The pinpoint of light grew into a flat blue disk, begging to be used. The Silentium seal crowded my thoughts, then the sigils and lines transferred from my mind to the blue light in front of me. Negative space fell away and the seal glowed in the darkness.

It felt . . . good. Heka was being funneled from me in a small stream. I could feel it leaving, but where was it going? Was my body using it to kindle moon energy? I couldn’t grasp how it worked, but I sure as hell felt it when it rushed back through me like fire and overflowed into the blue seal, charging it. On instinct, I pushed the silver seal with my mind, slamming it down to the floor while shouting the arcane words to complete the Silentium spell.

A spark blossomed into an explosion. For a lingering moment, the entire room was alive with white light. Bob’s convulsions halted; Lon and Hajo craned their necks upward. The silver seal bounced off the floor, expanded around all of us into a glittering cloud, then imploded.

Darkness dropped from the ceiling. The room fell silent. No more tickity-tick, scritchity-scratch of tiny feet. No more squishy crackles. No more buzzing wings.

“Are they gone? Are they?” Hajo said.

It took me several moments to get my balance. I braced for post-magick nausea, but it never came.

“Cady?” Lon’s voice broke with emotion.

I reached out for him, our hands colliding as Bob moaned.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Pain’s gone,” Lon answered as he wound his fingers around the back of my neck and pulled me close. “You used it?” he whispered.

“Not on purpose,” I whispered back.

Quick and rough, he kissed the side of my head. “I thought . . . Never mind.” He kissed me again, then released me.

I bent down to inspect Bob, my fingers still wary of colliding with bug exoskeleton, but all I felt was warm skin. Bob whimpered in relief and clamped his sweaty hands around mine as Hajo mumbled exclamations behind us between labored breaths.

Metal scraped over cement. After two flicks, a soft, orange glow ballooned from the Zippo, which Lon now held. He moved it over Bob’s skin, then his own leg. The black rings were gone. Bite marks too. Even the holes burned in my jeans by the blood had disappeared. He inspected the floor around us. No trace of the magical cockroaches remained. No smear of bug pudding, no twitching legs. Nothing. Only the wildly scattered bones of Bishop’s skeleton and the monumental crack running the length of the room remained as witnesses.

Lon crawled to the shattered skeleton and reached for the skull, grabbing the object that Hajo had first spotted, the one that started this whole damn mess. He inspected it under the Zippo flame, then handed it to me.

It was a rolled-up Polaroid photo. The backing was peeling away, the image was dark and indiscernible. I shoved it into my pocket and hoarsely said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

No one disagreed.

It took us half an hour to get to the Village. I shook the entire way. Prickling terror still lingered under my skin, and my muscles twitched with the memory of the blue-eyed bugs. In the moments when I was able to push away images of the abhorrent bugs and the realization of just how enormously powerful that old magick had been—We could have died!—I mused on the Moonchild ability and how good it had felt. I didn’t have any regrets. I thought I might, but I didn’t. At least not right now.

After we made back to the Singing Bean and watched Bob and Hajo walk to their vehicles, Lon and I sat alone in his car till the rain tapered off a little.

“Good goddamn riddance,” Lon complained, shoving the Lupara under my seat. “If I never see either one of those idiots again, it’ll be too soon.”

Unfortunately, I couldn’t hope for the same. Once Bob got over all this, he’d be back at Tambuku. And Hajo, well . . .

“I can’t believe you’re going to have to bind someone for that piece-of-shit junkie dowser,” Lon mumbled.

Two someones, actually, but a deal was a deal. And asshole druggie or not, I’d give the guy one thing: he didn’t cut and run in the middle of the hissing cockroach fight.

“I thought you were dead,” Lon said.

“Me? Why?”

“In the cannery, when you stopped the bugs. I . . . couldn’t hear you.”

“You couldn’t read my emotions?”

He shook his head quickly. “No. They were there, and then they were gone. Like listening to a radio that suddenly gets turned off.”

“That’s strange.”

“It’s never happened to me before. Not even when you’ve used the moon magick. Definitely not in the Hellfire caves when you banished that incubus. And even though things were crazy at the time, I think I would’ve noticed if it happened in San Diego, when your parents . . .” He gestured with his eyes, as if to say “you know.”

“Tried to sacrifice me?”

He grunted affirmatively. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. At least your magick scared the piss out of the death dowser,” Lon said. “Bob too. They’ll think twice before crossing you.”

Maybe, but we had bigger problems.

We now knew Bishop was dead and his body entombed in that warehouse. But if he’d been killed by the Snatcher thirty years ago, that raised a whole new set of possibilities. Had Bishop helped the Snatcher and later been betrayed? Or had he been trying to stop the Snatcher and gotten caught in the crossfire?

As Hajo sped by us on his green motorcycle, Lon and I reviewed the photos I’d taken with my phone. The seven binding mandalas clearly served a different purpose than the oval seal around Bishop, but what, exactly? Containment? A magical cage? Hajo had confirmed that there weren’t death-threads around the seven carvings, so they hadn’t been used in ritual sacrifice. If Lon could track down that Æthyric alphabet in one of his goetias—assuming that it was Æthyric—maybe we’d understand.