“Well.” Neil crouched behind the counter and came back up with a large tin divided into a dozen small compartments, each holding a different sort of dried leaf or seed. He quickly began stuffing a pinch of each sort into the cup of his pipe. “Well well well. You’re serious.”

“The Alignment’s peak falls next Saturday,” Riley said.

My mouth dropped open. That was in exactly one week! When he’d said it was coming soon, I hadn’t realized there was so little time.

Riley continued, “And the veil between worlds is thin. If one of your…” he paused, as though the words were uncomfortable in his mouth, “catnip-smoking bastards summons me then, I am afraid I will not be able to resist my directives.”

“It’s not like you can read summoning instructions off the back of a cereal box,” Neil muttered, adding an extra pinch of tiny dried flowers to his pipe for good measure. “These things take a lot of preparation. It’s unlikely a human could complete the ritual. You need all sorts of stuff. Sanctified candles and charcoal made from burned rowan wood and a human sacrificed with a knife forged from a meteorite, and it has to be the right sort of meteorite—”

“Things any human could find in this very shop,” Riley insisted.

“Well,” Neil looked uncomfortable as he put the pipe to his lips again and struck a match on the counter. “I don’t sell humans for sacrifice. Local ordinances. Cultists are industrious little buggers, though, they could probably find a hobo to sacrifice if they really wanted. But all the prep doesn’t mean anything if they don’t have the right books to read from.”

Books to read from?

“What sort of books?” I asked uncomfortably.

“They’re not easy to come by.” Neil touched the match to his pipe, and sucked in a deep breath of the fragrant smoke that curled from the bowl. His shoulders immediately slumped in relief. “The first is the Eldritch Grimoire. There’s only two copies left in the world, and I know where they both are.”

“And the other is the Necronomicon,” Riley supplied.

Neil nodded. “There aren’t many copies of that left lying around, either.”

Necronomicon. I slumped to the edge of a low counter, sitting between a stack of dusty papers and what looked like a human hand encased in a block of glass. “Oh,” I said.

Riley turned to me, his beautifully carved jaw jutting in concern. “Oh?”

“Vik had one of those.” My heart started to sink out of my chest and melt between the cracks in the floor. “And it was stolen a couple days ago.”

“Cultists,” Riley guessed. “Nobody else would have a reason to steal it.”