For the snake cultists to have a magic-user . . . well. That wasn’t good. And that may have been the understatement of the year.

When I got back up to my own room, I curled up on my bed and sent Dominic a text, asking him to answer if he was up. My phone buzzed a few seconds later.

JUST GOT BACK FROM PATROL. THE AREA’S QUIET. NO SIGNS OF SNAKE CULT ACTIVITY. WHAT’S GOING ON?

There were so many ways to answer that question, and half of them required a flowchart. I decided to go with something from the other half, and replied, DAD SENT BACKUP. MY GRANDMOTHER’S HERE. JUST WANTED TO WARN YOU.

This time, there was a longer pause before his return message. DID SHE BRING SARAH?

He was thinking of my maternal grandmother, Angela Baker. Grandma Angela is a cuckoo, like Sarah. But she’s not a fighter, and she’s not a receptive telepath—she can project her thoughts, but she can’t pick up the thoughts of the people around her. Not so useful when what I needed was to find the people who were responsible for the murders of my cast mates.

WRONG GRANDMA, I replied. THIS IS GRANDMA ALICE.

No pause at all this time, but his next text was in all caps: ALICE HEALY?!?

PRICE-HEALY, TECHNICALLY. SHE TOOK HER HUSBAND’S LAST NAME WHEN THEY GOT MARRIED. Grandma was the traditional sort, in some ways. Mostly the ways that gave her a higher chance of getting blood in her hair.

I’M COMING OVER.

NO! I CAN’T HAVE PEOPLE COMING IN AND OUT AT ALL HOURS. WE’LL COME TO YOU. I hadn’t been planning to go anywhere tonight—I was exhausted, and we didn’t have any new information to go on—but if I needed to introduce my grandmother to my husband in order to prevent some sort of incident, I’d find a way.

I WILL EXPECT YOU INSIDE THE HOUR, was Dominic’s last text. He stopped responding after that. I should probably have been worried, but I was honestly relieved. His silence gave me time to figure out how I was going to sneak out when I wasn’t going alone.

Grandma Alice isn’t a free-runner; like most of my family, she views my tendency to throw myself off tall buildings as just short of suicidal, although—being her—she also found it sort of adorable. When your grandmother with no sense of self-preservation thinks you’re being cute, maybe it’s time to reconsider your life choices.

On the plus side, she did like to drive, although the legality of her license was questionable. She definitely knew how to hot-wire a car, since she’d tried to teach me when I was six (just one of a long series of decisions that eventually led to my father saying she wasn’t allowed to be alone with us until we turned sixteen). Between the two of us, we could probably manage to scrounge up a vehicle. I slipped my phone into my pocket, pulled a few knives from under my mattress and tucked them into my shirt, and stood. Time to get moving again.

Pax and Lyra were in the living room. He was giving her a foot rub; she had a cold cloth on her forehead. Anders was nowhere to be seen. Pax looked up at the sound of footsteps, raising his eyebrows.

“Going somewhere?” he asked.

“Just downstairs to talk to Elle,” I said. I managed a smile that didn’t look entirely ghoulish. “Don’t wait up, okay?”

“Val, wait.” Lyra sat up enough to meet my eyes. “I know I’m the one who said this was okay, but I’m worried. It’s cool that your sister’s here and all—it sucks that your family doesn’t support you—and I don’t have any problem with her squatting until the show’s over, but you already sneak out the window most nights, and now you’re going downstairs to hang out with her. Is this going to affect your work?”

It was such a reasonable question, about such an unreasonable situation, that it was all I could do not to start laughing. Instead, I forced my smile to get a little wider, and said, “With my sister here, maybe I won’t feel the need to sneak out as much. I’ll be fine, Lyra. I’ve never gotten so little sleep that I couldn’t dance the next day.”

“I know. But I want it to come down to the four of us again, you know? Let’s prove we were the best season, and take home the grand prize for ourselves.”

“Easy for you to say,” grumbled Pax good-naturedly. “You already won once.”

“Lo says the audience probably won’t vote for one of the previous winners to take it all again,” I said. “Something about the perception that their favorites got robbed. So if it came down to the four of us, I think your chances would be really good, Pax.”

“Let’s get there and see,” said Lyra. She closed her eyes and lay back down, wiggling her toes as a signal for Pax to continue the massage. “Just be careful.”