“The Caleximus cult, nefarious ball bags who’ve made our lives a misery since Lord Abaddon was knee-high to a jellyfish. This will be the bunch who blew up Frank.”

Adept Six shrugged. “That makes sense, sir. It was the only mystically related thing we found in there that didn’t come from our closet.”

The Magister crumpled the paper in his hand. “Then that settles it. They want the box to set off their false Apocalypse before we can set off our true one,” he said. “I tell you what, Acolyte Three, we’re going cookie shopping, and when we do, we will bring the wrath of Abaddon down on their heads like a shit-ton of bricks.”

“Yes, Dark High One!”

“Yay,” said Acolyte Three weakly, head still down.

“Anything else in there?” said the Magister. He held up a bag on which someone had scrawled DRY ICE with a marker. “What’s in this?”

“We’re not sure,” said Adept Six. “We need to get it looked at. It might be another clue. Or just a piece of Frank’s liver.”

That’s when Acolyte Three’s stomach let go.

TWENTY-ONE

THE BEVERLY CENTER MALL SAT AT THE CORNER OF Beverly Boulevard and La Cienega, on the edge of Beverly Hills in that magical land where residents shopped purely by designer names and not prices. People caught looking at price tags were shunned and, while not physically exiled, mentally dispatched to the same shadowy hinterlands reserved for tourists in flip-flops, accordions, and pre-Dorothy flying monkeys.

When Coop finally exited the Beverly Center, he was both happy and a little shell-shocked. Coop was a price tag looker, and every salesperson in the Center spotted him as one the moment he entered. His clothes were ill-fitting enough that, at best, he’d borrowed them. At worst, he’d held up a Goodwill and stolen the first few things he’d seen on the sales rack. If Coop had known any of the rules of the upscale he might have done what any sensible person in his position would do: stand in the mall’s atrium and shout, “I’m an ex-con with money. Dress me for adulthood.” At least being a jailbird would have given him the exotic frisson of a Tibetan mastiff puppy or an Abyssinian cat, because there’s nothing people with money like to do more than dress up their expensive pets. But Coop didn’t know any of this, so he slunk around different men’s boutiques, fingering fabrics he’d only heard about in legends, gasping at prices he thought must be in pesos, not dollars, and generally revealing himself to be everything the Beverly Center hated: a reminder that while they were near Beverly Hills, they weren’t quite in it, so the broke and the clueless could invade their space at will.