Unseen

“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 stu

She looked a

“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 Dji

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 Dji

I didn’t blink as I watched her; there was something very predatory and primally frightening about her. “The Dji

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 ski

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?”

Isabel didn’t nod, but I did. I understood all too well how that felt.

“Well, I thought I could do anything, anyway,” Snake Girl said. “But how do you know if you don’t try? So I wanted to see if I could.” She hesitated, studying me, then Isabel. “You sure you want me to go into it?”

“Yes,” I said. Isabel said nothing.

“Your nickel,” Snake Girl said with a shrug. “I started small, with animals, making them into other things. Some died. Some went all crazy. But I kept going, because why not, okay? I turned dogs and cats into bears and lions, only it didn’t go so well most of the time. Big messes to clean up and hide. I figured I’d messed around with animals long enough, so I finally changed a couple of kids, made them grow six feet tall in a day.” Her fierce, malicious smile faded. “They said they wanted to grow up. Well, I made them grown-up. Only they didn’t do any better in the end than the dogs and cats, and there was an even bigger mess to clean up. And I got caught.”

I knew the next part of the story, the part that involved the Dji