Which meant Brenna now knew that Malena was a chupacabra. That was a relief: it meant I didn’t need to worry about blowing Malena’s cover. As a human, it wasn’t my place to run around outing cryptids who didn’t want to be revealed.
Malena wasn’t done. She turned to Alice, frowning, and asked, “Where the fuck did you go? You scared the shit out of all of us.” She sounded affronted, like scaring her was some great and profound crime against the laws of nature. Maybe it was. I didn’t know much about chupacabra culture, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it was based on firm principles of “don’t freak out your neighbor, save that for the humans.”
“Somebody who could open masked portals grabbed me from behind, and the next thing I knew, I was in another dimension,” said Alice. She made it sound perfectly reasonable, like this was the sort of thing that happened every day, and was no more problematic than breaking a nail.
Dominic didn’t take it quite so calmly. He stood up straighter and asked, “How could you tell?”
“The air.” We all looked at her blankly. Alice shrugged. “Most Earth-type dimensions have a breathable atmosphere. Getting access to the ones that don’t is surprisingly hard. The spells have all these countermeasures and protections built in and anyway, you can’t do it without more prep than my attackers had. They just shunted me to the nearest place they had access to, which hadn’t had an industrial revolution on the continent corresponding to North America yet. Everything smelled and tasted different. You develop a palate for that sort of thing once you’ve been dealing with it for long enough.”
Malena was the first to speak: “Lady, you need better hobbies.”
“I knit,” said Alice.
There was a knock at the door. I put my carton of shrimp down and moved to open it, letting a flustered-looking Brenna into the increasingly cramped motel room.
“Sorry I’m late to the party,” she said. “I had to circle a few times before I found a parking space.”
“There’s a garage across the street,” said Malena.
Brenna shrugged out of her coat, expression unrepentant. “It charged five dollars an hour. That’s highway robbery, and I’d never be able to explain the expense to my sisters. They’re only all right with the size of my car because the studio pays for half my gas, and we can use it on our Costco runs.”
Dragons bought in bulk. Of course they did. If there was something that could be done to pinch a penny, they would do it, and so well that it made human coupon clippers weep and beg to learn their secrets. I closed the door.
“How much did Malena tell you?” I asked.
“Just that she wanted a ride,” said Brenna.
I looked to Malena. She shrugged. “I figured you were going to do the debrief and I didn’t want to take the bus. I’m intrinsically lazy.”
“Right.” I took a deep breath. Brenna loved her dancers. This was going to suck. But the best way to deal with it was quickly. Turning to Brenna, I said, “All the dancers who’ve been eliminated are dead. There’s a snake cult operating inside the building, and they’ve been using the eliminated couples as sacrifices to try and manifest their god.”
Brenna blinked. She didn’t say anything.
“I have pictures of the bodies, if you don’t believe me. Please, try to believe me. You don’t want to see these.” I didn’t want to have seen them, and I had a lot more experience with death than Brenna did. She was a sheltered dragon princess from an established Nest. There was a good chance she’d never seen a dead body in her life.
Finally, she spoke. “You can’t be serious,” she said, voice quavering. “We would have noticed. I would have noticed. They’re my babies. You’re all my babies.”
“The snake cult has confusion charms tucked all over the theater,” said Alice. “Once someone was added to the forgetting portion of the spell, you would have just stopped caring. It’s not your fault.”
“Who the hell are you, anyway?” Brenna rounded on Alice, appearing to notice her for the first time.
“It’s cool, Brenna, she’s my grandmother—that never stops sounding weird.” I shook my head. “Brenna Kelly, meet Alice Price-Healy. Grandma, meet Brenna. No one is stabbing, shooting, or immolating anyone in this hotel room.”
“Please,” added Dominic. “I have to sleep here.”
“HAIL!” rejoiced the mice. “HAIL THE LACK OF STABBING, SHOOTING, AND FLAME!”
I wasn’t sure whether they couldn’t pronounce “immolation,” or whether it just hadn’t fit into their chant. It wasn’t worth arguing about. Besides, I had something else to worry about: Brenna, who was staring, open-mouthed, at the colony. This was the usual response to the mice, especially from people who hadn’t been warned about them in advance.