Esperanza

by Trish J. MacGregor

  She threw the door open, ran her hands over the flat, smooth surface. This shutter wasn’t an accordion; it was a metal panel, flush against the door. But down near the bottom, she found a turn lock, flipped it, then leaned into the panel, pressed her hands against it, and pushed. It slid slowly to the left, admitting early morning light, a chill, the sweet scent of pine.

  As she started to slip through the opening, Ian grabbed her arm, bellowing, “No! We don’t know if it’s over.” He jerked her back so hard she nearly tripped over her own feet.

  Tess wrenched her arm free, furious that he had attempted to restrain her. “Don’t ever do that.” The vitriol in her voice shocked her. Ian looked as if she had slapped him. “You said we don’t know shit. It’s true. And it’s time to find out what’s going on.”

  She brushed past him, pushed the door open wider, and stepped out onto the porch. An overturned cleaning cart blocked the path from the main building, a bank of fog rolled away from her on the left. Then Nomad shot past her, a blur of black, his snarls and frantic barking shredding the air. Behind him thundered an army, thirteen men stampeding down the path, waving rifles, pitchforks, machetes, flamethrowers. Ed Granger was in the lead, a bald John Wayne without a horse, shouting, “The bitch fled into the fog! Mow her down!” He gestured wildly at Tess. “Get back into the house, it’s not safe out here!”

  Tess hurried down the porch steps, stopped right in front of him. “The cottage was attacked and suddenly we found ourselves prisoners in there.” She stabbed her hand toward the building. “We deserve some answers, Ed.”

  “Brujos. Juanito, get her into the house.”

  Granger and his men raced on and Juanito Cardenas waved his rifle in a vaguely threatening way. “Go inside, please. It is safer.”

  “Hey, hold on.” Ian loped over, clutching the iron poker. “We’re guests here. You can’t order us around. You can’t put us into lockdown. You—”

  Juanito whipped his rifle up, aiming it at Ian. “Get inside now.”

  “Fine, fine, we’re going.”

  But as Juanito moved toward them, Ian slammed the poker down over his rifle, and as it clattered to the ground, Tess hurled herself at Juanito. He was at least half a foot shorter and forty pounds lighter than she and went down like a shoot of trampled bamboo. Tess swept up his rifle and she and Ian raced away from him, following the other men into the fog.

  She immediately regretted it. The fog was thicker and higher than it looked, a soup that darkened and curdled, swallowing brush and trees. She couldn’t see more than a few inches in front of her, but shouts and Nomad’s frantic barking rang out clearly. She and Ian kept angling toward the barking, stumbling over flower beds, through trees.

  “Quick thinking back there, Ian.”

  “Ditto, Slim. But will a rifle kill a brujo?”

  “I don’t have a clue. Why would they be carrying them otherwise?”

  “They’re also carrying flamethrowers. I assume you’ve shot a rifle before?”

  “Yeah.” And this one was a Winchester Super X3, a model she and Dan had practiced on last year, during a special training session. It was capable of shooting twelve shells in under two seconds and was touted as the fastest shotgun in the world. “How many of them do you think there are?”

  “It sounded like hundreds.”

  “We can’t handle hundreds. We’ve got a dozen shots. And that’s only if the rifle is fully loaded.”

  “We do what we—”

  The rest of his sentence was truncated by a man flying out of the fog on their left, one of Granger’s men swinging a shovel, bellowing and snorting like a wounded animal. He crashed into Ian and they slammed to the ground, grunting and punching, bodies so tightly pressed together she didn’t dare fire. Ian hollered, “Run, Slim, go, go.”

  She tore deeper into the fog, toward Nomad’s barking, but no longer knew why she was running, what the goal was. Her bare feet felt like blocks of concrete, she couldn’t see much of anything, and had no clear idea what was happening or what had happened. Her frames of references had been torn away from her.

  She clutched the rifle more tightly and moved toward Nomad’s frenetic barking. When the dog went silent, Tess stopped, dropped to a crouch, listened hard. Then shapes appeared in the fog, voices took on volume, substance.

  The rest of the brujos had fled, so it was just her and Nomad, staring at each other in the dark fog. Despite Dominica’s form as a cleaning woman, he recognized her. His amber eyes fixed on her with such precision and hatred that she knew she would be annihilated if he attacked. But she didn’t think he wanted to fight her. He was warning her. So she tossed him a sock with a note attached to it. Written in Quechua, it read:

  Oh, Ed. Really. Give it up. The transitionals are ours. Sooner or later, we’ll get them and then we will take Esperanza back. The land is ours. It has always belonged to us.

  Yours always,

  Dominica

  Nomad nudged the sock with his nose, as if its scent might tell him her true intentions, and looked up at her again.

  “Take it,” she whispered. “Just take the damn thing.”

  But suddenly, Nomad’s bones cracked and popped, his spine elongated, his ears melted into his head, his tail shortened and vanished altogether. His front legs pulled back into his belly, as if through an extraordinary gravity, and the bones rearranged themselves and extended into arms. His rear legs went through the same process and became human legs. His jaw widened, bones moving and wiggling beneath the skin like something living. His snout shrank, reshaping itself into a human nose, mouth, cheekbones. Then his fur disappeared and human hair raced up his arms and down his legs and across his skull. It happened at such luminal speed that when she blinked, Nomad was gone and Wayra stood before her in all his blinding, breathtaking beauty. Wayra, whose name in Quechua meant “wind.”

  “They’re protected, Nica. So give it up. You can’t seize them.”

  Shock tore through her—at the sight of him, the sound of his voice, that he was here at all. “How . . . I . . . thought you . . . lost the ability to shift centuries ago . . . when you were wounded. I—”

  “That is only a lie you have told yourself. And over the centuries, you came to believe it was true.”

  “You . . . you betrayed me, Wayra.”

  “You betrayed yourself.”

  “You chose . . . the chasers over me.”

  “You chose the brujos over me. It works both ways.”

  He moved toward her and slipped his long arms around her, pulling her gently against him. Even though she was only a virtual form, she felt the strength of his arms, inhaled the familiar, wild scent of his skin. When he slid his hands up through her hair, drawing her head back so that she was forced to look into his eyes, she saw him as he had been centuries ago, in the 1400s, when they had both been physical, a proud Spaniard whom she had loved unconditionally.

  Her father in that life, a wealthy landowner with a great deal of power, had hated Wayra and forbade her to see him. He then had married her off to a nobleman, who eventually cast her aside when she had proven to be barren. She had spent the rest of her life searching throughout Spain for Wayra, only to discover that her father had killed him. She died at the age of thirty-six from tuberculosis and a broken heart—and Wayra was waiting for her when she had crossed over.

  He read her thoughts now. “We are no longer those people, Nica.” Then he brought his mouth to hers, hard, insistently, and her pathetic virtual body melted into his, sobs clawing up her throat, her hunger and lust for him unabated after all these centuries. She ran her hands slowly over the back of his neck, across his shoulders, her memories coughing up the contours of his flesh, the shape of his bones, all the joy this man had given her. “Join me,” he whispered, his mouth moving against her neck, her throat. “It’s not too late.” His hands slipped under her skirt and between her legs, exciting her. “Together, we can end this ancient battle.”

  She pulled back slightly. �
�We can rule Esperanza, Wayra. I command the largest and most powerful of all brujo tribes. We will lack for nothing. And now that two transitionals have arrived, the—”

  “No.” His hands dropped away from her. “There is only one way.”

  Her heart shattered into a million pieces. “But—”

  Suddenly, shouting erupted nearby, men crashed through the brush. For a long moment, Wayra’s eyes held hers, his expression inscrutable, then he whispered, “Run now and you will run forever, Nica.”

  She had no choice. The men were too close, their voices too angry. She shed her human form and thought herself upward, watching as Wayra’s body quickly transformed again. As Nomad, he picked up the sock she had tossed him moments ago, and trotted on through the fog, the trees.

  Coward, she thought at him.

  She knew he heard her, but he didn’t reply. Crushed and stricken with grief, she thought herself home.

  The fog thinned rapidly and now Tess could see Granger and his men huddled in the courtyard. There, off to her left, from the same direction where the voice had been, Nomad emerged from the fog, carrying something in his mouth. The men couldn’t see him yet, but the dog saw Tess and immediately turned toward her, his strange eyes regarding her with what seemed like astonishment and an underlying fear.

  Baffled, Tess got to her feet and looked around quickly for some sign of the woman she’d heard talking about betrayal and tribes. But she seemed to be the only woman in the immediate vicinity. Nomad reached her, dropped a sock at her feet, then sat back, tail wagging.

  “I bet you saw them,” Tess said. “The man and woman who were talking.” Tess picked up the sock, a note attached to it. She couldn’t read the language in which it was written. “Let’s go find Ian, Nomad.”

  As they came out of the trees, men were huddled around Ian, who sat at the edge of the courtyard fountain, a towel pressed to his bleeding temple. It wasn’t immediately clear to her what was going on. “Ian, you okay?” she called.

  Heads turned her way. “For the moment,” he said.

  “He’ll need a couple of stitches,” Granger said. “We’ve called the doctor.”

  “How gracious of you, since one of your men tackled him out there in the fog.”

  “It was a misunderstanding,” Granger replied quickly. Too quickly. “And I’ll take that shotgun, mate. It belongs to Juanito.”

  “I’ll be glad to return the shotgun after you translate this.” She thrust the sock at him. “Nomad came out of the fog with it.”

  He glanced at the note, shook his head. “Can’t read it. Sorry. English and tortured Spanish are the limits of my linguistic skills.”

  “Then maybe you can tell me what a transitional is, Ed.”

  “A transitional?” He blinked rapidly, as if he had dust in his eyes. “Well, I know what ‘transition’ means, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard the word ‘transitional.’ Why?”

  “You’re a lousy liar.” She threw down the sock, tossed the rifle on the ground. “We’ll be checking out as soon as we find other accommodations, Mr. Granger. Please have our bill ready and open up those goddamn shutters.”

  She strode past them, to Ian, who was already on his feet, looking pale, shaken. As they headed back toward the cottage, Nomad following them, Ian said, “What the fuck happened out there?”

  “I’m not sure. I heard a man and a woman talking, but I couldn’t see them. I don’t have any idea who the woman was since I’m the only female out here. How bad is your head?”

  “When the bastard tackled me, my head hit a rock.” He moved the blood-soaked towel away. “How’s it look?”

  She winced. “Awful. There’s a first-aid kit in the cottage. I’ll work on it till the doctor arrives.”

  “And once he does, you go on into town and find us a way out of here. Bus, train, a driver, I don’t care what it is. We shouldn’t stick around here any longer than we have to.”

  She agreed completely. “If I can’t find public transportation, I’ll offer Manuel a sum he can’t refuse to drive us to the nearest airport.”

  Six

  Dominica waited on a dirt road without shelter from the bitter wind, in a place so devoid of beauty that it tore at her. In the distance, across the miles of flatness, an object sped toward her, a storm of dust following it. Ben, driving his favorite car, a 1992 Mercedes Benz 500 SL.

  Moments later, the car roared up alongside her, stopped, and Dominica climbed into the passenger seat, suddenly and completely exhausted. “Worn out?” Ben asked.

  “Very.” She would not tell him about Wayra, and quickly locked that information deeply within herself, where even Ben wouldn’t be able to find it.

  “And?” he asked eagerly. “What happened with the raid?”

  “It failed. They stayed hidden in the cottage and someone in the main building activated the shutters.”

  “Are they transitionals?”

  “Yes.”

  He let out a whoop of delight. Dominica couldn’t bring herself to tell him the rest of it yet, that these transitionals were untouchables. Let him enjoy the moment.

  His usual virtual form, the Ben she knew, looked like a California surfer, blond and tan, with vivid blue eyes. Her usual form was a slender brunette, the beauty she had been in her Spanish life. In brujo time, he was relatively young and she was not.

  Brujos had the ability to travel through time, and during such a sojourn, she had found him in one of Henry Ford’s factories in 1914 and seized him as he was leaving work one evening. She used him for five months, living through him vicariously, getting a taste of life in that period. Then one day he became aware of her, thought he was losing his mind, and took a gun to his head. The gun clicked but didn’t fire, saving her from annihilation because she wouldn’t have been able to escape his body before he died. So she’d seized his brain violently as she abandoned his body, and when he’d died of a cerebral hemorrhage, she had been there, waiting for him. They had been together ever since. She felt responsible for him.

  Ben remained with her tribe because he believed it was his best chance to seize a body and live out that person’s life, the ultimate goal of every brujo. Over time, her tribe had enjoyed some impressive successes. But it was never easy, there were no guarantees. If you conquered the temptations of immediate gratification, if you could keep the body’s personality subdued or subsume it altogether, you still inherited all the personality’s emotional baggage. And if you even recalled who you were, it was exceedingly difficult to achieve anything. The suicide rate among returns was high. The mental breakdown rate was even higher. Maybe one in five survived it.

  But she and Ben were fortunate. They had experienced several such lives together. The worst was as teens, disastrously short lives that nonetheless expanded their venue. The best was a Kansas life in the 1950s, where they had spent thirty years together in physical life. They’d tasted other lives between then and now, stints as long as several years in order to study a particular time and place. Full lives, however, were rare.

  “Can we take them?” he asked.

  She held her hands to the heat pouring from the vents. Heat and cold for brujos weren’t like they were in a physical body. She felt only a phantom sensation, similar to what an amputee experienced. In the old days, when her people controlled Esperanza, their senses had been sharper. But that time was long gone and here she was, racing through cold sunlight in a vehicle that cost a ton of money in the physical world but that, here, was created from intent and desire. Chimeras, her stock-in-trade.

  “Nica?”

  “No, we can’t seize them. I tried, just to see if it could be done, and was hurled out.”

  “What? But . . . that’s impossible.”

  Impossible, perhaps, but it had happened. “What do we know about Manuel Ortega? He drove the bus that took these transitionals to Esperanza.” She explained what had happened on the bus—and outside of it when Manuel had mocked her and turned the flamethrower on her. “I know that
he works for the Posada de Esperanza, does odd jobs around Gigante. Other than that, he’s a blank.”

  “I’m not familiar with him. But I’ll check into it.”

  “Do we know of anyone named Charlie?”

  “Last name?”

  “I don’t know.” She told him about the e-mail she had found on Ed Granger’s computer.

  “He sounds important in the chaser scheme of things.”

  Dominica thought immediately of Nomad. They’re protected, Nica. So give it up. You can’t seize them. Now that she knew Wayra could still shift, she doubted everything she thought she had known about him. Was he one of the chasers or simply a surrogate? Did the distinction even matter? Either way, he worked with them. More to the point, had she actually revised her own history? That is only a lie you have told yourself. And over the centuries, you came to believe it was true. Had her memories over the six hundred years of her existence betrayed her?

  “So how do we get to them?” Ben asked.

  “Wrong question. How did the transitionals get in? Who opened the gate? And why?”

  “We could seize Ed Granger and Sara Wells and find the answers quickly.”

  “They may not have the answers. Ed Granger recognized them as transitionals, but I think he’s as mystified as we are. Besides, we’d have trouble getting into the city now. The fans will be on everywhere.” For the last ten years, since she had ordered the attacks on the city, the fans had run after every sighting, every attack, to blow away the fog in which brujos often traveled. “How large are we, Ben? Sixty thousand?”

  “Sixty thousand, eight hundred and twenty-six as of yesterday.”

  Ben, the numbers man, the tribal accountant. “And our totals?”

  “Over two million, spread across the globe, but most of them concentrated in small tribes. Many of our members are still feeding off the ongoing disasters in Haiti, the Sudan, Darfur, Indonesia, you name it. As the hurricane season ramps up, they’re salivating over possibilities in the Gulf that Katrina didn’t finish off.”

  Vivid picture, that. “Have you heard of liberationblogspot.com?”