which gives us until Thursday,” said Malena. “You have any big monster-hunter genius ideas?”

“We get the confusion counter-charms from Bon, and make sure we’re all watching carefully when we’re in the theater,” I said. “We have a map to the subbasement. We know where they’re keeping the bodies. We can find them.”

“They have to be someone close to the show, or they wouldn’t be able to come and go freely—and they definitely wouldn’t be able to get the eliminated dancers to go anywhere with them,” said Brenna. “I don’t care how many confusion charms you put in the theater. A dancer who’s just been eliminated isn’t going anywhere with a stranger.”

“So we’re looking for one of our own, and we need to look fast,” I said. “We’re running out of time.”