“The bathroom sometimes, if I know I’m on a secure property,” I said. The knife was small enough to conceal in the palm of my hand. I held it there, tense and waiting for the moment when I’d need to let it go.
“Fuck you,” snarled Anders. He grabbed Lyra, who’d been standing in stunned silence throughout his outburst. She squeaked as he jerked her against his chest. “Fuck you all.”
“That is quite enough,” snapped Adrian. “You will stop that, right now. You will be silent, and you will get off of my stage. I am ashamed to call you my son. I refuse to call you my son. You’re never going to work in this town again.”
“Wow, Dad, way to embrace the cliché.” Anders slid a hand between Lyra and his chest. The gesture was surprisingly familiar. I knew it. Why did I know it? Why—
He pulled his hand back into the open. He was holding a knife, a wickedly curved thing that looked like it had been designed for use in a butcher’s shop.
Oh. That was why.
“Didn’t have to go this way,” said Anders, and jerked the knife across Lyra’s throat in a hard arc, severing her jugular and carotid veins in one continuous motion. Blood sprayed everywhere, splattering the stage. Lyra jerked like she’d been shocked, her hands going to the wound. There was nothing she could have done: the blood was coming too fast, and she couldn’t possibly stop it. She didn’t even have the chance to scream.
I screamed for her. I was already moving, my heels finding little purchase on the blood-slick stairs to the stage as I thundered toward Anders. My knife flew straight and true, catching him in the wrist. He swore and dropped his own knife. It landed in a pool of Lyra’s blood.
Lyra fell a heartbeat later.
She hit the stage like a sack of wet cement, limbs splayed and open eyes staring at the ceiling. Anders jerked my knife out of his wrist and dropped to his knees next to her, rolling her onto her stomach before dragging his hands through her blood. He started painting symbols on her back, smearing the careful makeup provided by our costumers. Lyra would hate that. She hated looking anything less than perfect.
“He’s our cultist!” shouted a voice, and I turned to see Alice running from the wings, onto the stage.
But there are cameras here, I thought dazedly. She’d be caught on film. If this was going out live, the Covenant would see her—and while they might believe she was dead and buried, there was no way they didn’t have her picture in their files. She was virtually Covenant Public Enemy Number One, thanks to what she’d done to my grandfather. The Covenant didn’t look kindly on traitors. They looked even less kindly on those who led their people astray. And none of that mattered, because we had lives to save.
Alice was running. I was running. She had a gun in her hand, a complicated, old-fashioned pistol. I was still trying to draw a second knife from under the tight nylon strap of my dress.
Then the center of the stage exploded, and we had bigger things to worry about than a few cameras.
The snake that came bursting into the light was something like a king cobra, something like a python, and something like a SyFy Channel Saturday night special. Its head was the size of an SUV and its body was sized to match, flowing out of the hole it had created in a seemingly endless river of scales and heavy musculature. The stage lights glinted off its side, making its reality all-too-concrete. This was real. This was happening.
Alice and I had both pulled to a stop as soon as the wood began to splinter, recognizing that we were charging straight into something a little too big for us to handle without a plan. Its body was between us now, blocking easy access. That wasn’t good.
“Aw, shit,” I said. “He finished the ritual.” Lyra’s death had been the tipping point.
The first screams from the audience sounded almost hesitant, like the screamers were afraid this was a hoax and didn’t want to be the only ones who fell for it. The snake kept coming, until its terrible head brushed the ceiling. Then it turned, tongue flickering, and looked at the people behind it.
“Holy shit,” said Adrian.
The snake opened its mouth and hissed. It was a sound from the dawn of time, one that hit my simian hindbrain like a jolt of electricity, reminding me that I was something snakes might enjoy eating, if they were large enough. This snake could swallow a Guernsey cow if it wanted to. Eating me would be no big deal.