“Like what?” My fingers trailed down his chest, trying to cop whatever feel I could get over his T-shirt. “Something boring like baseball? Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day?”

“Gonna need more than that,” he said with a slow grin, peeling away my straying hand to thread his fingers between mine.

“Hmm, what about all those flying cockroaches in the abandoned cannery?”

“That’s better. What else?”

“Smell of wet dog,” I suggested. “No—smell of Foxglove after she rolled around in that dead animal carcass she found in the woods.”

He laughed. “Christ, that was disgusting.”

“I couldn’t stop gagging.”

“You weren’t the one who had to bathe her.”

“I held the hose! And I never could figure out what was worse, Foxglove’s fur or Jupe barfing all over the grass after he handed you the shampoo.”

Lon grinned. “Jupe was worse, hands down.”

“Ugh, so gross.” I squeezed Lon’s hand tighter. “I remember you took two showers afterward, and no one felt like eating dinner. Then we watched that old stop-motion movie with the fighting skeletons.”

“Jason and the Argonauts.”

“Right. Then . . .” I remembered something else happening after Jupe went to bed, but it was fuzzy. “You were wearing this T-shirt,” I said, running a finger over the faded graphic.

Lon blinked several times, almost as if he’d gotten sentimental. “It doesn’t matter.”

I felt strangely sentimental myself. “I sort of miss Jupe.”

“Me, too,” he mumbled, so low I barely heard it. He cleared his throat. “But what we need to be thinking about right now is your mother.”

Talk about a cold shower.

He cradled my face in his hands. “We’re going to find a way to stop her. Come hell or high water, I will not let her take you away from me. You got that?”

I nodded.

He dropped one last lingering kiss on my forehead, then pulled back and slung his arm around my shoulders. “Why don’t we go get some food?” he said, leading me back to the SUV.

“And while we find a place that’s open, you can tell me everything you learned from Rooke.”

Downtown Los Angeles was a twenty-minute drive from Pasadena. And since Lon had spent a lot of time there for work—doing shoots, booking shoots, or catching planes to shoots—he drove us to a hotel he’d stayed in before, a swank building on Flower Street with a twenty-four-hour restaurant inside. Even at two in the morning, a handful of people filtered in and out of the modern lobby, so I donned my sunglasses again.

At Lon’s suggestion, instead of heading straight up to our room to continue what we’d started, we camped out on the restaurant’s outdoor patio, eating, talking, and using the hotel’s Wi-Fi to research our next plan of attack. He stayed on his side of the table, and I stayed on mine. I tried my damnedest not to think about the kiss or how much I wanted seconds. I truly tried. When I occasionally slipped, Lon wouldn’t even glance up. He’d just smile to himself and say, “Focus, Cadybell.”

Somewhere between all my nonsaintly thoughts, I managed to tell Lon everything I’d learned from Rooke. But even knowing now that the Naos Ophis group had roots in an ancient Gnostic sect, we still found zero information about a local group online. And I do mean nothing. The thought crossed my mind that just because the temple existed before I was born, that didn’t mean it still existed now. Because it was one thing if Rooke never found it in the 1980s but quite another if we couldn’t now. What doesn’t have an internet trail? Either they were an insanely tricksy lot, or we were on a fool’s errand.

“Look at this.” Lon scooted his chair closer to mine and showed me his laptop screen. “A splinter group of Ophites popped up in Crete in the late 1600s. After a brutal war and the longest siege in history, the Ottomans ousted the ruling Venetians. In doing so, they raided a hidden temple whose congregation killed snakes during rituals. The Ottomans found ‘hundreds upon hundreds of serpent-skin banners.’ They destroyed the temple, but after studying the Ottoman records, scholars now wonder if the group had combined Ophite beliefs with the older cult of the snake goddess—this one. From the sixteenth century BCE.”

He pointed to a picture of two famous Minoan snake goddess statues: bare-breasted women holding two snakes above their heads, one in each outstretched hand. One statue was smaller than the other.

“They’re believed to be the mother goddess and her daughter,” Lon said.

Mother and daughter. A chill raced down my arms. I stared at the statues and thought about everything Lon had just said. “Rooke said the serpent temple was using big exotic snakes. Where would they get those?”

“Exotic-pet shops?” Lon suggested.

“Maybe that’s a good place to start looking.”

Studying a map, we pinpointed cities in the area of the Mojave Desert bordering Los Angeles, “Inland Empire” cities such as San Bernardino and Riverside and other places such as Lancaster and Palm Springs. If Rooke said my mother made day trips to the serpent temple from Pasadena, we felt fairly confident gauging how far away was too far.

But when we drilled down for information on the exotic-pet stores that made the cut, only two in our targeted area seemed to carry more than a few chameleons and a python or two. One was a fish-and-reptile wholesaler, and the other was a company that provided trained exotic animals to movie sets. That one mentioned that special requests were “negotiable.” Since it opened earliest, we decided to try it first and the next morning drove an hour in rush-hour traffic to Riverside.