A Snake in the Grass (3 page)

“Oh damn…” Mira’s voice behind me was sad,
and I turned to see her crouch down near the stove, looking at the
shards of purple glass all over the linoleum. “That was my mother’s
vase.” She picked up a few of the bigger pieces, cradling them
gently in her palm. With her head down, her dark curls hung all
around her face, and I think she thought it would hide the
tears.

“Sorry, baby.” Stepping gingerly through the
remnants of the beautiful vase – Mira had thought to put shoes on,
I hadn’t. – I bent down to wrap my arms around her. “I’ll clean it
up for you, why don’t you go back to bed?”

She almost succeeded in hiding the sniffle.
“No. No, I’m up now. I’ll get it. Here, help me up so I can get the
broom.”

As requested, I laid Sveta’s gun on the
counter and gave my wife an arm to lean on so she could heave
herself back to her feet. Only six-ish months pregnant, but she was
carrying differently with this one than she had with Anna, and her
hips were hurting her already. Watching my wife go through
everything that pregnancy requires always makes me marvel that our
species has survived. If it were up to men, we’d be extinct by
now.

Like a ghost, Sveta padded through the
kitchen behind us and down the hallway, her shaska blade bared like
most of the rest of her. I knew she wouldn’t be happy until she’d
done a sweep and clear of the house, the yard, and possibly the
entire neighborhood block. I just hoped she’d put clothes on before
going outside this time. We’d had to call Cole to get her out of
jail, last go around. Having a cop in the family comes in handy
from time to time.

“Jess?” I glanced back to Mira. “You’re
glowing.” She nodded toward my bared back.

Dammit.
I wasn’t actually glowing, not
to normal eyes, but the unexpected noise in the night had brought
me up battle-ready too, and now that Sveta was under control, I
could feel the souls just under my skin writhing in agitation. Two
hundred and seventy-five of them, ready to spring to my defense if
needed. I knew they were willing, though I couldn’t have told you
how. We’d gotten to know each other fairly well since January, and
they were as attuned to my moods as I was to theirs. It was a very
odd, very unwelcome symbiotic relationship.

It should have been a dream come true for
someone like me. Almost unlimited power to destroy pretty much
anything I wanted. For a champion who had never had magic before,
you’d think I’d be doing a jig on a daily basis and slaughtering
demons left and right. But I knew that if I cast one spell, even
one tiny bit of conjuring, one of those souls would cease to exist.
Poof, burned up, ashes, gone. And the person connected to that soul
would drop dead on the spot. The souls might be willing to make
that sacrifice. I wasn’t.

While my wife flipped the light on and went
about cleaning up the broken glass, I stood in the kitchen and did
a few deep breathing exercises. Slowly, my adrenaline faded and the
riot of movement under my skin died down. “There we go…”

“Five bloody o’clock in the morning, and
everyone’s up traipsing around in their skivvies.” A large grumpy
form shuffled out of the hallway, already reeking of gin and pipe
tobacco. With gray hair sticking out at wild angles, a scruffy coat
of more-salt-than-pepper whiskers, and a heavily patched bathrobe
over possibly moldy house slippers, it looked like something out of
that movie with the puppets and the glam rocker in the tight pants.
You know the one I mean. “Can’t get a solid night’s sleep for all
this bloody noise!”

“Want me to put the kettle on, Terrence?”
Mira was nicer than I was at this hour of the morning.

“Yes, missus, if you would please.” The
curmudgeon shuffled his way over to my kitchen table and plopped
down, producing a hip flask from somewhere in his moth-eaten robe
and taking a swig. “The crazy bint clearing the house?”

“Yeah, Sveta’s taking a look around, but it
was just Chunk being a pest.”

Terrence snorted. “And the one time you think
it’s ‘just’, it’ll be something worse. You let her do her job.” He
eyed me up and down from under his bushy gray eyebrows. “And go put
some pants on, for the love a God and wee fishes.”

“Yessir.” With a sigh, I retreated toward the
back of the house, brushing past Sveta in the hallway as she
returned. “You, too. Pants.” She only grunted at me.

I pounded my fist on one of the closed doors
as I passed. I knew if Terrence was up, he’d roused the kid too.
They made such lovely roommates. “Up! Work!” If I was going to see
the sunrise, then Estéban could see it with me. The kid had been
slacking on his workouts lately anyway. We all had. Hazard of this
new, totally bizarre, living arrangement.

I understood, on a theoretical level, why
Ivan believed I needed bodyguards. One person had already died over
the souls I was now carrying under my skin, and there was no lack
of evil creatures and nefarious doers who would be happy to make me
casualty number two. But I would forever question the old man’s
choice in who he had assigned me.

Sveta I understood, in a “I’m actually kind
of scared of her” way. She was good with every weapon I’d ever seen
her pick up, alert bordering on paranoid, and practical in the cold
way that mercenaries grow to be. She was the only female fighter I
knew of in an occupation that typically chewed up the men and spit
them out if they stepped wrong by an inch. I’d seen her fight once,
years ago, and even then, I knew that I’d never hold my own against
her. It was just a good thing she was on my side.

Terrence, however. Terrence Smythe was what
Great Britain inflicted on us in retribution for that little
revolution we had a few centuries ago. The information on him in
our champion database, Grapevine, was spotty at best, despite my
newly expanded access. I assumed the lack of info was because he
was mostly active before computers were invented. Maybe before the
invention of the abacus.

From what I understood, he had been a
champion in his younger years. He’d survived to become a retired
champion, which told me that at some point, he’d been a badass in
his own right. Now, though, he was pickled on gin more often than
not, and hobbled around with a cane when he thought it might earn
him some sympathy. For him, people fell into two categories: those
with names, and those without. For example, Sveta had been “that
crazy bint” since day one, but Mira was either “Missus” or “Miss
Mira.” Me, I was “you.” Estéban was “boy.” Guess it could have been
worse.

His only redeeming feature, that I could see,
was that as far as magic went, he had it practically oozing out his
pores. I mean, I’d seen strong magic users before. My wife, when
she wasn’t pregnant, was one of the strongest, most precise
spell-casters I knew. I’d met a Maori native who, while completely
untrained, literally had more power in one hair than I did in my
entire body. But Terrence managed to combine the two, and he tossed
spells around like they were water with very few ill effects.
(Though I will say it’s hard to tell the difference between passed
out drunk and passed out spell-sick.)

I retrieved my sweats from the foot of my bed
and paused to examine my back in the mirror. In the dim light from
the bedside lamp, the pale white tattoos were almost impossible to
see, and yet I could have traced each one precisely. In the right
lighting, they would shine like the iridescent scales of a
butterfly’s wing, and they stretched from the tops of my shoulders
down to the waistband of my pants. Elaborate whorls and spirals,
things that connected at impossible angles and twisted through each
other like vines… I caught myself touching one of the ones at the
top and made myself lower my hand. They were mesmerizing, at times,
and it was best not to get caught in it.

I kicked Estéban’s door again as I passed,
and made my way out into the early morning while Terrence and my
wife chatted over tea at the kitchen table. The grass on my lawn
made my bare feet tingle when I stepped off my back patio, and I
rolled my head on my shoulders, letting the goosebumps crawl across
my skin then fade into nothing. Where once that would have been a
sign of danger looming, now it just meant that the souls in my skin
were reacting to the latent magic around me. The tiniest glimmer of
a spell would set them clamoring, friendly magic or not. Nothing
like having your advance warning system completely short-circuited.
The one thing I had always relied on was now completely useless to
me.

Terrence had placed formidable magical wards
around the borders of my yard, something I had long threatened to
do, but never done. That he’d done it with liberal application of
blessed alcohol from his flask (holy gin, kid you not), was
something of a sore point where Mira was concerned, but for the
safety of our unborn child, there was nothing she could do about
it. She was on spell-casting time out at least until the baby was
born. We still had about two and a half months to go.

The sliding glass door opened and closed, and
I felt more than saw Estéban step up beside me in the grass. He
stood out in my mind now, a tall, slender outline, the glimmer of
magic inside him speaking to the barely contained ocean inside of
me. It was eerie, to me, but I’d started to understand that this
was what it was always like for them. Estéban, Mira, Sveta,
Terrence, all the others. They knew each other instinctively, drawn
by like talents. It explained a lot about how Ivan had started
rounding up all the champions, so many years ago. Easier, when you
can just pick a guy out of a crowd and go “Ah yeah, that’s the
one.”

“C’mon, kid.”

He followed me out into the yard without
questioning, silently gliding through the kata forms at my side
like my darker twin. He’d come a long way in the last year or so.
The angry kid that had come to me was calmer now, more thoughtful.
I was pretty sure I couldn’t take credit for that, but I was really
glad to see it. It gave me a little more hope that the kid would
survive whatever life was going to throw at him.

We went through every form I’d taught him,
and I was pleased to see that his movements were almost perfect. He
had a good head for this stuff. I was proud of the kid, but part of
me felt like I had to test him one more time. Just in case it was
the last time.

“What are the seven virtues of bushido?” Part
of his test was to see if he could carry on a conversation and keep
up with the kata at the same time. He knew this one. I knew he knew
it.

“Righteousness, courage, benevolence,
respect, honesty, honor, and loyalty.” Not one movement faltered,
each one punctuated by a correct answer.

“Are you packed?” I abruptly changed
subjects, to see if I could throw him off.

“Yes.”

“Did you get your posters?”

“They’re rolled. Miss Mira is going to mail
them to me later.”

“You get emails and phone numbers for all
your friends?”

“They’re all in my notebook.”

“You got your phone charger?”

“Yes.”

He was leaving, you see. Tomorrow, we were
getting on a plane to Mexico, and I was taking Estéban back to his
mother and the rest of his demon-slaying family. There was a ton
more I could teach him, sure, but now, with things like they were…
I had a target on my back in the most literal sense, and the kid
was just collateral damage waiting to happen. It was time for him
to go home, back where it was safe.

I should have taken him home earlier, but
some pleading on his part (and Mira’s) had convinced me that the
kid should at least be allowed to finish out his senior year of
high school in peace.
“Give him a few months to be normal, Jess.
Please. Once he goes home, you know that’s gone for him.”
What
could I say? When she was right, she was right. So here we were,
end of May, and we were packing the kid up to go home for the first
time in over a year.

Between you and me? I was gonna miss him.

The secondary part of the mission, of course,
was to see if Estéban’s mother, a powerful
bruja
, could
figure out how to rid me of these extra souls without harming me,
or them. Someone, somewhere, had to know how, and while Carlotta
had never heard of such a thing before, she was willing to see if
she could figure it out. I was hoping between she and Terrence,
they could solve this little problem of mine and I could get back
to
my
normal life. For some loose definition of the word
“normal.”

“Jesse?” Estéban stopped in the middle of his
kata, but I finished the last move before I turned to look at him.
“Do you think I’m ready? Tell the truth.”

A year ago, he’d believed with the absolute
certainty of bull-headed youth that he was ready. A year ago, he’d
arrived in Kansas City in pursuit of the demon who had murdered his
older brother. He was guided by fury and bravado, and together,
we’d taken the thing down. Now… Now he asked if he was ready. I was
so damn proud of this kid it hurt.

“I think… I think that it is my strongest
wish that you
never
have to fight another demon battle in
your life, kid.” I watched him wilt on the inside, and kept going.
“But I also know that you will, and I am ninety percent sure that
you’ll live through it. I can’t make you any more ready than you
are, k-…Estéban. Whatever’s left to do has to come from you.”

A ghost of a smile flickered across his face,
and I snaked an arm out to yank him into a quick noogie. “Just
remember I’m older, and faster, and meaner. ’Kay?”

“’Kay.” He shrugged me off with a small
chuckle. “Whose turn is it to come with you to It today?”

“Sveta.” We both made a face. Taking Sveta
out in public was like walking around with a rabid honey badger on
a dental floss leash. But taking Terrence into the mall where I
worked was little more appetizing. The last time I’d worked, I’d
caught him out in front of the store where I worked, berating a
group of kids with fluorescent hair and skinny jeans, informing
them just why they were what’s wrong with the world. Considering
that those kids were my store’s target demographic, you can see how
this wasn’t helpful.