I made eye contact with Phil as I buttoned it up, dragging his gaze up from my chest. “You don’t want the amount of poison that will get you,” I said in my flattest voice.
He made a noncommittal noise. “So you say.”
The whole time I’d been putting on the shirt, I had allowed myself to drift along on my slightly undulating coils, getting closer and closer to the casket.
“Now that’s dealt with,” I said, “I need someone to tell me what, exactly, these guys mean when they say Santa Muerte.”
The man who had been bowing at my feet had grown silent as I spoke, watching me through narrowed eyes. I didn’t know if it was because he did or did not believe that I was whatever Santa Muerte might be. But I was fairly sure that whatever he was thinking, he was still my best possible chance of getting out of this alive.
Oh, and also without getting hauled off to a lab and experimented on by scientists for the rest of my unnaturally shortened life.
“It’s a local saint near their home,” Phil said, dropping down into one of the seats and draping his arms over the back of it. He rested his chin on his wrists and watched me with a lazy grin on his face.
I didn’t like that expression. It suggested that he thought he had the upper hand somehow. I moved a few inches closer to the casket.
Finally, the term Santa Muerte clicked for me. I had read an article about it when I was in grad school, the death-saint figure that was cropping up among South and Central American Catholics. She was like a cross between a saint and a skeleton, almost a voodoo figure, and was said to look out for those in dangerous positions. For this reason, she was a favorite of drug runners.
“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
