“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…”
“Chill out, kid. We just got here, and we don’t even have our stuff yet. Maybe there was traffic.”
He made some kind of noise indicating that he heard me, but he never stopped scanning the crowd, tension growing in his lanky shoulders. I finally gave up on trying to talk sense into him and snatched his bags off the conveyor belt when they came trundling by, setting them next to mine.
Sveta finally left her post when our crates were wheeled up on a flat cart, and she and Terrence went about checking them over, making sure nothing had been tampered with. I saw the locking sigils flare into view as the old man’s hands passed over them, the magic answering its maker, but none of them looked altered to me. Both he and Sveta made approving noises over the boxes, so I guess that meant our gear had made the journey unscathed.
“Oye! Primo!”
Estéban’s head jerked around at the shout, and a huge smile split his face. “Paulito!” Before I could even spot the source of the call, the kid had bolted across the terminal and was engaged in a very rough back-slapping hug with a strange man. What followed was an exchange in Spanish so rapid that I with my very rudimentary language skills couldn’t hope to keep up. I mean Mira and the kid had done a bang up job pounding the language in to my head, but my major accomplishment was knowing “Dos cervezas, por favor.” The kid looked happy, though, real happy.
Whoever Paulito was, the Perez family resemblance was stamped indelibly on his features. An inch taller than my protégé, maybe a couple of years older, but I could see hints of both Miguel and Estéban in the shape of his jaw, the angle of his eyes. They moved the same too, I realized, as I watched them walk toward us. Something about the set of their shoulders, or maybe the same slight bounce in their stride.
And like Estéban, Paulito gleamed to my newfound magical senses. There was magical talent there, and given that he was undoubtedly a Perez, he was probably well trained in its use.
“Paulito, this is Jesse Dawson, and Señor Smythe. And this is Sveta. Everyone, this is mi primo – my cousin – Paulito.”
Terrence shook the young man’s hand when offered, as did I. Briefly, the almost invisible symbols across my back crawled, no doubt in reaction to the touch of the unfamiliar magic. They settled though, the moment I broke contact.
Paulito tried to offer his hand to Sveta, but he made the mistake of giving her an appraising once-over first. By the time his gaze got up to her face, he found only ice-cold blue eyes waiting for him, and he dropped his hand after a few moments. His apologetic shrug was ruined by the almost leering grin on his face. Yup. Sveta was gonna throw him through a wall before the week was out. I could tell that already.
“I brought the truck, for the crates, but someone will have to ride in the back with them. There are only so many seats.” His English was accented, but easily understandable. In fact, most of the Perez clan probably spoke English better than a lot of American high schoolers I knew.
“Not a problem, bugs are pure protein.” Estéban smirked at my joke, but it was clear by the puzzled look on Paulito’s face that he didn’t get it.
The two young men took possession of our luggage cart, and we followed them out to the truck, left out of the conversation as they chattered back and forth in Spanish.
“Why can’t they just speak the King’s English?” Terrence grumbled, loud enough that I knew he meant to be overheard.
“Because we aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.”
“What the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?”
Chapter 5
The thing that action movies and TV shows never show when following the intrepid hero about his adventures is how freakin’ long they have to sit in the car to get where they’re going. I mean, in TV-world, the drive from Alabama to North Dakota takes like ten minutes, but in reality, there are road tunes and pit stops, greasy gas station food, and more empty roadside whooshing by the windows that anyone cares to remember.
While we weren’t exactly going quite that far, there was still a two-hour drive ahead of us, uncomfortably wedged between three weapons crates in the back of a seventies-era pickup truck. Paulito got the unfathomable privilege of riding with Terrence in the cab, and the rest of us got as comfy as we could in the bed, gritting our teeth as we jounced over potholes and dodged insects flying at warp speed.
Only Estéban seemed immune to the discomfort, leaning over the sides of the truck to point things out to Sveta as we barreled down the highway. Twice, we had to make a wild grab for his belt as his antics and his cousin’s driving threatened to jounce him right out over the battered tailgate. Nothing would dim his enthusiasm, though, and I even saw a faint smile curve the corners of Sveta’s lips in response, the kid’s excitement downright infectious. Dorothy was right, I guess. There’s no place like home.
We hung a left once we hit Cosalá, a small city that could have been taken right out of the pages of a fairy tale. The buildings were all the old traditional Spanish style, painted bright colors, and the streets were all cobblestone. It wasn’t some backwoods nowhere, though, they were a thoroughly modern vacation destination. We were an hour and a half from Mazatlán, and spitting distance from the Gulf of California coast and the beaches. I knew from talking to Miguel and Estéban that tourism was booming in the area, people drawn to the authentic food and old world atmosphere. When we’d visited before, we’d seen one of their local festivals, and I remembered how Mira’s green eyes had sparkled as we danced to the music under strings of colorful lights. She’d had this loose, patchwork skirt on, and her blouse hung off her shoulders…
I think I must have been wearing a dopey smile, lost in my thoughts, because Sveta kicked me in the ankle then rolled her eyes at me when I protested. “You’re heartless, you know that?” She only snorted at me.
The sun was slowly sinking toward the ocean, just visible in the distance, when we pulled to a stop in front of a storefront, painted a charming coral color. Paulito hopped out, mumbling about picking something up for his aunt, and vanished inside, while the rest of us nearly fell out of the bed of the truck, rubbing feeling back into our lower extremities.
Estéban inhaled deeply, and let it out in a contented sigh. “Now it is beginning to smell like home.”
Some locals were seated out in front of their shops, and Sveta let her gaze roam over them without hint of apology. They eyed her back in turn with as much – if less hostile – curiosity. “We are not yet at your home, yes?”
The kid shook his head. “No, another half an hour or so. Maybe less, the way Paulito drives.” He pointed west, toward the darkness of the mountains. “Up there.” Even with twilight barely trickling down the sides of the range, we could already see the twinkling lights of the houses up there, tiny outposts of homes on the mountainside. “The road will be rougher though.” He grimaced a little.
Terrence, who had been blessedly confined to the cab of the pickup until this point, rolled the window down to snarl at us. “Any chance of getting a move on? Some of us aren’t as young as we used to be, and this is hard on my old bones.”
He thought that was hard? I had half a mind to make him take my place in the bed of the truck for the last leg, but somehow I knew that Mira would know, and she’d give me that disappointed look. I hated that look. “You could get out and stretch, you know.”
The old curmudgeon just grumbled and rolled the window back up.
I was about to make some smart remark to Estéban – would have been supremely witty, I’m sure – when a hand closed around my forearm, and I turned startled eyes on Sveta. Despite her vice-like grip on my arm, her icy gaze wasn’t on me. “Ten o’clock.”
I followed her gaze to the corner of the building, and found a pair of dark eyes watching us in return. Half-hidden in the shadows of the alley, the young woman looked like a local girl, dressed in cut-off jean shorts and a tank top, showing off a lot of darkly tanned skin. Her black hair hung in loose waves aroun
d a heart-shaped face, and if she was wearing makeup, it was the kind that was meant to look like she wasn’t. She glanced at Sveta and I briefly, not seeming to care that she’d been noticed, and then her eyes settled on Estéban with frank curiosity.
I grinned a little, and elbowed the kid. “Hey. You’ve got an admirer.”
“Hunh?” Turning, he blushed faintly to find the very attractive girl staring at him. “Oh. Um…hola.” She smiled a little at his clumsy greeting, but didn’t answer him, only tilting her head so that her hair draped artfully across her bare shoulders. Estéban swallowed hard and seemed to have lost all words in every language he knew. Me, I settled back to see how long the two were going to stare at each other without talking, ‘cause this was damn funny.
Unfortunately, Paulito chose that moment to return, and the spell was broken. Settling a few grocery bags into the back of the truck, he followed his cousin’s entranced gaze to the alley, and broke into a broad grin himself. “Reina!”
The mystery girl dragged her gaze away from the kid, and she gave Paulito a teasing smile as he went to greet her. Despite my newness with the language, it was very clear that they knew each other. Very, very well, if you get my meaning. They murmured between themselves in Spanish for a bit, while Estéban shuffled his feet and did his best to look anywhere but. Finally, Paulito remembered his audience, and turned to make introductions.
“Primo, señor and señorita, this is mi novia, my girlfriend, Reina.”
We all made noises of hello, though Estéban’s mumbled “Encantado” was lost in the shuffling of his feet. For her part, the newly named Reina just inclined her head a little, that same small smile crossing her lips as her eyes swept over the kid, but she never said a word.
“I could die in here and no one would care!” Terrence had rolled the window down again, and we all jumped at his grumpy shout. He fixed us with a glare from under his bushy eyebrows, like he could kill us all with his brain.
A Snake in the Grass Page 5