Humans virtually never look up.
I was among the first off the stage, and the absolute first to hit the women’s changing room. My Jane of the Jungle costume was simple to shuck off and hang on the rack, and it was a matter of seconds to pull on my street clothes. I swapped my stage wig for my usual loose red ponytail, and filled my pockets with knives. By the time the first of my fellow dancers was coming through the door, I was pushing my way out into the hall, murmuring vague phrases about not feeling well. Some of them looked at me sympathetically, but no one tried to stop me. They all knew I hadn’t danced my best tonight.
As soon as I was alone in the hall, I grabbed the nearest curtain and shinnied up it to the rafters. Once there, I ran along the beams meant to hold our hanging lights to a position above the basement door. I crouched, holding a beam for support, and waited.
Malena arrived a few minutes later, sauntering casually until she saw she was alone. Then she skittered straight up the wall, stopping when she was roughly on the level with me. She blinked. I raised my free hand in a small wave.
“All present and accounted for?” I asked.
“The other seven girls were still getting changed when I left the room, and I don’t smell blood,” she said. “Where’s your grandmother?”
“I have no idea.” Probably in the basement, if I knew Alice. She was good at staying out of sight when she wanted to, and while we hadn’t planned for this moment in excessive detail—having too many variables meant it was better to wing it and play to our strengths than to get tripped up by a plan that wouldn’t work—she’d want to be where she could break some faces, if it came to that.
Dominic was outside, and would stay there until someone signaled him to come in. We’d need to find a better way of getting him into the theater if this continued for another week. Please, I thought, don’t let this continue for another week. Please, let us find the people who killed Poppy and Chaz, and stop them, and move on into a world where I could just dance, and not worry about anybody getting murdered. Please.
There was motion below. Malena and I both went very still, and watched as Pax walked down the hall, looking quickly from side to side. Like the humans, he didn’t look up. That made a certain amount of sense. Ukupani were aquatic in nature. Just being out of the water was disconcerting enough to keep him from looking for an ambush.
He opened the basement door and stepped inside, disappearing.
“He didn’t do it, did he?” whispered Malena.
“No,” I said, with absolute certainty. “If he had, he would never have been stupid enough to involve me.” Ukupani didn’t have a history of worshipping snake cults. I’d needed to explain the concept to him, and Hawaii was too small to have ever sustained anything the size of Titanoboa. Hawaiian terrors tended to come out of the sea. I fully expected that if anyone ever managed to summon Cthulhu or something like that, it would be anybody’s guess whether the squamous terror rose from the waters off Massachusetts or Maui.
“I still don’t smell blood,” said Malena. She was starting to sound unsure.
I paused. “Wait. If all three of us are here—I thought you were keeping an eye on Leanne.”
Malena’s eyes widened. “She wasn’t in the dressing room. I thought you were keeping an eye on her.”
“Shit,” I hissed, and swung around to dangling from the beam I’d been sitting on. From there, it was easy work to grab one of the guide ropes and lower myself, one hand over the other, to the floor. It wasn’t the fastest means of descent, but it prevented rope burns, and that was important to me. I was going to need my hands.
My feet had barely hit the floor when someone sighed behind me. “Val, Val, Val, do we have to have a talk about the insurance rates and keeping out of the rafters again? I thought we went over this.”
“Um.” I turned, forcing a sickly smile as Clint walked toward me. He was shaking his head in disapproval. Every encounter I’d ever had with the show’s judges told me to bow my head and look regretful. Every lesson I’d ever had about getting caught climbing somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be told me to turn and run.
I settled for a compromise, leaning back on my heels and smiling sheepishly. Clint was still dressed for the judging table, and tonight’s bow tie was covered in purple grapes hanging heavy on bright green vines. He looked concerned.