Snakes and Ladders Read online

  Fran eyed him. “Not sure I should be letting a snake god loose. Even one who didn’t eat my daughter.”

  Naga groaned. Running a hand over his scaly skull, he said, “I don’t know how many times I’ve got to tell you people this, but I’m not a snake god. I’m not a god of anything.”

  “What are you, then?” asked Fran.

  “I’m a Professor of Extra-Dimensional Studies at the University of K’larth,” Naga replied. “I was on my way to the hatchery to meet my season-mate and review the available nesting sites, when suddenly, here I was, surrounded by bipeds talking about how once I was properly ‘bound,’ I would grant them all their desires. Unless they desire a passing grade in one of my classes, I’m not in a position to grant them much, and if their idea of ‘binding’ me is to feed me small children, they clearly reached into the wrong dimension when they were fishing for a deity.”

  “So you’re trying to tell me you’re harmless?” Fran said.

  “No. I fully intend to track down and constrict the bipeds that summoned me until they tell me how to get home. But I’m no one’s ‘snake god.’”

  “Grandpa can figure out how to send him home,” Alice piped up.

  Fran nodded. “Probably true. How do I know you’re telling me the truth, Mister Naga not-a-snake-god?”

  “I didn’t eat the child,” Naga replied.

  Fran and Mary exchanged a glance. Finally, Fran shrugged. “Fair enough.” Pulling out the key ring, she started flipping through. “Mary, you take Alice on home. Naga and I have some business to take care of.”

  Alarmed, Alice rushed over to hug Naga around the middle. The snake-man gave her a startled, wide-eyed look, before glancing back to Fran. “No shooting Naga!”

  “No shooting Naga, pumpkin, I promise,” Fran said, sliding the key into the lock. The door swung open, and Fran leaned in to gather Alice into a tight hug, while the mice cheered. “I’m just going to take him with me on a little tracking expedition. Make sure he doesn’t wind up visiting when he doesn’t want to from here on out.”

  “Oh,” said Alice, and beamed as Fran kissed her on the cheeks and forehead. Then her smile dimmed, and she said, plaintively, “Mama?”

  Fran blinked. “Yes?”

  “Can Mary take me trick-or-treating first?” Alice gave her a half-sly, sidelong look. “Most of my candy got lost.”

  After a moment’s pause, Fran began to laugh.

  *

  Mary and Alice had wandered off into the night, to Fran’s firm request that no one else get kidnapped before November at the very earliest. Fran and Naga, meanwhile, went off to do their part for discouraging the presence of snake cults in Michigan.

  “We’ll never get them all,” said Fran philosophically, as Naga squeezed the air out of a man who had tried to claim that his mystic power was stronger than a really big snake’s capacity to constrict. “Damn fools seem to get off on worshipping snakes. You’d think they could do something new for a change. A kitten cult. Maybe a big-ass snail cult. But no, it’s snake cults, always snake cults, like they were on discount at the five and dime.”

  Three hours later, they came tromping out of the woods, errands done, and onto the road, where Mary—looking exhausted as only a dead girl can manage—and Alice, who still seemed to be made entirely of hyperactive forward momentum, were heading for the house. Alice squealed with glee when she saw them, and raced over to hug first Fran, and then Naga, who took her embrace with resigned dignity.

  “Can Mary and Naga come home with us?” Alice asked, brightly. “Grandma’s making pie an’ runic gingerbread!”

  Fran paused, considering the expression on Jonathan’s face when she came home with a dead girl, an unwilling snake god, and substantially less ammunition than she’d started out with.

  Finally, she smiled. “Well,” she said, “you’re supposed to get treats and tricks on Halloween.”

  In Alice’s bag, the mice cheered.