A Snake in the Grass Read Online Free Page A

feature, that I could see,
was that as far as magic went, he had it practically oozing out his
pores. I mean, I’d seen strong magic users before. My wife, when
she wasn’t pregnant, was one of the strongest, most precise
spell-casters I knew. I’d met a Maori native who, while completely
untrained, literally had more power in one hair than I did in my
entire body. But Terrence managed to combine the two, and he tossed
spells around like they were water with very few ill effects.
(Though I will say it’s hard to tell the difference between passed
out drunk and passed out spell-sick.)
    I retrieved my sweats from the foot of my bed
and paused to examine my back in the mirror. In the dim light from
the bedside lamp, the pale white tattoos were almost impossible to
see, and yet I could have traced each one precisely. In the right
lighting, they would shine like the iridescent scales of a
butterfly’s wing, and they stretched from the tops of my shoulders
down to the waistband of my pants. Elaborate whorls and spirals,
things that connected at impossible angles and twisted through each
other like vines… I caught myself touching one of the ones at the
top and made myself lower my hand. They were mesmerizing, at times,
and it was best not to get caught in it.
    I kicked Estéban’s door again as I passed,
and made my way out into the early morning while Terrence and my
wife chatted over tea at the kitchen table. The grass on my lawn
made my bare feet tingle when I stepped off my back patio, and I
rolled my head on my shoulders, letting the goosebumps crawl across
my skin then fade into nothing. Where once that would have been a
sign of danger looming, now it just meant that the souls in my skin
were reacting to the latent magic around me. The tiniest glimmer of
a spell would set them clamoring, friendly magic or not. Nothing
like having your advance warning system completely short-circuited.
The one thing I had always relied on was now completely useless to
me.
    Terrence had placed formidable magical wards
around the borders of my yard, something I had long threatened to
do, but never done. That he’d done it with liberal application of
blessed alcohol from his flask (holy gin, kid you not), was
something of a sore point where Mira was concerned, but for the
safety of our unborn child, there was nothing she could do about
it. She was on spell-casting time out at least until the baby was
born. We still had about two and a half months to go.
    The sliding glass door opened and closed, and
I felt more than saw Estéban step up beside me in the grass. He
stood out in my mind now, a tall, slender outline, the glimmer of
magic inside him speaking to the barely contained ocean inside of
me. It was eerie, to me, but I’d started to understand that this
was what it was always like for them. Estéban, Mira, Sveta,
Terrence, all the others. They knew each other instinctively, drawn
by like talents. It explained a lot about how Ivan had started
rounding up all the champions, so many years ago. Easier, when you
can just pick a guy out of a crowd and go “Ah yeah, that’s the
one.”
    “C’mon, kid.”
    He followed me out into the yard without
questioning, silently gliding through the kata forms at my side
like my darker twin. He’d come a long way in the last year or so.
The angry kid that had come to me was calmer now, more thoughtful.
I was pretty sure I couldn’t take credit for that, but I was really
glad to see it. It gave me a little more hope that the kid would
survive whatever life was going to throw at him.
    We went through every form I’d taught him,
and I was pleased to see that his movements were almost perfect. He
had a good head for this stuff. I was proud of the kid, but part of
me felt like I had to test him one more time. Just in case it was
the last time.
    “What are the seven virtues of bushido?” Part
of his test was to see if he could carry on a conversation and keep
up with the kata at the same time. He knew