A Snake in the Grass (11 page)

“Parents don’t have favorites,” I lied,
because it was what you are supposed to say. Cole was my mom’s
favorite. We’d always known it, and I never really thought about it
anymore. Cole was the good son, and I’d been the hellion she was
always pulling out of trouble. It wasn’t until I was an adult that
my mom and I had truly gotten to know each other.

I quickly jotted down a few mental notes for
things to do (and not to do) when my own second child arrived. I
didn’t want either of my kids to ever feel like I favored one over
the other.

Estéban reached out and tweaked something
with the wrench in his hand, the ratchet making a clicking sound
that was loud in the quiet barn. Whatever it did, it wasn’t want he
wanted, because he frowned and started digging through the box on
the ground for something else. Hey, what I know about engines is
confined to my ancient Mazda pickup, and largely revolves around
making sure I’m not walking home. Finally, he fished out a
different socket, and leaned in close to fiddle with something
else.

“Hey, could you hand me that…?” He gestured
vaguely to my right, and when I offered him an allen wrench I found
lying there, he seemed satisfied.

With a small smile, I settled down on the
pile of tarp, watching as my student started fiddling with the
motorcycle engine. I could totally imagine him in here, with
Miguel, both their dark heads bent close together as the older
brother explained this or that about what they were working on.
Miguel’s presence seemed to linger here, even though I knew very
well that his soul had passed on to wherever good people go in the
end. (Despite the fact that I’d recently met an actual angel, I
still wasn’t completely sold on the idea of heaven. Hell, on the
other hand, that I believed in whole-heartedly.)

I don’t know long we sat in that dusty, dimly
lit barn while Estéban tinkered and fussed over the motorcycle. I
handed him things when he needed, but other than the occasional
request, we sat in companionable silence. When the sun wandered
around to where it wasn’t beaming in the door, I found a work light
and plugged it in to give us more illumination.

We only realized we’d been missed when a
small head crowned with dark pigtails poked in through the door,
and a little girl’s eyes lit up in triumph. “Señor Smythe!
Los
encontré
!”

“Aw crap, we’re in trouble, kid.” I muttered
before the doorway was filled with a large, grumpy frame.

“Well it’s about goddamn time you two turned
up! Scare an old man to death, why don’t you!” Despite his bluster,
Terrence patted the little girl on the head, and slipped her a
toffee candy when he thought no one was looking. Giggling, she ran
off. “What the hell are you doing, all holed up in this
dustbin?”

“Working on Miguel’s motorcycle.” Estéban
leaned back to show off his efforts, and Terrence shuffled closer,
leaning on his cane as he bent to peer into the half-finished
engine.

“Hmph. Not bad. Needs a bit of tender loving
care, is all.” Without even looking, Terrence leveled a gnarled
finger in my direction. “You. Find me a seat.”

“Sir, yes sir,” I mumbled, but managed to
locate an overturned bucket that would suffice. I reclaimed my nest
on the tarp and watched in amazement as Terrence proceeded to
school Estéban in the finer elements of small engine work. Hunh.
Who knew?

Watching that grizzled old curmudgeon quietly
and carefully explain the mechanics of your basic dirt bike made me
realize that Terrence wasn’t exactly everything he wanted people to
think he was. Old and grumpy, yes. Drunk, quite often. But he had a
keen mind for a lot of things, and very little slipped past him
when it came to true observation. I could tell by his attitude that
he had fully grasped the importance of “Miguel’s motorcycle,” and
that he possibly even cared that the kid was taking this very
seriously.

Under Terrence’s tutelage, the engine shaped
up pretty quickly. The pair of unlikely mechanics figured out that
all the parts were present, at least, it was just going to be a
matter of getting them all functional before the bike would
actually run. We were about to go in search of things like gasoline
and motor oil when the kid’s stomach growled loudly, echoed quickly
by mine. Then I remembered that we’d only had about half an orange
each since breakfast. Lunch had obviously gone the way of the
dodo.

“Think that’s our cue to call it a day,
gentlemen.” I shoved up off the ground, brushing the dust off my
clothes with little-to-no success. “We need to get something for
dinner, or I’m going to eat Pueblo.”

Estéban snorted at me, while Terrence gave me
a puzzled glance under his bushy eyebrows. “What the hell is a
Pueblo?”

We meandered toward the main house with a
feeling of accomplishment that only comes from working with your
hands. Hell, I even felt pretty good about myself, and all I’d done
was watch and hand them things.

Dinner was well underway in the Perez
kitchen, but Carlotta was conspicuously absent. Instead, a rather
lovely woman – “My cousin Alejandro’s wife, Veruca,” Estéban
reminded me quietly – scolded us all in rapid Spanish until we
lined up at the sink to scrub our hands.

While we cleaned up, the first wave of the
dinner crowd – Estéban’s younger siblings and several cousins I
hadn’t met yet – scarfed down their food and then scattered to the
four winds, leaving the long table ready to be filled again.

By some unspoken signal, my roommates
appeared about the same time we sat down, the adolescent boys
jostling each other and conversing in loud, joyful voices. Like
most teenage males, they didn’t seem to care what food they shoved
in their faces, so long as there was a lot of it. With most of the
conversation in Spanish, I could catch maybe every fifth comment,
but that didn’t keep me from enjoying the meal. There was something
about being absorbed into a large family that just made things all
right. I even caught Terrence chuckling and shaking his head a time
or two, though he’d probably deny it.

Sveta showed up shortly thereafter, with no
hint as to where or how she’d spent her day. She simply stared at
one of the boys – Thing 1, I thought – until he squirmed under her
gaze and scooted over to make room for her. After that, the
conversation came to an awkward halt, more than one pair of dark
eyes fixating more on the beautiful woman at the table than the
plates of food in front of them.

“Have a good day, Sveta?” I raised a brow at
her.

“Mmf.” Fine. Whatever she’d been up to, she
was going to keep it to herself for now. She fished her boot knife
out, using it to spear some sliced mango, and the boys decided to
make themselves scarce in a mass exodus that was usually reserved
for things like shouting “Fire!” in a theater. I didn’t miss the
faint smirk that curved her lips as she nibbled delicately at the
fruit impaled on her blade.

“
Oye, Estéban
!” Paulito’s shout
preceded him, and even then he only hung his head inside the back
door, grinning rakishly. I only got about half the words in his
question, but Estéban turned to look at me.

“The older boys are going down into town. He
wants to know if I want to go.” There was uncertainty in his dark
eyes, as if he wasn’t sure he had permission to just
be
a
teenager. That made me sad. I’d worked real hard when he was in
Missouri to make sure he got to do kid things, too.

“You should go. Have fun.” When he hesitated,
I bopped him on the nose with a rolled up tortilla. “But I’m not
saving you any food, so you’re going to starve.”

He gave me a smirk and snatched the tortilla
out of my hand, devouring it in two bites. “Not if you don’t move
faster.” He gave Paulito a nod indicating that he was coming, and
then disappeared out the door to answering whoops of excitement
from the crowd of guys waiting for him.

“It’s good, you know.” I glanced over at
Terrence’s interjection, and he gave me a firm nod. “He’s too young
for these things, these messes we get into. Not right to offer to
give up your life before you’ve even lived it.”

I was inclined to agree with him, for once,
but I knew that Estéban would fight the notion that he could have a
normal life. Lord knew, I wasn’t the best example either.

I tried, oh sure, I tried. I had Mira, and
Anna, and a baby on the way. One point five kids and a dog, right?
I had a normal job working in retail, and I mowed the lawn and
cooked dinner and did laundry, just like anybody. But in the past
year I had been mauled by a hellhound, chased by spider-monkey
zombie things, and nearly squashed flat by a monster made of living
clay. My house was ringed with the most powerful magical wards
created by multiple casters. I currently carted around two hundred
and seventy-five souls that weren’t mine, and I truly believed that
at any given moment, a demon was going to pop out of nowhere to
take them, any way it could.

Poster boy for normal I was not.

But I’d made that choice when I was an adult.
Well old enough to know better, sure, but able to give informed
consent. Estéban wasn’t, despite his efforts to prove me wrong.

Part of me wanted to go talk to Carlotta, to
really plead the case that the kid was simply not ready to take on
the duties they wanted to assign to him. Surely, if they seriously
needed
an active champion, one of the older boys could, one
of the cousins. It was in their blood, too.

I knew, though, that Estéban would never
forgive me if I did. He’d see it as me, doubting his abilities,
which I didn’t. The kid could fight, and he wasn’t going to turn
tail and run at the first sign of trouble. I knew that. I’d seen
it, and he’d saved my bacon. I just wanted him to know that I had
faith in him, but that I didn’t want to see him turned into demon
chow before he ever hit twenty.

With a sigh, I pushed my plate away, no
longer hungry. If this was what being a father was like as your
child grew up, the years ahead of me were going to suck.

The sound of the old pickup truck carried
through the evening air, and there was a chorus of excited childish
chatter, followed by Carlotta’s unmistakable soothing voice. When
she and Rosaline came through the back door, she smiled to see the
three of us still at the table. “Oh, good, there is some dinner
left.”

I stood up to let her take my seat, and took
the big duffel bag away from Rosaline who thanked me with a
grateful smile. “How was your…thing?”

Carlotta chuckled and shook her head as she
fixed her plate. “It was a false alarm. A new mother tends to fret
over things that are quite normal.” Yeah, I remembered a few of
those with Mira when she was pregnant with Anna. They weren’t
always her false alarms, either. I think I did more fretting than
she did. “I do not think the baby will come before next week, but I
have been wrong before, so we will see.”

Rosaline glanced around the room with a
puzzled frown. “Where is Estéban?”

“He went out with Paulito and some of the
older boys. Cousins, I guess?” I shrugged. “Boys’ night out or
something. Said they were going down into town.”

Carlotta paused in the middle of raising her
fork to her mouth. “How long ago did they leave?”

“Um…twenty minutes? Maybe?” I glanced to
Terrence for confirmation, but he only shrugged. When she continued
to frown at her food, I asked, “Was that okay? Should I have made
him stay?”

“No, no. It is all right.” She smiled, but it
was obviously forced.

“Do you want me to go down and find him?” At
the word that we might be leaving, Sveta shoved the last of her
food into her mouth and stood up, ready to go.

Carlotta offered us both a smile again, this
one slightly more genuine. “No, I am certain he will be fine. They
will just be coming in very late, is all. They wake up the little
ones, when that happens.”

Sveta looked back and forth between Carlotta
and I, then sat back down, filling up her own plate again. “Then I
will take his bed, and he can sleep with the
visljuk
.” We
all stared at her, and she frowned. “The animal. The brown animal
that is not a horse.”

“The donkey?”

“Yes!” She pointed her knife at me, and since
she was smiling I was going to assume she wasn’t about to kill me
with it. “The donkey.”

I raised a brow at her. “You slept with the
donkey last night?”

“It was warm. He is pleasant.” She shoved her
plate away again, and wiped her knife blade off on her jeans before
slipping it back into her boot. “I will go walk the perimeter
again. Good evening.”

We all just watched her go for a moment,
before Carlotta broke the silence. “But…the
burro
bites.”

Well apparently, he bites everyone but Sveta.
Or maybe she bites back.

Chapter 8

I spent the rest of the evening completely
immersed in the large, boisterous Perez family. Everyone around me
had a story to tell about Estéban, and I even added a few of my own
from the time he’d lived with me. The only thing we were missing
was the kid himself. I hoped he was having a good time. He’d earned
a bit of rest and relaxation.

We talked and ate and laughed until even the
adults were yawning, and Carlotta finally issued the edict that it
was bed time. Obediently, we all wandered off to our assigned
bunks.

True to her word, no sooner than I’d made
myself as comfy as possible on my cot, Sveta sauntered in and
hauled herself up into Estéban’s bed with one arm and a graceful
swing of her leg. Thankfully, she wasn’t dressed just in a T-shirt
and panties, but the faded sweat pants she had on looked
suspiciously like… “Hey, those are mine!”

The smirk she gave me very clearly dared me
to take them back from her, and I really couldn’t do anything but
glare. God, it was worse than having a little sister.