Snake in the Glass Read online

  "Spaghetti," he said blankly.

  "Yeah. When we were kids and we came here with our folks, me and Alex used to have spaghetti-eating competitions with Vasia, Dina, and the rest of the kids. They used to scarf down pasta like it was about to be banned."

  We were close enough to the table now that my comments had been overheard. Uncle Mike grinned.

  "Your table manners haven't really improved since then, you know," he said. "You still eat like you expect hyenas to take your food away at any moment."

  "I watched The Lion King too many times at an impressionable age," I said, before pulling away from Dominic and throwing my arms around Uncle Mike. He responded by lifting me off my feet, wrapping me in a hug that was as carefully controlled as it was all-encompassing. I leaned back enough to kiss his nose before he dropped me to my feet.

  His smile was the twin of mine as he said, "You weren't this happy to see me in New York."

  "You were stepping on my toes in New York," I said. "Here, you're not someone trying to take over my assignment. You're just a member of my family, and I'm glad to see you."

  "Just him?" asked a warm, almost buttery voice. There was an undertow in it, something dark and strange and strong. Aunt Lea could drown you if you crossed her. That was part of what made her so perfect for Uncle Mike. She was about as dangerous as something beautiful could be, without actually marrying the Atlantic Ocean.

  "No, not at all," I said, turning and offering my hands to the woman who was now smiling indulgently at me. The blue-green highlights in her hair were even more evident at this distance. They matched her eyes, which were not a color normally found in mammalian nature. They were the blue-green of deep sea nudibranchs, of tropical fish and coral reefs, and they were the only thing that really gave away the fact that she was something stranger and more fluid than a human woman. The invention of color contacts had been a real gift to the Oceanids.

  "Hello, Verity," she said.

  "Hi, Aunt Lea," I replied, and stepped into the safe harbor of her arms.

  Her embrace lasted only a few seconds before she was letting me go and looking past me to Dominic, eyebrows raised and expression curious. "And you must be her new beau. Lea Gucciard."

  "Dominic De Luca," said Dominic, bowing slightly at the waist. His eyes never left her hair. "Your stylist is to be applauded."

  "My stylist is a plastic hairbrush and a bottle of sulfate-free organic shampoo," said Lea. She sounded amused. That was always a good sign in her. Fewer drownings followed her amusement than her anger. "The color's natural."

  "Then you are very fortunate," said Dominic. "Some women of my acquaintance have been known to pay hundreds of dollars to accomplish that same effect."

  Lea raised her eyebrows further before she turned to me. "Mike told me you were from the Covenant. Was he wrong?"

  It would have been impossible to miss the stillness that fell over the people around us, all of whom had been waiting politely for the family introductions to be complete before they began making their own. Gorgons put great importance on the family unit, maybe because there were so few families left. They also put great importance on their safety. If Dominic answered her question incorrectly, it was going to take everything I had, and then some, to get him out of here alive.

  Maybe this hadn't been such a good idea after all.

  "I was, yes," he said, without a trace of hesitation or anxiety. "I was raised by people who believed that anyone who was not human was the enemy, and should be cut down where they stood. I have seen the error of my ways."

  "Verity can be quite convincing," said Aunt Lea.

  "It wasn't her." Dominic glanced at me, shrugged a little, and looked back to Lea. "Her cousin is a member of a species dedicated to destruction. She can pluck your thoughts from the air as easily as I might pluck an apple from a tree. If anyone was going to be a monster purely due to the circumstances of their birth, it would have been her. And she asked me if I wanted to talk about algebra. She was hopeful, as if she had been waiting her entire life for someone to come along who wanted to discuss mathematics. If Sarah Zellaby is not a monster, when she had every right to be, how can I pass judgment on anyone else? I was of the Covenant. I was sworn to the sword and the secret. I got over myself."

  There was a moment of silence. Then Angelo was there, clapping Dominic on the shoulder with such force that my ex-Covenant boyfriend nearly had a quick introduction to the floor.

  "You see? Everyone can change!" Angelo beamed at Dominic, the snakes atop his head twisting and twining together in a serpentine tango. He was wearing smoked glasses, just like all the other members of the family. It would have been easier to put protective glasses on their guests, but it could have been read as inhospitable--and more, it would have taken control away from the gorgons. This way, if someone got out of hand, they could be stunned before they knew what was happening. "You can leave the Covenant, we can stop burying bodies in the basement, our Verity can settle down. We live in an age of miracles."

  "Miracles and scalloped potatoes, if my nose isn't lying to me," I said. "Hi, Angelo. Can we eat? I am a hungry miracle."

  "Of course, of course," said Angelo, waving a hand expansively at the table.

  That was my cue. I pulled out a chair, motioning for Dominic to sit down. He blinked at me, his manners and training warring with the fact that I was pulling out the chair for him. I nodded firmly toward the chair, hoping that he would take the hint. He was usually pretty good about that sort of thing, especially when we were swimming in dangerous waters--i.e., interacting with intelligent cryptids whose idea of proper behavior probably didn't match his.

  To my great relief, Dominic sat. Uncle Mike did the same for Aunt Lea, getting her settled on the other side of the table. Angelo pulled out a chair for Lydia, who flashed me a smile before she sat down, the snakes on her head curling contentedly against her scalp. On cue, the majority of the gorgons followed their lead, until there were only three people standing: me, Uncle Mike, and Angelo.

  Angelo looked at the two of us, his expression going carefully neutral. "Do you admit yourselves to be guests in my home?" he asked.

  "I do, and call you head of household," said Uncle Mike.

  "I do, and you're totally the boss," I said, prompting an eye roll from Uncle Mike and a small, sidelong grin from Angelo.

  "You can't follow rules even if it's to save your own soul, can you, girl?" he asked.

  "Not usually, but if you give me one that makes really good sense, I'll give it a go," I said.

  "It's a good thing I'm very fond of you," said Angelo. "Both of you, sit, and be welcome."

  We sat.

  Dominic was looking straight ahead, which meant that he had no idea what was going on, and was trying admirably not to ask. I put a hand on his knee, smiled, and said, "Ritual exchange wherein Uncle Mike and I, as the presumably dominant members of our respective relationships, accepted that Angelo is the boss here and promised not to cause him or his family any harm."

  "Don't worry about the 'dominant' thing," said Aunt Lea. "Gorgons can be old-fashioned sometimes."

  "Madam, you are in our home," said Angelo.

  "Yes, and I could drown you in your own water glass," said Lea. They both laughed. This conversation had been happening over and over again, in various permutations, for as long as I had been old enough to eat with the adults.

  (Uncle Mike was considered the dominant partner in his marriage because Aunt Lea had taken his last name. The fact that Oceanids didn't have surnames was beside the point as far as gorgon traditions were concerned. That didn't mean that the Kalakos family had anything but the utmost respect for Aunt Lea, and her ability to leave them perfectly dry and utterly drowned at the same time. She was a woman of unique and dangerous talents.)

  "Ah," said Dominic.

  Younger members of the family began appearing through the door behind the table, carrying trays of food and baskets of bread. It was mostly modified Greek fare, with lots of chunky
sauces covering interesting cuts of meat, and olives in every place it was possible for olives to go. The bread was a broad mix of white, wheat, olive loaf, and interesting little crunchy rolls. I piled several on my plate. I wasn't in training at the moment, and that meant it was time to enjoy all the carbs my mouth could hold.

  Two more of the younger gorgons started coming around with wine. The humans, and Aunt Lea, got a sparkling white. The gorgons got a dark, dangerous-looking red.

  "Gorgons really like their Medusa," I said lightly, breaking a roll in half and starting to use it to sop up the sauce covering my baked rabbit. "Sadly, we don't get to really like it, on account of how it's made with their venom and would cause us to die horribly. You should ask Alex about it sometime. He really understands the whole 'this is how drinking gorgon venom destroys your cells and paralyzes your nervous system' process."

  Dominic wrinkled his nose. "I think I will refrain, if it's all the same to you."

  Aunt Lea laughed. "Okay, I like him. You didn't tell me he had a sense of humor, Mike. What else have you been hiding from me?"

  "I have a second wife in Kentucky, who is currently raising my three secret children," said Uncle Mike, in a perfect deadpan. "Can you please pass the olives?"

  "Oh, great, now he thinks he's funny." Aunt Lea shook her head before returning her attention to her original target: Dominic. She was still smiling, but her eyes were slightly narrowed, indicating the intensity of her interest.

  I settled back in my seat and reached for my wine. Aunt Lea was a forensic accountant, which gave her lots to discuss with my Grandma Angela, and made her scarier than I liked to think about when she decided that she wanted to know something. Since she wasn't currently focusing on me, this made her interest a spectator sport. It was just too bad the gorgons didn't believe in popcorn with dinner.

  "So Dominic," she said sweetly. "Tell me about yourself."

  "I was born to an Italian Covenant family; the De Lucas have been sworn to the secret and the sword for hundreds of years, and prior to myself, none have defected or chosen other than a warrior's path. We were not scholars. The pen and the page have their adherents, but it was our burden to raise hands against the dark, not wards."

  "There's a lot of alliteration in those sentences, but not much context," said Uncle Mike. "What does it mean?"

  "To be sworn to the secret and the sword is to be someone who kills when the Covenant tells them to," I said, all too aware of Dominic's growing discomfort. "To be sworn to the pen and the page is to be someone who...well, who still kills when the Covenant tells them to, but who mostly stays home and does research." There were several other categories of service within the Covenant. I didn't know all of them. The fighters were my primary concern, and probably always would be.

  Judging from the look on Angelo's face, right now I was his primary concern. "How do you know so much about the Covenant?" he asked. "Have you been discussing philosophy with your new suitor?"

  "I wouldn't have brought him here if I thought his loyalties were under question: not unless I wanted help disposing of his body," I said. "I know what I know because my grandmother's family used to be sworn to the secret and the sword, and my grandfather used to be sworn to the pen and the page. Too recent for us to forget, you know?"

  "I know very well," said Angelo. There was a pointed note in his voice. The Price family hadn't forgotten our Covenant roots. Neither had the rest of the cryptid world, not even the people who were our allies. That was good. As long as we didn't forget, maybe we wouldn't go back to being the kind of people who thought that anything we did was justified, as long as it backed up our beliefs.

  Aunt Lea was still looking at Dominic, her head tilted very slightly, like she was trying to break the code that would explain him to her. "Do you have any siblings?"

  "No," he replied.

  "Where are your parents?"

  "Deceased, hence the lack of siblings." He grimaced and took another drink of wine. "They were both warriors in service to the Covenant. My mother removed herself from the field for a short time, after I was born, but not forever. That would have been far too much to ask, even if I had been old enough to make the request. They were killed when I was very young. I do not know what they were fighting when they died. Please do not ask me."

  "I wonder why the Covenant didn't tell you," said Uncle Mike. "Seems like that sort of knowledge would have made you a much better fighter."

  "It would have made me a man with a vendetta," corrected Dominic carefully. "Men with vendettas are not such useful tools. They go off on their own. They make their choices based on whether or not those choices will get them closer to the source of their anger. Margaret Healy has a vendetta. She hates the family that she feels betrayed her by choosing to leave, stripping her of the glories that should have been her birthright."

  "And we all saw how well that worked out," I said. Margaret Healy was a distant cousin of mine, from the branch of the family that had remained behind when my great-great-grandparents came to America. She was also a stone bitch, and had done her best to take me out back in Manhattan.

  "So they kept you ignorant in order to make you more versatile," concluded Aunt Lea.

  Dominic nodded. "Yes. Their reasoning was more elegant than that, I'm sure, but in the end, they simply wanted a man who would go where he was told and kill what he was instructed to kill. In a way, they did me a favor."

  For the first time since dinner had begun, Lydia spoke. "How was that a favor?" she asked. "They kept your history from you. In our culture, that's a crime."

  "In most cases, I would agree with you," said Dominic gravely. "In this case...I have a thousand prejudices to battle every day that I spend in Verity's company. Some of the things she asks of me are so alien to my prior experience that I have to stop myself from asking if she has lost her mind. I'm trying. Every day, I'm trying. I don't have any choice. I want to be a part of her life. Even if I didn't--even if I were fool enough to walk away from her--this is the only world I'm suited for, and I can't go back to the Covenant. I am no longer a good weapon. So I need to learn to be a better man, and that means it's best if I don't have some deep-rooted hatred of a specific species."

  You could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed. Then Aunt Lea smiled, bright as the morning, and asked, "So, do you want to have kids?"

  I choked on my wine.

  Half an hour later, we were most of the way through the first course of dinner, and Aunt Lea was most of the way through her interrogation. Good thing, too: Dominic was starting to look a little wild around the eyes, like he was afraid this was going to end in an execution. I should probably have stopped it before she ran out of steam, but honestly, I was as interested as she was. After we'd gotten off the delicate topics of his parents--painful--and our potential future children--awkward--he'd been willing to talk about essentially anything, all of it informative, and all of it interesting, at least to me.

  Dominic De Luca was a complicated man, which really just meant that he was alive and in the world. Everyone was complicated, once you dug down past the surface and started looking at the actuality. I was finally starting to see where some of his snarls were, and it was wonderful.

  "So Verity, you're a young woman in the world," said Angelo. "What do you think a father should do when he makes a perfectly lovely match for one of his daughters, a match that would see her cared for and supported all the days of her life, and she rejects it out of hand? Would you punish her?"

  There was a clatter as Vasia dropped her spoon into her soup bowl. I dared a glance down the table. She was sitting perfectly still, face stricken. Dina's expression was a cold mask, unreadable and closed.

  I looked back to Angelo. "No, sir," I said. "My father was always very clear about the fact that I would be the one spending time in any relationship I chose, not him. We have more dating options than you do--there are more humans in the world--but finding humans who knew about my occupation and what it required of me
has always been hard. So he let me find my own way."

  Before Dominic, my romantic life had been a series of one-night stands and short-lived affairs that inevitably ended with my partner accusing me of cheating. There was nothing else that explained the way I would disappear in the middle of the night, not coming back until morning, if I came back at all. To be honest, I'd started to despair of ever finding someone I could be happy with long before Dominic had come along.

  "Your species is not at risk of extinction," said Lydia.

  "Maybe not, but even if my father had been able to order me to marry someone I didn't like, he wouldn't have been able to force me to have kids. So if the goal is continuing the species, isn't it better to go with a good match?" I didn't look at Vasia. I couldn't. I wouldn't be able to stay as calm as I was if I saw the look in her eyes.

  "Manos is a good man, and he finds our daughter beautiful," said Lydia. "Matches have been made on far less."

  Dominic glanced to her, and then to me, looking unsure.

  "Ah, does the newcomer have something to contribute?" asked Angelo. "Speak, Mr. De Luca. I would be fascinated to know how someone from the Covenant regarded our little situation."

  "It's not my place..." Dominic began.

  Angelo narrowed his eyes. "You would deny me my request?"

  Sensing danger, Dominic changed course in the middle of the sentence. "Not at all. I simply did not wish to give accidental offense. You will please forgive me if I stumble over something that would have been better left unsaid, yes?"

  "I suppose so," said Angelo. The snakes atop his head hissed and writhed. He wasn't pleased. He was still going to give Dominic a little more rope to hang himself with.

  I slid my hand onto Dominic's knee under the table, squeezing lightly in the hopes that he would take it as a signal to be careful. He put his hand over mine. He got the message. Now I just had to hope that he could navigate these waters as skillfully as he could field-strip a rifle.