Snake in the Glass

by Seanan McGuire

  "Dina!" I called brightly, raising my free hand in a quick wave. "You look amazing. Did you just shed?"

  "You noticed!" She patted her serpentine hair softly. It hissed as it twined around her fingers. "How have you been? And who's short, dark, and brooding over there?"

  "He's tall enough for me," I said. "Dominic De Luca, meet Dina Kalakos. Vasia is her sister."

  "From a different clutch," said Vasia, removing her own kerchief to reveal a full head of lovely, iridescent green snakes. They were longer than Dina's, and seemed largely content to remain draped down the back of her neck, tongues flicking lazily.

  "You are...gorgons?" said Dominic carefully.

  "Yup," said Dina.

  "Who was that guy who met us when we first rang the bell?" I asked, before he could embarrass himself by trying to guess their sub-species. There are three types of gorgon left in the world. The Kalakos family was made up of lesser gorgons, which made the green color of Vasia's snakes all the more unusual.

  Vasia wrinkled her nose. "Suitor," she said. "His name's Manos. His family is large, well-connected, and wealthy, and he's a whiny baby-man who wants a wife so he doesn't have to learn to cook now that his mother's kicking him out of the house. I've told him thanks but no thanks twice, he's going to petition dad for a third chance, and then I'm going to tell him no thanks a third time, and that'll be that."

  "He's not that bad," said Dina. "Not all of us are striking beauties, you know. You should be more grateful for chances like this."

  "Then you marry him," said Vasia. She leaned over the desk and grabbed two sets of keys from the hooks on the other side. Real keys, brass and gleaming in the light from the chandelier overhead, not keycards. The Carmichael was an old-fashioned establishment, and it was content to stay that way.

  "If you'd follow me," said Vasia, straightening up again. "I'll lead you to your rooms."

  I glanced back when we were halfway up the stairs. Dina was staring after us, a moody, unreadable expression on her face.

  Maybe there was going to be a wedding after all.

  Our room was located on the third floor. It was big enough for me to dance in, with a bed that seemed designed to hold up to four adults at a time. The mice had the room next door, which was considerably smaller and not nearly as nice. I gave Vasia a sidelong look as I set their duffle bag down on the bed.

  "Did we get an upgrade?" I asked.

  "It was the room your great-grandfather always requested," she said. "We have a policy of putting any visiting Healy in that room if it's available."

  "You didn't put me in there last time," I said.

  "You were traveling with your parents last time," she said. "That's where we put them. Enjoy your stay, and remember, dinner is at eight. Daddy will be very disappointed if you're late."

  "We'll be there," I assured her. She smiled one more time and slipped out of the room, closing the door behind her.

  That was my cue. I unzipped the duffle bag, took a step backward, and announced, "It's safe to come out now."

  "HAIL!" cried the mice, before scampering out into the open and covering the bed in a sea of tiny bodies. I clapped my hands before they could scatter, and they stopped, turning to look expectantly in my direction.

  There is an art to dealing with Aeslin mice and not thinking longingly about the virtues of owning a cat. A large part of it is clarity. "We are at the Carmichael Hotel," I said. "It is owned by gorgons. Gorgons have snakes for hair. Snakes eat mice. The gorgons who own his hotel are friends of the family, and have promised not to come into this room for as long as we are staying here. I need you to promise that you will not leave this room unless I or Dominic accompany you. You will not chew holes in the walls. You will not go looking for the kitchen. You will not explore any holes that someone else has already chewed."

  The mice muttered amongst themselves, clearly disappointed by my unreasonable demands.

  "You will be allowed to order one extra-large pizza with everything per day," I said. It was important to provide them with a reason to go along with me. The muttering stopped. "Uncle Mike is bringing two dozen cupcakes when he comes to dinner. They are all for you. Another two dozen will be provided in two days. You have cable television, and since there are no humans sleeping in this room, you get to control the remote, providing you don't blast the volume after midnight."

  The mice, who had much more sensitive hearing than any human being, were starting to nod enthusiastically. "So Mote It Be!" squeaked the colony's high priest, triggering a wave of cheers and scattered "hails" from the rest of the mice.

  "Cool," I said. I opened the drawer next to the bed, pulled out the remote, and tossed it on the pillow. "Now what do you want on your pizza?"

  Placing the order only took a few minutes. The mice were still cheering when I left the room and walked to the next door in the hall. I knocked twice.

  "Yes?" called Dominic's voice.

  "Room service," I called back.

  The door opened. Dominic looked at me, one eyebrow lifted. He was still wearing his duster, a long leather thing that seemed to have been designed for the modern monster hunter. It was half armor, half security blanket, at least based on the way he kept putting it on while we were driving. If he hadn't taken it off yet, he wasn't comfortable here. Yet.

  We'd have to work on that.

  "Are the mice settled?" he asked.

  "I gave them the remote and ordered them a pizza. Same techniques my parents used on me when I was a teenager." Of course, back then, I had been sharing my hotel rooms with the mice. We had passed more than a few nights in the halogen glow of the TV screen, reruns of Star Trek boldly going while my parents enjoyed the rare luxury of having a door that locked between them and their children.

  (Alex had offloaded the mice onto me as soon as I was old enough to have my own hotel room. By the time Antimony was reliably going on the road trips instead of staying behind with Aunt Jane and Uncle Ted, Alex and I were old enough that we were the ones choosing to stay home. Maybe that was why we didn't get along so well with our younger sister. We'd never had the bonding experience that was sharing a hotel with our parents and the talking mice.)

  I slipped past Dominic into the room, looking around at all that space before I turned and smiled at him, long and slow and inviting.

  "You know, we have like an hour and a half before dinner," I said. "No one's going to bother us up here. The walls are totally soundproof."

  Dominic raised his eyebrow even higher. "Have you tested that?"

  "Never had a boy worth bringing here before," I said. "But I used to come here with my parents, and I figure there has to be a reason they were so happy to pay for a hotel room when my Uncle Mike and Aunt Lea live just about forty minutes away. Soundproofing accounts for a lot."

  "I see." Dominic shrugged out of his duster, draping it carefully over the back of the desk chair. "How did your family come to be regular guests at a gorgon-owned hotel?"

  There was an edge in his voice, like something about the situation was bothering him. I paused, reviewing the situation, before I grinned and sat down on the edge of the bed. "Your professional pride is hurt, isn't it?"

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "My great-grandparents had their honeymoon here, which means the hotel has been around since the 1930s at least--and you know enough about architecture that you probably guessed it was a lot older."

  "I place the foundation of the exterior building at somewhere in the 1860s," said Dominic.

  I nodded. "Exactly. A lot older. You're hurt because the Covenant came through Chicago like six times and never noticed this was here."

  "It...stings to realize that I once pledged my loyalty to an organization that was so willfully blind to the world around it that we could overlook a large boarding house operated by gorgons," he said carefully. "I wouldn't call it wounded professional pride. They are no longer my people. They wouldn't have me back if I was fool enough to want to go."

  "I
know." I patted the bed next to me, trying to lure him over. He hesitated before he came, sitting down and starting to unbutton the cuffs of his shirt. I leaned over, resting my head against his shoulder. "You cut ties about as conclusively as you could, and Sarah was in your head when you did it: you weren't lying. That's why we're here. I know you're not a double-agent, and I know you walked away from everything you'd ever known when you chose me over them. I want you to see how wonderful the world you're part of now can really be."

  "And getting away from the mice for the better part of a week, in a gloriously soundproof room, was never part of your design, I suppose." Dominic finished unbuttoning his cuffs, and began working his way down his shirt.

  "One day I'm going to get you into a T-shirt," I said, leaning over to help.

  Dominic grinned, short and sharp and so close that it half took my breath away. "I've seen you dressed for competitions. Between the two of us, we have the average amount of clothing worn by any two Americans. Besides, you like me buttoned down. It gives you something to undo."

  "The man speaks truth," I said, and then his hands were underneath my T-shirt, which was thinner and less complicated than his--and good thing, too, because waiting had never been one of my stronger skills.

  Dominic laughed as I pressed myself into him, and we fell backward onto the bed, already wrapped around each other, shedding clothing as we went.

  For once, the only one who was likely to start cheering was me, and that was the best part of all.

  We lay sprawled on the bed, me with my head resting on his stomach, him drawing lazy spirals on my back with thumb and forefinger. My eyes kept threatening to drift closed. We had been on the road for so long that I had almost forgotten how nice it was to be in a real bed, behind walls that were thick and secure and protected by things other than my personal armory.

  "Verity." Dominic's voice was low and insistent.

  "Nope," I said, closing my eyes and snuggling down lower, so that the small hairs below his navel tickled my nose. "Staying right here. Nothing you can say will move me. I am a rock. I am an island."

  "You are going to make us late for dinner, and while I'd be perfectly content to remain exactly where I am for the next eight hours or so, you seemed set on being here in time to share a meal with our hosts." Dominic pulled his hand away from my back. "I refuse to be the target of your ire when you wake up and realize that we missed it."

  "Dinner. Crap." I sat up, raking a hand backward through my hair. I needed to get it cut, and soon; I was starting to look more like a startled cat than a cockatoo, which meant it was getting too long. "Let me hop in the shower real quick. Pull out something casual but dressy, okay? Uncle Mike's going to be there, so you won't be the only human at the table."

  "He's coming alone? I thought he was married." Dominic slid out of the bed, starting across the room toward his suitcase, while I struggled not to get distracted by the view.

  "He is married, she's just not human. Aunt Lea is an Oceanid."

  Dominic turned and frowned at me. Then he shook his head. "Is there anything your family will not marry?"

  "I dunno," I said. "I'm banging a guy from the Covenant. I think it shows that we're pretty open-minded."

  Dominic opened his mouth, like he was going to say something. He hesitated. Finally, he turned away, unzipping his suitcase and beginning to dig through his clothes. "The shower's yours, if you want it," he said. "I will be ready in a few minutes."

  I frowned at him. It felt like I was missing something--something important. Unfortunately, if I tried to get him to explain, I was going to make us late for dinner. The Kalakos family was forgiving of a lot of things. They were not big fans of tardiness.

  Making a quiet note to myself to try to figure out what was wrong later, I grabbed my shower bag and bolted for the bathroom.

  A lot of older buildings have questionable plumbing and terrible water pressure. Since the Carmichael Hotel was outside a lot of building codes and might not even technically exist as far as the city was concerned, it would have been perfectly reasonable to assume that their showers would suck. It would also have been very, very wrong. The Carmichael didn't have a lot of permits, or access to the human building community. What it had instead was access to an entire world of nocturnal and subterranean contractors who were happy to do virtually anything for a paying customer.

  (It's borderline impossible to exist entirely outside the human economic system these days. Money talks, as the old proverb says. So does the media. Bogeyman children who would once have been perfectly happy with homespun and hand-me-downs were just as vulnerable to trends as their human counterparts, and their parents were just as susceptible to pleading, begging, and the all-important whining. Even cryptid communities that lived mostly off the grid were apt to take small jobs and produce handmade goods for sale to human markets, just for the sake of keeping the local currency on hand.)

  The shower was hot, and strong enough that it felt like it blasted off the top layers of my epidermis, taking all the grit and weariness of the road along with it. I turned off the taps and stepped out of the tub, once more ready to take on the world. I could hear Dominic moving around in our shared hotel room. That was enough to bring a smile to my face. He might be a little weird sometimes, and we might still be working our way through the places where our divergent upbringings clashed with our relationship, but he was here, and he was mine, and I was happy to be his. For as long as he wanted me to be.

  I gave my hair quick once-over with the blow dryer before I shimmied into the clothes I'd brought with me: a peasant-style yellow blouse, tight gray jeans, and a necklace of tiny silver snakes that had been a birthday gift from my big brother. They weren't fighting clothes, and that was why I was wearing them. The Kalakos family had known us for generations. That meant they trusted us...to a point. They never forgot what we were, any more than we forgot what they were. We just needed to tread lightly around each other.

  Dominic was dressed when I emerged from the bathroom. All in black, of course, which was pretty normal for him; black slacks, button-down black shirt, and even a black belt. I smiled. I couldn't help it.

  He frowned. "What?"

  "Just thinking about how much I'd like to undress you again, and wishing we had more time before dinner," I said. "I'm really looking forward to getting to Portland, and being able to slow things down whenever we want them. I'm tired of quickies in cheap motels while the mice aren't in the room. That's all."

  "How long are we here again?" he asked.

  "Five days. Uncle Mike is going to show us the city."

  This time, Dominic smiled. "Then we'll have plenty of time to 'slow things down' before we get back on the road. Now come. Introduce me to your friends." He offered me his arm. I took it, and together, we walked out of the room.

  The stairs down to the lobby were broad and beckoning as we walked down the hallway. I pulled Dominic away from them and down a bend in the hall to a smaller stairway, almost hidden by the construction of the floor. It was just as opulent as the rest of its surroundings, with a polished brass bannister and thick carpet on the steps, but it was somehow uninviting, like it didn't want to be used. Part of that was the narrowness: there wasn't room for two people to walk side-by-side.

  I stepped in front of Dominic, explaining cheerfully, "This way no one can attack them any way but single file," before I started down.

  "Charming," he said, and followed me.

  The stairs went down, down, down to lobby level and then lower still, finally widening out and opening onto a room large enough to host a professional ballroom dance competition. The floor was marble, and the draped fabric on the walls matched the lobby upstairs. Conversation pits formed by careful groupings of furniture studded the edges of the room. All of them were empty, unlike the long table set up on the far end, which was surrounded by gorgons.

  Gorgons, and one couple that appeared human, although the woman had blue-green highlights in her wheat-colored hair
. I smiled and waved when I saw them. Aunt Lea waved back, while Uncle Mike looked indulgently on. It was too far for me to really see his expression, but I knew that he was probably smirking, looking forward to watching Dominic try to navigate dinner without starting a diplomatic incident.

  I slid my arm through Dominic's as we walked across the room toward the table. "The big gorgon with the red and yellow snakes on his head is Angelo Kalakos. He's the current patriarch of the family, and he's the one who decides things like 'who is welcome at the Carmichael.' He's a pretty reasonable guy, and he used to be a professional Scrabble player, because the world is profoundly weird sometimes. The lady with the white and orange snakes is his wife, Lydia. Her father, Hector, knew my great-grandparents."

  Dominic paused to work through this before he asked, "Who takes whose name in gorgon culture?"

  "Ooo, good catch. See, you're adapting fast to the idea that human cultures aren't the only cultures that count. Among lesser gorgons, the family name is tied to the place, not the specific bloodline. Lydia was born a Kalakos, and since she stayed here at the Carmichael, when she took a husband, he took her name. Her sister, Aspa, moved to a gorgon community up in Canada, and she took her husband's name. That way, ownership of property or hunting grounds is continuous, and tied to the name."

  We were almost to the table. They'd be able to hear us soon. I gave his arm a squeeze. "Any more pressing questions?" I asked.

  "Are we going to be expected to eat living things? I love you very much, Verity, but I don't think even love can convince me to swallow a guinea pig."

  It was all I could do not to stop where I was and laugh myself sick. I forced myself to keep my expression neutral, and said, "No, they mostly eat a variation on traditional Greek cuisine. Oh, and spaghetti."