“They don’t,” he said. “It’s just . . . there’s so much blood.”
“Pax, do you need to leave?” I watched him out of the corner of my eye, looking for any sign that he was about to lose control. I didn’t feel like following the discovery of two bodies with a fight against one of my best friends in this competition. I’d do it if I had to. “Malena and I have things under control here.”
“What are you going to do?”
This was the awful part. Well. The latest awful part in a long line of awful parts that had spanned most of my life. “The three of us are going to go cram ourselves into the car with Lyra and Anders, and we’re not going to tell anyone what happened here. I hate to do it, but we have to leave the bodies for the janitorial staff to find.”
“What? Why?”
I looked up. Malena was sticking to the ceiling directly over the bodies, my phone still clutched in one half-taloned hand. She was staring at me, expression aghast.
“Because you and Pax aren’t human, and I’m here under an assumed name,” I said. “I don’t think any of us wants the kind of scrutiny that comes with this sort of discovery. Maybe more importantly, at least for me, I need to get those pictures to my dad. Spending hours explaining what happened to the police is going to delay that, and someone else could get hurt.”
The janitorial staff would find and report the bodies before we had to come back to this theater. Dumping the situation on their heads was a shitty thing to do, but that didn’t change the necessity of it, or the sensibility of distancing the three of us from things as fast as we possibly could. Hopefully, Adrian had a good medical plan for his employees, and the people who found the bodies would be able to get some therapy after the fact.
Sometimes I felt like I needed some therapy after the fact. It was really too bad that was never going to happen.
“You’re cold as hell, dancing girl,” said Malena. She scuttled from the ceiling back to the wall and down to the floor, where she offered back my phone.
“I sort of have to be.” I tucked the phone into my pocket. “You didn’t panic when I walked in, so I’m assuming Pax told you I was a friend. Did he tell you why?”
“I was sort of busy hoping he wouldn’t go all SyFy Saturday on me and bite my head off,” said Malena.
“All those shark-themed monster movies are racial discrimination,” grumbled Pax. He sounded a bit more like himself, and a bit less like he was going to start licking blood off the floor. I had to take that as a good thing.
“Yes, they are, and that was a sensible concern, Malena,” I said. I held my hands where she could see them and be certain I wasn’t reaching for a weapon, as I said, “My name isn’t Valerie Pryor. It’s Verity Price.”
Slowly, Malena blinked. “Verity Price.”
“Yes.”
“As in, you’re a Price.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t suppose you’re secretly the granddaughter of Vincent Price, and you’re just hiding your celebrity pedigree?”
She sounded so hopeful that I sort of hated to let her down. Sadly . . . “No. I’m the daughter of Kevin Price. I’m a cryptozoologist. Sorry about that.”
“Oh, great. ‘I’m just going to go on reality television again, no big deal,’ she said, right before she wound up in a room with two corpses, a hungry shark-man, and a member of the Covenant of St. George.” Malena shook her head. “I should’ve stayed in the desert.”
“I don’t belong to the Covenant,” I protested. “My family quit generations before I was born. I’m on your side, and that’s why I’m saying we need to get out of here. We can read about this on the Internet tomorrow.” And I could wait a few days before bribing someone for the autopsy results. That would tell me how worried I needed to be.
I was pretty sure that I needed to be extremely worried.
Cramming five people into one of the town cars supplied for our use was easy once we put Pax in the front seat. He had the longest legs. More importantly, he was still light-headed from all the blood he’d been inhaling, and by putting him closer to the air conditioning, I hoped he could clear his head a little.
The party was raging in the courtyard when we got to the apartments—and I do mean raging. The celebration after the eliminations was always loud, enthusiastic, and guaranteed to leave more than a few dancers to face the next morning with hangovers. But we’d made it through another cruel cut, and the urge to rejoice was strong. Anders and Lyra tumbled out of the car already cheering and pumping their arms in the air. They took off running, leaving me, Pax, and Malena to watch them go.
“I don’t think I can do this,” said Malena, as the car drove away behind us.