Alice stopped pacing and looked at me, expression unreadable. “Would that make a difference to you?”

Damn. “No,” I admitted. “We’d still need to find them and stop them before anybody else got hurt. We’d just need to widen our search area by kind of a lot.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Alice. She resumed her pacing. “If it weren’t for the cleanup job, I’d think you were onto something. Cleaning something that completely isn’t easy, especially when it’s something liquid. It takes a lot of energy out of the witch who spins the spell. Thomas didn’t just magic away the dust on his books, because it would have left him defenseless, and blood’s a much harder set of commands.”

“I thought you didn’t have any magic of your own,” said Dominic.

“I don’t, but I came home bloody a lot, and sometimes I dripped on things that weren’t supposed to be stained,” said Alice. “Once I dripped blood on a book that could have summoned something nasty from beyond the walls of the world. Thomas cleaned that up real fast.”

“So the fact that our killer or killers cleaned up the mess the way they did proves they were intending to be in the theater again,” I said.

Alice nodded. “Exactly. Bleach would have been good enough to do the job, if they hadn’t been worried about coming back there. Cleaning it so well that even an Ukupani’s nose can’t find traces of blood tells me they’re intending to use that space again.”

“But when?” asked Dominic. “They’ve made no moves that I can see.”

“There hasn’t been anyone else eliminated,” I said. “If I were them, I’d wait until after the next show. That way, it’s less likely to be noticed.”

“All right, then: when’s the next show?” asked Alice.

“Thursday night,” I said. “We have five days.”

She nodded gravely. “Okay. Let’s hope the flea market has a lot of knives.”

For once, I didn’t argue.

Eleven

“Being a smart shopper doesn’t just mean clipping coupons and watching for sales. Sometimes it means understanding when you need that Kevlar vest a lot more than you need to wait for it to go on clearance.”

—Evelyn Baker

The South Riverside Flea Market, Sunday morning, way too early for this crap

THE LINE TO GET INTO THE FLEA MARKET snaked from the admissions booth, where a bored-looking attendant exchanged hand stamps for crumpled dollar bills, all the way to the gravel parking lot. We stood patiently, waiting for our turn to step inside and experience the wonders of things sold off blankets and folding card tables. We were far enough from the comfortable unreality of Burbank that I wasn’t wearing a wig, and I could almost hear my scalp singing hosannas in the crisp morning air.

Getting away from the complex had been easier than expected. Lyra was a heavy sleeper when she didn’t have to get to rehearsals, and while she was probably going to be pissed when she woke to find me gone, there was no way she could have come with us. Alice had snuck out the back window of her pilfered apartment, while Malena and I had simply walked out the front gate with shopping lists in our hands, chattering about specials at Safeway. The guard on duty changed at nine AM. Even if the man who watched us go had been awake enough to make a note about our departure, no one was going to raise an alarm if we didn’t check back in. Two dancers heading to the grocery store was not cause for major concern.

Dominic had been waiting on the corner with the engine running and Alice already in the back seat. Malena and I just had to climb in and we were off, heading for the one-stop super-shop for the makeshift monster hunter.

(Alice was her own walking arsenal. Dominic and I weren’t too shabby ourselves, especially since we’d driven from Portland, which meant we’d been able to bring a certain amount of gear. But there was “a certain amount of gear” and then there was “prepared to take on a snake cult.” Whatever happened, I wanted us to be ready.)

“Why are we here?” asked Malena, wrinkling her nose as someone walked by carrying a mounted stag’s head. “Half this stuff looks unhygienic in the extreme. The other half’s just gross.”

“All sales final, all sales made with cash, and nobody asks your name or looks for ID,” I said. The line moved forward. “Not the place to go for guns or heavy ammo, but we’d have to buy a live elephant for anyone to remember us in a week.”

“Besides, some information brokers who have ties in both the human and not-so-human communities show up at these things,” said Alice. “We might be able to get a lead on what’s going on around here.”