“Wait a minute. I thought she had a skull and a robe. More like a decomposing Mary than a half-snake—not much like me at all.” I gestured at the two halves of my body.
Probably I shouldn’t be engaging the drug smugglers in conversation—and if I hadn’t needed to situate myself exactly correctly over by the casket, I would’ve bothered.
That said, I really was interested in why at least one of his men had equated me with a local saint.
Ron also sat down, though he watched me much more warily than his boss. “Local variation,” he said. “Every region’s Santa Muerte is a little different.”
Everyone around me watched me warily, except Baby Paige, who was now gurgling happily and playing with her mother’s hair.
“So tell me,” Phil drawled, “your... people, I guess you’d call them? Do they come from down south of the border?”
I glared at him. I had no intention of giving him any more information about me than he already had. Not that I had any information to give. I had no idea where my people had come from.
I didn’t bother to answer. I just shook my head. “So,” I said. “Let’s talk about how the rest of this flight is going to go.”
“I think that’s probably a good idea,” Phil said, standing and stretching a little. “Because I think what you have failed to realize is that you may be some kind of freaking monster, but you’re still far outnumbered.” He met my gaze then and let the faux-friendly expression drop from his face.
His gaze was flat and cold, more so even than any of the reptiles I’d met in my father’s herpetarium.
I would’ve called his eyes reptilian if it hadn’t been an insult to those of us who really were reptiles.
But it didn’t matter if he was an ice cube, or if he threatened me. I had already gotten into place and was prepared to move if he did.
We stared at each other for a long time in silence, the air around us growing thicker and heavier every second, dripping with the tension between us.
Finally, I think he realized I wasn’t going to bend. So he grinned, one side of his mouth going up in a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
“Find a way to bind her,” he instructed Ron. “I think I know someone who might want her.” He repeated the instructions in Spanish to the other three men. Only then did his smile reach his eyes—and it grew brighter when several of the men, apparently more afraid of him than they were of me, began to close in around me.
Chapter 9
I had figured something out while we were chatting.
From the minute Phil had focused on my breasts, he had stopped thinking of me as a monster and started thinking of me as a person.
No one on the plane was able to do that. Baby Paige, maybe, but nobody else. Lori and Hale sat there silent, staring at me in shock and horror. Ron was wary of me. The three Spanish-speaking men were divided between terror and awe, though at least two of them were more afraid of Phil.
But Phil had been focused entirely on the top half of my body. So as I inched toward the casket, he was paying attention to where my hands were. And they were far away from anything that he might consider important.
But he was so, so wrong.
My favorite form, the one that I had slipped into for the bottom part of my body when I had taken the snake-goddesses form, was a constrictor. And that meant I could hold on to things with any part of my snake-shaped body.
It didn’t matter that I was far too far away from the casket to grab the package Phil had Ron put in there.
And he really shouldn’t have said that I had nowhere to go. It engaged that illogical, reptilian part of my mind. The part that made me put my plans into action even if they weren’t fully considered.
When I moved, I moved with the speed of the striking snake. No one was expecting it—not really.
I used my tail to reach inside the casket, wrap around the package, and pull it back to me, even as I slammed myself up against the bulkhead door.
Phil finally noticed the package moving toward me. As I took it into my hands, he said, “I don’t know where you think you can put that. Taking it out of the casket doesn’t matter as long as it’s back in there when we land.” I stared at him briefly, then let a long, slow smile spread across my face. As he watched, I focused on shifting just a little—and only my mouth.
Tearing open the top of the package, I pulled out a velvet bag. The brown-paper packaging dropped to the ground. I peered into the small bag.
Diamonds. Of course. What else would a true villain trade in?
I almost laughed. Instead, though, I unhinged my jaw, opening my mouth wider and wider, until I heard gasps from the other people on the plane—and I opened it even wider still, just because I could.
I tilted my head back, held the bag above my distended jaw, and dropped it in. Then I let my shifted internal organs muscle it along, down toward the lower half of my body.
That was going to be miserable and uncomfortable later. But it was absolutely worth it for the look on Phil’s face.
His shock dissolved in seconds. “Cut her open and get it out,” he demanded, flicking a wrist my direction as he pointed at me. Nobody moved, and he spoke again, this time in Spanish—I presume to repeat the order.
When no one moved still, Phil’s face began to turn red and his eyes squinted. “I said, cut those diamonds out of the bitch.”
Ron shook his head. “I’m sorry boss, but did you see what she just did? I’m not getting anywhere close to her. She’s fast and she’s a fucking snake.”
The emphasis he put on those last two words nearly made me laugh—as if he wanted to point out exactly how insane Phil was for not taking my serpentine form into consideration.
He wasn’t wrong, of course. Phil was being exceptionally stupid. After all, he had no way of knowing that I didn’t particularly want to kill anyone.
“Ron,” I said, keeping my voice as pleasant as possible, “find a way to please remove the cash from Abuela.”
Phil’s second-in-command stared at me for a long moment. “There’s cash in there?” he asked, his tone deceptively mild.
“Sure is,” I said. “Maybe in her chest cavity? I’m not sure. You might have to search a little bit. Sorry about that.”
I wasn’t sure what I’d stumbled into with the cash in Abuela’s chest, but they didn’t need to know that whatever was going on between them was confusing the hell out of me.
“Boss?” Ron asked, still in that same mild tone. “Want to explain why there’s more cash in the body?”
Phil’s jaw went hard, and he glared at me. “Extra insurance,” he said with a snarl.
“I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” Ron said.
“Whatever this is, it can wait,” I said. Both men whipped around to look at me, maybe having forgotten that I was there in the intensity of their conversation.
I reinforced my presence by tapping the end of my tail hard against the carpet on the floor close to Ron’s feet. He jerked, and his face went pale.
“Get the money out and bring it to me,” I said again.
Ron swallowed hard, but he turned toward the casket.
“Also, you might want to get that knife off the chair,” I suggested.
I glanced over at Lori and Hale, who were now holding hands and huddling together.
I had to get a handle on the situation. With every move I made, it spiraled further out of control.
Also, I needed to remember that I had relatively few goals. I wanted to get me and Baby Paige out of there alive and get us back home.
That was it.
I had wanted everyone else to make it out alive, too, but these were drug-runners. I had to remember that they generally did not hold life in the same esteem I did, so everyone surviving might not happen.
I just had to keep frightening them into believing that I was as willing to hurt them as they were to hurt me.
And I needed to get the clear upper hand before we landed.
I had
no doubt that had we been on the ground, they wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot me.
Money first, then I’ll gather up all the guns.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do with all those guns once I had them, though.
After all, I couldn’t simply swallow everything that I wanted to get out of the way.
Chapter 10
My mind was spinning a million miles an hour. How was I going to get myself and Baby Paige out of here? Maybe if I got the money and the baby, I could wait until the plane landed and use the money to buy our way back home?
The image of me getting shot in the back while fleeing the airplane with the baby in hand flickered across my mind.
Shit. No. That’s not going to work.
While I was thinking, Phil was watching me, a sneer on his face.
“You really think you can get out of here? There’s no place for you to go.” He gestured around “You’re trapped in here.”
I let my lip curled up on one side. “You really think so?” I flicked the bottom of my tail hard and wrapped it around a nearby seat. I’d realized that everyone else watched my tail in absolute fascination. When it started moving, Lori whimpered and clutched Baby Paige tighter. Baby Paige reached out her little grabbing hands as if to touch it. The guy who’d fallen to his knees before looked like he wanted to do so again, and even Phil couldn’t help staring at it.
“The deal is, Phil, I can take the form of a constrictor. I can hold on to anything with my body. And I can even do it—” I turned and put my hands on the handles of the bulkhead doors behind me, “—while opening an airplane door and letting other people get sucked out into the air.”
“You do that, there’s nothing to stop us from shooting.” Phil’s eyes went completely flat again. He was definitely the snake in this situation—at least as far as traditional depictions of serpents went.
“Don’t lie to me,” I said. “We both know you don’t want to hit a fuselage and cause an explosion.”
He simply shrugged. I guessed we were going to have to see who blinked first.
I raised my eyebrows at Ron.
A pained expression crossed his face. “Boss, she fucking scares me. Even more than you do.”
Phil shook his head slowly. “You gotta make the call that’s right for you, Ron. By there will definitely be repercussions if you get the cash and take it to her.”
“And if you don’t get the cash and bring it to me, there will be an entirely different set of repercussions,” I added.
My stomach clenched, and I couldn’t tell if it was the diamonds—I tried not to think about what they might do to my digestive system as either a snake or a human—or if it was the sudden realization that I was actually going head-to-head against a drug smuggler.
I had grown up with scientists. Calm, rational people, who rarely even took Tylenol. And they had been too worried about what medication for humans might do to someone with my physiology, so they had never given me even that much.
Drug dealers were out of my realm of experience. Everything I knew about them I got from television and movies.
And yet here I was, explaining to one smuggler that if he didn’t go up against his boss, he was going to suffer.
This is not the kind of counselor I intended to be.
But this was where I was. Stuck in an airplane with a bunch of drug dealers. I glanced over at Paige’s parents. And a couple of drug users, too. And I was about to get into a battle over a bunch of cash stuffed in the dead woman’s chest.
My mind kept going off on ridiculous tangents. I kept thinking that I would rather the money be in a pirate’s chest. I shook my head at myself. I knew enough about psychology to know why I was doing that. It was an attempt to distract myself from trauma.
I couldn’t help but notice that Ron was spending his time looking warily back and forth between me and Phil. What would I do if he decided to follow Phil’s orders instead of mine?
Could I really throw someone out the plane? I wondered.
I seemed to recall reading once that it wasn’t all that easy to open the bulkhead door midflight. Something about people who opened it getting sucked out of the airplane. It wasn’t a good idea in general, I was sure.
Ron inhaled deeply as if to steel himself against what he had to do next. Then he turned to the men in the cabin and spoke in that rapid-fire Spanish of his. Suddenly, all the Spanish-speaking men who didn’t speak English well enough to follow along—which was, apparently, all three of them—looked horrified.
Phil kept talking, gesturing with the Bowie knife.
One of the men took a step forward—the one who had fallen to his knees in front of me. He was shaking his head, waving his hands, and speaking so quickly that I couldn’t understand anything he said—until he came to the words Santa Muerte.
Great. This conversation had something to do with the death saint.
I still didn’t have a really good sense of how Santa Muerte fit into Catholic iconography. But I knew she was connected the snake, and several of the people on the plane connected the snake to me, for obvious reasons. So in a sense, she was my patron saint, too.
“What are they saying?” I asked.
Phil chuckled. “They’re refusing to cut open Abuela because it would desecrate the body and that would anger Santa Muerte.”
“Even when I told them that you wanted it done, they refused.” Ron shook his head. “I may never be able to get them to help out.”
“Do they really have to help at all?” I waved one hand at the open casket. “You can handle her, right?”
From the other side of me, Phil snorted. “Yeah, it’s not like she’s going to fight back.”
Ron shot him an irritated look. “I thought you didn’t want this?”
The boss drug-runner shrugged. “I just don’t want you to give the money to her. It’s fine with me if you go ahead and remove it from the old broad’s chest.”
I rolled my eyes. “Quit stalling and get the money out.”
Turns out it was the wrong order to give.
Chapter 11
As soon as Ron moved toward the casket, all hell broke loose.
The man who’d complained about desecrating the body shifted his knife—the one he’d picked up again at some point—to the opposite hand and drew a gun.
Apparently, he really didn’t speak English, because he obviously missed the byplay earlier about not wanting to explode the plane. When he leveled the muzzle at Ron, almost everyone else in the plane drew a weapon, too, and the sides were instantly drawn.
But those lines also seemed a little fuzzy. Because the only person pointing a gun at me was Phil.
And of course, I didn’t have a gun to draw on anyone.
Even Hale had gotten in on the gun-drawing game. But he wasn’t sure who to point at, either. He wavered between me and Ron for a second, before settling on Ron.
Ron didn’t draw a gun at all. Apparently, he realized it was a bad idea to shoot inside a plane.
As my gaze flickered from one gun-wielding bad guy to the next, I frantically tried to come up with something to say or do that would defuse the situation.
At that moment, the plane began to descend.
I risked a glance out a window. We seem to be floating over miles and miles of jungle. I had no idea where we were. I assumed it was Central America, since we hadn’t been flying all that long, really.
The Spanish speakers glanced out the window, as well. One of them near the front of the plane said something about la casa, which I knew meant home or house.
If I’m going to be hanging out with drug-runners, I need to up my Spanish game.
Without the benefit of flight attendants or a pilot who announced anything, we had no way of knowing what it was time to sit down and fasten our seatbelts.
I didn’t know whether or not the pilot knew what had been going on back here. It could be that he was simply following his usual routine. And I’ve never been in half-snake form
on a plane before, so I had no idea if it was always this difficult to stay upright when the pilot turned.
But the plane tilted hard to one side and everyone around me grabbed hold of something. The stalemate was almost instantly broken. If the pilot hadn’t done it on purpose, it was a pretty impressive feat of timing in the universe’s part.
Ron’s gaze flickered toward me, and then away again. He said a few words in Spanish, then gestured toward the coffin. One of the armed men moved over and closed the lids, locking them down—for all the good that did. I knew from being inside the casket that it wasn’t terribly airtight.
“Sorry about that,” Ron said, never exactly looking at me “I don’t think we’re going to get to the money before the Lobo takes it for himself.”
To my right, Phil was already buckling himself into his seat. “Not a chance in hell you’re going to get that money,” he said.
I still have the diamonds. Surely, I can work out some kind of negotiation deal with those.
I just didn’t know if that deal would include more than just me. No matter how much I wanted to get Baby Paige out of the country and back into the United States, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to.
“It looks like a little standoff is over,” Phil said in a deeply self-satisfied tone.
None of this was turning out the way I’d imagined it. For one thing, I had never imagined swallowing a whole bag of diamonds. I could feel it in my stomach, the serpentine part, and every time I thought about the velvet bag roiling around down there, I risked vomiting it back up.
I noticed one of the Spanish speakers sat strapped into a seat close to the casket. He wasn’t about to risk me taking the money out of Abuela when he wasn’t looking.
“Might as well take a seat, honey,” Phil said. “There’s nowhere for you to go, and we’re landing anyway.”
Thin Skinned Page 4
