“Come on,” I said, and stepped into the stall.
California is flea market heaven. It rains rarely enough that it’s safe to have a remarkable variety of open air goods, and the vendors tend to become comfortable enough in their positions that they really nestle into a space, decorating and customizing it to their heart’s content. The front of the tarot and taxidermy stall looked like any other, with long, uncovered folding tables heavily laden with wares. But the back half was taken up by a gauzy tent that looked like something out of a Renaissance Faire, complete with rainbow streamers and multiple layers of netting. Someone was inside, their shadow moving against the net.
I stopped without reaching for the curtain. If the stall’s owner was in the middle of a tarot reading, they wouldn’t take kindly to being interrupted. Instead, I cleared my throat to let them know I was there before turning to study a stuffed and mounted furred trout. Like the jackalope, it appeared to be the real deal.
Dominic stepped up next to me, apparently reaching the same conclusion, as he said, in a low voice, “I thought these were extinct.”
“Not extinct, just mostly being preserved in private fisheries until science is ready for them,” I said. “The last time there was a wild spawning, some assholes poisoned the river to stop whatever weird disease they thought was making the fish all moldy.”
“There will always be things people aren’t prepared for, which must be covered in mirrors and greasepaint, until they seem believable enough to be borne,” said an Irish-accented voice behind us. It was light, female, and amused, like the speaker was the only one who knew the punchline to the world’s best joke.
I turned.
She was taller than me—who isn’t taller than me? In a world of giants, I’ve learned to treasure my high-heeled shoes—and about my mother’s age, with a smile that matched her voice for warmth and amusement. Her hair was black, with streaks of lilac gray. It looked dyed, rather than natural; everything about her looked carefully designed. I couldn’t be sure without a blood sample and an X-ray, but I was willing to bet she was human.
“So you recognize a furred trout,” she said, sliding her hands into the pockets of her jeans. The silver foil printing on her T-shirt was so faded that I couldn’t make out the name of the band it had been intended to promote; the graphic was nothing but the ghosts of gothic type and heavy metal guitars. “Short, blonde, and holding yourself like you think you might have to kill me—are you Alice Healy’s girl?”
“Is there no one who does not know your family?” asked Dominic. I glanced at him. His jaw was clenched so tightly that a muscle in his cheek was twitching.
Poor boy really didn’t understand what he was getting into when he married me. “We sort of tend to attract attention,” I said, and focused back on the stall owner. “I’m her granddaughter. How do you know my grandma?”
“She gave her children to Laura Campbell to raise, remember? The routewitch community took notice.”
I felt a small knot of tension uncoil between my shoulders. My Great-Aunt Laura had been missing since before I was born—the history of the Price family in America is a patchwork of unexplained disappearances and unanswered questions—but she raised Dad and Aunt Jane when Grandma Alice couldn’t. And Great-Aunt Laura had been an ambulomancer, which made her part of the routewitch community. Routewitches were magic-users of a sort, pulling their strength and spells from the long sweep of the road. They gathered power through travel, and through artifacts that had been carried around the world, amassing power with every step. Flea markets were their cathedrals, truck stops their holy ground, and while they were as capable of being deceitful and untrustworthy as anyone else, we had enough of a history with them that this encounter had just become a lot less dangerous.
“Verity Price,” I said, sticking my hand out toward the woman. “I’m Kevin’s daughter.”
“The older one, if I’m not mistaken: I know one of Laura’s last predictions related to the younger.” The woman took my hand. Her palm was callused enough to feel almost scaled. “Bon. Siobhan, actually, but ‘Bon’ serves me well enough.” She looked to Dominic as she let go of my hand. “And you, young man. You’ve traveled a very long way, from the other side of the Atlantic, if I know my road-ways. British?”
“Italian by birth,” said Dominic. “British by much of my upbringing. My name is Dominic.”
“He follows your lead, doesn’t he?” Bon looked back to me. “I’ve never met a Covenant boy who’d give his name to a routewitch without a fight.”
“Ex-Covenant,” said Dominic. “They’d kill me as soon as look at me at this point.”
“Oh, you are your grandmother’s bloodline,” said Bon, looking amused. “What can I do for the latest generation of the Price family? I’m sure you didn’t wander into my flea market because you were in desperate need of a mounted boar’s head—although if you are, I’d be happy to work something out with you.”
“Do you do your own taxidermy?” I asked. My head was reeling. Meeting Bon wasn’t as big of a coincidence as it seemed. Our kind of people have always frequented flea markets and rubbish sales, since they’re a great place to trade the things we’re likely to need. I just hadn’t been braced for someone with quite this much of a connection to my family history.
“No, I buy it from a family of Sasquatch up near Vancouver,” said Bon. “It keeps me running the West Coast twice a year, and helps them clean out their garage. Everybody wins.”
“Nice,” I said. I looked around one more time, assessing the people around us, before I focused on Bon. “I’m in town because I’m appearing on a reality show—Dance or Die. There’s a situation at the studio. Could I ask you a few questions?”
“Now we get down to it,” said Bon. “My cards told me not to skip the flea market this week. Come in.” She walked back to her tent, sweeping the curtain aside with a grandiose motion of her hands. The gauzy ribbons danced and fluttered in the breeze from her passing.
I followed her.
Dominic followed me.
The air was at least four degrees cooler inside Bon’s tent, which was lit by a pair of camp lanterns hanging from the roof. A carved wooden table occupied the center of the space, presumably for tarot readings. There were two chairs on one side of the table, and a single chair on the other side. All of the furnishings were plain, not buried in lace or doilies: this was a practical place in a very impractical location. The noise-dampening qualities of the tent were more surprising than anything else about it: once the gauzy curtain fell back into place behind us, I couldn’t hear a thing from outside.
My surprise must have shown, because Bon smiled and said, “I keep track of my space in other ways. If I need to deal with a customer, I’ll duck out.”
“What about shoplifters?” I asked.
Her smile turned feral. “I’ve been coming here for a long, long time. People know better than to steal from me. Now what is it you needed to know?”
“Have there been any rumors of a snake cult starting up in Hollywood?”
Her smile died. “A snake cult?”
“Yeah.” I pulled my phone out of my pocket, flipping through the gallery until I found the pictures of the bodies in the basement. It was getting harder to make myself remember their names. I didn’t want them to have been people I knew and liked, even if we weren’t friends; I wanted them to have been strangers, a delivery mechanism for the unspeakable, and not people I would have to mourn for when this was all over. “I took pictures of the runes we found. They’re sort of carved into naked dead people. Sorry about that.”
“What will you do if someone steals your phone?” Bon asked, reaching over and plucking it out of my hand.
“Abandon this identity before I track down the thief and make them regret their life of crime,” I said.
“Sometimes she makes jokes which imply she thinks of me as Batman,” said
Dominic. “I don’t think she looks in many mirrors.”
“Prices never do. They know they wouldn’t care for what they’d see,” said Bon. Her attention was fixed on the phone. She swiped her thumb across the screen, images of gore and tragedy reflecting on her eyes. Finally, she closed them and offered the phone back to me, saying, “That’s definitely a snake cult. No one else would be that careful in their cruelty.”
“Yeah, we get a good class of assholes in the snake cults.” I tucked the phone into my pocket, watching her carefully. “Dad says he thinks they have at least one magic-user working with them. The quality of the runes is too high for it to be a copy.”
“Well, they could be a bunch of disgruntled art students working from a really crisp source document, but that seems less likely.” Bon opened her eyes. “I think your father’s right. They’ve got at least one magic-user, maybe two, with them. How long would they have had to work on the bodies?”
It was always chaotic backstage after a show. There was removing and returning costumes to be worried about, and wiping off the worst of the makeup. Some of the girls would try to remove the top layer of hairspray from their hair with warm towels before they went home, on the theory that it was better to have a wet head than to be standing in the shower when the hot water cut out. (Since my real hair was never subjected to the stylists, I didn’t have to join in on that particular struggle.)
“About twenty minutes, tops,” I said finally. “That assumes they were able to get their victims into the basement where we found them without losing any time.”
“Were you able to study the bodies? They may have been knocked out.”
“The last snake cult I encountered used tooth fairy dust to subdue their sacrifices,” I said. I still had nightmares about that sometimes. “Unfortunately, the bodies disappeared after we took the pictures, and there wasn’t time for a full examination. There haven’t been any more deaths that we know of.” Yet.
“Yet,” said Bon.
I grimaced. I hate it when people put voice to my depressing mental asides. “Yeah,” I said. “These two were killed right after they were eliminated from the show. There may have been four previous deaths that we didn’t catch in time. We’re going to watch whoever gets eliminated this week like hawks.”
“What if you get eliminated?”
This time, I smiled. “Then whoever’s doing this is going to find out why you never follow a Price girl into a dark alley.”
“I feel we’re getting off topic,” said Dominic. “Can you tell us anything about the movement of snake cults in this state?”
“The state’s a little big, but I can tell you about the snake cults in this area,” said Bon. “Make-it-big schemes have always been huge in Hollywood. We’ve had more snake cults, demon summonings, and crossroads bargains per capita than anywhere else in North America. Last year I think we even surpassed Mexico City for people trying to barter with the dead, and that’s not easy. People want to be stars, and they don’t mind cutting corners to get there. This is a place that thrives on luck, you know? I always wondered why your family didn’t settle here. Healy luck and all.”
“Sometimes Healy luck is incredibly bad,” I said. “I think we didn’t want to risk it.” But more, Hollywood was where you went when you wanted people to pay attention to you, and that was something most of my family had never wanted. When I’d decided to want it, I had changed my name and my hair color and my past, and even that hadn’t been enough to get me away from the gravitational pull of the work I’d been raised for.
“That shows sense. Most of the people who come here don’t have much of it.” Bon dropped herself into the chair reserved, based on position, for her use. Dominic and I sat on the other side of the table. It seemed like the appropriate thing to do. “We’ve had snake cults here since the 1920s. A lot of people think—even if we can’t prove it—the snake cults are why Maleficent turned herself into a dragon in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. He’d been around Hollywood long enough to know the score.”
I stared at her, appalled. “Are you telling me Walt Disney was a snake cultist?”
“Nah. He summoned a demon once and bound it into one of his roller coasters, but that’s not the same as being a snake cultist.” Bon shook her head. “Still, he was here, he had to have heard. Snake cults are the pyramid scheme of instant fame and fortune. If you want one, you need to collect a bunch of loyal cultists you can feed to your snake god when you get it.”
“Pardon me if I sound ignorant, but . . . these people are attempting to summon snakes,” said Dominic. “Not djinn or creator gods. Snakes. How can a snake give you anything apart from venom and a quick death?”
“Snake gods don’t come from this dimension, at least not anymore; there’s some argument on whether the Titanoboa was big enough to have qualified for snake god status, and whether, if it was, there are still examples of the genus out there somewhere, slithering around and swallowing the people foolish enough to summon them. But that’s neither here nor there.” Bon leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table. “The point of the snake god is not the snake god itself, although the cults that worship them would probably disagree. It’s the stuff they bring with them when they tunnel through the dimensional walls.”
“It’s the shape of them,” said Alice. We all turned. She was standing in the entrance with a duffel bag slung over her shoulder that hadn’t been there when we had arrived at the flea market, and from the way it bulged at the bottom, it was packed to capacity with things she thought would be useful. “They’re long and smooth—not many limbs to slow them down. So the snake gods pierce through dimensions and get covered in the membrane that keeps them apart, and magic-users can use that membrane to fuel things. It’s raw possibility. Luck and lies and all the tricks you could wish for, wrapped around a giant snake like a second skin.”
“Alice.” Bon stood, a smile lighting up her face. “I wondered if I’d be seeing you.”
“Bon, you old troublemaker.” Alice dropped her duffel bag—it clinked when it hit the floor—and moved to wrap her arms around the other woman. Bon towered over her, but looking at the two of them, there was no question that, in a physical fight, Alice would mop the floor with Bon. “No one told me you were in Southern California these days.”
“I had a little falling out with the current Queen of the Routewitches and thought it might be a good idea to head for the other side of the country,” said Bon easily. She let go of Alice, dropping back into her chair. “You here about the snake cult thing?”
“My granddaughter needed me,” said Alice, gesturing toward me.
“Your granddaughter needs to do whatever it takes to keep more people from winding up dead,” I said. “So these snake cultists, they don’t really want to summon giant snakes from beyond the walls of the world? They just want a quick way to get their hands on pieces of reality, and the snakes make a good delivery mechanism?”
“Something like that,” said Bon. “A lot of snake cults do want the giant snakes, because they’ve lost track of what makes this particular bad idea work. That’s also why you don’t hear many stories of snake cults who got what they were looking for. The ones who actually manage to summon giant snakes wind up being slowly digested as often as they accomplish their goals. Maybe more often these days, since most people don’t remember the binding spells.”
“Do you?” asked Dominic. There was something low and dangerous in his voice. I put a hand on his knee, hoping it would be enough to hold him in place. If it wasn’t, I was going to witness the remarkable sight of my grandmother punching my husband in the throat. Family reunions were tense enough without adding that extra layer of awkwardness.
“I’m a routewitch, son, not a magician,” said Bon. She didn’t sound offended. If anything, she sounded amused. “I pull magic from roads and travel, and it’s mostly tied to foresight and prophesy and the dead. You want someon
e to talk to ghosts or tell you where there’s going to be a bad accident, I’m your lady. You want to know what the road knows or find a missing person, I’m happy to help. But if you want to summon a giant fucking snake from the other side of the universe, I’ll be leaving.”
“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.”