“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.”

“Yes and no,” I said. “They can make people suggestible, and they can falsify general memories, but they’re all here, at the theater. If Lyra decided I was sneaking around with Pax, a bunch of memory charms wouldn’t be able to convince her otherwise. She’d use that to explain why she wasn’t concerned when she couldn’t find me. Really powerful memory charms could rewrite a lot more, but none of us would be going to rehearsal. We’d decide we’d already been, and go hang out in the lobby.” Dancers loved to dance. Dancers loved to move. Dancers loved the moment where a new routine came together and the whole world made sense. But no dancer, ever, had loved being shouted at by a choreographer who couldn’t believe the arrogant stupidity of the dancers they had to work with. Each and every one of us would skip it if we could.

Malena nodded thoughtfully. “So they have to split the middle. Powerful enough that we don’t notice when things are out of place, but weak enough that they don’t disrupt the show. Do you think it could be one of the choreographers? They like it when we come to rehearsal.”

“I know it’s not one of us; I know it’s not Brenna,” I said. “That’s about where my knowledge runs out.”

“How do you know it’s not Brenna?” asked Pax. “She’s close enough to the dancers that any of us would follow her into a dark corner without thinking twice. She’s tall, too. Strong. She could probably subdue most of the dancers on this show without a problem.” He didn’t add that he was one of the few dancers too strong for her to take down. He didn’t need to.

I was too busy gaping at him to point that out. He’d just identified one major flaw in our intelligence gathering: namely, the fact that protecting the status of the various cryptids I knew had been so drummed into me for so long that I’d never thought to ask whether they knew each other. “I know because Brenna asked me for help the first night of the show,” I said. “She and her sisters need me to broker an introduction to the dragons of New York for them.”

There was a moment of stunned silence as Pax and Malena worked through the implications of this statement. Then they exploded, both of them speaking at once.

“—can’t be serious, there’s no way in hell that Brenna Kelly is—”

“—she’s too nice to be a dragon princess, it doesn’t make any—”

“—thought they were only interested in gold, not in reality television—”

I put up my hands, motioning for them to quiet down. “I didn’t tell you before because it wasn’t mine to tell; I’m telling you now because you need to know that she’s a friend. Dragons can be greedy and self-interested. In this case, that works in our favor. If she and her sisters want access to the male of their species, they won’t do anything that might get me hurt.” I didn’t bother reminding them that “dragon princess” was an outdated, inaccurate term. It was going to take a while for the phrase to work its way out of the language—assuming it ever did. A female cat was a queen, and a male harpy was a harrier. Why shouldn’t a female dragon be a princess? There were definitely more insulting words in the world.