“That’s what the engineers are trying to determine,” Diego said. “But they can’t get too close to the erased area. Watch.”
Diego moved to the outside of the railing, onto a strip of trampled grass, scooped up a handful of pebbles and tossed them out into the glistening whiteness where the hill had once stood. As the pebbles hit the bright surface, it crackled and popped, then the pebbles disappeared. “Where’d those stones go? Huh?” Diego moved quickly back to the steps.
“The same place Javier went,” Ian said.
“And where’s that, Ian?” Diego asked.
“I don’t know. But when the blackness swallowed his legs, he said they were gone, that he couldn’t feel them.”
“But what the fuck does that mean?” Diego’s voice turned hoarse, scared, and he rocked toward Ian, almost in his face. “Why’s this happening? Is it going to happen elsewhere, too?” Then he shook his head and thrust his hands in his jacket pockets. “Sorry. Lots of questions, no answers.”
“What’s the official explanation for what happened here, Diego?” asked Tess.
Diego’s expression tightened. “Mayor Torres instructed the department to say nothing until the science muchachos have done their thing. They’re getting high electromagnetic readings around that.” He gestured toward the disappeared area. “All that whiteness is like an … apparition.”
“They can’t keep this under wraps,” Ian said. “There were at least a hundred people here last night, witnesses. And you can multiply that many times with cell photos and videos, Diego. No surprise that the rumor mill about brujos has jammed into overdrive.”
Diego nodded. “I know, my friend. I know. One of my cousins was here last night. And now my wife is taking our two kids and her parents out of the city for a few days. Down to Quito. I told her she’s overreacting, that there’s no proof brujos are behind what happened here.”
Tess moved along the outside of the railing, just as Diego had done moments ago, and got to within a few feet of where the erasure began. She felt strangely disoriented by the spatial void the reflected light created, so she wrapped one arm around a vertical post to anchor herself before she snapped more photos.
An odd, cloying odor seemed to emanate from the erasure, a smell like ripe fruit that had been too long in the sun and heat. And she thought she could feel the post straining, trembling beneath what she sensed was a tremendous stress. She quickly moved back along the strip of grass.
“Are the photos going into tomorrow’s edition?” Diego asked.
“That’s the plan,” Tess replied.
Ian added, “We’ve got the online edition up already. But we’ll update it later today.”
“Then the shit’s probably hitting the fan right now.” Just as Diego said that, his cell rang. He glanced at the number. “What’d I tell you? It’s Mayor Torres. I’d better take this.”
As he walked away from them, the cell pressed to his ear, Tess whispered, “Ian, take a look at this.” She held out the camera and clicked through the photos she’d taken. “You see it?”
“Just sunlight glinting off the erased area, trees on the right … holy shit. What is that? Shadows?”
“I don’t know. It’s like a phantom image within the erasure.” Tess clicked through the rest of the photos, and the image was present in most of them, but didn’t get any clearer. “Let’s drive down to the bottom of the hill and get some pictures from there.”
“Sounds good,” Ian agreed.
But as they approached Diego, his body suddenly lurched, he dropped his cell, his fists flew to his eyes, and a hoarse, terrible sound issued from him. Then he fell to his knees and gripped his thighs and rocked back and forth, back and forth, his shoulders jerking right, left, backward, forward. He looked as if he were having a seizure. Tess and Ian glanced at each other; they both knew what was happening. By the time Diego’s head snapped up again, an oily blackness covered even the whites of his eyes.
When Diego stood without twitching, without any facial tics, Tess understood that a brujo fully controlled him.
“Ricardo here. Sorry to intrude like this,” he said in Diego’s voice, then thrust out his hand. “Mr. Ritter, it’s a pleasure.”
“First Dominica and now her brother? You gotta be kidding me. Why don’t you spooks just admit you’re dead and move on to hell or wherever.”
“We know we’re dead, Ian. You don’t mind if I call you by your first name, do you?”
“Not at all, Richie. Hey, Slim, that’s a pretty close interp of Ricardo, isn’t it?”
“Only if you add asshole at the end of it,” she said.
“She’s pissed off at me,” Ricardo said. “For scaring her like I did. For licking her neck. She tastes mighty good, Ian.”
“Get to your point, Richie,” Ian snapped.
“My point is quite simple, actually. We want the same things that you do. An Esperanza just as lovely and whole as it is now. We’re on the same side. No one in my tribe has seized any resident or tourist in this city since my sister’s defeat.”
“Except for right now,” Tess said. “And that waiter and the priest.”
“That was just to give you a message. We take our physical pleasures from hosts in other cities and countries now.”
Ian laughed. “And that’s supposed to make it okay?”
Diego’s face turned hard, his eyes flashed with anger. “It means that as far as Esperanza is concerned, brujos want the same things you do.”
“Only because you’re empowered by the city,” Tess said.
“As are you. And the chasers.”
“If we want the same thing,” Tess said, “then why did you erase most of the hillside and the deck and injure and kill dozens?” Accuse to clarify: a good FBI tactic.
“We didn’t. Talk to your father, Tess.”
The cries of a hawk caused him to drop his head back and shade his eyes as he peered upward. An instant later, a dark form shot onto the steps and landed in front of Diego. Teeth bared, the black Lab instantly shifted into its human form and Wayra said something in Quechua. The only word Tess understood was “Ricardo.”
Ricardo said, “Let’s say what we have to say in English, Wayra, so our gringo friends understand it all.”
Wayra sniffed noisily at the air, turning his head right, left, then leaned into Diego’s face. “You smell the same, Ricardo. Like roadkill. The centuries haven’t changed you.”
Tess had her hands in the pockets of her jacket and felt something she was sure hadn’t been there last night, when she’d been wearing the jacket, or even earlier this morning when she’d put it on before leaving Wayra’s place. She ran her thumb around the edges of it, felt the cool aluminum, and knew that somewhere on the front of it were her dad’s initials. Yes, right there, her thumb found the grooves of the initials: C.L. Her dad’s Zippo lighter. Or a duplicate of it. Thanks, Dad, what the hell am I supposed to do with this? Had he slipped this in her jacket pocket last night at Wayra’s? If so, why hadn’t she felt it then?
“I strongly urge you to have a heart-to-heart with the chaser council, Wayra,” said Ricardo. “You have pull with them. Most of them respect you. And all of them are scared shitless of you and your wife. They think you two are, let’s see, what’re the words I heard? ‘Unpredictable, evil, not like us, selfish…’”
Wayra chuckled. “Sounds like Newton and Maria and maybe Simon. What do you want?”
Ricardo threw his arms out, a gesture that encompassed all the erasure, the strange emptiness. “Isn’t it fucking obvious? The chasers intend to disappear Esperanza. If you and Charlie Livingston put pressure on them, they may back off. We want the same thing—human, shifter, brujo. We want to be left in peace to draw upon the power of this beautiful and magical city.”
Wayra rolled his eyes and laughed, a sharp, ugly sound. “You were always a lousy liar, Ricardo.”
Tess and Ian exchanged a glance. She mouthed, Charlie’s Zippo in my pocket, and hoped Ian understood what
she’d said—and what it implied. She could see that pulse beating at his throat, could see that his hands were fisted, and knew that in the next few moments, he would hurl himself at Diego in an attempt to drive the brujo out.
“If you release Diego’s body,” Wayra said, “I’ll talk to them.”
“Aw, please.” Ricardo shook his head and clicked his tongue against his teeth. “You disappoint me, Wayra.”
Except that it was Diego’s head that Tess saw, Diego’s voice that she heard, Diego’s face that grimaced.
“Wayra, Wayra, always the negotiator. I suspect you’ll talk to them regardless and, quite frankly, I’m the one in a position of power here.”
“What do you want?” Ian barked. “What the fuck is it that you really want, Ricardo?”
“Besides your lady friend there, Ian? When’re you two going to get married, anyway? My tribe has been waiting for that so we could seize your guests. That’s how we brujos are. Eternally fucked up and beyond repair.” His eyes flicked to Wayra. “Your position of power, my shifter friend, is down there with amoebas. Say bye-bye to adopted son.”
Diego gasped, his eyes bulged in their sockets, rolled back into his skull, and then a drop of blood spilled from his right eye and slipped down his cheek.
This fucker is going to bleed him out, Tess thought, and brought out her father’s Zippo, snapping the lid the way he did, snapping it fast, hard, trusting that her dad had a good reason for causing it to materialize in her jacket pocket. Then she aimed it at Diego and ran her thumb back over the roller and a tremendous flame shot out, a flame so far beyond the ability of this lighter that she knew her dad had arranged it. She kept flicking it, and with every flick, the fire burned hotter, more brightly.
Diego threw his hands to his face and stumbled back, shrieking. Richie Asshole leaped from the top of Diego’s skull, a discolored smudge in the sunlight, like a puff of dark smoke. Tess’s hand jerked upward, the flame now so hot and large she felt its heat against her face. But the puff of dark smoke had evaporated, and Wayra rushed toward Diego’s crumpled body.
3.
Wayra lifted Diego’s head into his arms, and struggled to ignore the beads of blood trailing from beneath his eyes, seeping from his ears, the corners of his mouth. He tried not to shriek, scream, rage, attack. Diego wasn’t dead. He was only compromised. He kept telling himself this, over and over again.
If I turn him, he’ll be healed, freed …
“No.” His wife spoke before she had shifted fully.
Wayra’s head snapped up. “Shifter blood can save him.”
“And it will change his life irreparably, forever. Leo can help him.” Illary stood before Wayra, fully human now, her smartphone already pressed to her ear. “He has treated others through the years.”
When Leo answered, she turned away from Wayra, and he looked down at the young man whose head was cradled in his arms. After his parents were seized and bled out by brujos eighteen years ago, Diego had stopped talking. Wayra adopted him, a request Diego’s parents had made of him, and even though Diego functioned and went to school and made excellent grades, he didn’t speak for three years. His first words after that long silence were, I’m not like you, why not?
Diego was the son Wayra never had, couldn’t have. As soon as Wayra had been turned centuries ago, he had become sterile. When Illary had been turned two thousand years ago, she could no longer conceive. Shifter blood and DNA assured the survival of the species by turning humans, not through procreation.
When Wayra had returned from Cedar Key with Illary, she and Diego had hit it off immediately. Now they had dinner every Sunday with Diego and his family, and he and Illary had adopted grandchildren.
Wayra ran his thumbs over the drops of blood on Diego’s cheek, wiping them away. He kept talking quietly, speaking to the essence of Diego. Diego stirred, was no longer bleeding from his eyes and ears, but didn’t regain consciousness. Wayra couldn’t stand it anymore and bit into his own wrist, then squeezed drops of his shifter blood into Diego’s mouth and hoped it would sustain him until he could give him more.
When Leo arrived, he knelt next to Diego, took his vital signs. He tugged down the lower lids of Diego’s eyes, examined his ears, the inside of his mouth. “The external bleeding seems to have stopped, but his blood pressure is low, so he may be bleeding internally. I’m going to get him started on an IV and admit him to intensive care. Has his family been notified?”
“I’m his family,” Wayra said sharply.
“No siblings? Wife? Kids?”
“He has a wife and kids, but I think they may be on their way to Quito,” Wayra said.
“I’ll call his wife,” Illary said.
Leo started an IV, fitted the bag of fluid on a portable pole, then examined Diego again. “How long did this brujo have him?”
“Maybe ten minutes,” Wayra replied.
“Ten minutes too long,” Leo murmured, and got on his cell phone. “He’s probably got the brujo bacteria in his blood. We’ll treat it with antibiotics. Was it the same brujo who terrorized Tess?”
“Yes,” Ian replied.
“So now they’ve started seizing hosts again?” Leo asked.
Not yet, Wayra thought. What Ricardo had done to Diego was for Wayra’s benefit, just to remind him that brujos could seize the people Wayra loved and bleed them out if they wanted to. “Maybe not,” Wayra said. “May I ride in the ambulance with him?”
“Of course,” Leo replied. “I’ll meet you at the hospital.”
Just then, Tess and Lauren led a pair of medics into the thicket. “Speculation out there is running wild,” Tess said. “All those journalists are from elsewhere. I told them Diego slipped and hit his head.”
“We’re ready for him in the ambulance, Leo,” Lauren said. “And intensive care has his room ready.”
Leo nodded. “Okay, let’s move him onto the stretcher. Lauren, can you ride with him and Wayra?”
“You bet.”
“Tess, Ian and I will follow in our cars,” Illary said.
Diego moaned softly when the medics moved him. The sound tore Wayra apart and he quickly grasped Diego’s hand and spoke to him softly in Quechua, assuring him that he would be okay, that he was already healing.
As they emerged from the trees, people outside the cordoned area surged forward, shouting questions. Wayra ignored them and hurried along behind the stretcher. Before they reached the ambulance, a police car sped into the area, lights flashing, and screeched to a stop alongside them. Martin Torres, the mayor, swung his short, plump legs out of the car and hurried over to Wayra. His squirrel cheeks puffed out, he whipped his sunglasses off his face and motioned toward the stretcher. “What the hell happened here, Wayra?”
“Nice to see you, too, Martin. Diego was seized by a brujo, is now unconscious, and for a rundown on his physical condition, I suggest you speak to Dr. Ordeño. I’m riding with Diego to the hospital.”
“Brujos?” Torres took personal umbrage at the mere suggestion that brujos had returned to Esperanza. “There aren’t any brujos in this city.”
“Diego was seized and the brujo started to bleed him out,” Wayra snapped. “So yes, they’re here. If you were doing your job, you’d know that. And the public should be told about this electromagnetic fluctuation. It’s all going to hit the newspapers, so why not get a jump on it?”
Torres whipped off his sunglasses, jammed them onto the top of his head, and rocked onto the balls of his feet, leaning toward Wayra, who towered over him. “Don’t tell me how to do my goddamn job, Wayra.” He poked Wayra in the chest. “You and your shifter wife are meddling in police business. I could lock you up just for that.”
Their enmity dated back a decade, to the day Dominica had seized Torres’s wife while she and Wayra were in a café. She had demanded that Wayra make love to her then and there. Wayra pushed to his feet and walked away and Dominica had bled out Torres’s wife.
“But you won’t,” Wayra said, and knoc
ked the mayor’s hand away.
He loped over to the ambulance, climbed inside, and one of the medics shut the door. Lauren had just finished taking Diego’s blood pressure. “His pressure is way too low, Wayra. Would your shifter blood help him?”
“I gave him a few drops orally. But he could use more.”
“Do you have to turn him to do that?”
“No. But if I could get some of my blood directly into his body, it would accelerate the healing.”
“A transfusion?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll have to type your blood and his and then…”
“I’m O, Lauren. Diego is A positive.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
She thought a moment, eyeing her supplies, then nodded. “Get on that other cot.”
As the ambulance sped through the city, siren wailing, Wayra’s blood flowed into Diego’s body. He shut his eyes, vaguely aware of Lauren’s voice, of her movements.
Just as his shifter blood had enabled him to survive the stab wounds that Ricardo had inflicted all those years ago, he hoped his blood would now save Diego.
As they neared the hospital, Lauren stopped the transfusion and removed the needle from Wayra’s arm. “He got about half a pint, Wayra. You think it’s enough?”
“I don’t know. Let’s play it by ear.”
Wayra sat up and looked over at Diego. “His color already looks better.”
“Yeah, it does.” She took Diego’s pressure again. “His pressure has risen slightly, too. Good signs. I’ll make sure he gets settled in his room. You’ll have to fill out some paperwork.” She opened a small fridge, brought out a container of orange juice and handed it to him. “Drink that, so you don’t feel light-headed.”
As he sipped at the juice, Lauren peeled off her gloves and updated Diego’s info on her iPad. Wayra noticed her gorgeous sapphire. “Congratulations,” he said. “When did that happen?”
Lauren glanced up, eyes beaming, and held out her hand, admiring the ring. “Last night.”
“Fantastic. Does Tess know yet?”
Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) Page 9
