Ghost Key

by Trish J. MacGregor

  She talked for a while about the ancestral memories of shifters, how those memories stretched back to the dawn of time before humanity, before chasers, brujos. “And ultimately, those memories, the knowledge we carry, makes us more powerful than chasers.”

  He threaded his fingers through hers and held their hands up to the light. Her hand was lovely, the fingers perfectly formed, her skin a pale brown, café au lait. “But if the chasers are the ones who rewrote our history, can we trust them?”

  “You tell me. You’ve worked with them, I never have. It’s why I didn’t reveal myself when they were around.”

  It took Wayra a while to answer his own question. “Over the centuries, I’ve met six of the thirteen who sit on the chaser council. Charlie and Victor are the only two I trust but that trust isn’t constant. I’ve known Victor since shortly before the decision was made to bring Esperanza into the physical world. He voted against it, as I would have if I were a chaser. He was overruled. So yes, I trust him in that sense.”

  “And Charlie?” she asked.

  “I met him in the year or two before he made his transition. The chaser council had been observing him for a long time, studying the connections in his life. They knew there was a possibility that his daughter, Tess, would be critically wounded in her work and felt she would be an excellent candidate to be the first transitional soul in five hundred years to enter Esperanza, thus breaking the brujo stranglehold over the city. So the chasers recruited Charlie before he died and my job was to guide him during his meditations and dreams. Once he made his transition and joined the council, I came to know him well. Of all the chasers on the council, at least from what I know of them, he’s closest to human life and obviously still has family here in the physical. He means well, I trust him to do the right thing, but he can be manipulative. He hasn’t been a chaser long enough to have anything to do with burying our true history. I doubt if he even knows about it. During my travels here, he’s been helpful.”

  “And both of them were responsible for those huge fabulous crows.”

  “I’ve never seen them do anything like that before. I suspect they violated chaser rules by meddling like that, but it’s long past the time to violate the chasers’ unfathomable code.”

  “They may be helpful to us. But for now, it’s best to keep my existence a secret from them.”

  “These other shifters. Do you have any idea where they may be?”

  “None. But until the day I saw you at that landfill, I didn’t know you existed, either, Wayra. My sense is that a confluence of events and circumstances will eventually make them known to us.”

  Maybe, he thought. But maybe not. Maybe there would be no confluence in their lifetimes. It exhausted him to try to follow the timelines, the connections, the magnitude of what he had just learned. He changed the subject. “How did you end up on Cedar Key? With Rocky and Kate?”

  She stretched out against the leaves again, one arm tucked under her head. “I left Europe after the Second World War broke out and returned to Esperanza. I spent weeks at a time in a place called the stone forest, searching for direction, guidance. One night in a cave, I had a vision of a place on the water. A fishing village. I felt it was an island to the north, in the U.S. In the distance, across an expanse of water, I could see twin stacks that emitted smoke. These structures were huge; I had no idea what they were. Or where they were. But I knew that in this place, I would uncover more about shifter history, that it was part of my destiny. So I stayed in the cave until I had another vision, of a long finger of land surrounded on three sides by water. I later realized it was Florida.”

  “How did you narrow it down to Cedar Key?”

  “Patience and time. I had nothing but time. In the late seventies, I ended up in Gainesville. In graduate school. One weekend, in 1978, I came to Cedar Key. From the fishing pier, I saw the twin stacks that had been in my vision. It was—”

  “The Crystal River nuclear plant,” Wayra finished. “It’s visible from the pier.”

  “Yes. It became operational in March 1977. It took me more than twenty years, Wayra, but I found the place in my vision. Cedar Key pretty much became my hawk home from then on. When I went back to the stone forest five years ago, I had another vision, of a young woman and her son. Kate and Rocky. The first time I saw Kate, I recognized her—but not him, he was too young. In my vision, he was older, as he is now. I studied them, watched him grow and mature. I was desperately lonely and considered living with them as a hawk, just for the companionship. I also knew they were connected somehow to my destiny.

  “Last year I was out on one of the smaller islands, feasting on crabs. A group of drunken fishermen saw me and thought it would be fun to snare a hawk. The hook went through my wing. I managed to bite through the line, but the hook was deeply embedded in my wing. I could barely fly. I somehow made it back to Cedar Key, to the beach in front of the animal rescue center where Rocky worked. That’s where he found me.”

  Wayra stroked the underside of her wrist, his heart aching for her.

  “You realize that he and Kate and Delaney are the new generation of shifters, Wayra.”

  “If nothing goes wrong.” He explained what had happened when he had turned the mother and her son during the plague years. “I couldn’t bear for that to happen this time, Illary.”

  “That was long ago.” Her fingernails traveled lightly down the side of his face. “Everything has changed since then. I don’t know Delaney, so I can’t speak for how his transformation may evolve, but I don’t think Kate and Rocky will be a problem.”

  “Except that the only reason I turned her was so that Rocky wouldn’t be alone.”

  “It was the right thing to do.”

  “She may not agree.”

  “You don’t understand the depth of her love for her son. Trust me, you did the right thing.”

  He hoped she was right, but it wasn’t as if he could change anything at this point.

  Leaves fluttered down through the air and caught in Illary’s hair. He wanted to know everything about her, every piece of her long history, every emotion, every twist and turn in her journey. “Europe. Tell me about Europe in the twenties and thirties.”

  “Exciting. But strange. For a time, when I was married to a man in Zurich and barely remembered my own history as a shifter, I went through therapy with Carl Jung. I told him my dream about the scarabs. Do you know that dream, Wayra?”

  Wayra had read everything Jung had written. He owned a copy of Jung’s Red Book, which wouldn’t be sold until next year. He had read the eloquent calligraphy in German. The dream to which Illary referred had triggered the basis of Jung’s theory of synchronicity. And it had come from a woman whose insistence on logic and rationality had become so rigid and dominant in her life that it choked off her cure. He couldn’t imagine Illary as that woman and said as much.

  She laughed and turned her head, bits of grass and leaves and pine needles stuck to her hair. “Wayra, by that time I had been alive for a thousand years. I had lost count of how many times I’d been widowed. I can’t have children. Rationality was my sanctuary. Yes, I was that woman. And when the beetle appeared at the window, I suddenly understood what I am. All my dim shifter memories burst forth with vivid brightness and rushed back. I’ve never allowed myself to forget any of it again. It’s why I’ve spent more time as a hawk than as a woman.” She paused. “Should we check on the new shifters?”

  Wayra pulled her closer to him. “They’ll be fine for a while longer. I want to know more and it’s easier when we do this mind to mind.” He kissed her once more and lost himself again.

  * * *

  Kate knew something was happening to her mind, body, and soul. But she couldn’t stop it, couldn’t mitigate it. It felt like a force of nature, something so powerful and transformative that she could only be swept along, swept up, and had no choice but to endure the excruciating pain.

  The pain was sometimes specific—her hands and feet, for instanc
e, felt as though they were burning. Her head pulsed and throbbed, the migraine to end all migraines. Her nose ached, her skin felt as if it had been set on fire, her tongue and teeth felt as though they had been cut out, extracted, and replaced with something else.

  The air she tasted and smelled was filled with history. She could sense a fox pissing on a pile of pine needles in a forest, but had no idea where the fox or the forest were in space or time. She sensed a house built on this same patch of pine needles, could envision the people who had lived and loved inside this house, but didn’t have any idea where in time or space the vision occurred. And so it went for what felt like hours, days, months.

  Gradually, the pain subsided and her senses continued to expand. She became the honeybee flitting from flower to flower, taking away not only some delectable nectar, but the entire history of the flower, its petals and leaves, its stalk, even the history of the soil in which it grew. She became the caterpillar and the butterfly, the eggs and the birds, the humans and their children. Her senses now told her everything she needed to know about her environment, but almost nothing about what was happening to her.

  Behind all the immediate sensations flowed information that inundated her, forced her to realize her reality had changed dramatically and irrevocably, but she had no idea what that meant in practical, daily terms. When she struggled through the labyrinth of her own memories in an attempt to piece together a coherent picture, a narrative that made sense, she couldn’t do it. Her memory of what had come before this moment of pain, this instant of sensory overload, this breath of life and beauty, was just a blank, a darkness that stretched even beyond Google’s infinity.

  Google. What the hell is Google?

  Something huge.

  Kate latched on to that, the idea of a google, of something bigger than the sum of its parts, a holographic universe in which each part might not only reveal the scope of the larger picture, but contain it as well. She could see its structure—the Indra’s net that mystics talked about—but she had no way of expressing this unity.

  She finally opened her dry, aching eyes.

  She was sprawled on her back in a densely wooded area, the shadows of the trees greater than the sunlight that spilled through the leaves. The sight captivated her, the way the encroaching light penetrated these deep shadows, changing the mood and texture of the woods itself. The leaves turned from dark green to a soft, celery green. She could see the life force pulsating in the leaves, the branches, the very bark. Insects flitted around through light and shadow and she could see their pulsating life force as well.

  Kate turned onto her side and stared in horror at her long legs and paws covered with short, soft gray fur flecked with rich brown. Shit fuck what’s happened to me? She began to shake uncontrollably and squeezed her eyes shut, certain she was locked in some terrible nightmare. Shudders swept up one side of her body and down the other. Her teeth chattered, her nose ran, she struggled to wrap her arms around herself, but couldn’t seem to do it. When she opened her eyes, her long legs and paws twitched and jerked, her muscles screamed for real movement, she thought she might vomit.

  Kate leaped up and tore toward the marsh, her powerful legs covering the distance in seconds flat. At the edge of the water, odors inundated her, the smells of various life forms that lived in the marsh—tiny fish swimming through the sunlight, dragonflies flitting from stalk to stalk, crabs scampering to and from the shore, and, much deeper out, manta rays, dolphins, sharks. Then there were the scents of the wading birds and the noise of their cries and chatter, blue herons and wood storks, egrets and gulls and pelicans. Their voices gave way to a celestial music, a celebration of life. The sensory feast briefly paralyzed her.

  She looked—and there was her reflection, a beautiful, sleek greyhound with human eyes. She touched her paw to the reflection and the ripples broke it up.

  Holy shit, it’s real, I’m changed, I’m a shifter like Wayra, he pressed his hand to my forehead and light came out of it and then he sank his teeth into my neck and I’ve gone around the bend, I’m in meltdown, I’m—

  Rocky, where was Rocky?

  The last thing she remembered was seeing her son on the floor of the houseboat, his limbs human, his face that of a dog or a wolf. Jesus God.

  Kate raced back into the wooded area where she’d come to, but didn’t see anything in the shadows. She sniffed at the air, drawing the smells deeply into her lungs. A sensory tsunami crashed over her, and for long, terrible moments, she felt as if her brain were short-circuiting. Then, gradually, she realized she could separate the smells of nature—water, grass, trees—from those of animals. It took her a moment to determine the distance and direction of several powerful animal scents, then she ran toward them, darting over fallen branches and protruding roots, into an area of the woods where the pines grew so tightly together it was as if they were joined at the hips, a family of multiple Siamese twins.

  She spotted a large dog with thick fur the color of sand striated with black, and when she silently screamed her son’s name, the dog’s head snapped around. His ears popped upright, straight as little church steeples, and his lips furled back, exposing his ivory-white fangs. Kate stopped. Rocky, it’s me.

  Mom. He howled as he tore toward her, and there in the shadows they danced around, sniffing and licking at each other. When he spoke, his words came to her in rapidly moving images, a movie of the mind. He had been hiding in the animal rescue facility when Amy, hosting a brujo, had appeared. The brujo had bled her out in front of Rocky, then seized him, infecting him. By the time Wayra had found him, he was dying and the shifter had changed him to save his life. Kate started to ask how the change had saved his life; she was a bit short on details. But the knowledge abruptly flowed into her awareness: the shifter immune system. It was why Wayra had lived so long.

  But why had Wayra changed her? She hadn’t been injured. She had freaked out at the sight of her son caught in some fucked-up biological nightmare, yes, definitely. She vaguely recalled screaming and rushing toward Rocky. But she hadn’t threatened Wayra. She hadn’t presented a threat to anyone. So, why?

  Her question, once again, brought an answer. Wayra didn’t want Rocky to ever be the last of his kind, to suffer the excruciating loneliness that he had. She appreciated that Wayra had saved Rocky’s life, but shouldn’t he have asked her before changing her?

  Well, yeah. But when would he have done that, exactly? When she had dropped from exhaustion at moving Delaney onto the houseboat or when she rushed toward Rocky, screaming like a banshee?

  She understood Wayra’s whats and whys. And honestly, did she really mind being something other than a bartender? Did she really mind that one of her options in life was being able to run forty-five or fifty miles an hour, discern the ancient history of the soil on which she walked, and that she had access to knowledge that seemed to date back to the beginning of time? Did any of that really bother her?

  No. She wished she could say otherwise, wished she could be enraged that such a thing had been thrust on her. But the bottom line—and right now everything for her was a bottom line—was that, except for giving birth to Rocky, her transformation was the most magnificent thing that had ever happened to her.

  What had happened to Delaney? He had been badly injured when she and Wayra had gotten him onto the houseboat. Had Wayra changed him, too?

  She had a bad feeling about it. Rocky picked up on her alarm, and they loped back through the woods, headed for the houseboat. What’s your first memory of all this, Rocky?

  Coming to in the woods and being assaulted by the odors. I went to look for you, Mom, but got distracted by a scent that consumed me.

  Before the marsh came into sight, the odor of the air changed dramatically. She smelled terror, hostility, rage. And then she saw the rising fog, a long, thick bank of it forming a kind of barricade between her and Rocky and the marsh, where the houseboat was.

  She felt Rocky’s uncertainty. Can it seize us? he asked.

/>   I don’t know. But if we’re moving like the wind, it’s probably less likely. How fast can you run, Rocky?

  Let’s find out.

  With that, he raced ahead of her and Kate dashed after him, rapidly closing the gap between them, then pulled out ahead of him and plunged into the fog first. The bone-piercing cold shocked her. A litany of voices thundered in her skull: Find the body, fuel the body … She felt the brujos within the fog trying to invade her, seize her, but they apparently found her distasteful and strange and broke away from her. Just the same, the fog rolled after her, pursuing her, the voices of the dead rising and falling in a maddening staccato rhythm. The fog brushed up against her tail, tasting but not trying to seize her. Then she reached the other side of it, and a moment later, Rocky burst from it like a bullet.

  Fifty yards later, just short of a small clearing, they stopped. It took her a moment to process what she was seeing—a tremendous jet-black Great Dane backed up to a tree, an electric cart blocking him on either side, four men in each cart, and two large, armed men standing in front of him.

  “Shoot the thing,” one man in a cart shouted. “It’s probably got rabies or some shit like that.”

  Kate didn’t recognize the man who hollered, but she recognized both of the armed men when they glanced around—a state deputy who drank vodka straight up whenever he dropped by the island bar, and his college-age son. No question that they had been seized and that the Great Dane was Delaney. She could smell him as clearly as she could smell the brujos within the deputy and his son—and inside the other men. Delaney was about to spring and she knew the two men would shoot him. She doubted if even a shifter’s immune system could save Delaney from shots fired at point-blank range.