“You need my foot up your butt,” she muttered, and skittered away, moving with a fluid, insectile grace completely at odds with her still mostly human appearance.
Content that she was trying, I turned to Alice and Pax. “Do either of you remember going to look for me, or did you just assume it had happened?”
“Pax and Malena told me they’d gone looking,” said Alice.
“I looked,” said Pax.
“As did I,” said Dominic.
“Okay, where?” I asked.
Silence followed.
“That’s what I thought. Look: my family’s spent so much time around cuckoos and Lilu and other things that scramble your head that we’re a little resistant. Not immune, but . . . we do okay.” I shook my head. “If I don’t remember looking for people I couldn’t find, and Alice doesn’t remember looking for people she couldn’t find, but we’re all mysteriously losing track of the folks we’re supposed to be keeping our eyes on? Someone is messing with us.”
“Does this fit the bill for something that doesn’t belong?” asked Malena, just before a bundle of dried flowers wrapped with a string of stone beads hit the floor. Pax jumped. Alice slanted a narrow-eyed glare up at the rafters.
“Yes, it does,” I said, as I moved to pick up the bundle. The flowers were thin and fragile, but they’d been red before they were dried; hints of color still showed on the petals. I sniffed, and was rewarded with a dusty, venomous sweetness. “I think these are resurrection lilies.”
“The stone is howlite,” said Dominic. I glanced at him. He continued, “We used to carry disks of the stuff when it was thought we might be going into an area containing a cuckoo. There was no proof it helped us to remember ourselves, but the thought was that any protection, however scant, was better than none.”
“Howlite is supposed to be calming,” said Alice. “It reduces stress, anger—all the things I live by.”
“And resurrection lilies are used in a lot of memory charms,” I said. “Someone’s looping memory in the halls. Keeps us from noticing when we lose track of people, keeps us from realizing that we’re wasting time doing things we don’t have to. This is bad.”
“We can get counter-charms from Bon,” said Alice.
“That’s not going to save Mac and Leanne,” I said.
She didn’t have an answer for that. Sadly, neither did anybody else.
Malena searched the rafters and found six more howlite and resurrection lily charm bundles. Once they were all collected, she slipped out through one of the high windows, on the theory that if we got the charms out of the building, we’d have a better chance of finding our missing people. (They weren’t powerful enough to make her forget what they were while she was actually touching them. As for the wisdom of having her move them, rather than destroying them . . . if we didn’t find Mac and Leanne, we could put the charms back and hopefully keep the people who’d created them from realizing how much we knew, at least for a while longer. Especially since we didn’t know anything useful. We had enough bits and pieces to be a danger to ourselves, but not enough to be a danger to anyone else.)
Dominic made a small, startled sound. I turned to see him blinking, looking suddenly confused. Pax looked much the same.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I never went looking for you; I found you by mistake,” he said, expression turning horrified. “I was angry with Malena for refusing to come off the wall, and stalked away. I all but ran into you after that—before, I would have gone to my grave swearing I’d sought you, and failed to find you anywhere.”
“Welcome to the wonderful, terrible world of memory charms,” I said. “It’s all right. I wasn’t hurt, and you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No,” he said. “It most certainly is not all right, and we’ll be discussing this later, at length. Right now, we need to find your missing dancers.” He turned and stalked away, heading down the hall toward the stage.
A hand touched my shoulder as I watched him go. I looked behind me. There was Pax, frowning deeply.
“You know, if you don’t want to discuss this with him later, he can’t make you.”
I blinked before I realized what he was implying, and burst out laughing. It was a relief, almost, to feel like laughing again, even though I knew the situation was dire. “No, no, nothing like that, Pax, I swear. He’s just worried, and he didn’t get a lot of coping mechanisms when he was a kid. I promise, he only wants to talk to me. And maybe make out with me. A lot.”
“If you’re sure . . .”
“I’m sure. Now come on, you’re the Ukupani. Do you smell blood?”
Pax closed his eyes and breathed deeply. As he did, he went perfectly still, becoming a statue of a man. Nothing moved except his chest, and once his lungs were full, even that stopped. He was motionless as only a predator could be, carved from stone and ready to return to life the moment his prey was within range.