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algae. Tiny black eyes stared dull and unseeing past me.
The head split in half revealing an enormous white mouth. The folds on the side of the head trembled, and a low sound rolled through the Honeycomb.Whoom! The creature scraped its broad nose against the glass once more and whirled, impossibly fast. I caught a glimpse of a clawed foot, a flash of a long muscled tail, and then it was gone, back into the churning water.
A Japanese salamander. Big one, as tall as Julie at least.
“Whomper,” Custer said and waved me on with a dismissive flick of his hand.
CHAPTER 6
THE TWISTED PATH TOOK US DEEP INTO THE HONEYCOMB,into the maze of twisted trailers. As I passed, I sensed people beyond the windows watching me. Nobody came out to say hello.
Nobody wanted to know what my business was. I had a feeling that if I stopped and asked for directions, I’d get no answer. If someone wanted to snipe me from behind one of those misshapen funhouse-mirror windows, there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about it. Julie felt it, too. She kept quiet and scurried in my footsteps, casting wary looks at the trailers.
Ahead the path ran into a tall tower of debris and split, flowing around it. The tower itself, a contorted monstrosity of trash and metal junk, rose to nearly forty feet. Near the top it tapered to a slender point merely five feet across before widening abruptly into an almost square platform. As I stopped to gape at it, two furry animals the size of a cat but equipped with long chinchilla tails and shrew snouts scuttled up the rubble and vanished in some hidey-hole.
I kept moving, my thoughts returning again and again to the hole in the ground at the Sisters’ gathering place. The pit bothered me. Any bottomless hole in the earth would bother me, especially this close to a flare. I was afraid something had come out of that hole and odds were, it wasn’t friendly.
The Sisters of the Crow had broken the first rule of witchcraft: don’t dabble. Either do it right, or don’t do it at all. Before one ever tried to cast a spell, one had to prepare for the consequences.
Had they been worshipping the Goddess, an embodiment of nature, a kind of all-purpose amalgam of benevolent female deities popular with cults, little harm would have come to them. The Goddess, much like the Christian God, was too all encompassing and benign. But they had worshipped the crow, which pointed to something dark and very specific. And the more specific the god, the less wiggle room its worshippers had. It was the difference between telling a child, “Don’t do anything bad while I’m gone”
and “If you touch this vase, I will ground you for three days.”
Until I identified the crow, I had to fly blind. Unfortunately, everyone from Vikings to Apaches had a corvid in their mythology. Crows created or swallowed the world, delivered messages for a handful of gods, served as prophets, played tricks, and if they were Chinese, lived in the sun and had three legs.
Nothing at the site had pointed to any particular mythos. Not even Bran—no accent, no meaningful peculiarities in clothes, no nothing.
What I needed was a big fat clue. A mysterious note laying it all out. A deity popping out of thin air and explaining it to me. Hell, I’d settle for an annoying old lady with a knack for solving mysteries.
I actually stopped and waited for a second to see if a clue would fall out of the sky and land at my feet.
The Universe declined to oblige.