A Snake in the Grass

by K. A. Stewart

  Her jaw clenched, and anger flashed through her dark eyes. I saw so much of Estéban in her at that moment, it was almost uncanny. Finally, after a few moments of uncomfortable silence, she gave a short, sharp nod. “I was aware of the fighting. The boys have always gathered to test themselves. Miguel would go, and Joaquin before that. But it was foolishness. Brawling, you call it. Young men blowing off steam. I did not stop it, because it was helpful for them to experience fighting in a…safe environment.” Once again, she fixed her son with the death glare. “This business of summoning demons, this is new, and I should have been made aware.”

  “You’re aware now, and I trust that you’ll put an end to it.” I shoved off the truck, and headed for the door. “I’ve got bigger problems right now, and we’re going to have to be gone at sunup.”

  “What? Why?” Carlotta followed me inside, with the kid right behind her, and while she didn’t actually have him by the ear, he still looked like he’d been swatted on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.

  Terrence was just shuffling into the kitchen, gray hair standing out at manic angles to his head as he rubbed his stubbled face. “Why is the crazy bint saying that we’re leaving? Rousted an old man right out of his warm bed, she did!”

  “We’re blown here. Sveta’s packing our stuff.” I sank down on the bench as the reality of it all hit me. We were blown. The demons knew where the souls were. Where the hell could I go that I wouldn’t be putting someone in danger? I damn sure couldn’t go home. “The demon saw me. He saw the souls. They know I have them now.”

  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 trail
ed 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.”

  I snorted at his retreating back, but rolled over and helped myself to a couple of strips of bacon. Chores. I could do chores. Chores were going to be the easiest thing I’d done in days. After a few moments of munching on my breakfast-in-cot, I sat up, stretching out muscles that were still protesting my treatment of them last night. I guess it said something that I’d slept through the mass exodus that morning, though the boys usually sounded like a herd of stampeding wildebeest.

  Fed and dressed – Mira had confiscating my best T-shirts, but I’d managed to smuggle one out that said “I’m not perfect, but parts of me are excellent” – I girded myself to face whatever the Perez clan could hope to throw at me.

  Okay, there were like a hundred people there already, and more arriving every few minutes. I gave up trying to remember everyone’s names after being introduced to the third Jorge and fifth Maria. Carlotta latched onto me the moment I appeared and I was set to work with the older boys, layering firewood into the huge pit out behind the main house. I got the idea there was probably going to be some kind of roast beast issuing from the pit later, but for now, all we had was the grunt work.

  On one pass through the courtyard, I caught sight of Sveta teetering on top of a tall ladder as she helped drape strings of lights through the overhanging trees. Terren
ce was off to one side, surrounded by a circle of ancient Mexican grandmother types, the women cackling at something the old man said like he was the second coming of James Dean.

  Somewhere around midmorning, Carlotta collared both me and Estéban again, directing us to go take showers and get ready for the ceremony with the same drill sergeant voice that she’d ordered everything else.

  “Is she going to follow me into the shower and make sure I scrubbed behind my ears?,” I asked the kid as we gathered up our nicer clothes.

  “She might. Better scrub just to be sure.” And y’know, I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. Don’t laugh, but I scrubbed behind my ears.

  I’d brought the one good suit I had, and I tried not to think that this was the same suit I’d worn to Miguel’s wedding, just over two years ago. I didn’t believe in bad omens or jinxes, I reminded myself firmly. With my long hair still damp, I bound it into a tail at the nape of my neck and seated the knot of my tie properly at the opening of my collar. Damn, I clean up pretty good if I do say so myself.

  I was passing by the boys’ room again when I caught a glimpse of Esteban standing at the window, staring out into space and definitely not completely dressed yet. “Hey, kid.” He flinched, proving that wherever his mind had just been, it wasn’t there with us. “You better get that tie on, or your mom is going to skin you.”

  He looked at the strip of silk in his hands with a sigh, shaking his head. “I don’t even know how to tie this stupid thing. Miguel always did my tie for church.”

  “C’mere… Christ, can’t take you anywhere.” My jab got a little bit of a smile from him and he handed the tie over obediently. “You gotta learn to do this yourself, y’know. Women like a guy who doesn’t wear a clip-on.”

  “Yes, because there are so many girls around right now. I’m related to half the mountainside, you realize.” I raised a brow at him, realizing that I had to look up just slightly to do so. Damn kid needed to quit growing. He just shrugged his shoulders. “Just saying.”