“But the woman was curious,” Payne continued. “And she came to the Serpent in secret and willingly offered herself to him. And from her womb was born Sophia, the essence of wisdom. Mediatrix between the two worlds. A gift to all humans. But when Sophia grew to be an adult and started giving her knowledge to the people in this world, the man saw that she wasn’t blood of his blood. He saw the Serpent’s light in her, and he knew what the woman had done.

“In his petty jealousy, he tried to snuff out Sophia’s light. So the Serpent hid her inside a copy of himself, a green snake in the grass. And he told that snake to go out into the world in secret, carrying Sophia’s light in its flesh. And the Serpent gave the snake venom, to protect itself from the evil man.”

I’m not sure if Lon thought Payne might be referring to him in an abstract sense, but he immediately stuck his hand inside his jacket and quietly thumbed open the strap on his holster. Not good. If I was going to get any information, it had to be now.

“Aren’t you an evil man?” I asked Payne.

“I am a being of light trapped inside a human body. Therefore, I am filled with sin. But I partake in the Serpent’s gift regularly to cleanse myself.” Payne waved his hand to the snake skins hanging above us. “When I consume their bodies, I gain the essence of Sophia’s wisdom. The more I consume, the closer I am to home.”

He was eating them.

Eating the snakes.

“Is that what Enola wanted from you?” Lon asked, recovering more quickly from that gruesome information than I could. “To find a way to bring Sophia back to life in a human body?”

He spun around to face me. “Enola feigned interest in Sophia, but what she really wanted was Sophia’s gift of knowledge.” He opened a box on the altar and removed something, then turned around to show it to me: a ripped fragment of parchment framed in gilded glass, a little bigger than his hand. I was too far away to read the writing on it, but the calligraphy looked old.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Take a look,” he said, holding it up for me.

My heart sped. I glanced at Lon. He quietly took out his gun and disengaged the safety. I took a step closer. Just a step. Just so I could see better.

“This is all that’s left, this small piece. For hundreds of years, my family has kept this. Hundreds of years, and Enola stole it from me within a few months of knowing her.”

“What is it?” I repeated.

“It is the Invocation of the Great Serpent.”

All of my muscles tightened. “A summoning ritual?”

“To call down the Lord of the Æthyr onto this plane. The Father of Wisdom. Eve’s lover.”

I’d never heard of such a thing, and surely this, much like Payne’s religious fervor, was overstated. But if it had a rare magical seal or some bit of wisdom that might help my mother tweak the Moonchild ritual, I could see why she’d want to steal it.

“It’s not the only written record of the Invocation,” he expounded. “There are older copies scattered around the world, but this was the only one in the States. And it is sacred knowledge that the Serpent gave to Sophia, so that she could call him back to this plane in secret. But this time, it wasn’t an evil man who wanted to erase the Serpent’s gift—this time, it was an evil woman who wanted to abuse it.”

“Enola, you mean.”

After pocketing the gilded frame inside his jacket, he turned to face me again while tugging at the fingertips of his gloves. “The Moonchild experiment. That’s all she wanted to talk about, her precious child of the moon, and how the ritual was wrong—how she could give me untold wealth if I’d only let her borrow the parchment. I refused. She stole it from me. And then she cursed me.”

Agitated, he threw his gloves onto the altar and held up his hands. They were a horrific sight, mangled and covered in scar tissue. It looked as if fire had melted off all the flesh and his body had barely been able to regrow enough skin to cover his finger bones.

His voice was low and filled with bitterness. “If I get within a mile of Enola, I burn from the inside out. The pain is the worst torture you could imagine. My extremities go first.” He yanked up his pants leg to reveal the top of a prosthetic foot inside his boot. “I lost this one the last time I tried to see her, about a year before the Black Lodge slayings started. I’ve tried to have her murdered, have hired other people to do the deed. They never came back, so I eventually gave up.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “There’s no such magick.”

He chuckled. “Having been a victim of it, I must politely disagree. Enola was a master at finding lost magicks and doing what other magicians could not, which is what drew her to my work. I found that out later. You see, we didn’t meet by chance—she’d had someone invite me to her book signing. She’d arranged everything, all so she could get her hands on the parchment.”

“For her Moonchild experiment,” I said, thinking aloud. “She used your invocation to alter her own ritual, so that she could call down a demon into her womb.”

“Not a demon. She wanted to create something new.”

“Like Sophia?” I asked.

He violently shook his head. “Sophia was the sun. Mother of Wisdom. She was made of golden light, like her father, the Light Bringer. What Enola wanted was a spirit of darkness. The essence of the moon. A creature of silver.”