A Snake in the Grass (16 page)

Terrence rubbed his nose with one gnarled
finger, making way more noise than that gesture should normally
make. “Was bound to happen sooner than later. Been a miracle you
got by this long.”

“Yeah, the honeymoon is obviously over. Best
thing we can do is vacate, try to buy some time.”

“Jesse…” It was Estéban who spoke up first, a
frown darkening his young face. “What good do you think running
will do?”

“You heard the thing, kid. It saw me clear as
day, and that little critter isn’t strong enough to keep that
knowledge to itself. If something bigger and badder doesn’t know
already, it’s a matter of hours, days if we’re lucky, and then
they’ll come for me. Best place for me to be is ‘not here.’”

“You don’t know that. Besides, where will you
go?” I hated to have my own thoughts echoed back to me out of an
eighteen-year-old’s mouth, but he wasn’t wrong.

“I don’t know. Maybe… Italy. Maybe the
Knights Stuck-up-idus can help.” I didn’t have a great opinion of
the Catholic order of demon slayers, the Order of St. Silvius, but
if there was anywhere that was truly going to be demon-proof, I
figured the Vatican had to be it. Judging by Terrence’s dismissive
snort, he didn’t really like them either. “Or…hell, just stay on
the move, maybe. One step ahead of them.” Stay on the move, don’t
go anywhere near my wife, or my children. Christ.
Mira…

Someone pressed a cup of steaming coffee into
my hands, and I looked up into Carlotta’s very calm, very serene
face. “There is nowhere in the world safer than this place, Jesse.
Even if an army of hell-spawn came charging up the mountain, these
wards would hold. They have stood in place for more generations
than you can imagine.”

“The whole charging demon army image isn’t
exactly comforting, Carlotta.”

She patted my hand. “Regardless. You have
time to make plans. There is no reason to go rushing off into an
uncertain situation. You will stay for the
fiesta
tomorrow,
and the ceremony honoring Miguel. Señor Smythe and I will attempt
again to devise a vessel for the souls. We will proceed as we had
planned in the beginning.”

I sighed and sipped the coffee. “I don’t want
to put your family in danger.”

“It is what we do, Jesse.” That from Estéban,
his hands resting on his mother’s shoulders and his eyes looking
way older than he had any right to.

I glanced to Terrence, who just shrugged his
shoulders. “I just want to go back to bed.”

With a sigh, I threw up my hands in defeat.
“Fine. Then someone better tell Sveta before she gets everything
loaded in the truck.”

“That’d be me then.” Terrence shoved away
from the table and went shuffling into the back of the house,
muttering again about the crazy bint.

“You too,
mi hijo
. To bed. You have an
important day tomorrow.” I guess it spoke to how exhausted Estéban
was that he didn’t protest being treated like a wayward child. He
kissed his mother on the cheek, then stumbled toward the back of
the house, his arm wrapped around his ribs. That told me he had
more injuries than I’d previously noticed. Oh well. If he thought
he was man enough to take it, he was welcome to it.

Carlotta settled down on the bench next to
me, her own cup of coffee cupped in her hands. “I should not drink
this at this time of night. I will never get to sleep. But I find
the heat soothing.”

I made a small noise of agreement, nursing
the dark liquid in tiny sips. It was good just to have something to
do with my hands. We sat together in companionable silence for a
long time, just listening to the clock over the kitchen sink tick
away the night hours. Finally, I sighed, pushing the cup away from
me. “What are you going to do about Paulito?”

“I do not know.” Carlotta stared into her cup
as if all the answers would appear there. “I do not know this boy
who has taken my Paulito’s face. He may not be my son, but I have
always treated him as one of them, like I would any of my nephews
or nieces. My Paulito, he would not have committed this crime.”

“But he did. I heard it from his own mouth,
and he said it real easy. It wasn’t his first time. Estéban said he
knows more than one demon to call. You need to figure out where
he’s getting this information.”

She nodded, weariness and sorrow deepening
the faint lines around her eyes, her mouth. “He will tell me, I
think, if I ask. Surely, someone has placed this evil into his
mind. I cannot believe that he would seek it out on his own.”

“Sometimes, people aren’t who we think they
are, Carlotta. Even people we’ve loved for a long time.”

A ghost of a smile twitched at the edges of
her mouth. “You know, my husband’s father was named Paulo. That is
why so many of the boys bear that name now. Even Estéban. But when
Paulito was born, everyone said that he looked just like his
abuelo
, and so he became Little Paulo. Even now, as a grown
man, he remains Paulito.”

“Little Paulo is dabbling in things that are
going to get him killed, and that’s if he’s lucky. I couldn’t see
his arm, to know if he’s given up his soul or not, but if he’s gone
this far, it’s only a matter of time.” I reached out to take her
hand, squeezing it a little. “Once that happens, I have seen the
truly terrible things they can do to him. It will be bad.”

Somewhere in the mountains of Colorado, there
was a creature wandering around with only half an arm remaining, no
voice of her own, and a hunger that had no way to be satisfied.
Neither living nor dead, that thing that I’d left up there was just
one punishment that a demon could inflict on a person when they
owned their soul. The last thing in the world I wanted to see was
Estéban have to go put his own cousin down because Paulito tried to
eat someone’s face.

After a moment, she squeezed my hand back. “I
will speak to him tomorrow at the
fiesta
. I believe that he
will allow me to help him. We will have it sorted quickly and there
will be no more of this.” Patting me on the hand, she deposited her
cup in the sink and went to return to the room she was currently
sharing with Rosaline.

That left me all alone in the kitchen, a cup
of cooling coffee on the table in front of me. Wearily, I just lay
my head down on my arms, feeling the grain of the wood under my
skin. Immediately, I could feel the soul-drunkenness setting in,
and I was too tired to stop it, letting it wash over my senses. The
humming started in my ears, the sound of the very air around me,
and my skin prickled with the feeling of tiny particles of dust
landing on me.

The surface under my face was an old table,
and it had fed countless members of this family. If I trailed my
fingertips across the surface, I could almost feel the dips and
crevices in the wood, like canyons to my heightened senses. I could
smell traces of dinners and breakfasts like there were platters of
food in front of me, and the faintest sounds of laughter and voices
tickled at my ears, the ghosts of long-forgotten conversations.

It would be so easy to close my eyes, to just
lose myself in the overwhelming feelings. No more worries about
souls, or demons, or champions or anything. Just drifting along
from one sensation to the next.

You’d waste away. Just shrivel up and blow
away on the wind
. I knew the little voice in my head was right.
I think there was even a myth like that, a guy who starved to death
because he just couldn’t quit staring at beautiful stuff.

As my gaze followed one curl of steam from my
coffee cup swirl up into the air, I felt like I could follow the
individual water molecules as they cooled and dispersed into the
kitchen air. I could have watched them forever.

With effort, I pushed back the stars in my
vision and sat up. The clock on the stove said that I’d lost two
hours in that little episode, and I shivered a little. Dangerous.
The power I was currently hauling around was too damn dangerous for
any one person to have. They needed to be somewhere else, and soon,
‘cause honestly, I wasn’t sure that I was strong enough not to get
lost in it. Maybe more importantly, I wasn’t sure I was a good
enough person not to use it if needed.

Though my body knew it was hungry – I hadn’t
eaten for hours, I realized – my stomach felt unsettled. Not to
mention it was somewhere around the darkest armpit of night, and
clanking around in the kitchen was the surest way to wake up the
family. And I already knew that sleep wasn’t going to come easily,
if at all. That left just one thing to do.

Outside, the night was mountain-air cool,
though we really weren’t at a very high altitude. Still, I stripped
off my shirt, hanging it over the side mirror of the pickup truck,
and did a few stretches to warm up my muscles. I unlaced my boots,
feeling the dry dust and gravel under the soles of my feet. For
just a moment, I wanted to stop and examine that, catalogue the
different textures, the high crags and low valleys of the tiny
pieces of rock I stepped on, and ruthlessly I bit the inside of my
cheek until it bled. The pain helped, and the fuzziness around the
edges of my vision receded.

The katas were easy. After so many years, so
many repetitions, my body flowed through the forms without any
conscious direction from my brain. I honestly couldn’t even tell
you how many I actually know, but I made it my mission to get
through as many as I could. There was something simple in feeling
how my muscles moved and bunched, stretched and flexed. There was
power there, my own power that had nothing to do with magic or
souls or spells. Sheer kinetic energy, and I could use it for
something good, like exercise, or something wholly destructive. I
could kill, just as easily as not, but other than demons, that had
never been my choice. And it was the choice that made the man. I
had to remember that.

The night birds, once they became accustomed
to my presence, set up their usual cacophony of calls, and a small
family of bats darted and whirled just out of my reach, drawn by
the insects that were clustering around the single light I’d left
burning. It would have been easy to drift into their dance, just
standing and watching how they darted and twirled above me, but
every time my mind started to stray, I brought my
bushido
teachings to mind.

The first thing that popped into my head was
from the
Hagakure
. If you are caught in a rainstorm, it
doesn’t do any good to go running and hiding under shelter. You’re
going to get soaked anyway. Okay, maybe it’s a bit obscure, but it
was what spoke to me. See, the basic idea is, if you know the
outcome is inevitable, then railing against it isn’t going to do
you a bit of good. The demons were going to come for me. That much
was a given. It could be in a few hours, it could be in a few days,
hell, it could be twenty years from now. Time really didn’t mean a
lot to them, not like it does to us. I needed to just man up and go
walking in the rain. It can’t hurt you if you know it’s coming.

The second thing that floated to the surface
of my mind as I worked was a comment on marriage. See, the samurai
believed that you should always treat your wife as you did when you
were first together, and then you would always be happy. Man, I
really hoped I did that one. Mira was the brightest light in my
very dark world. Even when I couldn’t be with her, I hoped that she
felt treasured. I didn’t deserve her, and I knew it. She put up
with so much crap because of me, ranging from my blatant disregard
for my own personal safety to the very real possibility that she
would do herself serious harm casting a spell to save my life
someday.

I’m sure I looked like a crazy man, spinning
and kicking and punching all by myself out in the darkness, my only
company being my very long shadow cast by the kitchen light. I
worked until my muscles gave up burning as a lost cause, and even
the tattoos on my back seemed to have stilled out of sheer
exhaustion.

It was the last teaching that kept me out
there, the one that I just couldn’t get out of my head. Ironically,
it is also the first teaching of
bushido
: the essence of the
bushido
is death. To do nothing, and live, is a worse
disgrace than to die trying.

It was one of those things that I knew, but I
couldn’t say that I honestly
knew
until recently. A tiny
part of me always thought I’d find a way out of most of the
dangerous shit I’d done. That little part of me believed I was
immortal, like all dumb young males ever. I’d come close to death
before, sure, but until I stood there in that driveway, chest
heaving and skin full of more life force than I could ever possibly
contain, I don’t think I’d ever
felt
it close before. Death
was near. It was just a matter of time.

Chapter 11

I think the sun was coming up by the time I
snuck into the room I was sharing with the Perez boys. Estéban was
curled up snoring in his bunk, so I had to assume that Sveta was
once again snuggled up with the donkey, which was just too much
weird for my brain to even handle at that state of tired.

Even as my head hit the flat little pancake
they were calling a pillow, I heard Carlotta’s house slippers
whispering down the hallway and knew that breakfast and the chaos
that went therewith would be occurring soon. My stomach gave a
half-hearted growl at the thought of food, but the rest of me said
“screw you, I’m sleeping,” and I didn’t really think about anything
after that for a while.

The smell of a fried pork product of some
type woke me, and I opened one eye to find Estéban waving a plate
full of food back and forth in front of my face. He gave me a small
smirk, marred only slightly by the bruises on his face and sat the
plate down on the floor. “The family is starting to arrive for the
fiesta. You have about twenty minutes before Mama comes to wake you
herself and presses you into chores.”