“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.”