Opening the door flooded the room with light from the hallway. I squinted. Alice walked forward until she was standing beside me, her own eyes narrowed against the glare.

“This isn’t hidebehind work,” she said. “The construction is pure bogeyman.”

“It was a composite community,” I said. I was trying not to stare.

The tattoos on her left shoulder were gone. Not covered in dirt, or scarred—cutting a charmed tattoo could sometimes release whatever effect it had been designed to contain—gone. The skin was smooth and clean, like it was never tattooed in the first place. There were clear places on her arm as well, cutouts shaped like birds or eels or strange, twisty things from the bottom of the sea.

Alice saw me looking and smiled wryly. “I told you, I’ve been burning charms as fast as I could. It leaves a mark.”

“I always wondered how you got your tattoos to change.” It was an inane comment. It was the best I could do in the moment.

“They’re one-use only, and they don’t do subtle; whoever grabbed me didn’t come with a damn glowing door,” said Alice. She looked around the hall, expression calculating. “How far underground are we? And what time is it? There were some temporal distortions in there.”

I didn’t want to ask what that meant for her—how long she’d been trying to get back to us, or how long it had been since she’d slept. Those were questions for later. “It’s Friday morning. Around eleven, I think? You only went missing last night.”

“Thank heaven for little favors,” she said.

The mouse on my shoulder, not to be outdone, proclaimed gleefully, “HAIL!”

“That, too,” said Alice.

“As for how far underground we are, I went down two flights of stairs, each about twenty feet long. So we’re deep enough to be a problem if an earthquake hits. And there’s more.” I took a quick breath, gathering my thoughts, before I launched into a summary of what I’d overheard while I was hiding in the room where Alice had emerged.

When I was done, she was frowning, and so was I. Another thought had occurred while I was speaking, and this one was unsettling, to say the least. “Grandma, if you were trying all night to get back to us, how is it you came through in the room I was actually in? That seems like a pretty big coincidence.”

“Coincidence is just another word for an accident that doesn’t kill you,” said Alice. “My transit charms are set to drop me as close as possible to a family member, if there’s one in the area I’m traveling to. It wouldn’t do me any good to finally find the dimension where your grandfather is and wind up on a different continent, now would it?”

Reminding her that Grandpa Thomas wasn’t likely to be anything more than bones and memory by this point didn’t seem like a good idea. I just nodded.

“As to why I came out down here . . .” Alice’s frown deepened, turning pensive. “Which direction did you say they came from?”

We walked down the hallway side by side, pausing only so I could set the Aeslin mouse on the floor near a convenient break in the wall. It scampered off to locate the rest of the colony and pass on the news that Alice had been found. They would keep searching the theater for confusion charms and signs of what the snake cult was up to, but they’d do a better job if they weren’t consumed by worry for the family’s senior priestess.

The difference in our stride was almost startling. We were roughly the same height, but where I stalked, she prowled, like she was daring something to jump out and have a go at her. It was the difference between a brawler and a technician, and while I wouldn’t have wanted to meet her in a dark alley, I was reasonably confident that in a real fight, I would have been able to get out of the way before she could lay a finger on me. Give her a gun or a blunt instrument, and the tides would turn in her favor. Everyone had their own strengths and weaknesses.

That thought brought me back to our snake cultists. What about their strengths and weaknesses? Their magic-user must have been the one urging patience, and saying the spells they were using weren’t an exact science. Magic was never an exact science; only science got to use that particular label. Magic was more like cheese making than chemistry, depending frequently on “when it feels right.” When the spell felt right, they’d be able to rip a hole in the wall of the world, and their target giant killer snake would come tumbling right through.

If the male had been the group’s magic user, the female voice belonged to . . . who? A female cultist, an administrator, a lure? It wasn’t Brenna, which was still a relief, but apart from that, I had no real idea who it was or what purpose she would be serving. Lindy, maybe. Lindy never did like the dancers as much as she pretended to, and there were certainly ways that a snake cult could have appealed to her. But it was hard to imagine her willingly sacrificing her ballroom dancers to a giant snake, no matter what she’d been promised.