Free Shaman's Blood by Anne C. Petty Page A

from the crowd. Ned felt lightheaded. He wasn’t sure why Mistress Savoie had thought this was what he needed to do to get his answers, but some enlightenment had better happen soon or he would be out the tent flap and running flat out toward the dirt road behind the trees. And then he froze. There was a boy, a little younger than Ned had been when his mother had dragged him to handlings like this. The kid stood motionless at the edge of the stage. Ned didn’t need a close up of the tight mouth and pallid cheeks to know paralyzing terror when he saw it. The woman turned to the boy and thrust the diamondback toward him. “Take it!” he heard clearly over the cries of the faithful and the fearful. The boy took a step forward and reached out, grabbed the reptile clumsily from the woman, and then promptly dropped it.
    The enraged rattler hit the tent floor with a resounding thwap and snake-warped its way down the aisle, amid shrieks of panic and tumbling chairs as men, women, and children fought to get out of its path, which was aimed directly toward Ned.
    Without blinking, Ned reached out as he’d done on many other such nights long ago and grabbed the serpent firmly behind the head, hauling it up. Its body whipped the air for frenzied seconds and then wrapped around his arm up to the elbow. It felt dry and heavy against the meat of his forearm, hanging on for all it was worth.
    “Don’t be scared, son,” said his mother. He felt her at his back, close to his shoulder. “She’s milked dry.” Ned turned fast, swinging the arm with the snake in a wide arc, scattering screaming worshippers in its wake. She wasn’t there to see, but he’d felt her. He looked back toward the stage and saw Mr. Bolo hurrying toward him. Ned shifted his attention to the snake.
    She glared at him with vertical-slitted pupils, the striped ridges over her eyes giving her a cat-like expression. Her gaping mouth showed recurved fangs, fully extended. Ned’s grip was firm behind the wide triangular head, holding her as tightly as she held him. The snake was channeling all its aggression and panic into its madly buzzing rattles. Below the black and white stripes of her tail he counted nine, with a broken tenth. He knew you couldn’t precisely date a snake’s age from the number of rattles, but from her girth and length, she had the feel of a reptile that’d been around for awhile.
    Ned held her face up at eye level and touched the ridge over her eyes, ran his finger over the snout, and lightly traced the curve of one perfect fang and then the other. The snake shivered all along the length of his arm, squeezing him in a death grip. Someone near him screamed and he barely heard Brother Micah’s high-pitched voice saying something about aiming for the open box at his elbow. Ned shut them out and focused entirely on the red-brown eyes of the serpent. She held his gaze, and then, unexpectedly, her pupils widened and it seemed to Ned that her head changed shape, becoming rounder, smoother, smaller, with wide-set eyes and no brow ridge. Her stripes faded to a smooth brownish olive-green with diagonal rows of darker scales forming an all-too-familiar chevron pattern down her body. Ned choked and nearly let go. Somebody had him by the shoulder. He blinked hard, coming out of the vision.
    “That’s some fancy handlin’ you done there, son. Here now, I’m gonna peel ‘im offa you and you can just ease ‘im back in the box quicklike.” Brother Micah held the empty snake box just under his hand. Ned nodded and watched, still as stone, as the older man wrestled the coils loose. Ned aimed the snake’s head down into box and let go. It fell heavily into the container without offering to bite. He let his breath out.
    Brother Micah handed the box to one of his subordinates and turned back to Ned. “What’s your name, son? You from around here?”
    Ned shook his head, avoiding the question of his name. He rubbed his arm, getting blood flowing properly