If I’d had hands, I would have run them over my face in irritation. Instead, I let the tip of my tail twitch once, twice—and on the third time, it accidentally thumped against the inside of the coffin. I instantly held it still.
“What was that?” Lori’s voice sounded panicked.
Baby Paige let out a wail.
“What was what?” In my imagination, Hale didn’t even bother opening his closed eyes to acknowledge his wife’s distress. He sounded bored enough to be sitting there half-asleep. “And God, Lori. Shut that kid the hell up.”
Lori ignored his comment about the baby. “It sounded like it came from inside the coffin.”
“No way. You’re imagining things. You need another hit.”
“I am not hallucinating.” Lori’s voice rose. “Dammit, Hale. You never believe what I tell you.”
Ron’s voice interrupted Hale. “No. I heard it, too. She’s right. It sounded like it came from inside the coffin.”
“Something inside shifted, then,” Hale replied. “You know, like a box of cereal? Contents may settle during shipping.”
Another male voice spoke in Spanish, and Ron answered him in the same language. I didn’t like not knowing what was going on out there.
But then I heard footsteps coming closer.
Dammit. They were about to open the coffin. I was sure of it. My time as a passive bystander—or by-hider, anyway—was almost over. And I had no idea how I was going to deal with being found, either.
I withdrew to the bottom of the coffin again—but I wasn’t able to pull my entire body under the fabric. Not without sliding under Abuela’s skirt. And that just seemed way too impolite. She’d been through enough.
I was still contemplating my options when the top half of the coffin flipped open and light streamed in.
Chapter 7
“Nothing there,” Ron announced. “Nada.”
I knew that word. I didn’t know the spate of Spanish that followed after. But I was coiled and ready to move when the bottom half of the casket flew open because I could tell it was coming.
As soon as the light hit my eyes, I flowed up and out the back corner of the casket, away from the side where the two men, Ron and his Spanish-speaking companion, stood.
Both men leaped backward, cursing in two different languages. I slipped under the closest row of seats and began sliding toward the front of the airplane, searching for a place to hide.
I heard Ron yelling, but made out only one line in his scrambled screeching. “Yes. I said there’s a motherfucking snake on the plane!”
Someone laughed, and Ron cursed again.
The problem with being the snake on the plane is that there aren’t really that many good hiding spots for snakes. Not big ones, anyway.
I finally managed to get myself wedged into what I suspected was designed to be a trash receptacle in a small kitchenette in the center of the plane.
I stayed there for all of two minutes with the drug-runners alternating between tearing up the plane and howling in laughter at Ron’s frantic shouts before I decided that the last thing I wanted was to be cornered when they finally, inevitably found me.
So I peeked back out and made my way from hidden corner to hidden corner.
Right up until the moment someone else saw me and gave a shout. “Holy shit, he wasn’t lying. There really was a python in the casket!”
Once I’d been spotted, it was inevitable that they’d start talking about ways to kill me. As a general rule, humans aren’t that forgiving of reptiles ending up in their spaces. Especially not snakes.
One of the smugglers casually pulled a gun on me, prepared to shoot. His fellow travelers in the airplane began waving their arms frantically and shouting at him in Spanish, presumably to keep him from actually following through with that plan.
For a full thirty seconds after he lowered his weapon, I was certain that I was going to survive this trip. But then another one of the men aboard—I counted four passengers in addition to Lori and Hale—pulled out a knife.
It was a scary knife, too—one of those giant Bowie knives, made for hunting and scraping the insides out of animals.
And wereanimals, apparently.
Just the sight of it made me hiss in dismay.
“Did you hear that?” Ron demanded. “Damn thing just threatened us. That’s what it means when they hiss like that.”
What? It is not! I wanted to yell at him, but of course, I couldn’t.
I tried to retreat back the way I’d come, but the people on board had been busy piling up objects to block my way under the seats.
Even worse, another man stood back there, also holding a knife.
I was trapped. I flicked my tongue out, trying to test for any weaknesses. When that didn’t work, I concentrated carefully, letting the heat-sensing pits of a viper develop in my face, hoping the extra sense would show me some hidden space on the plane that I’d missed before.
Nothing.
I contemplated actually fighting the men with the knives.
No go. I mean, I could kill them. Even in my current shape, I could disrupt the blood-flow to a human’s brain and knock him out in mere seconds. It didn’t take long after that to cause death. And I was able to mimic the form of any snake, to take on all its characteristics, so I could shift into a viper easily enough, or an elapid snake. A bite from, say, a black mamba or a cobra could kill a man.
But I wasn’t willing to do that.
It would be murder, as far as I was concerned, and everything in my upbringing screamed at me that it was deeply wrong.
I couldn’t allow myself to be killed, either—my natural self-preservation instincts screeched against that just as much.
That didn’t leave me many options. If I tried to squeeze one man until he passed out, the other would attack me with his knife.
They planned to kill me. I could see it in their eyes. And they were moving in closer at every moment, trying
