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“Find a spot by the food court, place the bag on its side with the zipper open, place the dish of cold Red River cereal in the bag, close the bag while the basilisk is eating, only look at it with this piece of mirror.” Dean held up the sideview mirror that had broken off the truck on his firstdrive to Ontario a year and a half ago. The support had snapped, but the glass was fine, so he’d hung on to it. “You’re sure it’ll come to the cereal, then?”

“It’s got to be hungry, and that stuff’s close enough to chicken feed it’ll never know the difference.”

“I can’t believe we’re…”

“…utilizing local resources to disable a metaphysical threat.”

Dean stared at the cat.

Austin stared back.

“Well, when you put it like that,” Dean said at last. He opened the door and stepped down onto the asphalt. “Try to stay out of sight. The windows are open and you’ve got lots of water, but I don’t want some good Samaritan calling the cops on me because they think you’re suffering.”

“Nobody understands my pain.”

“You can say that again,” Dean sighed as he closed the door.

The parking lot felt soft underfoot. It wasn’t the heat, even though it was hot enough to paint his T-shirt to his body, and bright enough to light it up like Signal Hill; it was as if the asphaltitself was rising around each boot and trying to drag him down. Not exactly what had happened to Claire and Diana the morning he’d dropped them off since they’d left visible footprints in the tar and he had no actual evidence that this was going on anywhere but in his head. No footprints. No smell of melted tar. Just a feeling. Accompanied by the certainty that things on the Otherside had gotten worse instead of better.

Things always get worse beforethey get better, he told himself and didn’t find it very reassuring. He wanted to help. He couldn’t help. All he could do was make sure that when Claire came home, she wouldn’t be facing a life-sucking reanimated mummy. Given the condition of the parking lot, it didn’t seem like enough.

He found himself walking with an exaggerated, high-stepping gait. And he wasn’t the only one. Across the lot, two kids, one around three, the other no more than five, were walking the exact same way. The funny thing was, their mother—Dean assumed it was their mother although she could have been a babysitter—didn’t seem to notice. Her feet were dragging with the unmistakable exhaustion of someone who’d just spent the morning with two preschoolers in a shopping mall.

Were children more open to the extraordinary?

He flushed as he realized the mother—or babysitter—was aware of his attention. Flushed darker when he realized she was staring at his…uh, jeans…and smiling in a way that was making him distinctly nervous. Picking up his pace, he made it to the concrete in time to turn and see all three of them pile into a later model station wagon.

Not a minivan.

Which was good; right?

Feeling vaguely nostalgic for the days when he knew what the hell was going on, he went into the mall.

The air-conditioning hit him like a dive into the North Atlantic, and the sweat dribbling down the sides of his neck dried so fast it left goose bumps behind. A trio of fourteen-year-old girls burst into high-pitched giggling as he stepped back and held open the door for them, the giggling punctuated by“Oh. My. God.” at frequent intervals as they passed. Dean had the uncomfortable feeling they were referring to the rip in the right leg of his jeans. Maybe he shouldn’t have worn them out in public, but after years of being washed and ironed, they were so thin that they were the coolest pair he owned in spite of how tightly they fit.

He’d parked by the food court entrance, having a strong suspicion that a man carrying a basilisk in a hockey bag was going to need to cover as short a distance as possible inside the mall.

By the time he reached the edge of the seating area, he remembered what he hated about these kind of places. He’d seen dead cod with more personality.

Actually, in this kind of weather, dead cod had personality to spare.

Only the fact that the forces of evil were using this mall as part of their attempt to take over the world made it any different than a hundred malls just like it. Although not a lot different.

Austin had been certain the basilisk would be hanging around the food court.

Dean studied the area carefully, walked over to the ubiquitous Chinese Take-Out, and bought an egg roll and a coffee. He couldn’t just sit down at a table in the food court without food, taking up space he had no real right to; that would be rude. Tray in one hand, hockey bag in the other, he made his way through a sudden crowd of teenagers toward the more thickly filled of the two planters—the perfect basilisk hiding place.

The good news: the table closest to the planter was empty.

The bad news: either a chicken-lizard combo smelled like the shallows after one of the big boats had just flushed her bilges on a hot day or the basilisk wasn’t the only thing the planter was hiding.