Lyra fell a heartbeat later.

She hit the stage like a sack of wet cement, limbs splayed and open eyes staring at the ceiling. Anders jerked my knife out of his wrist and dropped to his knees next to her, rolling her onto her stomach before dragging his hands through her blood. He started painting symbols on her back, smearing the careful makeup provided by our costumers. Lyra would hate that. She hated looking anything less than perfect.

“He’s our cultist!” shouted a voice, and I turned to see Alice running from the wings, onto the stage.

But there are cameras here, I thought dazedly. She’d be caught on film. If this was going out live, the Covenant would see her—and while they might believe she was dead and buried, there was no way they didn’t have her picture in their files. She was virtually Covenant Public Enemy Number One, thanks to what she’d done to my grandfather. The Covenant didn’t look kindly on traitors. They looked even less kindly on those who led their people astray. And none of that mattered, because we had lives to save.

Alice was running. I was running. She had a gun in her hand, a complicated, old-fashioned pistol. I was still trying to draw a second knife from under the tight nylon strap of my dress.

Then the center of the stage exploded, and we had bigger things to worry about than a few cameras.

The snake that came bursting into the light was something like a king cobra, something like a python, and something like a SyFy Channel Saturday night special. Its head was the size of an SUV and its body was sized to match, flowing out of the hole it had created in a seemingly endless river of scales and heavy musculature. The stage lights glinted off its side, making its reality all-too-concrete. This was real. This was happening.

Alice and I had both pulled to a stop as soon as the wood began to splinter, recognizing that we were charging straight into something a little too big for us to handle without a plan. Its body was between us now, blocking easy access. That wasn’t good.

“Aw, shit,” I said. “He finished the ritual.” Lyra’s death had been the tipping point.

The first screams from the audience sounded almost hesitant, like the screamers were afraid this was a hoax and didn’t want to be the only ones who fell for it. The snake kept coming, until its terrible head brushed the ceiling. Then it turned, tongue flickering, and looked at the people behind it.

“Holy shit,” said Adrian.

The snake opened its mouth and hissed. It was a sound from the dawn of time, one that hit my simian hindbrain like a jolt of electricity, reminding me that I was something snakes might enjoy eating, if they were large enough. This snake could swallow a Guernsey cow if it wanted to. Eating me would be no big deal.

Lindy’s scream was high and shrill, and would have been ear-piercing even without the microphone to amplify it. As it was, I could feel it all the way down to my bones. I wasn’t the only one. The snake’s head whipped around, homing in on the source of the irritation. Then it struck.

I caught a glimpse of its teeth as it shot past me, enough to know that they were long and sharp and far too plentiful. It moved like a freight train, mouth closing around Lindy and cutting her off in mid-shriek. The rest of the audience picked up the slack, screaming and rising from their seats as they stampeded for the doors. Most of the audience, anyway. The blonde women who’d been scattered through their ranks remained where they were, going so still that it felt like a joke to think anyone could mistake them for mammals. Nothing hot and fast could ever be that still.

“Thought snakes didn’t have ears,” said Malena. She was at my elbow again. I glanced at her long enough to see that she was in her human form before focusing my attention back on the snake.

“They don’t,” I said tightly. Anders was laughing and capering around Lyra’s body, the hole in his wrist apparently forgotten. He was one of our snake cultists, absolutely. But he hadn’t acted alone. I knew he hadn’t acted alone. “The vibrations from the noise must have been enough to catch its attention, and that was all it took.”

Poor Lindy. She hadn’t been my biggest fan, but she’d deserved better.

“How the fuck do we kill it?”

Hearing her say “we” was like a shock to my system. Here I was, just standing there, staring at the giant snake as if it was someone else’s problem. Well, it wasn’t. It was my problem, because I was in the building, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my family history, it’s that sometimes responsibility and proximity are the same damn thing.

“Get to my grandmother,” I snapped. “I need a gun.”