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 fac
e 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.
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.”
A Snake in the Grass Page 7
