A Snake in the Grass (27 page)

The legs were animal-like, bringing the thing
up to stand on its toes, powerful thighs ready to propel it
forward. More bone spikes had grown out of the spine, clear up the
back of the neck and protruding out the top of the skull, and when
it finally turned to look at us, the face was…indescribable.
Suffice to say that there were fangs everywhere, and more of that
dark, chitinous armor.

The monster-formerly-known-as-Paulito turned
its whole body, the neck frozen in one position by the extrusions
of bone and armor, and its gaze zeroed in on Estéban. Opening its
gaping maw, it bellowed, and the sound shook the night.

“Run, kid!” But he had nowhere to go. We were
in the middle of nowhere, with no cover, nothing to hide behind or
take shelter in.

The creature sprang, its impossible limbs
launching it a good ten feet in the air. Esteban waited until the
very last second, then dove out of the way, rolling to his feet as
the thing crashed down where he’d been just seconds before.

Whatever was left of Paulito in there, it
obviously remembered the grudge against his cousin, because the
monster kept focused on the kid like I wasn’t even there. As
stealthily as I could, I tried to circle closer, intending to
reclaim the fallen machete and join in on the fight. Turns out, I
wouldn’t need to.

The thing swiped at Esteban with the thin,
claw-tipped fingers, and screeched as they met spell-blessed metal.
The Way was wickedly sharp and layered with so much magic, it
sliced through shell and bone like it was butter.

The kid was fast, as fast as I was really,
and that was what saved him. The creature was ungainly, unbalanced,
and it cornered like a brick. Estéban darted under its reach,
slicing at where hamstrings should be, and the thing bellowed in
pain, dropping to its…knees? On all fours, it looked more pathetic
than dangerous, but it tried to lunge at the kid again as he came
around in front of it.

Estéban only stepped back a foot or so,
removing him safely from the range of the thing’s slavering jaws.
“
Vaya con Dios, primo
.” And the katana came down, a perfect
strike. The gruesome head bounced once on the flattened grass, and
the huge body slowly toppled over to land on its side. A pool of
dark fluid slowly formed under the severed neck.

“Yessssss……!” We both whirled at the voice,
turning to find Reina still standing there. I’d totally forgotten
about her. “Yes! It is done!”

The ground beneath our feet gave a sudden
lurch, and a crack opened up in the earth, splitting the clearing
right down the center. All I could do was try to keep my feet as
the quake vibrated down to the very core of the mountain we stood
on. It went on forever, it seemed, and when things were finally
still, Estéban and Reina stood on one side of a six-foot-wide
crevasse, and I stood on the other.

Estéban, still with my sword in his hand,
turned to face the woman. “What have you done?”

The dark woman threw her head back and
laughed, a joyous carefree sound. “Oh, I did nothing. You did it,
little champion. It was all you.
Gracias
.” And with one
negligent wave of her hand, an unseen force hit Estéban hard enough
to throw him a dozen yards, and when he landed, he didn’t move
again.

“Kid!” I started to run forward, only to find
myself on the crumbling edge of the opening in the earth. In the
dark, it was impossible to tell how deep it was, and even with a
running start, I wasn’t sure I could clear it.

“Be careful, soul-bearer.” Reina sauntered
forward, her hips swaying artfully as she approached. “After all of
this, I would hate to have to fish you out of a hole in the
ground.” She peered over into the chasm, shaking her head in
obvious amusement.

The souls in my back stilled, suddenly, the
first time since this whole thing started that I hadn’t felt them
creating a riot under my skin. I felt them watching her warily,
like rabbits under a hawk’s shadow. “Who are you?”

She chuckled, shrugging her bare shoulders.
“Reina will serve our purposes, I suppose. It means ‘queen’ in
their language, did you know? Though how you all keep such things
sorted in your tiny brains, I will never understand.”

“It’s you.” I knew it, even as the words
escaped me. “You’re not working for the first…you
are
the
first.”

She smiled coquettishly, shrugging again. “It
is one way I am known, yes. Though there are some that would argue
whether or not I am
the
first, or simply
a
first.”
Her smile took on a dark gleam, and she tilted her head, eyeing me
up and down. “Some like your dear friend, The Architect.”

A chill ran down my back, and I was suddenly
very aware of Axel’s spell. I’d only heard him called The Architect
one other time, and I still didn’t know why. “I don’t know what you
mean.”

Reina snorted her disgust. “You reek of The
Architect. Do you think I cannot smell it on you, the stench? He
sent you, did he not? You can return to him and tell him that you
failed. I walk the earth once again, free.”

The spellstones had gone dark, I realized.
The moon was just barely peeping over the trees, not quite full,
and the light we stood in was white, not green. “The ancient
priests…they didn’t defeat a great evil here.”

“No. Oh, they tried, valiant little things.
But all they were able to do was confine me here, temporarily.”

“A thousand years or so is an odd definition
of temporary.” One step at a time, I started making my way along
the edge of the crevasse. If I couldn’t go over it, I’d have to go
around it. I had to get to Estéban.

“For your short-lived kind, yes, I suppose it
is.” She strolled along with me, like we were taking a flirtatious
jaunt through the woods on a moonlit night. “In recent decades,
though, the bindings started to weaken. I was able to project my
image out, a little farther every year. Trying to make contact, you
see.”

She paused, looking down, and I realized
she’d come upon what was left of Paulito. “He was so easy to
manipulate. So much hate and envy.” Nonchalantly, she nudged the
massive body with one foot, toppling it over into the gaping hole
in the ground. “I told him what he wanted to hear, and he brought
me what I needed to break the bonds.”

“Blood.”

“Death.” Her eyes flashed red for the first
time, lighting up the night for a heartbeat. “A human death, to be
specific. I knew, if I could get both of them here, that one of
them would die. It didn’t matter which one.” The glare in her eyes
died down, and she smiled at me again. “I was not counting on you,
though. The soul-bearer. Even here, in my prison, they whispered of
you.”

“Yeah, people tend to do that.” I stepped on
something that wasn’t rock, or grass, and it moved slightly under
my boot. Glancing down, I realized that I’d found Estéban’s
machete, forgotten in all the chaos. “So, uh, what’s the plan now?
You’re loose. You’ve got a couple thousand years of movies and pop
culture to catch up on. What’s a single demon do for a night on the
town? Disneyworld?” I ran my mouth, because it’s what I do best,
and slowly tried to work my toe under the hilt of the machete
without her noticing.

She laughed softly, and I was glad that I
could entertain the nice lady demon. “You talk a lot. I mean, you
all do, but you more than most.”

“It’s a gift.”

“And you think that if I reveal my plan to
you that you will be able to stop me in some way? Or perhaps take
the information to The Architect in exchange for some reward?” She
shook her head, her dark hair falling around her face. “Foolish.
First of all, The Architect knows very well what my plan is. My
confinement merely postponed it, it did not change it. Second, I
could tell you every single thing I’m planning, and it wouldn’t
make a bit of difference. The end result is inevitable.”

“That’s some major self-confidence
there.”

“I am eternal. You are less than half a grain
of sand in an infinite hourglass.”

“Nice imagery. Almost modern.”

“I try.” She tilted her head to the side.
“And as amusing as this is – what do you really think you’re going
to do with that blade, anyway? – I find that I am anxious to be
away from this place sooner rather than later. So we must discuss
the multitude of souls that you are carrying with you.”

Well crap. Since she’d seen it anyway, I did
a little kick with my foot to flip the machete up into my hand.
Looked pretty slick, and there wasn’t a single person here to
appreciate it. Story of my life.

I felt better with a blade in my hand, even
if it wasn’t mine. Still had no idea what I was going to do with
it, though. I didn’t think taking on the queen bitch over there was
going to be as simple as sticking the pointy end of a sword between
her ribs.

“The souls are not up for discussion. They’re
mine.” My shoulders grew warm at that, a feeling of approval
radiating out from the tattoos.

“They’re a commodity. They can be bought and
sold, like anything. And I am willing to buy them from you.”

My skin rippled, the souls expressing their
distress at that thought. “What’s the going rate for a soul these
days?” Not that I was actually going to take her up on it, I just
had to buy some time until I figured out what my next course of
action was.

“For these? Oh…I’d say a life would be
sufficient. One pure, untainted life, in exchange for two hundred
and seventy-five souls.”
“My life?” I had to laugh at that. “Listen, lady, I don’t know who
told you I was pure and untainted, but they told you some vicious
lies.”

Reina grinned. “Who said I was speaking of
you?” Her head turned, ever so slightly, and one hand stretched out
toward a dark form on the ground, one I’d been trying very hard not
to think about.
Estéban.
“He has a valiant heart. I can feel
your touch on his soul.”

No…
“Leave him out of this.”

She raised a brow at me. “What is it worth to
you? The advantage is all yours here, you must realize. You get his
life, safe and sound. You rid yourself of your cumbersome burden.
You free yourself of the pursuit that you must know is coming. You
can just…walk away. The alternative is that someone – myself,
perhaps, or maybe your dear Architect – will rip that power out of
you, and leave you a smoking husk on the ground. The souls will
still be gone, and you will have gained nothing.”

“When you put it like that, you make it seem
like there’s no choice.” I couldn’t see well enough to know if
Estéban was still breathing. Reina could be jerking my chain all
along. But if there was a chance… I couldn’t let the kid die. I’m
sure Reina knew that. That was the point, after all.

“No one would blame you, soul-bearer. Under
the circumstances, you are taking the only option you have
available.”

She was right, to a point. Given the choice
to let Estéban die, or give up the souls, yeah, there was only one
acceptable result. However, there was a third option she hadn’t
even considered. Hell, I shouldn’t be considering it. “You forget
one thing.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“I could just take these two hundred and
seventy-five souls’ worth of power, and I could blast your sorry
ass back to Hell where you belong.” I could do it. I’d burned up
one of the souls before to save my own neck. Surely this much mojo
behind a blow like that would be enough to give even a demon as old
as this one pause.

Her eyes narrowed, and for the first time,
the pleasant smile dropped completely. “You would dare that? They
will die, you realize. Every human who gave their soul over to you
for safe keeping will cease to be at that moment. Two hundred and
seventy-five lives sacrificed to save one boy? Is that really what
you want?”

Of course it wasn’t what I wanted. In my
perfect world, we were all going to walk out of this alive, but I
didn’t always get what I wanted. It was a bluff. I just had to hope
I could be convincing enough, for long enough.

I’d forgotten to take into account the souls
themselves. They were aware back there, after a fashion. I could
feel them perk up the moment I suggested burning them up, using
them to banish the Reina-demon. I braced for the pain, preparing to
have my muscles knotted into uselessness, but it never came.

Instead, the tingling sensation, the
ever-present zing that told me they were there, started to spread.
The tattoos spread up the back of my neck, into my hair, and down
my arms, until I could see them shining white in the darkness as
they coiled around my wrists, like frost on glass as they covered
my hands. Under my jeans, it was the same, the feeling of hot-cold
threads tracing designs on my skin, all the way down to the soles
of my feet. The dark clearing lit up like someone had turned on a
floodlight, and all of it came from me, blazing in the night.

I might be bluffing, but the souls were not.
They made it perfectly clear that they had chosen, and I could feel
a deep satisfaction from them, as if deciding their own purpose had
been all they wanted all along.

“I don’t know that what I want is going to
matter very much.” They closed over my eyelids last, and I blinked
out of reflex at the brightness. When I opened them again, I was
again spell-sighted, the dim stars above us now excruciating in
their clarity. Each and every blade of grass that swayed in that
clearing drew my attention. The odors of old and new magic, of
sulfur and cloves and rotting, decaying flesh threatened to choke
me, and I could feel bits of it clinging to the inside of my
lungs.

It was like that first night, the night the
souls had blasted their way into me. I was drunk on it, and even in
the face of certain doom for myself and for my multitude of
passengers, I wanted to laugh with a giddy sense of joy. This was
being alive.