We didn’t find any traces of Alice—or any blood—nearby. We did find four more underground rooms, one of which was only accessible by going through a door hidden in the back of a janitor’s closet. Dominic and I had been forced to go into that one alone: both Malena and Pax had wrinkled their noses at the smell of the cleaning chemicals on the shelves, and refused to go any farther until we confirmed that something was actually down there.
Nothing was down there. Nothing but spiders and concrete and the faint scent of mold. Most of the underground rooms had been like that: perfectly squared corners, perfectly smooth walls, and wasted storage space. The ones that did have things stored in them seemed almost haphazard—folding chairs in the room where we’d found the bodies, a few pieces of old stage equipment in another, and some sad-looking costumes in a third. The stairs were an obstacle, sure, but given how over-packed all of the aboveground storage rooms were, I would have expected the crew to have been bleeding off more of the excess. So why weren’t they?
Dominic and I returned to ground level, where a quick glance at my phone confirmed that it was coming on one in the morning. “All right, here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “Dominic, no one knows your face. Go hail us a cab. That way, if Adrian has anyone watching the theater, he won’t see one of us doing it. We’re all going to ride back to the apartments, and then Dominic and I are going to go see some friends of my grandmother’s.”
“Nope,” said Malena.
I raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“I said, nope. Nuh-uh. Not going to happen. Because from where I’m standing, it sounds like you just said ‘hey, other half of the party, we’re officially in a horror movie now, so how about you two go off on your own, don’t worry, nothing bad will happen.’” She smiled tightly, and her teeth were sharp as rocks protruding from the desert floor. “My mama didn’t raise no fools. We ate them. I’m sticking with you.”
“Malena is right about safety in numbers, but I’ll go back to the apartment anyway,” said Pax. “Anders and Lyra need someone to keep an eye on them, and if you’re not there when Lyra wakes up, she’ll assume you went for a run or something. If I’m not there, she’ll decide we’re having an affair. I don’t want to have that fight with her. Do you?”
“Not in this lifetime or any other,” I said, suppressing a shudder. Lyra was a good friend, and always had been. But between her crush on Pax and the need to keep certain aspects of my life secret from her, sometimes she seemed like just one more obstacle—an obstacle that had to be placated from time to time, to keep her from feeling like she was being replaced.
Valerie didn’t have those problems. Valerie was just another dancer, and anything she needed to hide would be mundane and understandable. Sometimes I envied Valerie, even though I knew that her life was simple only because she didn’t actually exist. Maybe that was always the secret to a simple life. Reality was the complicating factor.
“Meet me at the back of the theater,” said Dominic, disappearing through the nearest exit. We waited a count of thirty before following him.
The night outside was as dark as Burbank ever got. The sky was painted with soft orange light from the streets below it, and illuminated billboards rose above the buildings at irregular intervals, disrupting any decent stretch of shadows. Batman would have taken one look at the cover available here and vanished right back to Gotham, never to venture forth again.
I loved it so. If only it hadn’t been connected to so many things that weren’t worth the effort it took to keep on loving them.
“All this cloak and dagger security is cute, but I’m not sure it’s necessary,” said Malena as we walked toward the back corner of the theater to wait for Dominic and the cab. “Those confusion charms you found are going to have people convinced that they saw us half a dozen times over the course of the night.”