“Your father called me. Fortunately, I was in a place with phone service, or he’d have summoned your Uncle Mike.” Alice raised an eyebrow. “Far be it from me to criticize Mikey—he’s a good kid—but do you think he would have fit in with your new friends better than I will?”
“You don’t fit in with my new friends at all,” I protested. “They’re in their twenties, and they dance for a living. You’re . . . not in your twenties, and you kill things for a living.” And for food, and sometimes, I suspected, for fun. It was hard to tell with Grandma Alice. She was the only human I knew who lived primarily off-dimension, and that sort of thing had to be bad for her sense of social norms.
“No, but I look like I’m in my twenties, and I’m believable as your semi-estranged sister who wants to mend some bridges.” Alice began reassembling her rifle, still looking at me. “I know this isn’t ideal, Very. I’m not here to blow your cover or get you into trouble. I’m just here to make sure that you’re safe. Snake cults aren’t something to mess around with.”
“I already handled a snake cult in New York,” I said.
Alice’s expression turned hard. “No, you handled a bunch of amateurs who’d been lucky enough to stumble across a sleeping dragon. They were working out of the pop culture version of the snake cult bible, and they had no idea what they were doing. What kind of forces they were playing with. Do you honestly think I crossed three dimensions because I thought you couldn’t handle yourself? Please. Your father sent me the pictures you took. The people you’re dealing with here, the people who killed those poor children, they have a much better idea of the rituals they’re trying to enact.”
My knees felt suddenly weak. I allowed myself to fold to the floor, settling cross-legged as I stared at her. “You think it’s going to be that bad?”
“I think some of those runes were things I’d never seen before,” said Alice. “Some of them I’d only ever seen in Thomas’ notes. Even he didn’t know what they all meant. There have been snake cults as long as there have been people, Very, and some of them had the chance to get extremely good at what they did before their neighbors sensibly rose up and slaughtered them.”
“I don’t think the words ‘sensible’ and ‘slaughter’ belong in the same sentence,” I said.
“They do when it’s that or watch your children get swallowed by a snake the size of a freight train,” said Alice. She snapped the last piece of her rifle back into place. “What did you find at the theater today?”
I shook my head, chasing off the image of snakes big enough to have their own SyFy Channel franchises. “Nothing,” I said.
She blinked.
“I mean it literally: there was nothing.” I explained the situation, from the empty basement to the lack of blood trace evidence.
By the time I finished, Alice was frowning. “You’re saying an Ukupani couldn’t find any signs that someone had been killed there?” I nodded. Her frown deepened. “Ukupani are some of the best long-range hunters in the world. They can scent a drop of blood in the water from up to a mile away. If he couldn’t detect any signs of blood . . .”
“They bought a lot of bleach,” I concluded.
“No,” said Alice. “You would have been able to smell that much bleach. But there are spells and charms that absorb blood, use it to power things. Whoever drew those runes on the bodies was an actual magic-user, not just someone screwing around.”
I stared at her. “Oh,” I said, after a moment. “Crap.”
Alice nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Crap.”
Magic is real, in the sense that sometimes the world does things that can’t be explained using science as we currently understand it. Magic isn’t real, because once something becomes explainable, we start thinking of it as “science,” and we no longer pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s sort of like cryptids. Creatures that were once considered impossible and mythological become completely plausible as soon as someone figures out how to explain them. The wheel turns, and the world changes.
Here is what we know about magic: