“A legacy? What does that mean?”
I picked my way across the room, careful not to step on any of the fading lines on the floor. My entire body ached and my skin felt pinpricked and tight. My heart dropped down to a normal beat, but the thuds were heavy and hard. “It means that Cathy Ledwith wasn’t the first. And, unless we stop this, Alyssa Rand won’t be the last.”
I drove home with the heat blasting and the radio off, Will’s taillights shining bright in front of me. Everything felt wrong—I felt wrong—and I tried a series of deep-breathing techniques I had seen on some late-night yoga set infomercial. Everything was churning in my head—was it the students or was it the school? Had other girls gone missing, girls we didn’t know about yet? Who—or what—was to blame?
I was just starting to feel normal again when I crested the third-floor steps of our apartment.
“Christ.”
And there it went again.
“What is this?” Will asked.
The little strip of public property between our apartment and Will’s was set up like a waiting room, complete with a stack of long-expired magazines, my living room set, and the half-dead spider plant I had been trying to revitalize since the Bush administration. It would have been a nice little setup if I didn’t have to throttle the arm of the couch and clear the coffee table to reach my front door, or, if it had been, you know, inside my apartment as it had been when I’d left this morning.
“Good luck with all that,” Will said with a smug smile before disappearing into his furniture-on-the-inside apartment.
I groaned and grabbed my door, flinging it open. “Nina, what the hell is go—”
“Shhhh!” I was met by a chorus of angry hisses and then the business end of a megaphone as Nina yelled, “Cut!” directly into my face. She pinched her icy, bony fingers around my elbow and yanked me into the kitchen, which had miraculously gone from cozy mess to break room chic: our mismatched collection of hand-me-down mugs with unappetizing statements—Carrie for Prom Queen, The Problem Is Gonorrhea—had been replaced by an orderly heap of stolen straight-from-the-UDA Styrofoam standin mugs and brown paper napkins stamped with the Starbucks logo. Our sugar bowl was stuffed with pilfered packaged sweeteners and coffee stirrers, and bottled water bloomed from an ice bath in the sink. There was a hastily arranged basket of individually wrapped snacks that I recognized—basket, bagels, and all—from the Red Cross station on Second Street.
“What is all of this?”
Nina swept an arm toward the cleared out living room. “Auditions.”
I scanned the room and frowned. “Auditions? For the UDA commercial?” I rolled up on my tiptoes and eyed the woman pacing my living room. She couldn’t have been under five feet nine inches tall or over eighty pounds. She took short, careful steps, smacking a sheaf of papers against her bony hip as she spoke soundlessly, her eyes bright and batting, engaging the struggling kitten on my Hang in There! poster.
“Who is that?”
Nina produced a clipboard from somewhere and thrummed through a stack of eight-by-ten black and white glossies. “Um, that is Stella MacNeir. Don’t you just love her?”
I pinched my bottom lip. “What department does she work in? I don’t think I’ve ever seen her. Is she new?”
“Uh, new like just off Broadway.”
I raised my eyebrows, impressed. “Like, Broadway, Broadway?”
“Like Broadway at Kearney, San Francisco.”
“That’s Big Al’s porn shop.”
Nina leaned through the kitchen–living room pass-through. “Thank you, Stella. We’re going to wrap up for the day. We’ll be in touch.”
“Wait. You’re auditioning people for the UDA commercial who don’t work at UDA?”
“I need the best, Soph.”
I gaped as Stella slid into a neon-pink leopard-print jacket and slipped one of my Frescas into her knock-off handbag before she slunk out the door.
“That’s the best?”
Nina looked casually over her shoulder as though Stella would reappear, perhaps in even more thespian-slash-sex-store-worker glory. She looked back at me, using her index fingers to rub tiny circles on her temples. “Look, it’s been a really long day. And we need Stella. You know how many actual Underworld employees show up on film? Two. Two! And one of them is a centaur. So as you can see, outsourcing this part was necessary.” Nina’s face suddenly brightened as her eyes slipped from the top of my forehead down to my toes.
“Unless . . .”
I stepped backward, mashing my hips against our cheap Corian counter. “No. Oh, no.”
Nina framed me with her hands and grinned so widely, I could see the tip of her fangs and the tops of her gums. “Oh, you’re perfect.”
“No. I know what you’re thinking and no. No, no, no.”