“Here,” she said. “Enough gore to keep a teenage boy happy. I need to shower forever. We done here, or are we gonna hang out and see if we can’t murder the shit out of the people who did this?”
I hesitated. There were five of us, and I might be up for elimination next week; even apart from the need to save the lives of my fellow contestants, my own life was potentially in imminent danger. At the same time, we had no idea how many snake cultists there were, or whether they were human or something else. If we stayed, if we waited, we could be wasting five lives for a chance at saving two.
The thought was followed by a wave of guilt. Since when was my life worth more than anyone else’s? Since when did I get to value my friends above the people I was supposed to be protecting and taking care of? No. I couldn’t think that way.
“Yes,” I said. “We wait.”
Hopefully, we wouldn’t be waiting for nothing.
There were no other entrances to this particular basement: just the one door, leading down to the abattoir the previously innocent space had become. Malena crawled up the wall while I took to the rafters. Alice elected to wait just inside the basement door, sitting on the steps and waiting for someone to come and make her night more interesting.
Pax and Dominic were a problem. Neither of them were climbers, and we couldn’t put Pax on the other side of the door with Alice unless we wanted him driven wild by the smell of blood. In the end, we’d sent Pax down the hall to hide in the curtains and watch for people who might be coming to check on their handiwork, while Dominic went outside to watch the parking lot. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but this wasn’t a perfect place to put together an ambush. The basement was a killing jar . . . if we could get our killers inside. Until then, they had all the hallways and hidey-holes of a very large theater at their disposal, and we needed to be careful.
I crouched in the rafters, balancing on the balls of my feet, and waited for the signal to move. Malena clung to the wall nearby. She looked calmer, and more human, than she had in the basement. She wasn’t as upset by the smell of blood as Pax was. That didn’t mean it hadn’t been getting to her. It could be easy to forget, sometimes, how weak the human nose was when compared to most therianthropes. As a chupacabra, Malena was attuned to the smell of rot and offal. It was probably perfume to her heightened senses. Leaving her to marinate in it would still have been cruel.
“You okay?” I murmured. The theater had been designed to muffle backstage noise as much as possible, with sound baffles in the walls and foam padding on the bottoms of the rafters. Our killers would have to be bats to hear me.
(Bats weren’t off the table—the Batboy story has some real cryptid roots—but they weren’t likely. None of the batlike cryptids we’ve found so far have been therianthropes, and I was pretty sure I would have noticed people with giant leather wings trooping around the halls.)
“Mac didn’t like me,” she replied, her voice pitched as low as mine. “He said Latin ballroom was primitive and dirty when compared to ballet. I said he was a racist fuck-hole. We weren’t friends, you know?”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just nodded, hoping she could see how sorry I was from my expression. Hoping she would understand my silence.
Malena grimaced. “But, man, he could dance, and when a couple of the guys got on my case for having a funny diet—that whole ‘all-liquid, all the time’ thing looked sort of like an eating disorder to them, I guess—he told them to go stuff themselves. Said I was a brilliant technician who was wasting herself on an inferior form of dance, and that I was worth twenty of them. He wasn’t a nice guy, but he was a good guy, you know?”
“I do,” I said quietly. I’ve known my share of good guys who wouldn’t know nice if it bit them in the ass. Sometimes I liked them a lot better than the alternative.
“He was a good guy,” said Malena again, almost meditatively. She went silent after that, and I let her. She was the one who’d just suffered a loss, not me. She knew what she needed better than I did.