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didn’t look cheerful at all—it looked ominous and false, like a clown’s greasepaint smile. The trailer sat on blocks, Eddie saw, and was hugged by a rough wraparound plank porch. Under the trailer was darkness, and he wondered if there were more snakes lurking. And if there weren’t, what was lurking inside? Was Phineas Irving, preacher, some kind of snake-summoning warlock, sending his minions at them by mind control?
    But zigzagging lines were chopped into the planks of the porch, and though Eddie saw snakes coiling and sliding on the ground right up to the edge of the wood, he noticed that none of them actually so much as touched the planks.
    “What are those things, badgers?” Mike shot at another snake. “Ferrets?”
    “You’d have been a great farmer, Mike,” Eddie laughed. Jim swiped with his sword and swept three snakes out of the way, clearing a path to the porch. Eddie and Mike charged through, with the singer on their heels, and then they spun to look at the field of snakes behind them.
    Twitch the falcon snatched another snake from the ground, tearing it in half with his talons and shattering its skull with his beak. The gray-brown things, whatever they were, played havoc with the snakes. They had long faces and bodies and tails but stubby little ears, and they were quick as bullets, slipping out under every rattler’s strike and then biting snakes through their windpipes, killing them instantly.
    “Weasels?” Eddie guessed. It had been a long time since he’d earned his Mammals merit badge. Whatever these things were, he hadn’t seen any in Chicago. Or Iraq. He kept the Remington trained on the snakes nearest him—just because they hadn’t come on the porch yet didn’t mean they couldn’t or wouldn’t do so now. But the rattlers hissed, shook their tails at him, showed him their long, curving fangs, and stayed back.
    Twitch alighted beside the three of them, melting into his human form. He chose his female shape, which Eddie assumed was for Mike’s benefit and the amusement it gave the fairy, because Mike saw Twitch and did a double-take. “Whatever it is,” Twitch hazarded, “it isn’t cats.”
    “Cats?” Mike asked.
    “Mongoose,” said a voice Eddie didn’t know, and he realized the colossal screw-up he’d just committed. “Hands up.”
    Eddie relaxed his grip on the shotgun, letting it dangle by its strap from his right shoulder. He raised his hands over his head, his companions doing the same, and they turned to look at the source of the voice.
    The man was tall and wiry, the kind of wiriness you got by living in the desert and not taking in enough water or calories. The skin of his face and his big knuckles was sunburned and rubbed raw by the wind, and a shock of bristly yellow hair made his head look like a scrub brush. A once-nice gray wool suit jacket hung off him like a trench coat off a scarecrow. He squinted down the barrel of an M1917 Enfield into Eddie’s chest. That would be a .30-06 cartridge, Eddie knew, and it would blow a hole in him the size of a pineapple.
    “You Phineas Irving, by any chance?” Eddie asked.
    ***

Chapter Four
    “I’m the owner of this land,” the scarecrow spat out. “And you’re trespassers.” His elbow was a little jittery, but his aim didn’t waver.
    “Mierda.”
    “Easy,” Eddie said. “We didn’t come looking for a fight.” Jim looked poised to stab the guy; that he hadn’t done it yet probably meant he took seriously the threat that the homeowner would kill Eddie.
    “You have guns out,” the blond man pointed out. “You’re shooting.”
    “At snakes!” Eddie snapped, exasperated. “Didn’t you notice you’re surrounded?”
    The gunman dropped his elbows to his sides and seemed to relax, just a little. The gray-brown animals bounded up onto the porch and cuddled around his ankles. “Yeah,” he said, “but the fact that you’re carrying them at all makes me nervous. And your friend has a sword.”
    Jim’s