A Snake in the Grass (9 page)

As we playfully bickered and stole tidbits
off each other’s plates, I noted that Estéban held himself apart,
helping his mother bring more platters of food to the table rather
than engage in the silliness. When he caught me looking, I raised a
brow at him, and he just shrugged, finding something else to look
at. I got it, though. He had to prove them that he wasn’t just one
of the kids anymore, and acting like a responsible adult was his
first step. It didn’t sit easily on his lanky shoulders, and I
could see a hint of wistfulness in his eyes as he watched Thing 1
‘accidentally’ slosh a full glass of water into Thing 2’s lap.

The brawl that could have ensued was quickly
quashed by Carlotta’s fierce glare, and in no time at all the boys
had eaten and scattered, leaving the place looking like a horde of
locusts had passed through.

Once my competition was gone, I helped myself
to a second plate full, and ate at my leisure. The kid – Estéban, I
really had to quit calling him ‘kid’ – sat across from me, and we
were soon joined by Sveta who appeared from outside looking fresh
as a morning daisy. “And where have you been?”

“Sleeping.” She gave me a smirk and slid in
beside Estéban, nodding to Carlotta as she was handed a plate.
“Thank you.”

We ate in companionable silence, several
members of the family wandering in and out to take their breakfast
to go, and by the time we were done, Terrence had shuffled in,
fully dressed if not fully awake. Carlotta filled a mug with coffee
for him without being asked, and he grumbled under his breath.

“What he means is thank you, Carlotta. He’s
British, his English is terrible.” That earned me a baleful glare
from the old man, and I grinned in return. “So, what’s the plan for
today?”

Carlotta slid in on the other side of her
son, finally taking a moment for her own breakfast. “I thought it
would be best if we began with…that…” She nodded toward me, but we
all knew she was thinking of the scrawl of iridescent tattoos
across my back. “Before I get too involved in preparations for the
fiesta
.”

“And when will this fiesta be happening?”

“A few days, still. We are waiting for more
relatives to arrive. Some of them must travel far.” She slipped her
arm around her son’s shoulders. “All of them wish to come see
Estéban.” He blushed and ducked his head.

“And you, kid? You got plans?”

He wiped his mouth off and stood, gathering
up his own plate, then reached for the others to begin cleaning up.
“Morning exercises, first. Then I will see what else needs to be
done. Alejandro said that the goat fence has some loose
boards.”

Carlotta raised a brow at his sudden
industriousness, but didn’t say a word. “We will be in the
sanctuary, if you need anything.” Estéban nodded, and disappeared
into the house after dropping the dishes off in the sink. His
mother sighed softly, allowing some sadness into her dark eyes for
the first time since we arrived. “He feels he must step into his
brother’s place…and his father’s.”

“It’s what we do.” I gave her a small smile
and a shrug, and after a moment, she smiled back.

“Foolish men. Taking on the world alone, when
we would gladly do it beside you. Come then. I need to gather a few
supplies and then we will see what can be seen.” She paused,
looking at Terrence. “Señor Zelenko said you would be helping with
this?” There was no mistaking the skepticism in her voice, no doubt
put there by the faint odor of gin that followed the old man like a
cloud.

Terrence harrumphed, pushing his way to
standing with a screech of the wooden bench. “I’m not so old that I
can’t sling a few spells when called for. You just lead the
way.”

“And you have training?”

The old man paused, then drew himself up
stiffly. “I can promise, I’ve been doing this longer than you,
young lady.” It should have been a compliment, almost flirty, to
call Carlotta a young lady. Instead, it came out snide, and her
dark eyes flashed dangerously.

“We shall see.”

So that’s how this was going to go. I was
going to be the guinea pig in the middle of a magical pissing
match. Sveta didn’t even try to hide her smirk. I threw a bit of
tortilla at her. “Oh shut up.”

With a chuckle, she stood as well. “I will
walk the perimeter, do some reconnaissance.”

“You realize we’re probably in the safest
place in the entire world, right?”

“And I will be certain that it remains
so.”

There was a strained silence between Carlotta
and Terrence when they returned from gathering up whatever it was
they needed, and as we left the main house for the sanctuary –
whatever that was – I spied Estéban in driveway, working his way
through his morning katas. For a moment, I stopped to watch, trying
to look at him with a teacher’s critical eye, but really, he looked
good.

I wasn’t the only audience, either. The
kid-pack had materialized, forming a wide-eyed ring around my
protégé as he went through the motions of a fighting style that was
completely alien to them. As far back as history could remember,
before their name was even Perez, the men of this family had fought
with everything they had at hand. They fought with machetes,
shovels, and crude stone weapons. They had been farmers, and
ranchers, and the occasional soldier, but they had no formal
training in combat. Their style was simple and brutal, at once
rustic and completely lethal.

Compare that to me with my extensive martial
arts background. While I wasn’t above a down and out street brawl,
the basic motions of my fighting style were on the opposite end of
the spectrum from what Estéban had learned at his father’s knee.
There was grace there, and control. We’d blended his teachings, and
his fury was tempered now with calculation, his rage with a
rock-steady patience.

He slipped into a sword kata, one of my
favorites actually, though we’d had to modify some of the moves to
account for his shorter blade. A machete just wasn’t going to be a
katana, no matter how we tried. And while he’d practiced with my
sword a bit, for the sheer logic that being confined to one type of
weapon was never safe, the thicker blade of the machete was where
he found his comfort. It had been his brother Miguel’s, and before
that, their brother Joaquin’s, and before that, their father’s. I
had no idea how many generations that weapon went back, but there
was as much Perez sweat and blood on that blade as there was demon
blight. It was part of their DNA.

“He has learned much from you.” Carlotta’s
voice was soft, but still, I jumped a little. I hadn’t heard her
come up behind me. “He seems…calmer, than when he left.”

“He’s a good kid.” I deliberately turned my
back on the scene. Estéban didn’t need me watching over him
anymore. He could do this on his own, and that included his morning
exercises. I offered my elbow to the lovely woman at my side, and
she slipped her hand into the crook with a small smile. “Mira and
Anna are heartbroken that he’s gone.”

“He could have stayed. If he wanted.” It was
the right thing for a mother to say, as she prepared to let go of
one of her newly-adult sons. The right thing, but that didn’t make
it any less painful.

“No, he really couldn’t. We all know that bad
things are coming for me, and…he needs to be clear of that. He
needs to be somewhere that he can go on and do good things, while
the world goes to shit elsewhere.”

“Language, Jesse.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The sanctuary was nothing more than a small,
well-built building located on the very edge of the Perez property.
It had four wooden sides, a roof, a door, a couple of windows. It
could have been a tool shed, or a small storage unit, except for
the fact that Terrence waited just outside with a look of
speculative caution on his craggy old face. Oh, and the fact that
the entire structure glowed and writhed with magical wards. Just
drawing in sight of it made the tattoos across my back crawl, some
of them twisting in a decidedly unpleasant fashion.

My breath hissed between my teeth, and my
steps faltered a bit. Carlotta stopped and turned a concerned eye
on me. “It hurts?”

“A little. I don’t know why.”

“Let me see.” With quick, officious
mom-hands, she stripped me out of my T-shirt in a heartbeat, then
circled behind to look at my back, making clucking noises in the
back of her throat. “There is…what is this…darkness here?”

She never touched my skin, but I felt one
finger trace a searing line across my shoulder blades, cutting a
line through Axel’s concealment spell. It almost dropped me to my
knees, and I sagged, gasping. “Leave it! Gah, leave it!”

“Here now, what’re you doing to the boy?”
Stars danced in my vision, so I couldn’t see Terrence bustling to
my rescue, but I could smell the moment he arrived. “Poking at
things you don’t understand, causing problems…” His gnarled hand
clamped down on my elbow, pinching hard, but oddly, the mundane
pain allowed me to focus, to breathe.

“There is a spell laid upon him, something
filthy and nasty. Was this your work? Did you do this?” Accusation
dripped from Carlotta’s lips, the sound of a mother wolf about to
do battle for her cub.

“No, that was done before I arrived.”
Terrence sniffed, offended at the implications. “Boy won’t let me
remove it either, and it sets the souls all aflutter if you try to
touch it. You have to work under it, or around it.”

As the pain subsided, Carlotta’s face
appeared in my swimming vision. “Jesse? What is this spell? It is
not Mira’s work.”

“A…friend did it. It serves a purpose, so
just leave it. Please.” Raising my head, I looked again toward the
sanctuary, and the same few souls coiled up tightly somewhere in
the vicinity of my lower back. It felt like someone had kicked me
in the kidneys. “That’s not the problem. They…some of them don’t
like the building. They don’t like the magic there.”

“Hm. Just a few, you say?” Again, she
disappeared out of my field of vision, and Terrence squeezed my
elbow again just to remind me that he was there. “Here, do you
see?” Obviously, she wasn’t talking to me, since I’d have to pull
an Exorcist to get my head around that far. “This grouping here.
The skin is red, angry.”

“I see it. What’s it mean? We’ve never seen
them do this before.” Terrence prodded me in the ribs with one
thick finger and I jumped in spite of myself.

“I think…perhaps…these are the souls of
someone who knows
brujeria
. The magic calls to them.” A palm
lay flat against my skin, and soothing cold spread out from the
touch. Quietly, Carlotta murmured in Spanish, and the riot of
action in my back calmed, then stilled entirely. The knotted
muscles relaxed, and Carlotta chuckled softly. “How
interesting.”

“What did you say? That was no spell.”
Terrence was right, I realized. I smelled no cloves, the tell-tale
marker of a magic user at work.

“I simply told them that I was a
bruja
blanca
, a white witch, and they had nothing to fear. Whoever
they are, they have known
la bruja negra
, and they were
afraid that I was one.”

I’d only ever seen one person that I thought
might qualify as a
bruja negra
, a black witch. I’d never
seen her cast a spell, or even do anything more than smile and chat
with me, but that tiny Korean woman in her college sweatshirt and
worn jeans still scared me more than most of the demons I’d ever
faced. I had to wonder what I would feel if I encountered Mystic
Cindy again while hosting these two hundred and seventy-five souls.
Probably best not to find out.

“All right, enough of this twaddle. We have
work to do.” The old British curmudgeon gave me a shove toward the
small structure, but he waited until he was sure I was steady on my
feet before he did it. I could almost think he cared.

The small structure should have been stifling
hot in the early summer heat, but once they got the windows opened
up and a breeze flowing through, it was actually quite pleasant. I
found a spot on a small bench against the wall, and watched as
Carlotta and Terrence unpacked the implements of their respective
trades.

Terrence’s gear looked most familiar to me.
Salt, a mortar and pestle, a silver bell, some other things. I’d
even seen him employ his heavy cane in some of his casting, using
it to set the borders of his personal protective circle.

Meanwhile, the first two things Carlotta
pulled out of her bag were an ornate silver cross, and a vicious
obsidian knife, the black stone gleaming like it was wet. She made
that clucking noise in her throat again as she sorted her things,
placing bundles of dried herbs just so, laying out a large skein of
coarse red cording. Next to that went a coil of black cord, and
beside that, a rosary that looked to be carved of amber.

“Before we begin, perhaps you can tell me
what has already been determined, so that we are not covering the
same ground again.” Carlotta’s gaze fell on Terrence, and the pair
of them started talking magic and things that went right over my
head.

I quit listening, just leaning against the
wall and concentrating on the faint swirl of movement beneath my
skin. They had calmed, but they weren’t still, and wouldn’t be so
long as I was inside this building. While they may have destroyed
my danger sense, there was no way someone could hide any magic from
me now, as the souls reacted to even the tiniest spell.

I had to wonder if they had moved like this
for Gretchen, the previous host. We hadn’t exactly been BFFs or
anything, but she’d never mentioned it. She didn’t say whether or
not they responded to her moods, or if some of them would react to
memories their physical selves had made. How much of their living
counterparts were still in there? The question only served to
remind me that these were real people I was carrying around, living
breathing people, and if these souls were destroyed in some
fashion, those lives were over.