Chaos Choreography
Page 105

“See, here’s the thing,” I said. “Right now, you’ve got some nasty damage to your knees—that probably hurts, huh? I mean, knives are meant to hurt people, that’s what they’re for—but that’s all the damage we’ve done. To you. Your friend, he’s pretty dead. I hope he wasn’t too important to you. My grandmother gets upset when people come at me with knives.”
The bogeyman cast an alarmed glance at Alice. His already grayish complexion, which looked sallow and strange by the candlelight, got even paler as he put two and two together. There weren’t many people my age who could go around claiming someone who looked younger than them was their grandmother. If I could . . .
“We didn’t have a chance to introduce ourselves before,” I said. “Hi. I’m Verity Price. That’s my grandmother, Alice Price-Healy, standing over there. You know, the one who killed your friend.”
“Oh, God,” moaned the bogeyman.
“What? Didn’t your bosses tell you there were monsters in the dark when they left you alone down there?” I leaned closer still, shifting more of my weight onto my hands. “Tell us what you know, and we’ll let you live. Don’t tell us, and we’ll find a way to make you tell us. You probably wouldn’t enjoy that very much.”
“He could be into pain, dear,” said Alice. “It’s not nice to judge.”
“Sorry, Grandma,” I said. I smiled at the bogeyman again. “Sorry. Sometimes I get carried away, too.”
“I’m not telling you anything,” spat the bogeyman. “You think my life is worth more than my severance package? Bullshit. You Price girls think you’re so smart, like you can fix everything just because you’ve got some big human savior complex, but you can’t. You’re not everywhere, and where you’re not, we have to find ways to handle things for ourselves.”
“Severance package?” I asked blankly.
“Verity, grab him,” said Alice. She sounded alarmed enough that I moved, lifting my hands off the floor and lunging for his wrists.
I was close. I wasn’t close enough. I’d been so focused on intimidating that I hadn’t thought about restraint—and why would I have needed to? We’d taken his shotgun away. He was injured and outnumbered. There was no chance that he was going to hurt either one of us.
He wasn’t trying to hurt one of us.
A knife, ribbon-thin and sharp enough to gleam in the light from Alice’s candle, slid out of his sleeve as he raised his arm to his throat. With a single decisive motion, he sliced lengthwise, and his flesh parted in a river of red. I shouted, a wordless exclamation of dismay, still moving toward him.
Then Alice’s arms were around my waist, yanking me away from the arterial spray. She was faster than I had been, maybe because she’d caught on more quickly than I had: she got me clear without a drop of blood hitting my clothing.
“You have to go back upstairs,” she said, pulling me back even further. “You can’t be covered in blood, or people are going to ask questions.”
“You’re covered in blood,” I said, pulling away. She let me go, and I turned to face her. “Won’t that raise questions?”
There wasn’t that much blood on her when I actually looked, and what there was matched her tank top almost perfectly. She could easily write it off as grease stains or mud. I’d never really stopped to think about my grandmother’s wardrobe choices. Suddenly, they were starting to make a terrible kind of sense.
“I’m planning to sneak out the back door as soon as I collect the mice, since I can’t be here during the day,” she said, tone calm and level. “I need a shower and some sleep. I’ll drop the mice back at the apartment, do what needs to be done, and then get my bike and go to check in with Dominic. We need to find Bon.”
“For the counter-charms, right.” The reality of what just happened was starting to sink in. My heart was hammering against my ribs, and my stomach was filled with sour churning. I wasn’t going to throw up—I was too much of a professional for that—but oh, I wanted to. “Grandma, that man just killed himself rather than let us question him. What the hell are we in the middle of?”
“He mentioned his severance package. Bogeymen are all about commerce and contracts. The snake cult probably offered him enough money for keeping their secrets that it was worth his life to get that payout.” Alice looked over my shoulder, back to the bogeyman. Her expression softened. “Poor man didn’t have a choice. If the contract terms were strict enough, he could have found himself in the position of needing to die or provide an additional sacrifice from his own family. No bogeyman patriarch would be willing to do that if there was any other way.”