A Snake in the Grass (10 page)

I already had one death on my conscience. One
soul, burned up to power a magic I hadn’t even realized I was
using. Someone, somewhere, dead to save my life. It ate at me,
coming back to nip at the edges of my thoughts at inopportune
moments. Didn’t matter that I hadn’t known what would happen, or
even what I was doing at that moment. Soul-drunk, I’d started
calling it, high with the sheer amount of life force that had
surged into my body upon Gretchen’s death.

It had eased up in the time since, but
sometimes, when my guard was down, they’d flare up into my eyes
again and I could see everything in that moment. Things like air
currents, and infinitesimal imperfections in a flat surface. Water
pulsing through plant leaves and the exhales from sleeping garden
rodents, well hidden from normal sight.

It was hard to pull myself out of that, too
easy to get lost in the minute wonders of the world. The first
time, it had scared Mira to death. She had to slap me to bring me
back to myself, and then she cried for an hour. I think she was
afraid that one day, my mind would go walkabout, and wouldn’t be
able to wander back. I was afraid of that too.

Realizing that my eyes had fixated on a knot
in a board for the last five minutes, I squeezed them shut and
pressed the heels of my palms against them. I had to watch it, or
I’d drift off, just like I feared.

“You all right?” Something nudged my boot,
and I nodded at Terrence’s gravelly question. “C’mon then. Herself
wants you standing.”

I got to my feet, dropping my T-shirt on the
bench, then moved to the center of the room as Carlotta indicated.
“I get to keep my pants, right?”

“Hm. So far.” Both practitioners walked slow
circles around me, looking me over from head to toe, so I just
rested my hands atop my head and held the pose. Occasionally, one
of them would reach out to touch my back, getting a couple of good
jumps out of me. “Hold still.”

“I’m ticklish!”

Terrence snorted at that, then took over my
former seat on the bench, leaning both hands on his cane. “You can
see that they’re dug in hard. Not just sitting on the surface, no,
they’re soaked all the way in to the muscle and bone.” Well that
didn’t sound encouraging.

“I’ve never seen the like.” Carlotta’s voice
was a mixture of awe and serious contemplation. “I have no idea how
to remove them, let alone remove them without harming them, or
Jesse.”

“Well, what I’m thinking is, they need a
vessel. We can’t just return them to their homes, because they were
given up willingly, and because we don’t know who they all belong
to, so we can’t just go askin’ them to take their souls back pretty
please.” Terrence’s accent got thicker, I realized, when he was
truly concentrating on what he was doing.

“Hm. Yes. A new host of some kind, willing to
keep them safe.”

“Or maybe somethin’ non-livin’. A talisman to
bind them to, or some kind of holy relic.”

Again, they lapsed into talking amongst
themselves, and left me just standing there feeling poked and
prodded. A lab rat, that’s what I was. “Uh, can I put my shirt back
on?”

“No.” From both of them, in unison, and they
didn’t even miss a beat in their conversation.

“Perhaps we are thinking too large,” Carlotta
finally remarked. “Perhaps it would be easier to extract them one
at a time, rather than all at once.”

This was gonna hurt. I just knew this was
going to hurt.

Terrence snorted again. “If you can figure
out how to get even one of them out, you’re a better spell-worker
than I. Honestly, I’m not sure we can get them out unless they
actually
want
to leave.”

Now that was an interesting thought. The
souls had left Gretchen and come into me because of the terms of
her demon contract. Those circumstances had been laid down and
cemented long before I’d ever met her. However, with no deal on my
part, no rules and regulations set, what was going to govern the
passing of these souls on to someone else, if the souls themselves
weren’t willing to be passed?

“What…what happens to them if I die while I
still have them?” I hadn’t asked that question before, and I was
pretty sure neither of the casters with me had the answer, but it
was one of those things that needed to be out in the open. What
was
going to happen, upon my death, if I still held these
two hundred and seventy-five lives?

As expected, neither of them answered me, but
I could feel the weight of the looks they exchanged behind my back.
Finally, I felt Carlotta’s warm had come to rest on my shoulder,
just above the highest of the shiny white marks. “That is not going
to happen.”

Her voice sounded a thousand times more
confident than I felt.

Chapter 7

I’d like to say that Carlotta and Terrence
put their heads together and magicked me up a cure, but it quickly
became apparent that the only thing they were going to put their
heads together for was to lock horns. About three hours into their
experiments, my back was burning like fire from the constant
mystical poking and prodding, and my head was pounding from the
incessant bickering. Terrence had dubbed Carlotta “you old bat” and
Carlotta only muttered darkly in Spanish at him in return. I knew
those words. Those weren’t polite words.

I honestly couldn’t even tell you what they
were fighting about. It started when Terrence tried to use gin and
his cane to mark out a protective circle around me on the floor,
and just got increasingly ridiculous from there. They disagreed
about everything, up to and including basic tenets of Christianity
–and trust me, Anglican versus Catholic wasn’t even that much of a
stretch, they just wanted something to argue about – and how it
applied to working magic. When they finally got around to bickering
about the type of bees that made the wax in the candles, I’d had
enough.

“Oh dear God, get a room.” I scuffed my foot
across the chalk line on the floor – Carlotta had won that argument
– and the magical circle broke with a faint pop of pressure in my
ears and the scent of cloves. I went to slump on the bench, letting
my head rest in my hands. “I’m calling a break here, folks.”

“Working the boy too hard. Old bat.” Terrence
hobbled over to sit beside me like he was my long lost best friend,
and glared at Carlotta.

“
Idiota borracho
,” she grumbled at him
in return, and took a seat on the bench opposite us, arranging her
long skirt neatly. “We are getting nowhere, and honestly, I do not
know if the pain we are causing you is worth the effort. It may be
more beneficial for us to work on the theory of this for a while,
without your presence.”

I looked skeptically between the two of them.
“Do you really think you can play together unsupervised?” The
absolute lack of amusement on both faces was identical, and if I
was a bit more suicidal, I would have laughed.

Before we could hash out any more details,
there was a knock at the door, and Rosaline’s voice. “Mama
Carlotta?”

“Come inside, Rosaline.” The door swung open,
and Rosaline gave us all a bright grin before setting her gaze on
Carlotta. “Señora Alvarez. She is calling for you.”

Carlotta heaved herself up off the bench with
a decisive shake of her skirts. “Well, that ends this for today.
Babies do not wait. Fetch my bag, Rosa.” She glanced back once, to
fix Terrence with a stern look. “Do not touch my things, I will
gather them up when I return.”

“As if I’d want to touch anything of hers…”
The old grouch muttered at Carlotta’s back, but I noticed it wasn’t
loud enough for her to actually hear him. “All right, you, go make
yourself useful elsewhere. I’ve got work to do.”

You don’t have to tell me twice. I bailed
before anyone could change their minds, yanking my T-shirt on as I
beat a hasty retreat. The burning sensation in my skin eased as
soon as my back was covered, as if the souls knew they weren’t
going to be assaulted anymore for a while.

The Perez compound was bustling with life as
I made my way back toward the main house. Children ran across my
path, playing games and shouting to each other. A few of them even
paused to give me grins, then darted off again. There were women at
a few of the other buildings, hanging out laundry on lines, or
shaking dust out of rugs. I nodded and waved when they noticed me,
but I couldn’t have told you any of their names. There were just so
many people.

No one was in the kitchen when I sauntered
through, so I grabbed a stray orange out of the bowl and headed out
the back door to keep looking. Wasn’t hard to locate Estéban, all I
had to do was follow the sound of a pounding hammer.

As promised earlier, my protégé was working
on the fence for the goat pen, nails sticking out of his mouth as
he carefully hammered the loose boards back into place and replaced
a few that had gotten too chewed or rotten to be of use anymore. He
didn’t even hear me coming until my shadow fell across him, and he
looked up, blinking against the sun.

“You need some help there?”

He spit the nails out into his hand before
answering. “No, I’m almost finished.” Standing, he stretched with a
grimace, proving that he’d been at it a long time. “I do not
understand why it was allowed to get like this. Paulito could have
made repairs, or anyone really. This didn’t need to wait for
me.”

“Maybe they just didn’t think it was
important. I mean, it looks like the goats are all still here,
right?” One of the furry beasts, all wiry black fur and gnarled
horns, looked at us and gave a disgusted “blaaaah!”

“Only because of Pueblo.”

“Who’s Pueblo?”

“That’s Pueblo.” He pointed toward some
scrubby shade trees across the lot, and at first I didn’t see
anything. Then, the shadows shifted a little, and I realized I was
looking at a dun colored donkey, the creature’s ears perked and his
gaze fixed on us as if he knew we were talking about him. Standing
under the low hanging branches, the dappled light broke up the tan
form and made him almost invisible if he remained still.

“That’s a donkey.”

“Mhmm. Best guard dog you can have. He will
not let the coyotes get to the babies, and he keeps the goats
together if they get out.”

“But…that’s a donkey.” Despite my rural-ish
origins, I am so not a farm guy.

“
Burro
.”

“Whatever.”

The kid chuckled at me, gathering up his
tools. “Come on. We will wash up and then find lunch.”

I offered him a few sections of my orange as
we walked to the tool shed. “Your mom had to run off on a baby
thing, so looks like I’m free for the afternoon. Any more repairs
need to be done?”

“I haven’t had a chance to look around yet.
Probably. Where is Sveta?”

I shrugged, my mouth full of orange, then
helpfully added, “Dunno. Said she was going to walk the perimeter
or something, but that was at breakfast.” If I had to wager, she
wasn’t too far away. She struck me as the
lurk-in-the-shadows-and-watch type. That thought made the souls
across my shoulders ripple uncomfortably, and I had to remind them
(and myself) that Sveta was on our side.

The tool shed was more of a small barn, and
as we went in to store the hammer and a few other things, a
tarp-covered shape caught my eye. If I didn’t know better, I’d say
that looked like… “Is that a motorcycle?”

Estéban glanced to where I was pointing, and
tensed up so hard he almost tripped over his own two feet. I caught
his elbow until he could find his balance again. “Hey, you
okay?”

“That is Miguel’s motorcycle.” Ah. Oops. I
watched him as he tucked his tools away, noting the uncomfortable
hunch to his lanky shoulders. His eyes kept going back to that
dusty tarp in the corner, and his jaw was clenched so tight I
thought he was going to grind his teeth to powder.

I just stood silently, watching him struggle
with whatever it was going on in his head. After a few moments, he
sighed, resting his hands on the workbench in front of him and
hanging his head. “He was working on it, you know, before. He
didn’t get to finish it. I don’t think it even runs.”

“Can I look at it?” He nodded his permission,
so I went over to strip the tarp off the bike, sending clouds of
dust swirling into the air. Crouching down, I examined what I had
revealed.

It wasn’t anything special, just an old dirt
bike in a state of semi-disassembly. Looked like it had been red
and blue at some point in its life, but it had been used hard, and
the paint was more scuffed and scraped than solid color. A small
box of parts rested behind the front wheel, obviously a project in
mid-completion that someone had expected to come back to shortly.
He never made it.

“Miguel was teaching me about engines. He
said once we were done with this one, we would find one for me.” I
could hear a ghost of a smile in his voice as he came to stand
behind me. “Mamá would have freaked out, so we weren’t going to
tell her until we were done.”

Secret plans, promises between brothers. I
knew how that was. Cole and I had made a few of our own, back in
the day.

“Didn’t know you knew about engines.” Funny
how you can live with a guy for over a year and still know so
little about him.

He crouched down beside me, hand resting on
the handlebars to hold his balance. “I don’t know it well. Like I
said, he was teaching me.”

“Maybe you can finish this yourself, then. If
you can find someone to help.”

“Maybe.” Absently, like he wasn’t even aware
of what he was doing, he picked up a small socket wrench, twirling
it between his fingers. “We spent hours out here. We’d go in for
dinner, covered in grease, and Mamá would yell at us for not
washing up. Miguel would just give her this grin, and then it was
all okay. I think he was her favorite.”