by Jenn Bennett
And that’s when I got the boot.
“Go on and shift back down,” he said in a strained voice, gently but firmly ejecting me from his lap. “We need to be ready to leave in a half hour and pick up our clothes on the way out.”
And as I dazedly pulled my clothes back into place and watched him disappear into the bathroom and lock the door, I realized something that made me sad.
During everything that had just happened, he’d never even kissed me.
If I thought the Pasadena kiss was the elephant in the room, it was a mouse compared with our little predawn tête-à-tête on the love seat. And maybe because we were barely speaking after it was over, we efficiently got ourselves ready to leave on time . . . only to have rain-slicked roads and an overturned eighteen-wheeler make us late.
But by the time Lon and I had inched through the detour with a million other cars and found our way back to Reptile Hell, it was 8:15 a.m. A quarter hour past the time this Parson Payne guy was supposed to show for his snake pickup.
I squinted past the windshield wipers as Lon flipped on his turn signal and spied an empty loading dock. No way had we traveled half the state to follow Wildeye’s notes only to be stymied by a random traffic accident.
An old dark brown Jeep Grand Cherokee pulled out of the parking lot—one with blooming rust spots, a dented fender, and the back windows covered in peeling do-it-yourself tinting. It most definitely qualified as “ratty-ass.”
“There!” I shouted to Lon as the Jeep turned onto the road in front of us. “That’s him.”
“Are you sure?”
“No one’s at the loading dock. No Jeeps in the parking lot. And look, there’s a giant wooden crate in the back—you can see it through the cracks in the window tint.”
“Shit.”
Lon swerved back into his lane and trailed the Jeep through Ontario.
Through Riverside.
Through San Bernardino.
And into the desert.
A steady rain fell on the SUV as we continued east on I-10 through miles of flat, lonely land. Thousands of white, leggy turbine windmills stood sentry between the freeway and long chains of crinkly mountains in the distance.
“He’s going back to Joshua Tree,” Lon finally said.
“No sense in turning back now.”
He nodded in agreement and kept driving.
So far, no new random knack had popped up to replace the super-smell, so that was good, I supposed. But now that the sniffing was gone and our normal conversation had gone off like old cheese, all we had to occupy our time on the drive were the radio and the dreary rolling landscape.
Yippee.
Two hours passed, along with my bedtime. I knew Lon was tired, too. Nothing to do except buck up and hope this was worth it. The rain gradually stopped, but the ominous dark clouds hung around. Signs for Palm Springs appeared, but we turned north, skirting around the western edge of Joshua Tree National Park. The rough ground was barren except for spotty clumps of desert grass and outcroppings of burnished wind-hewn rock; the park’s ubiquitous namesake, with its twisted branches and spiky tops, dotted the landscape between.
Somewhere before we’d hit the oasis community of Twentynine Palms, the brown Jeep pulled off the freeway onto a side road. If the land was lonely before, it was pretty much depressing here, and it was harder to stay far enough behind the Jeep that we weren’t noticed. A few houses and buildings stood near the turnoff. But a couple of miles past the last gas station, the Jeep turned again, this time onto a dirt road. It dead-ended after a mile.
The Jeep slowed to enter a long unpaved driveway, guarded by two crumbling stone posts. And arching between them was an old painted sign that had been turned upside down: SOPHIA RANCH.
It wasn’t the only sign. Several no-trespassing warnings were posted around the gate and on the weather-faded fencing that banded the property.
“Christ, I really don’t like this,” Lon mumbled.
The Jeep came to a stop just outside the gate. Maybe to check the rickety mailbox. Lon pulled up next to him and lowered his window halfway. Cool air rushed across the front seat. The Jeep’s driver’s-side door creaked open. I craned my neck to get a glimpse of Parson Payne and instead found myself looking down the barrel of a shotgun.
Lon raised his hands.
“This is private property,” a rough voice said from the Jeep.
“I can see that,” Lon answered evenly.
“You followed me from Ontario.”
Lon kept his hands in the air. “We just want to ask some questions.”
“I don’t think I’m in the mood for chatting.”
I raised my voice to be heard over the wind. “Please. Are you Parson Payne? We need to talk to you about an occultist who visited here twenty-five years ago. Her name was Enola Duval.”
The shotgun lowered, and the man leaned out of the Jeep. I saw the halo first. Dark green, the darkest halo I’d ever seen. My mother was conferring with an Earthbound? She hated Earthbounds. Not that she could see their halos—most humans couldn’t. Only me. And in hindsight, I supposed my humanity was up for debate at this point.
“We’re trying to track down the origins of a ritual,” I added. “We know she spent some time here, and we were hoping you might remember some things.”
I shifted so I could see the man better. The disgruntled warehouse worker at the reptile store wasn’t wrong: Payne was an ugly son of a bitch. Leathery sun-damaged skin rippling with wrinkles. Long white hair pulled tightly back into a long braid. In his seventies, I guessed. When his dark eyes flicked from Lon’s halo to mine, surprise blazed across his face. Just for a moment.
“Who are you two?”
“I’m Butler,” Lon said. “This is Miss Bell.”
Payne blinked several times and then tossed his shotgun into the Jeep. “Storm clouds followed us from the city. Come on through to the house before they break. We can talk there.”
Lon raised his window and idled the SUV, waiting for Payne to lead the way. “We need to be careful,” he said to me, without moving his gaze from the road. “He was shocked to see you.”
“Did he recognize me? Could you tell by his emotions?”
“I don’t think so. But keep in mind that we don’t know the last time he had contact with your mother. They could’ve been friendly all these years.”
The flat land became rockier and dipped into a small canyon. A large, flat-roofed adobe-style house sat at its entrance, surrounded by several other smaller bungalows, which all looked run-down and unoccupied. The compound was backed by a ridge of enormous boulders that stretched into deeper canyon walls in the distance.
Next to the main house, the Jeep backed into a carport otherwise filled with scrap metal and a variety of junk. I watched Payne exit his car and wondered if he was going to retrieve the illegal boa he’d bought. But he just marched to the house’s front door and stood there waiting while Lon parked at the side of what might have been a nice driveway fifty years ago.
“No other cars here,” Lon murmured. “You think he’s alone?”
“Don’t know, but he left his shotgun in the Jeep. And hey, at least he’s not a magician.”
“Earthbounds can dabble,” Lon reminded me as he opened the center console and fished around for something. “And we don’t know his knack or who he’s got on his side. If he was friendly with your mother, he might be friendly with other magicians.”
“Believe me, I couldn’t be any more leery right now.”
“Stay that way.” Lon found what he was looking for, a holstered handgun. Beneath his thin leather jacket, he clipped the holster to his belt. “And be ready to shock the shit out of the good parson if he does anything that sets off warning bells.”
Biting cold cut through my jacket as we battled the wind to meet up with Payne, who led us inside the adobe home. And once we were inside, I saw it wasn’t a house at all but a lobby—at least, it had been at one time. Wooden cubbyholes and hooks for room
keys lined the wall behind a registration desk. Signs with arrows pointed the way to private numbered bungalows and rooms down a hallway that stretched out of sight. Old brass luggage carts sat in the corner, loaded with storage boxes near a door labeled BAR AND RESTAURANT.
Touches of old-fashioned California-meets-Mexico rustic décor graced the walls. Everything smelled of dust and smoke.
“The ranch used to be an inn,” Payne said as he strolled to an enormous stone fireplace in the center of the room, where he knelt on a woven rug to light a fire. A chandelier made of antlers hung from rough rafters above. “Back in the ’40s and ’50s, Hollywood writers and producers vacationed here. But in 1967, a family of five was murdered in one of the bungalows. Rumor was that the killer was living out on the property. They never caught anyone, and the ranch never recovered. I bought it for pennies in 1978. That was a couple years before I met Enola, actually.”
“How did you meet her?”
Payne stood up from the fledgling fire and squinted at me as he brushed off his knees with gloved hands. His clothes seemed too big, as if they were hanging off his bones. Maybe he’d lost a lot of weight recently. “I met her in L.A. at a book signing in a New Age bookstore on Melrose. She wrote something about the origins of ritual in Greece and Italy—Ritual Mysteries of Antiquity and the Search for Knowledge. She had some interesting ideas about Gnostic cults. They were mostly wrong, but she vehemently defended them. I invited her to stay at the ranch. It wasn’t open to the public, but we had a handful of people stay from time to time, interesting people who were dialed into the current.”
“Nonsavages, you mean.”
He nodded. “Occultists, pagans, philosophers, writers.”
“Did she know you were—”
“Son of the Serpent?”
“Earthbound,” I corrected.
“One and the same,” he said, flashing me a disconcerting smile. His teeth, dear God—the middle six on the top had been filed to points. “And no, not at first. Like most humans, she wasn’t gifted with the sight. But she eventually believed.”
Wood crackled in the fireplace. “She was a member of Ekklesia Eleusia,” I said.
“Oh, I’m well aware of that.”
“What did she do when she was staying here?”
“She talked. Soaked up knowledge. Connected with like minds.” Payne braced one arm on the mantel and watched the hearth. “She’d recently lost a child, so she was looking for solace, she said. Reflecting on the meaning of life.”
Reflecting, my ass. Reflecting on how she could fix her Moonchild formula, maybe. But the way he talked made me think he wasn’t all that sympathetic to my mother, either.
He glanced above my head, studying my halo. “You might not understand that, because you’re too young to have children of your own, I’m guessing. Just how old are you, my dear?”
Out of Payne’s sight, Lon lifted his hand for my benefit, but I didn’t need the warning. The old man was speaking in riddles, not telling us anything of substance. If he was bold enough to ask my age, he had a good idea I was Enola’s daughter. Which should be an advantage to me—for once—because he was supposed to be my mother’s ally in some sort of capacity. But I couldn’t get a clear read on his feelings about her. And that, frankly, gave me the willies.
I did my best not to let it show and merely smiled at his question before asking one of my own. “When was the last time she stayed here?”
“Oh, I imagine it’s been twenty-five, twenty-six years.” His mouth curled into a taunting smile.
Shit. He definitely knew who I was. “Why did she stop coming?”
“A busy woman like Enola Duval?” he said, voice thick with sarcasm. “I imagine she had people to see. Things to do.”
“You never saw her again?”
“Something always kept us apart.”
What the hell did that mean? I couldn’t figure out if lack of sleep was screwing with my instincts, but I had a feeling this man hated her guts as much as I did.
“You do realize what eventually became of her?” I said.
“The Black Lodge murders? Oh, yes. She and her husband were quite the media darlings for a while there, weren’t they?”
Indeed. We stared at each other until I couldn’t hold his gaze. “Is your temple still operational?” I said, glancing around the cavernous, dust-filled room. “Seems quiet around here.”
“When I first bought the ranch, before Enola Duval graced my doorstep, there were days when this room was filled with people and conversation. Most of my original flock is old or in the ground. But as long as I’m still standing, it’s functional.”
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 insi
de 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.”