Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(57)

“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 *s 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?”