And he still bought snakes on a regular basis. Big, expensive ones. Where were they? From the look of this shabby lobby, there was no indication these walls had seen anything but neglect and hard times. “Did Enola ever do any magick for you?” I asked.

He snorted. “She demonstrated a few . . . tricks,” he said, spiraling his gloved hand in the air. “And she offered to work in trade, but I refused her.”

“Trade for what?” Lon asked in a low voice, speaking up for the first time since we’d entered the building.

Payne blinked at Lon as if he’d forgotten he was there. “Now, that is a good question, brother,” he said. “For the answer, I’d have to show you. Would you care to see my temple?”

We warily followed Payne out one of the back doors into a covered breezeway. Lon’s face was a stony cliff. One hand twitched over the bump beneath his jacket, the other protectively held the back of my neck. I wished like hell he was transmutated so I could communicate my thoughts to him. Even more, I wished I could read his thoughts. What was he reading from Payne?

The breezeway opened up to a stone path that circled the eastern group of bungalows, some of which had boarded-up windows or junk piled in front of the doors. I scanned the grounds for signs of other people and saw no one. Only a curving pool, mostly hidden by a dilapidated wooden fence. A few broken boards allowed me a quick peek inside as we passed. Lightning streaked across the dark storm clouds, illuminating piles of beer bottles on the cement patio surrounding the pool. A hose hung limply from the broken diving board, and the pool itself looked half-filled. The dark surface of the water rippled unsettlingly.

But we weren’t headed there. Payne was leading us away from the compound, toward the rocky cliff walls of the canyon, where another rounded adobe-style structure jutted out from the cliffs. Half clay, half sienna-colored stone, the temple looked as though it had been built in stages by a madman who’d run out of funds halfway through construction. But Payne assured us that this wasn’t the case.

“A sacred spot for the Serrano tribes who’d settled the oasis before the miners came in the nineteenth century,” he shouted back to us as his shoes kicked up dust. “I extended what was already built.”

The first thing I noticed when we were a few yards away was tire tracks leading to a small utility cart with an attached trailer. What did Payne haul out here? My mind jumped to the boa constrictor in the back of his Jeep.

The second thing I noticed was the spider web of carvings that covered the clay walls. Sigils. Strange ones, reminiscent of the spells Lon and I had uncovered last Halloween when we were tracking the Sandpiper Park snatcher and ended up going toe-to-toe with Duke Chora, the demon my mother recently murdered in the Æthyr.

The temple’s carved symbols had to be Æthyric. And the closer we got, the more I was certain their purpose was to keep the temple hidden. How that was possible, I wasn’t sure, because they weren’t lit with white Heka or with the pink magical light I associated with Æthyric magick.

A stained-glass window was set into the clay wall above a wooden door—it looked like a figure of some sort, but it was hard to tell with no light behind it. Payne took out a set of keys to unlock and open the door. Darkness lay inside. No way in hell was I walking in there. But Payne opened a rusted box on the wall and removed a metal striker, which he used to light two oil lamps inside the door, exposing the first few feet of the temple entrance’s dusty mosaic-tiled floor. And spelled out in the broken chips of earthen tile were the words we’d been chasing: NAOS OPHIS.

“Come on in,” Payne said. “No live serpents in here today, don’t worry. Might find the occasional rat or a lizard or three. The scorpions don’t come out in the day.”

As he circled the outer walls lighting lamps, Lon and I hesitantly stepped inside. Kerosene and a strange, leathery scent filled my nostrils. The room was larger than I expected, shaped like a dome. A ladder led to a wooden balcony circling the walls beneath the rounded ceiling, and rough beams crisscrossed from one side to the other, from which hung something that looked like Spanish moss, dangling in clumps.

I scanned the shadows. No real furniture here, just three pews facing a sunken fire pit in the center. A couple of display cabinets with glass doors stood against the walls near some odd paintings of snakes devouring cities. Serpentine dragons. A human woman giving birth to a litter of cobras.

Storm-gray light filtered in from glass windows above the balcony. And now that Payne had lit more lamps, I began to be able to see better what dangled from the balcony and the rafters.

Not Spanish moss.

Preserved snake skins.

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, tacked up with nails. All shapes, colors, and sizes. This was the leathery smell in the air. Bile rose in the back of my throat.

“Would you like to hear a story?” Payne headed to the far end of the room and climbed stairs onto a wooden dais, where he began lighting candles at an altar. “The Great Serpent traveled down from the Æthyr to see the new world. He settled in a tree in a lush garden, only to have his nap interrupted by a man and a woman. The Serpent was intrigued and tried to converse with the couple about his world, but the man was jealous and forbade the woman to speak.”

Candlelight illuminated a sculpture sitting at the back of the altar, as tall as a person: a clay tree whose trunk was being strangled by a massive snake with arms and the head of a man biting an apple. Crude renditions of what could only be Adam and Eve cowered below the branches.