Esperanza

by Trish J. MacGregor

  Tess left the bedroom before Maddie could ask any more questions. The couch in the living room sure looked inviting and she propped up the pillows, grabbed one of the throws, and sank into the comfortable cushions with the Glock pressed to her chest.

  Her heart beat frantically for a long time.

  Tess. Wake up now, you’re in danger . . .

  She bolted upright, blinking hard and fast against the dark, certain she had heard her dead father’s voice. “Dad?” she whispered, and realized she was clawing at the mark on the underside of her wrist. It itched like crazy. She leaped off the couch, ran into the bedroom, turned on the lamp, and woke her mom and Maddie. “They’re close. You two have to get out now.”

  Maddie knuckled her eyes like a sleepy three-year-old, took hold of Tess’s arm, looked at the mark. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “The bruise is getting darker.” With that, she vaulted out of bed.

  Lauren had gone to bed in jeans and a T-shirt, and now hurried around the bedroom, jamming stuff in her pack. “How much time do we have? How close are they?”

  Time. Tess didn’t know, it was all too new. Even though the bruise itched and had turned a deeper plum color, it didn’t burn yet. Yesterday when this happened, the burning had started right after she had pulled into her mother’s driveway. So perhaps they had a little time.

  Tess raced back into the living room, jammed her arms into the sleeves of a lightweight jacket. Ridiculous. A jacket in June. But its multiple pockets held two guns and four clips. When Lauren and Maddie joined her, she handed her mother one of the weapons and two clips “Mom, take this. Twenty-two rounds. You’ll be carrying it illegally, but use it if you have to.”

  “Lauren doesn’t know how to shoot a gun,” Maddie said.

  “Ha,” Lauren said, “Tess taught me long before you arrived.”

  Tess tore the towels away from the cracks under the door, swept up her room card. As they entered the quiet hall, she noted her room’s distance from the elevator and the exit sign that led to the stairs. The latter was closest, but she suspected these brujo bastards would arrive in human form, as the bodyguards, and would use the elevator. Would she hear the elevator doors opening if she was inside her suite? Probably not. But she had her own alert system. The bruise looked nearly black and itched terribly, but it still didn’t burn. They had time. Please let me be right. She pushed open the door to the stairs, hugged her mother and Maddie.

  Her mother whispered, “We’ll check into—”

  “No, don’t tell me. The less I know, the better. I’ll call when I’m on my way.”

  She waited by the railing, watching them descend through the stairwell, footfalls echoing. Many flights down, her mother leaned out over the railing and blew Tess a kiss. Tess choked back a sob and hoped that sending them away was the right thing to do. The door below clattered open and shut.

  Plan, what’s my plan? She muted the iPhone’s ringer, ripped away the tape on the sliding glass doors, opened them a foot, closed the slats on the wooden Levalors. She swept up all the towels, and in the room her mother and Maddie had shared, stuffed pillows and some of the towels under the covers, the oldest trick in the adolescent playbook. She hoped these brujos had been dead too long to know it. She left some clothes on the chair, turned out the lights, went into the smaller bedroom, and threw the covers back. She draped towels over the back of the chair to make the room look inhabited, turned on the lamp.

  Her wrist began to burn. Badly. Shit, not much time. Bathroom. Shower on. She spun the faucet to hot, tossed a beach towel over the upper edge of the door. It was large enough so that it fell halfway down the glass. It would make it difficult to see inside. She stepped out, shut the door. Where to hide?

  Linen closet. It stood between the bathroom and the bedrooms. The wooden slats in the door would enable her to see them once they crossed the living room and entered the hall. She slipped inside quickly, testing the range of her vision. Not as wide as she’d hoped, but it would do. The skin at her wrist now radiated heat. They’re close. She turned on the phone’s recorder.

  The fridge hummed, the shower drummed, the breeze kept knocking the Levalors together, clickety-clack. Then she heard something else, a popping sound, and the bruise suddenly felt as though it were on fire, burning from the inside out. They had arrived.

  Tess peered through the door slats, heart thundering so loudly she was terrified they might hear it. One of them entered her view—dark hair, a muscular man. As he moved toward the bathroom, she saw his face. One of the bodyguards. His companion, just now coming into view, was the bald-headed clone of Vic Mackey from The Shield. He veered toward the bedrooms and Tess suddenly had no idea how she was going to do this. She couldn’t shoot them simultaneously and didn’t know which one to aim at first. The dark-haired guy solved the problem. He slipped into the bathroom and shut the door. Tess opened the linen closet quietly, grateful that it didn’t squeak, and slid across the tile floor in her stocking feet, toward the bedroom where baldie had disappeared. She heard popping sounds in the bathroom, the shattering of glass, and the bald guy spun around, clutching his weapon, and saw her.

  For the briefest second, their eyes locked, and Tess sensed the brujo inside, a male energy shocked to see her here, armed. Tess fired. The bullet struck him square in the forehead, an explosion of blood and bone marking the entry point. His eyes widened with astonishment—then he simply fell back onto the bed. Nothing emerged from him, no dark wisps. Tess dived for the floor and rolled away from the door as the other man charged in, shouting, “Ben, get out, it’s a setup, the shower’s empty.” And Tess opened up.

  Her shots hit the man in the legs and he went down so hard that she heard his knees cracking. He shrieked in pain, fell forward onto his chest, lost his grip on his weapon. Tess leaped to her feet and moved toward him. “Don’t move.” She swept up his weapon.

  “Ben,” the man hollered.

  “He’s dead,” Tess said. “Ben is dead.”

  Nineteen

  Dead?

  Ben?

  Dominica looked up and saw the body on the bed in front of her, a bullet through the head. Fire or the instantaneous death of the host body were the only ways to obliterate a brujo. Ben, gone. And she, this terrible, wretched bitch, had done it.

  Grief nearly crushed her, a sorrow so deep she hadn’t even known these emotions existed. She started sobbing and, in between sobs, tried to speak. But this horrible woman was snapping questions at her, threatening to shoot her in the head if she didn’t start talking. Her fierce, sudden rage stole the life from her grief.

  “I promise you this, Tess Livingston. I will take everyone you love as much as I loved Ben and will make sure their deaths are excruciatingly painful. Worse than the lawn man’s.”

  “What are you called?”

  “Dominica.”

  “What do you want from me, Dominica?”

  “Your death.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re important to the survival of Esperanza. And to the chasers. They’ve gone to great lengths to protect you.”

  “Chasers? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You will.”

  “Get up,” Tess barked.

  “I can’t. You shot this body in the knees.”

  “Roll onto your back.”

  Dominica severed the connection to Lew’s pain centers, forced his body to roll, then to vault forward and lunge for the horrible woman. Tess leaped back, but too slowly, and Lew fell onto her, all two hundred and twelve pounds of him. He knocked her sideways into the bureau, air rushed from her lungs, her gun skittered across the room, and Lew crashed to the floor.

  Dominica seized control of Lew’s limbs, forcing him to his feet again, forcing him to grab the lamp. The cord jerked from the socket and he staggered toward Tess on his injured knees, swinging the lamp like a baseball bat. But Lew’s legs were in such bad shape that he lurched like a cripple, the lamp whistled past Tess, and she dived for the gun and squeezed
off a shot that ripped into Lew’s thigh. Dominica didn’t feel it, but Lew did, and he shrieked and went down, crushing the lamp with his body.

  “Tess Livingston, you’ll wish you had stayed dead!” Dominica shouted.

  Because Lew’s body was beginning to lose consciousness, Dominica leaped out of him and through the roof, into the darkness. Wind swept her through the night. She called repeatedly for Ben, called just in case she was wrong that instantaneous death of the host body could obliterate a brujo. Where had she heard that? Who had told her? She didn’t know. Among her kind, there were certain things that you just knew. But because you knew them, did that mean they were true? She kept calling to him, but he never answered.

  Distraught, directionless, she wandered aimlessly, struggling to come to terms with Ben’s annihilation, with the gaping dark hole it had left inside of her. She didn’t understand how she, dead for nearly six hundred years, could feel this kind of despair and loss or why she had felt it for most of her life as a bruja. Despair over Wayra, Ben, the animals that came and went through her town house. Wasn’t death supposed to be the end of suffering?

  Awhile later—minutes, hours, she didn’t know—she found herself back inside Tess’s mother’s house. The rooms were empty, someone had cleaned up the crime scene, a dreadful silence suffused the air. She listened to this silence, hoping she might hear Ben whispering to her, laughing, urging her to follow him to wherever he had gone. The silence, so vast and deep, mocked her. She screamed and shrieked, but because she was formless, the noises she made didn’t register in the physical world. Only the silence remained, the air shaking with its soundless laughter.

  Enraged, she tried to turn on a stove burner so the gas would seep into the air and she could strike a match and blow up the goddamn house. In Esperanza, it wouldn’t be a problem. Here, it was impossible. She couldn’t make her hand solid enough to touch the knob, to pick up a match. Here, she was nothing, powerless.

  Unable to retaliate against the bitch for what she had done to Ben, unable to get even with her, to make her suffer, Dominica left the house, uncertain about where to go, what to do. Should she mobilize her tribe? She imagined it, thousands of her own kind descending on the Florida Keys, sweeping across this miserable string of islands, seizing every person in sight. Another San Francisco feast, but larger and minus the fog.

  A car pulled into the driveway and she paused, hopeful that it would be Tess, whom she could follow to wherever her mother and niece were. But Dan Hernandez got out. Good. She could take him, injure him, kill him. She could use him to extract her revenge, to make Tess suffer.

  He stood outside his car for a few moments, looking around furtively, checking out the dark street behind him, the yards to either side of him. There were no people around, no other cars, windows were dark. He climbed the stairs quickly and walked right through her. No reaction. Dan tore away the crime tape, turned the knob, flicked on a light switch and only then did he enter. Afraid of the dark, Agent Hernandez? Curious about why he was here now, in the hours before dawn, Dominica followed him into the house.

  He turned on an overhead light, studied the floor where the lawn man had fallen, looked around the room, obviously inspecting the cleaning job. He proceeded into the kitchen, opened a door under the sink, brought out a bottle of Pine Sol. He wet a hand towel, wrapped it around the bottom of a sponge mop. In the living room, he splashed Pine Sol all over the floor and started mopping, long, vigorous strokes that threatened to scrub away the color of the tile.

  Intrigued, Dominica just watched him. The house had been cleaned professionally, so he wasn’t here for that. She had the distinct impression that the cleaning symbolized something he hoped to eradicate within himself.

  Dan tossed the dirty towel into the washing machine in the utility room, reached under the sink again, removed more rags and bottles of cleansers. Then he went to work in earnest, cleaning counters and windows, tabletops, even the ceiling-fan paddles. He stacked dishes in the washer, started it. He scrubbed the double kitchen sinks, ran the garbage disposal. A one-man cleaning service.

  The whole episode was so strange that Dominica decided against taking him right now. Better to accompany him for the time being, to observe, allow her grief to take her in some new direction. So when he finally shut the front door and went downstairs to his car, she was beside him, settling into the passenger seat.

  Right now, she didn’t give a shit what happened to Esperanza. It could fall, collapse, be conquered. It didn’t matter. The only thing she cared about was revenge. You were her lover before Esperanza. And now you’re mine, Dan, whenever I choose to seize you. He would be her conduit and her ultimate retribution against Tess for what she had done to Ben.

  One man dead, the other a raving maniac, and the local cops didn’t have a clue what was going on. Until they wised up, Tess’s federal badge was all that stood between her and an arrest warrant.

  The cops and forensics team finally left her suite just before dawn and she checked out of the resort shortly afterward. Tess drove her mother’s Prius south, her exhaustion extreme, her mind blank. But in the back of her head, that eerie voice looped through her thoughts. I promise you this, Tess Livingston. I will take everyone you love as much as I loved Ben and will make sure their deaths are excruciating.

  Tess lowered the windows and the warm air that blew through the car smelled thickly of summer, ocean, salt. But she felt vulnerable with the windows down, worried that the bruja who had threatened her might come through the windows, might . . . Stop it. The mark on her wrist didn’t burn, the discoloration had nearly faded. That meant there weren’t any brujos nearby. She would be sure to share that little tidbit with Dan, the Bureau shrink, and her boss.

  She called her mother’s cell and didn’t even reach the voice mail, a sure sign her phone was dead. When she tried Maddie’s cell number, her niece answered on the first ring.

  “Tesso. Are you all right?”

  “I am now. Where’re you and Mom staying?”

  “Tango Fritter Inn, northwest part of the island, about half a mile outside the town of Pirate’s Cove.” She ticked off the address. “Enter it into the GPS. It’s tricky finding this place. We’re in room thirteen.”

  Bus 13. Cottage 13 . . . fear of the number 13 is called triskaidekaphobia . . .

  The number 13, the wrist mark an alarm system, talking to ghosts, attacks by spirits. It was as if her life had collapsed into a whole new paradigm and she didn’t have any idea what the rules were. She braked for a stoplight just short of the Tango Key bridge, rubbed her eyes. “Unlock the door. I’m nearly there.”

  “Unlocking door now, Tesso. See you in a few minutes.”

  Tess plugged the GPS into the cigarette lighter and typed in the address for the Tango Fritter Inn. The light turned green, she continued on toward the bridge. By any standard, it was an engineering feat, crossing the twelve miles between Key West and Tango. It had been badly damaged in the category five storm that had devastated the island several years ago. For months, residents had come and gone only by plane or boat. The bridge finally had reopened last July 4 to great fanfare. She remembered because she and Dan had attended the massive celebratory street fair and fireworks display.

  She fully expected that in a few hours she would be unemployed and perhaps sought by the police for the man she had killed in the suite. Then there was the other guy with his shattered kneecaps, and the man she had killed in her mother’s house. She knew how guilty it made her look.

  As she crossed the bridge, the copper sun punched a hole in the horizon. Light touched the trees on the opposite shore, setting them on fire, and the flames burned across the placid silver waters of the Gulf of Mexico. She turned right onto the perimeter road that led around the island, the old road with its rich history, its landmarks, its meandering course that rose steadily from sea level to hundreds of feet above the gulf, along the perimeter of cliffs.

  Cliffs, in Florida.

  Tango Key w
as like no other island in the Florida straits. Even the geological structure was different—no limestone, few flat surfaces except to the south in the town of Tango, where the hurricane devastation had been extreme. Up here in the hills, nature appeared to have restored itself, with farms flourishing, wooded areas thickening, fruit groves bursting with new life. As she approached the outskirts of Pirate’s Cove, she felt a glimmer of hope and optimism for the first time in months. Every time she came to this island, it was like that. If she arrived in a depressed mood, that darkness lifted within minutes.

  As if to emphasize just how different Tango was from the rest of Florida, Tess suddenly spotted what looked like a flock of low-flying hummingbirds. The morning light washed over them and seemed to fill them until they were luminous, celestial. The flock angled east, toward Key West, and she lost sight of them Humming bird. Here. One more impossible thing. But it felt like a sign that she was doing the right thing.

  Just beyond the town, the GPS directed her to take a series of quick turns. She finally followed a sparsely populated dirt road to the edge of a cliff. The hotel stood there like a crane with one foot anchored on land and the other tucked out of sight. Part of it jutted out over the cliff, some fancy architectural thing that would crumble away whenever the cliff did. But Florida didn’t experience earthquakes and the hard stone that comprised the island seemed capable of withstanding nearly anything. The hotel had not been taken out by the category five hurricane. It hadn’t suffered any damage at all.

  Her mother opened the door, took one look at Tess, and slid her fingers through Tess’s hair. “My God, what happened to your hair?”

  Her hair? “Windblown, Mom.”

  “Never mind.” Lauren pointed at the bed. “If you don’t fall into this bed immediately, I’m going to knock you out with a punch to the jaw.”

  “I’m thirty-three, Mom, not fifteen. But the bed sure looks inviting.” She crawled into it and the last thing that registered was her mother drawing the covers up to her chin.