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I held out my hand, and the dragon leapt without hesitation from her to me, where it sat in my palm and stared up at me. It was lighter than I had expected, and very warm. Its skin was soft and dry, and it cocked its head quizzically, as if asking a question I could not hear.

“Hello, little brother,” I told him, and touched my finger lightly to his head. He settled down comfortably in my palm, and I handed him back to Mabel. She took him back with raised eyebrows.

“You’re different,” she said. “Djinn, right? I used to have a Djinn, back in the day. He was a big fella, scary as hell. Used to really have to watch my step around him. Part of why I got out of the business when I did.”

“The business” being, of course, the Warden business. Mabel was a former Warden—Earth, of course—who had elected to have her powers blunted and leave the service. I had no doubt she still retained a strong influence over the living creatures in her shop; they were uniformly healthy and happy, from the snakes to the lizards to the arthropods like tarantulas and scorpions, who were surprisingly complacent.

“My name is Cassiel,” I said. “I came to introduce young Isabel there to your friend.”

Mabel’s face, which had been open and friendly, shut down completely. I felt the entire mood of the shop shift, and the iguana moved on his perch under Isabel’s hand, lifting himself up on strong, muscular legs. His large, mottled dewlap came down from concealment, making him look even larger, and he bobbed his head up and down in rapid, aggressive movements. Ibby took a step back in surprise, but the iguana was looking at me, not her.

“Costs five dollars each to see the Snake Girl,” Mabel said. Her words were monotone, stripped of any kind of emotion. She held out her hand. I opened my wallet and placed a ten in her palm, and she met my eyes. Hers were black, bitter, and hard. “She ain’t my friend,” Mabel said. “And I only do this because she wants me to. If it was my choice—”

But it wasn’t, clearly, because she shook her head and stalked over to the swaying beaded curtain in the doorway. She held it open, face averted.

“Ibby,” I said, and held out my hand. “We have someone to meet.”

“Can’t I stay here?” she asked. Her voice sounded faint. “I like the iguana. He’s nice.”

“His name’s Darwin,” Mabel said. “He’s very nice. Maybe the kid ought to stay here.”

“She needs to see,” I said.

Mabel looked up, startled, and I could see the calculations moving through her mind until she finally nodded. “All right,” she said. “All right, then. Come on, little one, your friend’s already paid for you. Darwin will wait for you, I promise.”

Isabel frowned, looked back at the iguana with real misgivings, but he laid his head back down on the branch with every indication that he was agreeing with Mabel’s statement.

I took Ibby’s hand, and together we went to meet the Snake Girl.

The first indication of something unusual was that there were bars at the end of the hallway—a gate, one with a lock. Mabel walked ahead of us, keys jingling in her hand. She unlocked the gate and slid it aside with a scrape of metal. The air was warm, and smelled feral.

“Right,” she said. “Rules. Snake Girl is on the other side of the glass. Don’t touch the glass. Don’t get her upset; it takes days to calm her down. Don’t try to talk to her, either. You only look and you go. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t intend to follow any of those rules, but Mabel didn’t need to be advised of that fact.

“Straight down on the left,” Mabel said. She slid the gate in place behind us and locked it. “I’ll wait here until you’re done.”

Despite the warm, musk-scented air, I felt a chill move through my body. I felt it in Isabel, too.

Was I doing the right thing?

It was too late to change my mind. It’s for the best, I told myself.

And I hoped that I was right.

Isabel and I walked down the narrow brick hallway, which ended in an arched doorway that opened into a larger room. Half of the room was closed off by a giant glass barrier—heavy glass, at least four inches thick, with steel reinforcing wire inside. At the back of the room was another door, one with no handle on the inside. There was a slot at the bottom wide enough to admit trays for food.

Inside the room, sitting on a battered sofa that had once been antique gold in color, was a young woman of about twenty. She was stunningly beautiful—an exotic Aztec cast to her perfectly proportioned face, and skin like rich, glowing copper. Her eyes were black, and so was her hair, flowing in ebony waves down her back.

She looked annoyed. She was lying slumped on the sofa, clicking a remote control at a big flat-screen television across the room. She finally gave it up and tossed the remote to a nearby coffee table, which held stacks of well-thumbed magazines and soft drink cans. She seemed partial to Dr Pepper.

“What?” she snapped at us, finally giving us her attention. Her voice came through clearly, but off to the side from a speaker installed in the wall. “You never seen a Snake Girl before? Vámanos, losers. You’ve got your five bucks’ worth.”

The girl was perfectly human down to her waist, and wearing an old, faded T-shirt that featured the same cartoon character decorating Isabel’s crash helmet. From the waist down, however, her body turned into the muscular coils of a serpent—massive, and patterned like a rattlesnake in tan, brown, and black. The scales glistened in the light, and as the coils began to move, undraping from the sofa, I saw the gleam of white bone at the end of her body.

She had a long rattle, and it began to set up a relentless buzzing, like a thousand hives of agitated bees.

Isabel, wide-eyed, had said nothing at all. Finally, she looked up at me and said, “What happened to her?”

Snake Girl laughed. It was a harsh, unpleasant sound like knives stabbing a chalkboard. “Mira, it talks. What you think happened to me, little bitch? I got cursed by an evil witch. What else? Only I was the evil witch.” She stopped laughing and moved with frightening speed to the glass, her top half swaying above the massive, muscular snake’s body as she stared down at us, but especially at Isabel. She finally looked directly at me. “You. You look Djinn.”

I shrugged. “I was.”

“Explains how you knew I was here,” she said. “I don’t take out ads in the Yellow Pages. Didn’t think the Djinn paid that much attention to the Wardens’ failures.”

I didn’t blink as I watched her; there was something very predatory and primally frightening about her. “The Djinn never forget a failure like you,” I said.

That seemed to please her, in some bizarre, obscure way. She focused again on Ibby. “And you. You’re just like I was when I was your age. Maybe a little skinnier. But I was shorter.”

Ibby took a big step back, but I wouldn’t let her run away. Not yet. She tried to pull free, but I exerted a little Earth power to freeze her feet where they stood. Snake Girl pressed both her very human hands to the glass, then squashed her face against it, too, turning the beautiful features into something alien and monstrous. Then she pulled back and laughed, clearly delighted by the discomfort she was causing.

Ibby was shaking with it.

“I was so smart,” Snake Girl said. “I knew better than anybody. See, I was good, and I learned really fast. Eight years old and I was setting bones and curing diseases. Ten, and I was making crops grow out of dead ground. I was a fucking miracle, that’s what I was. They all said so, all the curanderas.” She smiled, but it was deeply unpleasant, and her body twisted sinuously to one side, then the other. It was mesmerizing and terrifying, and I could feel Isabel trembling. “I could do anything. To anybody. For anybody. You understand how that feels?”