“I know what you’re going to say, and I promise, I did think this through,” she said, as soon as the door was closed. She turned to face me, smiled blithely, and handed me a plate of chicken. “I got caught.”
I blinked. “Come again?”
“I was sneaking back into my apartment, and I guess I timed things wrong, because the first town car pulled in before I could close the door. They asked what I was doing here, I said I was your sister and begged them not to report me, they asked if I had any useful skills, I said I was an excellent cook.” Alice shrugged. “Apparently, as long as I’m willing to run the grill, I’m not actually an intruder. Tomorrow’s taco night.”
“I can’t . . . you can’t just . . . oh, my God.” I sat heavily down on the couch, looking at the plate of chicken balanced on my knees. It looked tasty. My stomach rumbled. Dance is a sport, and it burns a lot of calories. “You’re sure no one looked like they were going to rat you out?”
“That Jessica girl didn’t look happy,” said Alice. “I promised to make fruit smoothies in the morning. That seemed to help. She doesn’t seem like the sort who enjoys waiting on herself.”
“No, I’m pretty sure she’d hire people to dance for her if she could get away with it, and thought she could get the credit.” I took a tentative bite of chicken. It was better than it looked. Stupid Grandma and her years of experience at cooking things over an open flame. I swallowed before asking, “Did you find anything useful, besides the location of the grilling tools?”
“They were in the same shed where these people keep the grill,” said Alice. “It wasn’t a big mystery.”
I raised an eyebrow and waited.
Alice laughed, apparently feeling like she’d been annoying long enough. “I went to all the cryptid bars I knew of, and then I went to three more that have opened since the last time I was here. Some pretty nice places, if you don’t mind martinis made with spinal fluid. Anyway, I asked around, and nobody knew anything about a new snake cult in town. I had people in two separate places ask me if I meant the gorgons over in Newport Beach. So far as magical asshole activity, this town seems to be going through a quiet patch.”
“That’s surprising,” I said.
“Not really. There are lots of nonhumans in Southern California. They settled here because they thought it would stay small, if you can believe it. Beautiful weather, but no big natural resources—no gold or oil or flourishing fur trade. When the humans started coming and ruining the neighborhood, they stood their ground. Most snake cults are made up of frustrated humans who feel like they should be higher on the supernatural pecking order. As if being the dominant species on this planet wasn’t enough of an accomplishment.” Alice shook her head as she sank down onto the couch next to me. “I’ll hit the supply shops tomorrow, see whether anyone’s been buying the materials for a big summoning. Given what you said about the blood, though, that seems likely to be a dead end. Someone who can scrub the blood from a room that way isn’t going to need saltpeter and silver to accomplish whatever it is they’re trying to do.”
“No, probably not,” I admitted. “Malena’s going to come with us to the flea market on Sunday. She speaks Spanish, so she can help us with some of the vendors.”
“Malena—that’s the pretty chupacabra girl, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “She’s really psyched about you being Frances Brown’s daughter. I wouldn’t be surprised if she asked for an autograph.”
Alice laughed ruefully. “Of all the things I have and haven’t earned in my lifetime, that’s among the most perplexing. But I’m glad she’s coming with us. Maybe that will stop her from putting me on too high of a pedestal.”
“I think it may be a little late for that,” I said. I would have said more, but a knock from the back of the apartment pulled my attention away. I frowned and stood, leaving my chicken behind.
Alice had already drawn a wicked-looking knife from somewhere inside her clothes. I wasn’t sure where: she was wearing cut-offs and a tank top, and the knife looked too large to have been hidden under either. I shook my head and motioned for her to put it down. Then I turned and walked toward the source of the knocking.
Dominic was standing outside the window of the back bedroom. I groaned theatrically as I opened it.
“What part of you people are supposed to stay far, far away from here was too difficult for you to grasp?” I asked.
“The part where your grandmother gets to be here with you and I don’t,” said Dominic. He boosted himself through the window, casting me a brief smile before he said, “And besides, this requires less running across the city on your part. I’d like you to continue to do well in this competition for as long as you choose to do so—or for at least as long as it takes us to catch our killers. A good night’s sleep will help.”
“You know what doesn’t help me stay on the show and catch the killer?” I asked. “Being kicked out because I was caught hosting a family reunion in our apartment complex. Seriously, you can’t be here. Neither one of you should be here.”
“HAIL!” shouted a tiny, ecstatic chorus. “HAIL THE CONFLICT OF PLACE!”
I went stiff. Then, slowly, I turned to see the Aeslin mice clustered on the floor next to a suspiciously cartoonish mouse hole. The edges were perfectly smooth; I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a tiny welcome mat on the floor outside.
Keeping my voice carefully neutral, I asked, “Have you been cutting holes in the walls?”
“And lo, did the Precise Priestess speak unto us, and say, Have You Considered Hiding In Plain Sight? And we did take our knives of cutting, and our saws of sawing, and begin Making Improvements.” The spokesman—spokesmouse—of the group sounded so proud of itself that I couldn’t really get angry, just exasperated.
“That doesn’t mean cutting holes in walls we don’t own,” I said. “Antimony doesn’t have any authority here.”
The mice looked confused. Confusion on a mouse was adorable, which made it even harder to stay mad at them.
Then Alice swept into the room. “Who wants chicken?” she asked.
The mice cheered.
Several minutes and two plates of barbecued chicken later, we were settled in the living room (with the curtains firmly closed, as I didn’t feel like tempting fate). Dominic sat on the couch. I sat in front of him on the floor, where he could rest a hand on my shoulder while I stretched the kinks out of my legs. And Alice, who was never very good at holding still, paced.
“So no one in town knows anything about a snake cult, and no one at the theater is acting weird,” I said. “Well. Any weirder than usual. Dancers are inherently weird. It’s part of the job description. What do we think the chances are that the murders were a matter of convenience? Maybe we have a snake cult working its way through the reality shows of Burbank, and we just had our turn on the rotation.”
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.”
Malena glanced nervously at the people around us, eyes landing on Dominic. She knew he was my husband, not my boyfriend. She didn’t know he was a former member of the Covenant of St. George, or that he’d still belonged to the Covenant when we’d started dating. There were some things that wouldn’t be fair to drop on her while we were all still getting to know each other.
“She made a whole speech about monsters and men in a coffee shop the first time we met,” he said solemnly. “No one paid her any attention, but still. I feel your pain.”
“No one’s listening to us,” I said, flapping a hand dismissively. “Eavesdropping is fun, but when people start talking about monsters and nonhuman intelligences and income tax law, everyone around you assumes you’ve been watching Game of Thrones again.”
“You watch Game of Thrones?” asked Malena, with even more suspicion, like I’d just proven myself to be completely untrustworthy.
“I don’t have time to watch anything, but I don’t live under a rock. I pick things up.” I stepped up to the ticket booth and forked over four dollars. All four members of my group received hand stamps, and we were in.
Most of the week, the flea market was a vacant lot that was formerly a drive-in theater. The marks were still there, if you knew how to look for them: the grid painted on the blacktop, the distant “flea market office” building that looked suspiciously like a repurposed concession stand. The rise of Netflix and cheap cable might have spelled the end of the drive-ins, but their bones lived on, and had been used to construct new hybrid creatures, half yard sale, half mega-mart, all a little shady. Things that fell off the back of trucks had a tendency to wind up here, as did bootlegs of the movies that would once have been shown on the drive-in screen. People were everywhere, minding their own business and mining other people’s junk for treasures.
“Everybody got their shopping lists?” I asked.
Nods all around.
“Great. Then let’s scatter, and get this over with.” I started down the nearest aisle. Dominic stuck with me. Malena trailed after my grandmother, looking both terrified and elated by the opportunity to spend time getting to know her better.
You’re welcome, Malena, I thought. A little alone time with my grandmother would either cure her hero worship or elevate it to terrifying new heights. Either way, it would be interesting.
“Do we really need this much rubber hosing?” asked Dominic, pulling my attention back to my own assignment.
“Potentially,” I said, looping my arm through his. “It has a lot of uses, including draining flooded areas. If we find another blood bath like the last one, I need to be prepared to take samples without disturbing the scene. Lower a hose, suck a little—but not enough to start breathing anything nasty—and voilà.”
Dominic gave me a sidelong look. “Samples.”
“Yes.”
“Of the blood.”
“Yes.” We’d reached a stall selling old gardening equipment, including an assortment of machetes. I stopped to check the quality of their steel. “We need to know if these people are being drugged, and if so, with what. That’s going to tell us more about the snake cult that’s pulling this crap. We have so little data at this point that everything is important.”
“So the rubber hosing is predicated on someone else being killed.”
I looked up from the machetes and nodded. “It is. I’d like to say we could stop it from happening again, but without more resources than we have, and without any real leads, I don’t know that we’re going to be that lucky.”
“A pity, then, that we cannot set up cameras in the theater.”
Cameras. I gaped at him. “You’re a genius. If we weren’t already married, I’d ask you to marry me, just for that.”
“While I am always glad to have you reaffirm your decision to marry me, what did I say that was so genius? We can’t set up cameras. We have neither the technology nor the training.”
I handed the stall’s owner a ten dollar bill and tucked my new machete into my shoulder bag. “No, but we don’t need to. Cameras have already been set up for us. Reality television, remember? And my cousin Artie is amazing with computers. If there’s any sort of cloud storage setup for the theater, I bet he can get in and see what’s what.”
Dominic smiled. “I appreciate this plan. Please tell him that it was born of my genius.”<
br />
“Will do,” I said. “Come on, genius. Let’s go find some lye.”
We found some lye. And some bleach, and some saltpeter, and an assortment of rare spices being sold as attractive ground cover. We also found a lot of knives, many of which found their way into my bag. Only some of them would be suitable for the kind of combat I prefer—the kind where I throw knives at people, and they stay as far away from me as possible—but there’s no such thing as too many knives. There’s only more knives than you have room to hide under your mattress, and I was planning to solve that by sending the bulk of the new armory back to the Be-Well with Dominic.
A stall at the end of one of the last rows crammed into the lot boasted a sign reading “TAROT AND TAXIDERMY.” I exchanged a look with Dominic, who seemed nonplussed.
“Well, there’s definitely taxidermy,” I said, indicating a mounted bison head that looked like the cousin of the deer we’d seen on our way in. It was next to one of those faux jackalopes that used to be popular in certain kinds of novelty shop.
(Faux jackalopes were popular even when jackalopes were more common, back when there were so many of them that people had to admit they existed. It’s just that real jackalopes look sort of like jackrabbits on steroids, with sharp claws and muzzles too long to fit most people’s ideas of what a rabbit looks like. It was much more profitable to slap horns on some innocent bunny and claim it was the real deal, especially when you were selling to people who’d never seen a prairie in their lives. People are weird, and there’s nothing new about that.)
Or wait . . . I narrowed my eyes, taking a closer look. The jackalope had a long muzzle and what looked like tiny daggers set into its digging paws. It wasn’t a fake. It had just been a baby when it died, which was why it was so much smaller than I expected a jackalope to be. And based on the condition of the fur and the quality of the glass eyes set into its fur-covered skull, it had been preserved within the last twenty years.
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