It hadn’t been long enough yet to make my escape, and I hadn’t seen a perfect route just yet either, but it was out here. I just had to keep my eyes open.
Speaking of—
“Oof!” My body throttled forward, toes catching on a root, and the soil I was just reminiscing about coming towards my face. I braced for impact, muscles tensing when an arm swooped to cradle my waist and righted me back up in one brisk tug.
“You okay?” Reyes' husky voice cusped my ear.
“I’m fine,” I breathed. Gently, my hands settled on his forearm around my waist, a subtle signal to let me go. He did, backing away enough so I could turn and hand him a tight smile. “Thanks.”
“Flip flops aren’t really hiking material, huh?”
I scuffed my shoe across a bed of pebbles, watching them sprawl and flee in front of us. “Guess I forgot to pack my steel-toed boots.”
We walked another half mile or so before we came up on a sign with a huge red warning that read ‘venomous snakes’ and listed four types of slithering animals, all with names infamous enough that I recognized each one.
“You said you were a boy scout, right? On the plane?”
Agent Reyes cleared his throat. “From eleven to fifteen, yeah.”
“Would you be able to recognize any of those snakes if we saw them out here?”
A ghost of a smile curved at his mouth as I spared him a glance, and he reached his hand above him and plucked a leaf right off of its branch. “Scared of snakes, are we?”
“Not scared. More so curious.”
With the leaf he’d stolen from nature, he folded its shape between his fingers, repeating the same action over and over. He creased the leaf like paper origami, refining its edges and shaping it back and forth until he’d turned it into a tiny folded green square pinched between his fingers.
“Yes, I’d be able to recognize them if we saw one,” he said, drawing my attention from his busy-at-work hands to his face.
“Which is the deadliest of the four?”
“Depends.”
A man of many words.
“On?”
He chucked his tiny square of distraction into passing bushes. “Rattlesnakes are far more aggressive and tend to inject more venom in one bite, but the coral snake’s venom is deadlier.”
“Isn’t a coral snake the one with the rhyme?”
Reyes nodded and picked another leaf. The palm-sized leaf was yet another victim to his stress as he folded it front ways and back, eyes searching out and making notes of each bench or sign we passed.
“Black touches red, friend of Fred. Yellow touches red, kill Fred dead,” he rattled off absent-mindedly.
“Uh, who the fuck is Fred and what happened to Jack?”
Finally, Reyes paused his fidgeting and handed me a cock-eyed look. “Jack?”
“Uh, yeah. Red touches yellow, kill a fellow. Red touches black, friend of Jack.”
“I’ve never heard of Jack.”
I shrugged and trudged forward. “Maybe a snake got him.”
A soft breath of laughter breezed past my ears, slight but warm.
Ahead of us sat a bush at the curve of the trail with flowers like trumpets the color of snow. They stung my eyes with their beauty, and I was fast-walking towards them before my mind could catch up. A smile rose on my lips as I approached the bouquet of brilliant white, eager to pet their soft petals.