Page 94 of Her Psycho Beasts

“What happens if he steps off it?” Savage asks, his nose an inch away from the floor, delicately sniffing the stone.

“I imagine it’s like an IED,” Lyle says drolly. “As soon as I step off?—”

“Boom!” Savage cackles.

But my father doesn’t want me dead.

The sound of rock grating on rock resounds about the chamber, making our heads snap up, looking for the source.

“Not boom,” Scythe says. “Look.”

He’s pointing at a thick ledge that lines that entire room just below ceiling level. A cobra, open-mouthed in rage, is angled right at Lyle. Its stone throat is hollow.

“Not boom,” I agree, looking back down at the serpent spell. “It looks like they’ll shoot venom at you.”

It would be enough to incapacitate me, but kill anyone else.

I’d been taught how to read these markings since I was a child, little puzzles written with paper and pen. I could construct one well enough, but to unravel one as complex as this? That’s a different story. There are six identical lines sandwiched between longer instructions?—

Rock grinds on rock once again and I turn to see Eugene in the air, flapping next to a second serpent rotating to face us. A spear of anxiety shoots through me as my eagle eyes scan the ledge, looking for the fine lines in the stone that mark the presence of four more blocks with the potential to rotate towards us.

Six snakes.

And when the sixth snake turned it would likely trigger the shooting mechanism.

“They’re turning at one-minute intervals,” Lyle says quietly. “A safeguard against anyone that chooses not to move. You get hurt either way.”

Four minutes left and counting.

“Everyone, quiet!” I snap. I sit down in front of Lyle, crossing my legs and leaning right over to make sense of the spell.

So the rotating snakes explain the six identical instructions in the spell. The first is the trigger and the last line would be the instruction to shoot what I guessed was venom or some type of poison.

I take my fingernail and attempt to scratch off the instruction to trigger the movement of the first snake. But the blood has longsince seeped into the stone and my fingernail doesn’t even make a dent in the markings.

Deletion won’t work.

“Fuck,” I mutter.

Lyle’s power halos dangerously around him.

“Can’t Lyle use his telekinesis to push the stone down and step off it?” Savage asks.

“Honestly, I wouldn’t risk it,” I reply quickly. “The force would have to be exact.”

“Savage, come boost me up,” Scythe says, stepping up to the wall where the fourth serpent will appear any second. “I want to take a look at them.”

I don’t even bother looking at what they’re up to as Eugene gives a warning squawk, and five seconds later, rock grinds again.

So I can’t delete lines of the spell, but Uncle Ben thought that itispossible. My great grandfather probably had some safeguards in place in the event of someone setting it off by accident, right?

“What if we rip them off?” Savage grunts as Scythe clambers up his back to stand on his shoulders. “Lyle, can you yank them off?”

“Don’t!” I cry. “The spell will trigger if they’re tampered with.”

“What does it say will happen exactly?” Scythe asks. “It does smell like poison up here.”

I blink at the last line of the spell.

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