“I already handled a snake cult in New York,” I said.

Alice’s expression turned hard. “No, you handled a bunch of amateurs who’d been lucky enough to stumble across a sleeping dragon. They were working out of the pop culture version of the snake cult bible, and they had no idea what they were doing. What kind of forces they were playing with. Do you honestly think I crossed three dimensions because I thought you couldn’t handle yourself? Please. Your father sent me the pictures you took. The people you’re dealing with here, the people who killed those poor children, they have a much better idea of the rituals they’re trying to enact.”

My knees felt suddenly weak. I allowed myself to fold to the floor, settling cross-legged as I stared at her. “You think it’s going to be that bad?”

“I think some of those runes were things I’d never seen before,” said Alice. “Some of them I’d only ever seen in Thomas’ notes. Even he didn’t know what they all meant. There have been snake cults as long as there have been people, Very, and some of them had the chance to get extremely good at what they did before their neighbors sensibly rose up and slaughtered them.”

“I don’t think the words ‘sensible’ and ‘slaughter’ belong in the same sentence,” I said.

“They do when it’s that or watch your children get swallowed by a snake the size of a freight train,” said Alice. She snapped the last piece of her rifle back into place. “What did you find at the theater today?”

I shook my head, chasing off the image of snakes big enough to have their own SyFy Channel franchises. “Nothing,” I said.

She blinked.

“I mean it literally: there was nothing.” I explained the situation, from the empty basement to the lack of blood trace evidence.

By the time I finished, Alice was frowning. “You’re saying an Ukupani couldn’t find any signs that someone had been killed there?” I nodded. Her frown deepened. “Ukupani are some of the best long-range hunters in the world. They can scent a drop of blood in the water from up to a mile away. If he couldn’t detect any signs of blood . . .”

“They bought a lot of bleach,” I concluded.

“No,” said Alice. “You would have been able to smell that much bleach. But there are spells and charms that absorb blood, use it to power things. Whoever drew those runes on the bodies was an actual magic-user, not just someone screwing around.”

I stared at her. “Oh,” I said, after a moment. “Crap.”

Alice nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Crap.”

Magic is real, in the sense that sometimes the world does things that can’t be explained using science as we currently understand it. Magic isn’t real, because once something becomes explainable, we start thinking of it as “science,” and we no longer pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s sort of like cryptids. Creatures that were once considered impossible and mythological become completely plausible as soon as someone figures out how to explain them. The wheel turns, and the world changes.

Here is what we know about magic:

There are people who, for whatever reason, can affect the world on a molecular level. They can convince things to appear out of thin air, open portals between places, or—yes—tear holes between dimensions. Most of the time, it’s the symbols that matter. You don’t have to be a mathematician to copy an equation, and the answer will be the same whether you did the work in real time or wrote it down from memory. Most so-called “wizards” and their ilk are working from copies of copies of copies of the original crib sheets, sketching out spells and charms that they don’t really understand. They’re not harmless, but they’re not as dangerous as they could be, either.

The problem with working from someone else’s notes is that mistakes will start creeping in, which was why Dad could tell the age of the runes we’d found carved into Poppy and Chaz. Degradation of information was inevitable . . . unless they had someone on their side who understood what they were doing. Someone who could check their math, and could, say, draw a charm to completely purge the blood from a room. A magic-user, someone for whom the use of this particular language came as naturally as Sarah’s use of math or my use of the tango.

Magic-users are pretty rare. It’s partially training and partially genetic, and both factors have suffered greatly at the hands of the Covenant. The last magic-user in our family was Grandpa Thomas, who had a small talent for elemental magic and a large talent for moving things with his mind, at least according to Grandma Alice, who—as has already been established—was not the world’s most reliable source. Still, if we assumed she was telling the truth about that, then we had a baseline for how rare the talent was, since no one in the two generations following their marriage had shown any tendency to set the curtains on fire with their minds. Two children and five grandkids, and still nothing had manifested.