“I’ll get you back to the room,” she informed me, not giving an inch of affection. It was unfair how much it stung to have her mad at me, and it was also unfair that all of thedreadingof her being mad at me didn’t make this moment any easier. Why was this the one thing that preparation couldn’t help?
Why couldn’t I go back in time and make a different choice? A less selfish choice?
And how could I explain that all the things that felt so important at the beginning of this cruise—the launch, my brand,the plan—now felt so much less important than they did just a few days ago?
“You and I need to talk. I messed up, I know. Okay? But first, I’m going to the theater,” I told her despite her deepening frown. “I have a feeling some rogue shrimp cocktail is about to take out an entire show.”
Chapter Thirteen
Krysta sourced a pair of crutches from the infirmary, and I made my way with noisy urgency down to the theater. Krysta went ahead of me, holding open doors and indicating to guests that I didn’t have time to talk. She was polite, if cool, and professional, if clipped, but I could tell that she wanted to be anywhere but near me right now.
I felt awful, like the human equivalent of an olive oil coffee drink, greasy and unnecessary, but I knew I deserved to feel that way. I knew that the entire reason I was in this situation now, racing to the theater while the cast and crew started dropping like food-poisoned flies, was that I had tried to handle this on my own. If I’d told Krysta about the blackmail—and had let her do her job—I had no doubt that she would have handled it a lot better than me. Maybe she could have spared this ship a vicious shrimp-ocalypse.
But first, the shrimp-victims, the shrimp-scapegoats. The scape-shrimps. I had to warn them, if they didn’t already know, and then find a way to cancel the show. It would be disappointing for the guests for sure, but better than having towatch a troupe of pirouetting vampires puke until their wigs fell off.
Krysta opened the backstage door to utter chaos.
Mack was darting from person to person, scarf flapping, while the two hair-and-makeup artists were trying to fit a few of the ensemble cast members with main-character wigs.
“Okay, which vampires are we missing?” Mack demanded. “Frannie, Noah, Austyn, Sam—”
“Austyn and Sam are werewolves!” someone called from the back.
“Teagan, the heroine’s understudy,” someone else added.
Mustache-dad raised his hand. “I’m not going to lie,” he said weakly. “I don’t feel so hot.”
“Me neither,” whispered another actor holding a golden onion.
Music filled the front of the house, and we could see the lights dim from under the grand drape. I moved to scan the wings for Cassie and suddenly realized that Pearl wasright next to me, having appeared as silently as a ghost.
“Jesus,” I gasped, my heart having jumped so far up my throat it was in my sinuses. “I didn’t see you.”
She gave me a serious look, her eyes shining in the backstage light. “A werewolf just threw up on my shoes,” she said. I looked down at her feet to see that she was indeed barefoot, save for an anklet and several toe rings.
“Someone poisoned the shrimp at the party earlier,” I whispered as the opening song began playing and the grand pulled back to reveal our heroine holding a cactus. “Are you feeling okay?”
Pearl nodded, and her silky hair waved like a gauzy curtain. “I’m vegan, and Gretchen only eats sustainably caught shrimp.”
Was my shrimp not sustainably caught??? I made a mental note to look into that.
“Pearl, I think it’s going to hit most of the cast before the show is over. I need to find the person responsible. Will you tell Mack what’s going on?”
She agreed with a sigh—something about his turbulent energy—and then I moved as quietly as I could on the crutches to the dressing area, looking for Cassie. Krysta followed and then touched my arm. It was a perfunctory, nonloverly touch, and once again, I felt like an olive oil latte, like something no one had asked for.
“You stay here,” she said quietly. “I’ll check the director’s room—”
She didn’t have to. Cassie appeared that moment in a wig, jeans, and a long-sleeved T-shirt with a short-sleeved flannel shirt over the top. She was already in costume. She froze when she saw us and then narrowed her eyes.
“You can’t stop this, Addison. It’s happening.”
“I know what you did, and we’re not letting you get away with it,” I said. And then I moved closer, hopping a little to keep my boot off the floor. “Look,” I told her, gently, “a book I read once told me that you can’t build a house on a foundation of sand. You can’t build an acting career on top of Imodium and saltine crackers.”
Cassie laughed. “That’s rich, coming from the itchy-serum queen.”
I let go of a crutch bar and waved my hand around to indicate she was making my point for me. “Exactly! I’m learning this lesson literallyright now. Don’t you think I wish I’d done things differently? Done things with less lying and arm-twisting? It’s not worth living the rest of your life haunted by the terror that this will come to light. And Cassie, it’s going to come to light.”
“You wouldn’t,” Cassie said, red coming up underneath her freckles.
