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Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, Band 5) - Softcover

Buch 5 von 16: InCryptid

McGuire, Seanan

 
9780756408138: Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, Band 5)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 075640813X ISBN 13: 9780756408138
Verlag: DAW, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

The fifth book in New York Times-bestselling Seanan McGuire's witty urban fantasy InCryptid series about a family of cryptozoologists who act as a buffer between humans and the magical creatures living in secret around us.

"The only thing more fun than an October Daye book is an InCryptid book." —Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Sookie Stackhouse series

Destiny, Noun:

   1. The inevitable or irresistible course of events.
   2. The inescapable future.
   3. See also “Screwed.”

Verity Price is back on the West Coast and getting back into the swing of the family business: cryptozoology. She's rescuing cryptids from bad situations, protecting them from monster-hunters, and generally risking life and limb for the greater good, with her ex-Covenant partner/husband, Dominic, by her side. Her ballroom dance career is behind her...or so she thinks.

When Verity gets the call from the producers of Dance or Die, the reality show she almost won several years before, she finds the lure of a comeback impossible to resist, and she and Dominic are off to L.A. for one last shot at the big time.
 
Of course, nothing is that simple. When two of her fellow contestants turn up dead, Verity will need every ally she can find—and a couple she wasn't looking for—in order to navigate the complicated steps of both the tango and a murder investigation without blowing her cover. It doesn't help that her official family backup is her grandmother, Alice Price-Healy, who thinks "subtle" is something that happens to other people.

Winning this competition may have just become a matter of life and death.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Seanan McGuire is a Washington State-based author with a strong penchant for travel and can regularly be found just about anyplace capable of supporting human life (as well as a few places that probably aren’t). Early exposure to a vast number of books left her with a lifelong affection for the written word, and led, perhaps inevitably, to her writing books of her own, starting somewhere around the age of eleven. The October Daye novels are her first urban fantasy series, and the InCryptid novels are her second series, both published by DAW and both of which have put her in the New York Times bestseller list. Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer; Rosemary and Rue, the first novel in the October Daye series, was named one of the Top 20 Paranormal Fantasy Novels of the Past Decade; and her novel Feed, written under the name Mira Grant, was named as one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2010. She also won a Hugo for her podcast, and is the first person to be nominated for five Hugo Awards in a single year. You can visit her at www.seananmcguire.com.

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One

“If at first you don’t succeed, try again with a bigger gun.” — Alice Healy

The bank of the main civic reservoir, in the middle of the night, Portland, Oregon

Now

Too many eyes to count watched us from the surface of the reservoir. Every time I swept my flashlight across the water, I found another two or three dozen pairs glowing in the darkness. All of them were focused on the flashlight, which meant all of them were focused on us. Way to make a girl feel loved.

“Forgive me for stating the obvious, but we’re outnumbered,” murmured Dominic. He wasn’t holding a flashlight. His hands were empty, for now. If something moved, so would he, and given how many knives he could conceal in his leather duster—which may have been cool fifteen years ago; now it was just a weird, if practical, affectation—he wouldn’t have any trouble fighting it off.

“Yup,” I agreed, continuing to play my flashlight across the water. Eyes, eyes, eyes. Everywhere eyes. I ran down the checklist in the back of my head, trying to find something they could belong to that wasn’t a sudden and inexplicable infestation of swamp hags. Swamp hags don’t belong in city reservoirs. Adults don’t move between territories very often, and the size of the eyes I was seeing implied an infestation of adolescents. Which made no sense at all. They would’ve had to be carried here, and who the hell thought that was a good idea? Why—

A bullfrog’s sonorous croak split the air. I blinked twice before I burst out laughing, earning myself a sidelong look from Dominic.

“What is so funny?” he asked.

“We’re here because Artie heard a rumor about ‘something weird at the reservoir,’ right?” A nod. “And we both assumed the eyes were the weird thing, hence your comment about us being outnumbered.” Another nod. I grinned. “The only thing that’s wrong here is how many frogs are swimming in the drinking water. Somebody should probably tell the city.”

“Frogs.”

“Yup. Frogs.” I picked up a rock and lobbed it toward a cluster of eyes. The cluster scattered. Several plump bullfrog bodies were briefly visible in the flashlight beam. The rest of the eyes didn’t budge. I lowered my flashlight. “They get hypnotized by the light—hence the staring. They’re an invasive species, but they’re not our problem.”

Something splashed a little farther out in the reservoir.

“Ah, Verity,” said Dominic.

“People introduced them all over the country, sometimes by mistake, sometimes on purpose, and sometimes because they were trying to feed the family manticore,” I said. “Manticore are surprisingly chill about eating amphibians. You’d think the whole ‘cold blood’ thing would be a problem, but you’d be wrong.”

“Verity, I must insist,” said Dominic.

“Insist on what?” I turned to face him, the beam of my flashlight striking his chest and illuminating his face. He had his serious expression on, the one that implied an asteroid was about to smack into the planet and wipe out all human life, thus sparing him the indignity of putting up with it for one minute more. It used to piss me off when he made that face. These days I find it funny as hell. Nobody fights harder for the survival of the people around him than Dominic, and it’s not his fault he sounds like a stuffed shirt half the time. 

He is a man of many excellent qualities, which is why I married him.

“I must insist you look back at the water.” He was starting to sound faintly strangled. That wasn’t normal. It probably wasn’t good. I turned my flashlight back toward the reservoir.

The light gleamed off the scales of a long, slender column that stretched from the water to some unseen higher point. Mouth suddenly dry, I played the light upward, confirming that a) the column was a neck, and b) the neck belonged to something carnivorous in the long-necked plesiosaur family.

“Oh,” I said. “Well. Will you look at that?”

Like the frogs, the plesiosaur seemed fascinated by my light. Unlike the frogs, the plesiosaur had a head at least two feet long, and a mouth that bristled with sharp, flesh-ripping teeth. I’d been a lot happier when it was just frogs.

“That is a dinosaur,” said Dominic. “I . . . I admit, I was not expecting a dinosaur.”

“Technically it’s not a dinosaur, it’s a plesiosaur,” I said. “I think. Probably. I don’t feel like getting closer so I can find out, do you?” Plesiosaurs, and things like them, are the purview of my brother Alex, who likes reptiles and amphibians and other creatures he can’t reasonably have a conversation with. Unfortunately, Alex was in Ohio, and had not accompanied us on the night’s adventure. I’m the urban cryptid girl. My job involves talking to things that can talk back, and as far as I knew, plesiosaurs didn’t fall under that umbrella.

Maybe I was being hasty. I cleared my throat, pasted on my most reasonable-looking smile, and called, “Hello, the plesiosaur! Would you like to have a nice chat about what you’re doing in our reservoir?”

My name is Verity Price; I’m a cryptozoologist. That means that sometimes my life includes shouting at extinct genera of reptiles. My life is weird.

The plesiosaur cocked its head, looking for all the world like an enormous iguana. For a moment, I thought maybe this was going to work out for the best. The plesiosaur would reveal a heretofore unsuspected intelligence, and explain in small, pleasant words how it had wound up in the Portland reservoir, and how I could get it out before the authorities noticed.

Then the plesiosaur opened its mouth, made a horrifying keening noise, and darted toward us, moving fast enough to constitute a clear and present danger. I yelped, jumping out of the way. Dominic was a dark blur against the bushes as he raced for safety. The plesiosaur’s jaws snapped shut where I’d been standing only a moment before.

“Not friendly,” I said, in case Dominic had somehow managed to miss the memo.

“Oh really? Whatever gave you that idea?”

“There’s no need for sarcasm,” I called. In the distance, Dominic snorted.

The plesiosaur pulled back for another strike. I braced myself to jump again. The thing couldn’t stay in the reservoir, that was for sure, and I didn’t want to leave when there was a chance it might eat a jogger or something, but I wasn’t ready to kill it, either. There’d been no reports of it hurting anyone. There hadn’t even been any conclusive sightings, prior to me and my flashlight. It was just an innocent prehistoric reptile, doing what came naturally for innocent prehistoric reptiles.

The head snapped forward again. I jumped backward this time, using my momentum to turn the motion into a handspring. It was showy and pointless, but a girl’s got to stay in practice somehow, and besides, it wasn’t like we were in a lot of danger as long as we didn’t hold still. The plesiosaur was cranky and snappy, but it couldn’t leave the water. Well. I didn’t think it could leave the water. It probably couldn’t leave the water.

I decided to stay a little farther back from the water.

“Is there a plan? Or are you just going to keep jumping about like a startled cat?”...

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Verlag
DAW
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
075640813X
ISBN 13 
9780756408138
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
DAW
https://www.aeuln.top/

Kl?nenfeldstr. 22
Muttenz
4132
Schweiz
Verantwortliche Person
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