Ghost Key

by Trish J. MacGregor

  As she neared them, she swung her flaming mop stick and whacked Humpty so hard across his bulging belly that the stick, the metal stick, bent like a straw. Another whack and it snapped altogether. The flaming part of it flew off, arced through the air, and landed in the road. Humpty gasped and stumbled back, arms clutched against himself. The younger, thinner man lunged for her, and she slammed into him with the bike.

  The impact destroyed the bike’s front wheel, Maddie catapulted over the handlebars, String Bean fell back into Humpty, and both of them crashed to the ground. Maddie landed on her side, and pain flared in her arm. She ignored it, vaulted to her feet, and hurled herself at String Bean. She Tasered him in the crotch and he shrieked and shuddered against the ground, as if in the throes of a seizure, then passed out.

  Humpty scooted back across the dirt and the gravel, his feet struggling for purchase, and even as she moved toward him, she could see the ensuing struggle between him and the brujo inside him. She didn’t have any idea what a Taser might do to a brujo, but there wasn’t time to think about it. Humpty screamed, “You’re gonna die, bitch, you’re gonna die, the whole tribe’s looking for you.”

  He got up clumsily, his feet jerking this way and that, as though his host were starting to fight back, and kicked out with his right leg. His boot grazed her hip and she stumbled. Crimson poured across her vision and she threw herself at him and Tasered him in the neck. He didn’t even shriek. His eyes rolled back, his bladder let loose, he crumpled to the ground.

  Adrenaline pumped through her, the inside of her mouth turned bone dry. Maddie scooped up her broken mop stick, raced to the electric cart, and took off into the woods. She glanced back twice to see if they were chasing her, but neither guy had gotten up yet. She didn’t have any idea what had happened to the brujos within those men, but if they’d vacated the hosts, then she had to assume they were pursuing her and that one of them could seize her at any moment.

  The cart moved faster than she could run, but it couldn’t outrun a determined brujo. She set the broken mop stick upright against the edge of the passenger seat and, driving with her knee, wrapped some of her spare rags around the stick, soaked them in lighter fluid, and lit it. The torch burned brightly. She lifted it in her left hand, waving it in the air around her just in case brujos were after her. A lunatic with a torch. Was this how she was doomed to live from now on? Would she be looking perpetually over her shoulder, arming herself with primitive torches or flamethrowers, Tasers or guns? The only way she would ever be rid of Dominica was to annihilate her.

  But how?

  Burn the town. Start with the hotel.

  The idea of returning to the tribe’s headquarters filled her with dread. Besides, burning the town would only cause the brujos to leap from their hosts or bleed them out and take off.

  And she wouldn’t be able to do it alone.

  But whatever she did would have to be done alone. For all she knew, holdouts like Zee Small’s group might have been hauled in while she was in the deep sleep and she might be the only uncompromised person left on Cedar Key. Her life now reminded her of I Am Legend, and she was the only human left on an earth populated by vampires.

  Will Smith she was not.

  Vampires these ghosts were not.

  Like vampires, though, they were vulnerable, not the gods she once thought they were. And Dominica, because she had existed for so long, was vulnerable in ways that younger ghosts were not. Her vulnerabilities were emotional: She was vengeful, hungry for power, and always loved the one she was with. She feared Wayra because he could destroy her by either disappearing her back in time or taking her into himself and shifting, and she probably feared him even more now that Maddie had escaped. Dominica truly desired a brujo bastion. Maddie might be able to manipulate her emotions in one or two of those areas, but so what? It wouldn’t destroy her.

  Think, think. She knew the answer to this, Dominica had lived inside her for months, they had shared psyches, histories, emotions, thoughts, ideas, even sex. Maddie knew her better than anyone, even better than Wayra. She could seize humans, take over and heal their bodies, inflict excruciating agony, plunge her hosts into the deep sleep, kill them. But she was no longer human, didn’t fully understand twenty-first-century America, and hey, she couldn’t multitask.

  In Esperanza, she had given an order to her tribe and her minions—most of them very old ghosts and some of them ancient ghosts—carried it out. Here, she didn’t have nearly as many minions and among them were only a few—Whit, Joe, Jill, and Gogh—whom Dominica trusted and who had any inkling of what was actually going on. Liam used to be the fifth of her trusted brujos, but he had fallen permanently out of favor.

  And just like that, Maddie had it. If there was too much going on at once, Dominica could delegate only so many duties, responsibilities, and crisis management to these four ghosts. At some point, she would have to do everything herself and wouldn’t be able to because she couldn’t multitask.

  Maddie started to laugh. She laughed until the trees blurred, and then she slammed on the brake and leaned over the side of the cart and puked. The contents of her stomach covered the ground. She pushed pine needles over the mess with her foot, lifted her head, wiped her hand across her mouth, dug out a bottle of water and drank deeply, washing the taste of puke from her mouth, sating her thirst.

  Can’t multitask. That’s it. Create chaotic eruptions all over Cedar Key.

  She started the cart and drove fast through the trees. When she reached the edge of the thicket, she looked out, hoping to see a street sign. There. “Bay Street, Bay Street,” she murmured. “Where the hell is Bay Street?”

  Memory coughed it up. She was just below the third bridge, off State Road 24. The homes located on the small roads on either side of the main highway belonged to locals. Artists, fishermen, shop owners, restaurant workers, retirees. Most of them had fled early on, been seized, or perhaps joined Zee’s group.

  Maddie stopped the cart in front of the first house she saw, broke inside, and spent fifteen minutes pillaging the place. As she was about to leave, she realized her right arm ached terribly, and when she removed her jacket, she saw that her shirt sleeve was sliced open just above the elbow and soaked with blood. She rolled up her sleeve, and blood dripped down the inside of her arm. She tore off her shirt and stared at her wound, a three-inch horizontal gash. When she lifted the flap of skin she nearly passed out. Bone, she thought she could see bone.

  When did this happen?

  Maybe when she’d been thrown off the bike.

  She weaved down a hallway in her bra and jeans, her jacket and bloody shirt draped over her shoulder, her pack clutched in her left hand, her good hand. In the bathroom medicine cabinet, she found gauze, Betadine, Band-Aids, hydrogen peroxide, alcohol, Neosporin, a bag of cotton balls. In a cabinet drawer, she uncovered a sewing kit with needles, thread, a thimble, safety pins.

  Clean and close. She selected the thickest thread, coarse and midnight black, and threaded the sharpest needle. She knew the needle was wrong, that she needed what her grandmother had used to stitch Maddie’s foot when she’d sliced it open on jagged glass during a barefoot run on the beach. But she would make do with what she had.

  She opened the bottle of alcohol and dropped the needle into it, careful to keep the thread draped over the lip so it didn’t slip away from her. She didn’t have the time to find and thread another needle. Already, her hands shook, her vision blurred. Maddie sat on the floor, her back against the wall, and went to work on her injury in earnest now—cleaning it, letting it bleed, sopping up the blood, cleaning it some more, alternately squirting it with Betadine, hydrogen peroxide, and Betadine again.

  Even if she managed to stitch it shut, she worried about infection and whether the cause of the injury was rusted. Her procedure was hardly hygienic and she couldn’t recall when she’d had her last tetanus shot. What a dark irony it would be to survive brujo possession only to die of lockjaw.

  The inst
ant the needle pierced the skin at the top end of the slash, she choked back a cry. When she tried to stick the needle in even farther, so that she could stitch from deep under the slice, her vision swam into blackness, and she nearly passed out from the pain. Frustrated, disgusted with herself, she pressed the needle in deeper, deeper.

  I’m gonna puke. She forced herself to pull the needle through, as though her flesh were a piece of fabric. Up, across, in, one stitch, two, three. She paused at some point to sip water, to dab Betadine on her stitch job. Then she resumed her stitching until she had thirteen tiny, neat stitches. Her hands shook so terribly that it took her a while to tie off the thread.

  Already, the skin around the slash looked angry, puffy, bright red. More Betadine, a dab of antibiotic salve. Then she bandaged the injury with gauze, and rifled through the cabinet for antibiotics that might fight the infection. She found a container of Augmentin that had expired two years ago, eight pills inside, and popped one. At 500 milligrams apiece, she would take another this evening. Or two more.

  If she lived that long.

  She rested afterward, sitting against the wall with her eyes shut, her arm throbbing, and after a while, she forced herself to stand, to find a clean shirt. She shoved her bloody shirt into the trash, put on her jacket, and moved out into the rest of the house to take inventory.

  Dominica’s tribe had taken most of the food and beverages, but not the rags, the containers of kerosene and lighter fluid, the brooms and mops. She loaded everything into the back of the cart and moved on to the next house, the next, and the next. She didn’t take just rags. She took glass bottles, towels, linens, feather pillows, aluminum foil, Saran Wrap, matches, anything that might give her an edge.

  At the end of nearby Pine Street, she found a two-story house with a one-car garage that backed up to the water. On the first and second floors, large windows overlooked the bayou, so she would be able to see fog if it formed and boats if they approached. The second floor boasted front and back balconies, and when she sat on the floor in the middle of the master bedroom, she had an unimpeded view of the bayou on one side and of the street on the other. If anyone or anything came near the house, she would know. If brujos arrived in their natural form, she probably would sense them and she would fight them with fire.

  That was her plan, at any rate. The big question was whether she could survive long enough to implement her plan.

  As she unpacked her pillaged supplies and carried them up to the master bedroom, her arm continued to ache and throb, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. Maddie took it as a sign that her luck would hold. But signs, she thought, were the last refuge of desperate people.

  She went back downstairs and drove the cart into the trees behind the house. On her way upstairs again, she detoured into the garage and discovered a few more useful items, including an F-150 Ford truck with huge tires and a mean-looking grille across the front. No key in the ignition, of course not. Too damn easy. She checked the usual spots where people hid keys—the visor, the inside of the fenders, beneath the steering wheel. Nothing.

  But on her way back upstairs, she found the car keys hanging from a decorative hook in the hallway. Maddie grabbed the keys and raced up the stairs to the master bedroom. She spread everything out on the floor and quickly went to work. She intended to create so many weapons and booby traps that Dominica would need tens of thousands of ghosts to handle the chaos.

  Never again would Dominica or any other hungry ghost use her, defile her, subjugate her, demean her, or keep her imprisoned within her own body.

  Twenty

  Wayra came to in his human form, in a bed of dead leaves and pine needles, covered by a light blanket, his head resting in the lap of the loveliest woman he’d ever seen. Long hair, the color of cinnamon, framed her exquisite face, light brushed her high cheekbones, an astonishing feather tattoo ran the length of her neck on the left side. Her tawny eyes seemed familiar to him, but he knew he’d never seen her before.

  His first thought was that he had died, Dominica had won, and this woman was something he’d conjured in the afterlife.

  Then she ran her long, cool fingers across his forehead, brushing his hair back. The touch felt real, but he wasn’t sure that she was real until he drew his fingers through her hair, thick and luxurious and as soft as an infant’s skin. His thumb traced the curve of her chin, the arch of her brows, the bow of her mouth. He even touched the magnificent tattoo and could almost feel the feather pulsing and throbbing with life.

  Wayra looked into her eyes again and suddenly understood. She had the eyes of the hawk. “It’s not possible,” he breathed.

  “You were never the last of your kind, Wayra.”

  She slipped under the blanket with him, fitted her body against his and, for long moments, simply held him. He could feel the beat of her heart, the warmth of her skin, the soft whisperings in her mind as she reached out to him, one shifter to another. Slowly, hesitantly, his arms wrapped around her, and for the first time ever, Wayra embraced one of his own kind, ending centuries of loneliness.

  A breeze skipped through the trees, rustling the branches, rearranging sunlight and shadows, and a strange peace suffused Wayra. It was as if all these centuries of his existence had culminated in this single discovery, that he was not the last of his kind, that somewhere along the nonlinear progression of his existence, he had accepted a lie as truth.

  “But how can you exist?” He whispered the words, afraid that if he spoke too loudly, this fragile reality would shatter and she would disappear. “No chaser has ever spoken of you.”

  “There’s a great deal the chasers don’t know or understand.” She kissed him and the intimate contact enabled their minds to instantly open to each other.

  He learned that her name was Illary, Quechua for “rainbow,” and that she was aeons older than he was. When she was changed at the age of sixteen, she was a close friend of Mary Magdalene and one of Christ’s disciples, part of a group of noblewomen who supported Christ financially as he traveled through Galilee and Judea. He saw her early years as a human disciple of Christ, then as a hawk that was never far from Christ or Mary Magdalene. After the Crucifixion, Illary and her creator, the man who had turned her, had left the Holy Land and gone in search of others of their kind.

  During their journey to Esperanza seven hundred years later, Illary’s creator had been killed by a hunter’s arrow. She had finished that journey alone and had arrived in Esperanza shortly after the city was brought into the physical world five hundred years ago. In all the centuries of her existence, she had turned only one person, a man whom she had loved as Wayra had once loved Dominica. He, too, was killed by a hunter’s arrow and had joined the brujos, just as Dominica had done. But her lover, unlike Dominica, had left Esperanza willingly and now ruled the largest tribe of brujos in Europe and Asia. Illary had not seen him for more than a thousand years.

  Her loneliness throughout all these centuries had so far surpassed his own that he didn’t understand how she had managed to remain whole, sane. She heard his unspoken question and another chapter of her life opened to him—centuries spent in Europe in her human form, when she had nearly forgotten her shifter history and rationality was her refuge. He saw that she had been married and widowed dozens of times and none of her partners had ever known the truth about what she was.

  Their clothes slipped away, her naked body covered his, and Wayra felt as if he’d fallen into a dream from which he never wanted to awaken. She drove out the bitter taste of the brujos he had taken into himself. In their lovemaking, each delicate taste and sensation enabled them to travel more deeply into each other’s respective histories, down through decades, centuries, millennia, until they reached the collective memories of their race. Images swirled through them, around them, some of them so strange and alien that Wayra had no context for them: red rivers, a sky with twin suns, glacial peaks, oceans of unimagined depths, a continent of bold, pulsating blues at the edge of time.

&
nbsp; A magnificent bird with a seventy-foot wingspan flew between the twin suns. On a vast savannah beneath those suns loped a gigantic African bush elephant. In a rushing scarlet-colored mountain river, a monstrous-sized wolf hunted for fish. On a sunlit leaf as big as a full-grown man, a Goliath beetle soaked up the day’s warmth. Just above it, a tremendous butterfly suckled from the center of a gigantic orchid, its luminous red and blue wings opening and closing with elegant grace. At the edge of a vast ocean, a huge saltwater crocodile lay in the shoals, water lapping at its sides. In the depth of that ocean, a whale-shark moved with a stealthy silence, and alongside it swam a Chinese giant salamander and a colossal squid, its tentacles ten miles long.

  Mammals, amphibians, insects, reptiles, invertebrates, fish, birds, all excessive in size: Were these the original shifters? The prototypes? Where was the place with the twin suns?

  Still locked together, they rolled through the fallen leaves and pine needles, their bodies now slick with sweat. His fingers tangled in her hair, his mouth moved against her neck and breasts, his tongue inscribed secret codes against her skin. When her body arched against his and she cried out, her voice rose into the murmur of the breeze, the whispering of the leaves. Wayra drove on to his own completion and all the exhilarating and alien images instantly evaporated.

  A long time later, they lay side by side, fingers intertwined. “So tell me how it can be that you exist,” he said.

  lllary rose up slightly, one hand supporting her head, the other hand resting lightly against his chest. Her dark hair cascaded over one shoulder. Wayra drank in her beauty; she intoxicated him. “Shifters predate humanity on the planet, Wayra, and everything you think you know about your genesis is wrong and you’ve been lied to—by your creator, by the chasers.”

  Wayra wished he could feel anger about this, but in truth, it didn’t surprise him. She explained that in the beginning, there were seven tribes of shifters, the ones he’d seen. But by the time of Lemuria, science was intervening and some of the shifters’ kind became genetic experiments, created in laboratories. But the dog/wolf shifters were not created in any lab; they were among the original seven tribes.