A Snake in the Grass (6 page)

“Oh, Bellita…” The kid got down on his knees
and hugged her tightly. “I will miss you very much, too. But I
promise I will write you letters, so you must practice your reading
every day, all right?”

Anna sniffled, but nodded solemnly. “But
you’re still my big brother, right? For always? Pinky swear?”

“Pinky swear.” He sealed the deal with a
handshake of linked pinky fingers, then stood up with her in his
arms. “And you can walk me out to the car, all right?” He gave me a
significant look over Anna’s head as he turned to head out
front.

Right. A moment alone with Mira. She had
taken the coat again, holding it in her arms like it was going to
fly away without restraint. Her eyes were a little red, but she
wasn’t actively weeping, so I counted that as a good sign. “Hey.
You gonna be okay?”

“Did I seriously just lose my mind and insist
that he take a parka to a nearly tropical environment?”

“Yeah. A little.” I opened my arms and she
stepped into them, her belly interfering just a little with our
usual snuggling position. “It’s okay. He knows you love him.”

She sighed, resting her forehead against my
chest. “I know he needs to go home. I can’t imagine not seeing Anna
for over a year, I’m sure his mother is about to go crazy for
missing him. But the house is going to seem pretty empty without
him.”

“I know.” I rested my chin on top of her
curly head, stroking her back soothingly. “But hey…we’ll still have
Sveta and Terrence. You can mother them. Maybe see if Sveta will
let you paint her nails or something.”

She snorted softly, but her shoulders shook
with silent laughter. “I think I’ll pass.” Finally, she looked up
at me, drawing my head down to kiss me gently. “Be careful. Come
home to me.”

“Always. You know that.” I crouched down to
rest my head against her stomach, but the occupant inside was quiet
at the moment. “You take care of your mom, you hear?” Mira’s
fingers tangled in my hair, and we sat like that for a moment, just
breathing together. Then, something crashed outside and broke the
spell. “Time to go.”

Somehow, we got everyone herded into the car
that was supposed to be there, and no one stashed away that wasn’t
supposed to be – though Anna tried – and with a last few tears and
kisses and dear god would
some
one just drive, we managed to
get on the road.

Kansas City’s airport is actually pretty easy
to navigate, compared to some other places I’ve passed through, and
we arrived with plenty of time to get our bags checked and get
through security.

All four of us had demon slaying gear to pack
– mailing things to Mexico wasn’t an option – and since the
government tends to frown on weapons like that on airplanes, we
were forced to check the heavy duty crates. They were locked and
tagged with all the proper paperwork to ensure that they’d remain
that way, and for extra precaution, Terrence had placed some
magical locks on them too.

As the sky-hops loaded them onto the cart to
wheel them away, I could see the sigils flare into visibility from
time to time. Only to me, though, and presumably the three
champions with me. Ordinary people would never see the magic right
under their noses, and if they did, it could usually be explained
away as a trick of the light, or fatigue. Hopefully, the physical
locks would keep out the airport thieves, and the mystical locks
would keep out…worse things.

Checking our bags was the easy part. Getting
through security, however… That was another issue.

I’d flown a lot in the last few years, I knew
the drill. Anything that even looked like it contained liquid –
like my mace canister – was in my suitcase. I wore my scuffed up
sneakers instead of my combat boots, and I had my key chain
collection of other anti-demon paraphernalia ready to dump into the
bin to go through the scanners. No big deal.

Terrence, on the other hand, would try the
patience of a saint on one of his
good
days. This was not
such a day.

“Sir, you can’t take that on board.” The TSA
agent patiently held his hand out for the silver flask that the old
champion was clutching protectively to his chest.

“It’s for medicinal purposes!”

“Sir, all liquids have to be in a
three-point-four ounce bottle, in a Ziploc bag, and no one believes
that your gin is medicinal.” The security guy looked terminally
bored, and I had to wonder how many times a day he had this
argument.

“You can’t have my flask! It’s real silver,
you know what this costs?”

“Then you’ll have to dump it out, sir.”

From the look on Terrence’s face, that
suggestion seemed tantamount to offering to kick the baby Jesus or
something. “That’s expensive gin!” Even his hair was offended,
standing out from his head in irate disarray.

“I’m sorry, sir, regulations.”

I could see actual security guards starting
to mass off to the side, and knew we were about two more tirades
away from seeing Terrence get strip searched. Leaning close, I
muttered into his ear, “Just go dump it out before they send you
into a little room with a big burly guy and some rubber
gloves.”

With a look of utter disgust at the TSA
agent, Terrence hobbled off toward the restrooms to dump out his
flask, slamming the point of his cane down loudly with every step
just so that the entire world could know that he was pissed off.
When he returned, the smell told me that more of the gin had gone
down his throat than down the sink.

“Sir, we’ll need to x-ray your cane,
too.”

“Oh for the love a Saint Peter. You’ll deny
an old man his cane, too? Is that what we’ve come to in this world
now?”

Before his voice could rise any higher, I
snatched the cane from him and threw it on the conveyor belt. “Get
on the damn plane, Terrence.”

With an insulted sniff, he marched through
the metal detectors – showing no need for the cane, I might add –
displaying his now-empty flask, and collected his cane on the far
side. Behind me, Estéban muttered to himself in Spanish. He and
Mira had been giving me a crash course in Spanish in preparation
for the trip, and I knew none of the words were complimentary. I
was inclined to agree with him. Sure, being old and crotchety meant
that you pretty much got to do whatever you wanted and hang
thoughts of etiquette and proper behavior, but if that was how this
whole trip was going to go, I was seriously thinking about
misplacing Terrence somewhere down in Mexico.

I watched carefully as Sveta passed through
the checkpoint. She looked normal enough. A plain gray T-shirt (she
must have a dozen of the same shirt), jeans, ponytail. And if her
eyes swept the crowds around us with a bit more scrutiny than the
average person, well, nobody seemed to notice. I knew perfectly
well, though, that she had to have at least one weapon on her, if
not more, and when she slipped through without comment, I had to
wonder just where she’d stashed them and what they were made out
of. When she caught me eyeing her, she gave me a raised brow and a
faint smirk. On second thought, never mind where she’d hidden her
weapons. I didn’t need to know that badly.

The first leg of the flight passed without
incident, and we changed planes in Houston with little to no drama.
There would be one more stopover in Mexico City, and then we’d hit
our final destination something like twelve hours after we started.
I mean, what do you say about being in the air that long? The food
sucks, and always looks like it’s about one stray solar flare from
becoming sentient. One airport looks very much like another when
you get down to the nuts and bolts of it. The passengers sitting
around you sometimes change, but they’ve all got that same ‘dear
god let it be over’ look on their faces.

It wasn’t my first long plane trip – wasn’t
even my longest – but there is just something about being forced to
maintain a seated position for that long that is exhausting. My
whole body ached, just thinking about it, and my usual plan for
this sort of this was to just close my eyes and think of England.
(No, not really. Closing my eyes, though, that was on my list.)

My seat was next to the kid’s, and Sveta and
Terrence had been spread out in the rest of the cabin. I made a
solemn vow to myself that if I saw a sky marshal towing Terrence
down the aisle, I was going to swear I didn’t know him. I let
Estéban sit at the window and settled in to reclaim some of the
sleep I’d missed out on last night.

Somewhere near the halfway point, I opened my
eyes to see the kid staring out the window, a pensive look on his
face. “Kid? You okay?”

“I’m fine.” He sighed a little, giving me
that all-purpose teenage shrug. “Just thinking.”

“About?” Estéban was the typical adolescent
male, he viewed ‘talking’ as one of the greatest punishments that
could be inflicted upon him. Sometimes, though, just sometimes,
he’d open up, and when he did, I figured it was best for me to
listen.

“Miguel.”

That was to be expected. I’d been thinking
about him too.

Miguel was one of the kid’s older brothers.
He was one of the first champions I’d ever met, and while he’d been
quite a bit younger than me, he’d been fighting demons for much
longer. He was quick to laugh, always smiling, like the darkness we
dealt with on a daily basis had never touched him. We’d struck up
an instant friendship, and as he’d begun courting the love of his
life, Rosaline, we’d traded demon slaying information for
relationship advice. I’d liked Miguel. A lot.

The last time I’d been to Mexico, it had been
for his wedding. I still had the picture sitting on my desk at
home, Mira and I on one side, Ivan on the other, flanking a young
couple who obviously had no eyes for anyone but each other.

A year later, Miguel was dead, slain in a
rigged demon battle. I’d managed to free his soul, with Estéban’s
help, but it wouldn’t bring him back, and it didn’t make his loss
any easier to those he’d left behind.

I gave the kid a small nod, to let him know
it was okay. “I think about him a lot too. I think he’d be very
proud of you, y’know.”

“Maybe.” His gaze drifted out the window
again, watching the world pass by far below us. “I just keep
thinking… Why are we doing this? Papa is gone, Joaquin and Miguel.
Me, someday, and then one of the little ones will have to step into
my place. And for what? All these years, all these centuries, and
they don’t stop coming. There will never be an end. No one
wins.”

Pretty damn deep, for a kid, and he wasn’t
wrong. “I think… I think we do it because for that one person, that
one single person at that one single moment, that we help, it
matters a lot.”

“And if that’s not enough?”

“Then you walk away.” He jerked his head back
toward me like I’d scalded him, shock evident in those dark eyes.
“You always have that option, kid. If your heart’s not in it, you
won’t fight well, and your end will come sooner rather than later.
Better to walk now than throw your life away.”

“This is what we
do
, my family
.
I cannot just walk away from that.” He shook his head and looked
out the window again. “You do not understand.”

I did, though. Better than he realized, but
it wasn’t an argument worth pursuing. I think all of us felt that
way, to some extent. All of us who chose to put our lives and souls
on the lines to help out complete strangers. Even with my
retirement dancing within tantalizing reach, a part of me wondered
if I’d truly go through with it. When it came down to the actual
moment when I could say no, would I? I hadn’t so far.

Maybe it was like Sveta said. Maybe I didn’t
know how to be anything else. Sleep wouldn’t find me again, after
that, but I sat with my eyes closed, trying to meditate my way out
of the dark spiral of what-ifs and mighta-coulds.

Our wheels finally touched down in Culiacán,
which is the capital of the state of Sinaloa. Before I’d met
Miguel, I didn’t have the foggiest idea what that meant, but I’d
learned a lot in the time since. Things like it got just as
freakin’ hot down there as it did back at home, though I personally
thought the humidity was better. Things like the mountains are
really damn beautiful, and the trees and bushes didn’t really look
a lot different than Missouri. Things like tequila is a whole
different beast on its native soil. Y’know, important stuff.

We all shuffled along like rigor mortis had
set in on the flight, stretching and working the kinks out of
annoyed muscles as we waited for our luggage and our crates. Only
Sveta seemed unaffected by the flight, finding a place to stand
with her back to a wall as she let her blue eyes sweep the crowds
around us.

I’d only seen her a few times on the flight
as she’d passed by us on the way to the restroom or whatever it was
she did, but I didn’t believe for a second that she had been
unaware of anything that had happened on that plane. I was willing
to bet she could tell me the full descriptions of every person who
sat near me on the plane, as well as what they ordered for the
meal, and maybe even their date of birth and favorite ice cream
flavor.

Even standing to the side as she was now, I
could see the gears spinning in her mind, how she catalogued every
single person she saw, analyzing their threat potential. Most she
dismissed, but I saw her gaze track a few men across the terminal
until they disappeared from her sight. I couldn’t say for sure what
she was looking for, and I’m not sure I wanted to know what would
have happened if one of those men had stopped and looked back at
her.

Estéban was searching too, no doubt trying to
find a glimpse of a familiar and long-missed face amongst the
strangers. The longer he went without finding anyone, the more his
brows drew together in concern. “Mamá said that someone would come
pick us up. I hope that nothing has gone wrong. Maybe we should
call…”