Page 116 of Blue Moon

“The thought was enough.”

Echo arrived ten minutes later, escorted by Chase, her Man Friday, who travelled with her most of the time. For years, the two of them had gallivanted around the world, but now she spent half the year in California with side trips to Vegas. She’d flown in for the Nevada Food Festival this month, and Marcel kept bitching when she got in his way in the kitchen.

She was a tiny woman, no bigger than Luna, but she packed a cyber punch that could rival the NSA. They’d tried to poach her often enough.

Romeo looked down at her. “Should I get a cushion?”

I kicked him in the shin, but Echo just smiled sweetly.

“Insult me one more time, and all you’ll get back is a smoking motherboard.”

“Priority is the feeds from the twelfth-floor cameras, today and yesterday.”

“Okay.” She flicked a wrist at Romeo. “Find me a sandwich.”

Sin

Look at this.

I squinted at the picture she’d sent to our group chat, then squeaked and dropped the phone. It bounced off my foot and came to rest beside an eight-foot-tall statue of Anubis.

“Bitch.”

Romeo picked up the phone. “Is that a snake?”

“Give that back.” I snatched it from him and texted a middle-finger emoji to Sin. “Don’t touch my stuff.”

“You don’t like snakes?”

“None of your damn business.”

But no, I didn’t much like snakes. Not since a cottonmouth killed my cat right in front of me when I was six years old. That had been my first taste of death, but certainly not my last. The phone buzzed again, this time with a laughing emoji and a longer message.

Sin

It’s a king cobra, six feet long. Animal Control just caught it in Julius Whitlow’s home movie theatre.

Guess that answered one question about his death—it wasn’t accidental. King cobras weren’t native to Nevada, thank fuck.

Me

What was it watching? Snakes on a Plane?

Sin

Cobra Kai was right there.

Dice

Do y’all realise there’s literally a movie called Cobra?

Storm

Neither of those cobra movies have any snakes in them.

Me

So we’re back to Snakes on a Plane?

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