Ghost Key

by Trish J. MacGregor

  “But I have to tell you,” he went on, “that when I first saw you, I hoped like hell it would all come to pass.” Then he leaned over her and touched his mouth to hers, a kiss so simple and yet so exquisite that she felt powerless to do anything except reach back and lock her hands behind his head, at the back of his thick, powerful neck. For long moments, it seemed that they breathed in perfect rhythm with each other, that their hearts beat as one.

  Then the chopper moved in low over the marsh, sixty feet, fifty, forty, thirty, twenty, practically skimming the gulf, and gunfire tore through the reeds, chewed through the water. Kate instantly rolled to the right, onto her hands and knees, pulled the nine millimeter from her jacket pocket, rocked back onto her heels and shot blindly, without thought, into the sky, at the chopper. When she emptied the clip, she slammed in another. As the chopper circled in closer, she fired twice and the helicopter blew apart in midair.

  The explosion reverberated across the water, through the marsh, a moving tide of violence. Pieces of flaming debris rained around them, igniting the tips of the reeds, which burned fast and hot. She just sat there, clutching the weapon, air bursting from her mouth in short, panicked staccato bursts.

  “Delaney, we need to—”

  He lay there bleeding, groaning, motionless, and she fell forward, her hands landing on either side of his head. “Delaney, Christ, what…” She lifted his head, begging him to speak to her, open his eyes, something, Christ, something. His eyes opened, but were glazed with pain.

  “Side,” he gasped, and passed out.

  His shirt and jacket turned crimson. He was going to bleed to death here, in the Zodiac, where he had kissed her. A part of her actually believed she had caused this, that she was cursed, a purveyor and vehicle of bad luck. She loved Rocky and he had disappeared. She had loved Rich and he had become possessed by a brujo. This intriguing man had kissed her—and now might die. Kate started the engine and broke free of the marsh. Flaming debris rained down as she crossed the open water between the marsh and Sea Horse. She thought she heard a boat closing in on her and maneuvered the Zodiac erratically, a zigzag that hopefully would make her a more difficult target.

  “Stay with me, Delaney, stay with me.” She kept repeating these words, a mantra, a prayer.

  Kate heard the hawk before she saw her, circling low, then flying in alongside her, keening loudly. When she plunged into the mangrove around Sea Horse, she cut the engine, tipped it out of the water, and paddled frantically. Liberty spiraled upward. Delaney hadn’t moved. His blood covered her hands, saturated her clothes.

  The instant Kate saw the houseboat, she shouted for Wayra, but he was already on the deck, probably alerted by the hawk, who keened nearby. “I can see you,” he shouted, and shone a flashlight in her direction. “I heard the gunfire. Are you hurt?”

  “Delaney is.” Her fear for him choked off her words. She had some first-aid supplies on board, but was pretty sure that Delaney’s condition went well beyond what first aid could do. “He … broke me out. Freed me from the feds.”

  The Zodiac bumped up against the side of the houseboat; she tossed the rope to Wayra, and he secured it to the ladder. She suddenly realized that getting Delaney out of the raft would be difficult. She estimated that he was six foot seven or eight, weighed well over two hundred and fifty pounds, and that she and Wayra might not be able to move him. Her hands, slick with his blood, kept slipping off him. He continued to bleed. She heard the wheeze of his breathing as she lifted his torso and Wayra grabbed his forearms and pulled.

  They finally managed to get him onto the houseboat deck. Kate buckled from relief, exhaustion, and sank to her hands and knees. Wayra dragged Delaney into the houseboat, leaving a trail of blood behind him. The ripe stink of Delaney’s blood suffused her senses; she knew she would smell it for the rest of her life. Minutes ticked by before she could haul herself up. She stumbled through the open deck doors.

  And what she saw paralyzed her—Rocky on the floor, his body caught between human and animal, like some scene from that movie Altered States. His limbs were human, his face was that of a dog or wolf, his eyes were wide open, lupine, a soft amber color, flickering here and there, rolling back in their sockets. And beside him was Delaney, Wayra hovering over him, one hand pressed to his forehead, the other welded to Delaney’s chest, light shooting from his palms. He sank his teeth into Delaney’s neck and Kate shrieked and lunged at him, and Wayra caught her and whispered, “Shit, Kate, I’m sorry,” and slapped his hand against her forehead.

  She swam into a dream. And in this dream, she was everywhere and nowhere. She wandered through memories that were not her own and every time she struggled to break free of whatever this was, she found herself at Rich’s place, the last time they had made love, when the evil ghost had been inside of him.

  And she knew that Wayra was changing her just as he had changed her son and was changing Delaney. With his mouth at her neck, she didn’t have the strength or the will to fight him. She succumbed.

  Sixteen

  Wayra tasted his own urgency, a foul bitterness that coated his tongue, clogged his nostrils, threatened to choke him. He swept Kate’s fallen weapon off the floor and pocketed it. He worked off her jacket, then lifted her and set her gently on the couch, on her back. He stared down at her, sickened by what he’d done.

  He knew he’d bitten her for no other reason than to prevent her son from ever being alone, as Wayra himself had been for so many centuries. It violated every code he’d ever lived by and he deeply regretted it. His emotions had gotten in the way. But he couldn’t undo it now and was grateful she would sleep through the transformation process. As the only uninjured and healthy one in this trio, her transformation would be complete in four to six hours.

  He turned his attention to Delaney. Big man, nearly seven feet tall. Wayra guessed he weighed about two-seventy. That alone would lengthen the time of his transformation. But he was also badly injured. It meant his vastly improved immune system would slam into high gear to heal him first, just as Rocky’s had. Then the transformation process would begin. No telling how long it would take. Rocky was twenty-four hours into the process. When Wayra had turned the mother and son who were infected with the plague, their transformation had taken two days. He hoped that wouldn’t be the case for either Rocky or Delaney. He didn’t think either of them had two days to spare. Wayra removed Delaney’s jacket, tore open his bloody shirt. Christ, so much blood. It covered his right side like a second skin and made it impossible to tell the nature of the injury or how bad it was. He ran over to the galley sink, filled a pot with warm water, set it on the floor next to Delaney. He hurried into the bathroom and fetched clean towels and washcloths, Betadine and hydrogen peroxide.

  He worked on the blood for long, tense minutes, wash and wipe, wash and wipe, until he could see the deep, gaping gash a bullet had torn across his rib cage. Wayra couldn’t tell if the bullet had penetrated. If it had, then his body might expel it during his transformation or tissue would grow around it, encasing it forever. The bleeding had stopped. That meant the transformation had already begun. Wayra treated the wound with the peroxide and Betadine, then felt along Delaney’s ribs to see if he could find any breaks. He didn’t detect any. He hoped that if there were hairline fractures he couldn’t feel, damage he couldn’t see, the transformation would heal them.

  Wayra found a shirt that was at least a size too small for Delaney, but it would have to do. It was important that his transformation, like Kate’s and Rocky’s, happened while he was clothed. That way, whenever he shifted in the future, he would always return to his human form wearing clothing, with his belongings zipped into pockets or whatever he carried. He didn’t know why this was so, it just was.

  He got up to check on Kate. Beneath her lids, Kate’s eyes flickered back and forth, as if she were in REM sleep, dreaming. Good, this was as it should be. It meant she was accessing the vast collective pool of shifter history, the first step in a transformat
ion unless the person was injured or sick. For Rocky and Delaney, the healing was first, then the history. Within this history lay the blueprint of transformation that their bodies would use, a blueprint now encoded in their DNA. The shape each of them ultimately took would be determined by the nature of their individual consciousness.

  Even though it had been centuries since Wayra had turned anyone, the information about the process surfaced with shocking clarity and speed. He suspected it was that shifter blueprint at work.

  Wayra didn’t have any idea how Delaney would fit into this picture. Maybe he wouldn’t. If he survived, he might choose to turn a woman and form his own pack. Or perhaps he, Kate, and Rocky would form a pack. That part of it was out of his control.

  As he drew a cover over Kate and then turned to Rocky, he noticed the hawk. She watched him warily from the back of a kitchen chair, those bright amber eyes so sentient and aware that he felt if he reached out to her in his other form, they would connect in some way. When he crouched beside the boy, the hawk fluttered to the floor beside him and drew her beak across the side of his thigh.

  Wayra reached out and stroked her head with his fingers. She made that soft, trilling sound he’d heard several times now, the equivalent of a cat’s purr, then flew back to her perch on the chair. Wayra’s gaze lingered on her for a moment, puzzling over her, then he turned his attention on the boy.

  The infection that had sent Rocky into convulsions was gone now, but his transformation was hideous to watch. It was as if he were caught in some terrible evolutionary loop—his feet and hands in the midst of conversion, fingers and toes disappearing into the knobs of his fists and ankles to create what would eventually become his paws. His head was no longer human, and at this point it was difficult to determine what kind of dog—or wolf—he might become.

  He figured Rocky would emerge first, then Kate, then Delaney. They would possess the rudimentaries of what they could do as shapeshifters, but he would have to teach them the nuances. As their creator, he was obligated to do so. But he sure as hell couldn’t teach them what they needed to know while they were on the houseboat. They had to be outside, on land, in a wooded area or some comparable spot so that their initial sensory perceptions were of the wild.

  Wayra walked out onto the porch, the hawk following him, and listened to the darkness. Night sounds, that was it. Yet he had heard gunfire, boats, and the explosion of the chopper. Surely that would prompt another chopper to be sent out, more boats, a rescue mission, something. He climbed the ladder to the upper deck, the hawk flying on ahead of him, and peered out over the tops of the mangroves. Fog stretched across the gulf, five feet high and still climbing, so much fog he couldn’t even see water in any direction. That explained why there was no rescue mission.

  But would the young brujos who traveled in this fog seize hybrid humans? Unknown. He hoped they would avoid his trio just as they had avoided him. Regardless, he had to risk moving them to land or his shifters might end up like that boy he’d turned hundreds of years ago, never right in the head, eventually committing suicide.

  The mangrove where the boat was anchored never gave way to solid land. So he would have to move along the shoreline, which meant his shifters would be more exposed to the fog, to the south side of the island where there was a lighthouse, a beach, and thickets of trees and brush. Or he could head for the old cemetery on Atsena Otie Key. But that would mean three or four miles of open water, a less appealing choice.

  Wayra whistled for the hawk and the two returned to the cabin. Not much had changed with his three charges. He made sure they were as comfortable as possible, then went over to the tiny pantry and brought out the torches he’d made earlier in the day. He had wrapped rags around a couple of broomsticks and a mop stick and now he saturated the rags in gasoline. He slipped several packs of matches in his jacket pocket, left a box of kitchen matches on the counter, and helped himself to one of the torches. Just in case. He turned down the battery-operated lantern, picked up another and carried it into the pilothouse with him. The hawk stayed with Rocky, Kate, and Delaney. He was certain she would warn him if there was any significant change.

  He set the lantern on one of the benches, stood the unlit torch in the corner, reeled in the anchor. He started the engine, kept it just above idle, and didn’t turn on any outside lights. Instead, he shone a flashlight through the window, orienting himself as he navigated to the edge of the mangrove. At this level, the fog was the same thickness and color as clam chowder. It pressed up against the front of the boat, drifted across the pilothouse window. He didn’t hear the brujo litany, didn’t sense anything inside it. Was it just ordinary fog? That seemed unlikely. He brought the power up and the houseboat chugged out into the fog, away from the safety of the mangroves.

  Wayra headed along the eastern shoreline of Sea Horse and the fog quickly swallowed the houseboat. He felt like Jonah in the belly of the whale, the beat of the boat’s engine the throb of the creature’s heart. Chug-chug, chug-chug, a monotonous rhythm. He turned off the lantern, the flashlight, and noticed there was enough illumination within the fog—light from the stars or the moon—for him to see. But there was nothing to see, just the pale soup of the fog.

  He navigated using the compass, the depth finder, the GPS. On the GPS screen, the houseboat pulsed a bright red and moved along the dark shadow that was Sea Horse. Two miles into the journey, something in the fog changed. He sensed it, an anger, a malevolence. And then he heard the litany: Find the body, fuel the body …

  The hawk suddenly shrieked and Wayra slammed the engine into high gear. The houseboat sped ahead, but it didn’t move quickly enough to outrun the fog. The stuff drifted through the wood, the glass, seeped through any minuscule crack or hole it could find. Tongues of it wrapped around his ankles and the cold bit through his skin, muscles, into his bones. Wayra lit the torch and touched it to the long rope of fog that ran from the wall to his leg. It broke apart, and the separate pieces swiftly retreated. Wayra brought the engine to idle and rushed into the cabin.

  The hawk flew around wildly, shrieking, her wings flapping hard as she dived toward the windows, where fog pressed up against the glass, then drew back, afraid of her. Wayra raced over to the windows on the right, thrusting the burning, smoking torch at the glass. The fog retreated as though it didn’t perceive the glass, then dived toward it again, intent on gaining entry.

  Suddenly, Charlie Livingston and Victor materialized in the middle of the room. Charlie looked the same, the guy in white, Mr. Clorox. But Victor was so agitated his clothes went from Grecian tunic to jeans to a Wall Street three-piece suit to shorts and a T-shirt. His eyes changed shape and color, and Wayra knew none of this boded well for him.

  “Vic, Charlie, good to see you both. I hope you’re here to help.”

  “We’re going to cover you all the way to Goose Cove,” Charlie said. “This fog is filled with some older ghosts that are hungry enough to sample the four of you. Dominica sent out a call and an appalling number of these bastards answered.”

  “Just do it,” Wayra said, and thrust his torch at the window again.

  Charlie and Victor raised their arms at the same time and evaporated. A moment later, the world erupted with caws and cries, squawks and a high-pitched keening. Birds. Hundreds of them. Wayra couldn’t see them until the fog rolled away from the houseboat with astonishing swiftness and then shock tore through him. Thousands—not hundreds, but thousands—of gigantic birds spread out against the starlit sky, and spiraled steadily downward toward the houseboat until they created a black veil that hid it from view. The hawk flew wildly around the room, then followed Wayra into the pilothouse and pecked at the side window until he opened it. She flew out and joined the birds.

  Crows.

  On the GPS, the blinking red light that had been the houseboat was replaced by a dark, undulating mass. Now and then, a bank of fog approached the dark mass, but the crows immediately attacked it and the fog either dispersed or fled. He imagine
d that the brujo net hummed like crazy right now, alerting Dominica to the presence of the tremendous crows.

  Black crows and a single white crow.

  Anxiety gnawed at him. Would it work? If not, then his trio would be more vulnerable than they would have been if he’d stayed where he was. It terrified him to think that in his eagerness to do the right thing for the people he had transformed he might have made a choice that could kill them.

  * * *

  For the second time tonight, Sanchez and everyone else in the camp heard the crows and scrambled onto the top of their trailers and trucks, heads thrown back, faces turned toward the sky. But this time, the birds weren’t over Cedar Key. They swept in a massive wave across the starlit sky and looked to be headed somewhere out into the gulf. Zee swore they were headed south to Sea Horse, but Sanchez didn’t know the area well enough to agree or disagree.

  At one point, he and Jessie wandered away from the crowd and walked down to the finger of land that jutted into the water. Cemetery Point. Fog blanketed everything beyond it, and even from where he stood, he could hear the lascivious voices—find the body, fuel the body … He slipped his BlackBerry from his jacket pocket, turned it on, and found three text messages from his sister.

  WTF?

  Call me!

  I called Delaney’s boss, he put me in touch with some fed named O’Donnell, nasty SOB who refused to answer my questions. I’m contacting a reporter at the Miami Herald and telling him there’s a story for him on CK. Let the Herald blow this one wide open, hermano.

  “Shit,” Sanchez murmured, and quickly punched out Nicole’s number. To his relief, the call went through and she answered on the first ring.

  “Jesus, Nick. I thought you might be dead.”

  “The cell signal is erratic. Put your reporter friend on alert, but he shouldn’t come anywhere near here. I’ll send you videos when I can.” Then he gave her a thirty-second summary of what was going on.