“Bon was with the Campbell Family Carnival for a while, as their fortune-teller,” said Alice. “Laura vouched for her. She’s not involved with the snake cult that’s killing your friends. I’d stake my left eye on it.”

“That is . . . very specific and somewhat disturbing,” said Dominic, relenting and leaning back into his seat.

I took my hand off of his knee. “So you don’t know of any snake cults currently operating in the Burbank area?” The background information was nice, but it wasn’t going to do us any good if it didn’t lead us to whoever was killing people on the set.

“Not right now,” said Bon. “There’s one in Anaheim, but there’s always a snake cult in Anaheim. Blame Disney again. So many of his villains thought ‘well, I’m in trouble, better turn into a giant snake’ that it’s seeped into the public consciousness as the solution to all problems.”

“Turning into a giant snake is never the solution to your problems,” I said. “It actually ranks somewhere between ‘cut off own hand, replace with chainsaw’ and ‘summon indestructible dream demon.’ Bad plans one and all.”

“Forgive me if I’m committing some terrible faux pas that I’d be able to avoid if I were more aware of the role of the routewitches in the extranatural ecosystem, but what, then, can you do to assist us?” Dominic’s voice was calm, measured, and wary. He was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I couldn’t blame him. Every time he thought he’d reached the bottom of the weirdness well, I pulled up another bucket of unexplained phenomena and impossible realities.

“I can tell you that anyone who uses those runes,” Bon gestured toward me, and hence toward my phone, “knows what they’re doing, and will probably be able to get their defensive wards in place before anything breaks through to our level of reality. That’s the good part. No one is going to get eaten by mistake.”

“What’s the bad part?” I asked.

“A lot of people will probably get eaten on purpose. Snake gods are hungry when they rise, and if you want to keep a snake happy, you feed it.” Bon pressed her lips into a thin, hard line. “Worse yet, those runes . . . they’re not trying for one of the smaller unspeakably large snakes. This is going to summon them something enormous, and two deaths won’t be enough to fuel it. Neither will six deaths.”

“How many will be?” I asked.

“Honestly, I can’t say. But I’d guess at least ten, probably more like twelve or fourteen.” Bon’s expression turned grim as she looked around the tent. “You’ve got a lot of bodies ahead of you if you don’t figure out who’s doing this.”

Well, damn.

Twelve

“The world is going to get in the way sometimes. That’s what the world does. What you have to do, what you have to be prepared to do, is plant your feet and tell the world that you’re not going to be the one who gives ground.”

—Enid Healy

The Crier Theater, four days later

WE HAD LEFT THE FLEA MARKET—collecting Malena from a stall that sold live birds, where she’d purchased a box of pigeons which she had proceeded to suck dry in the car—and returned to the apartments with our newly-acquired weapons and our newly-heightened sense of urgency. Explaining what we’d learned about the situation to Malena while she picked feathers out of her teeth had been odd, but not odd enough to make me stop.

In the end, we were better armed and better informed, but no more aware of who was behind the situation. Dominic had dropped us off with a dire warning to be careful, and we’d slipped back into our rooms without attracting too much attention. It helped that Sunday was everybody’s free day; no one was looking for anything out of the ordinary. No one but us—and even we couldn’t find it. Even Artie hadn’t been able to work his particular brand of incredibly nerdy magic. Oh, the theater had cloud storage, but it was used solely for rehearsal footage and show recordings, not for the security in the halls.

(One good, if largely irrelevant, thing had come of his trawling through the systems: we knew for sure now that it had been Jessica, and not Reggie, who’d been in the wrong when she got dropped. It was basically useless information, but Pax had passed it on to Reggie without letting on how he knew. Reggie had been a lot more careful around Jessica since then, which was all to the good. She wasn’t quite sabotaging the other contestants. She was still enough of a snake that she should have been attracting a cult of her own.)