His powerful legs slammed into her and the next thing she knew, they were on the beach of the Lago del Sueño.
Ian saw Wayra shoot to his feet, then he transformed at the speed of light, and Nomad leaped toward something that only he could see—and vanished. After that, Ian drove like a man possessed, shouts rising throughout the bus for towels, blankets, something with which to cover the dead.
Another roadblock loomed just ahead, large refrigerated trucks parked across the road, several dozen snipers on top of them firing at everything that approached. Ian couldn’t tell if the snipers were host bodies or virtual forms, but the distinction no longer mattered. “Slim, grab a couple of grenades,” he shouted. “Get up to the rooftop and blast those fucks to the Stone Age. I’m going to their right, over the sidewalk, where the smoke is thickest.”
“Done.”
He watched her briefly in the rearview mirror, tearing down the aisle, her burned white hair flopping around. At the back of the bus, Ian saw Maddie already gathering up grenades from the bin of weapons. Then both women clambered up the ladder to the rooftop and vanished from his sight. It scared him, that he couldn’t see her anymore.
Fog now moved around the blockade of refrigerated trucks in front of him. Firelight turned the stuff an eerie pumpkin orange. He sensed the brujos waiting within, could hear their whisperings again, that sound like sandpaper drawn across satin, grating yet slippery and soft.
Ian slammed his foot against the accelerator, shifted gears, and the bus tore over the curb and barreled up the sidewalk, crashing through tables and chairs and anything else in the way. The fog rushed toward them, that terrifying chant reached out to them. Ian hollered, “Flamethrowers, fast!”
Flames blasted from the windows, the rooftop. The fog recoiled swiftly, but the snipers on top of the refrigerated trucks kept shooting. The smoke, so thick and dark and oppressive, offered excellent cover, and before they sped out on the other side of it, two refrigerated trucks went up. Grenades, he thought. Tess and Maddie had hit their marks.
The explosion hurled flaming debris fifty feet into the air and spewed it in every direction. Stuff rained down around them, chunks of metal and pieces of bodies slammed into the top of the bus. Maddie and Tess reappeared and hurried back up the aisle armed with flamethrowers again.
Ian pressed a button on the dashboard and a shield covered the front windshield, with a four-inch horizontal opening that allowed him to see the road. Another button raised shields along the side windows, but left enough open space for weapons to be extended. Then he gunned the accelerator, shifted gears, and the bus tore free of the smoke. The air echoed with gunfire, explosions, the shriek of sirens. It sounded like Armageddon.
He slammed on the brakes, the engine racing, staring at the road ahead. He recognized it. It was the one he’d followed out of the city when Juanito was so badly injured. The church where he and Tess had spent their last hour as transitionals lay some distance beyond it. The same church where Illika, Juanito, and others were trapped. One way or another, he would get there.
But first, he had to take the bus through the army of host bodies that occupied the road as far as he could see. Men and women, even teenagers, stood shoulder to shoulder, armed with guns, machetes, pitchforks, rifles, assault weapons.
He had no idea how the brujos had gathered so many weapons. But he understood this strategy: put a human face on the enemy. March out the strongest host bodies, all of them locals, most of them Ecuadorians, and dare the avengers to kill their Latino brothers and sisters.
Vehicles lined both sides of the road—more refrigerated trucks, vans, cars, all with headlights blazing. Ian suspected that if he and the cars and buses behind him dared to slam through the army of host bodies, these vehicles would pursue them to the gates of hell.
“How many buses and cars are behind us?” Ian asked Tess.
“Dozens.”
He radioed the drivers of several other buses, and within moments, vehicles lined up on either side of him, engines revving. “Assume positions,” he shouted. “We’re going first and we’ll shoot straight through them. They’re heavily armed. Anyone who wants to get down on the floor, do so now.”
No one moved to the floor.
“End the brujo tyranny!” shouted someone at the back of the bus, and the chant went up.
Ian looked at Tess and mouthed, I love you.
Tess’s beautiful eyes latched on to his. Back at you, bigger than Google, she mouthed. Then she, Lauren, and Maddie moved back to their seats, flamethrowers ready.
He revved the engine once more, a signal to the other vehicles, then released the emergency brake, and the bus sprang forward.
Tess didn’t know how long it took to slam through all the host bodies that filled the road. Seconds, hours, days. But she felt every horrifying thump, every shriek of agony, every brujo annihilation. When flames shot from her weapon, she smelled the burning of clothes, hair, skin, and saw the survivors scattering, fire leaping from their backs and legs and heads.
Trucks and cars exploded, but other vehicles careened away and vanished into the dark countryside. Pieces of smoldering metal fell from the sky. Thump, thump, thump, went the bodies that hit the bus, each thump interspersed with a hail of gunshots, knives, machetes.
Just as her flamethrower ran out of fuel, they broke free of the host army, and the bus shot up the road. But vehicles pursued them, and fog tumbled toward them from both sides of the road and quickly grew into a wall.
“Grenades!” Tess shouted.
Moments later, four quick and furious detonations on both sides of the bus set trees ablaze, forcing the fog back, and the road opened up in front of them.
But for how long?
The fog chased them for miles, closing in, backing off, closing in again. Then it rolled over the bus, swallowing it completely, and the insidious whispers filled the air, Find the body, fuel the body . . .
“Make sure the fog isn’t getting in through the windows and doors,” Ian shouted.
Tess shot to her feet, but suddenly, through the horizontal slit in the windshield, she spotted lights moving against the distant horizon, dozens of them in formation. Choppers. Their brilliant searchlights swept across the landscape, then great furious bursts of fire exploded beneath them. The fog rolled away so fast it was as if it never had been there.
“Look,” she hollered, pointing. “Remove the shields from the windows, Ian.”
As he did, everyone on the bus saw the lights, the choppers, their firebombs plunging from the sky. Excited cheers and shouts reverberated through the bus.
Ed Granger had finally come through. Tess didn’t have any idea how he’d done it, what strings he’d pulled, what favors he’d called in, or how he had convinced the pilots to fly into the city at night. But he apparently realized that the liberation of Esperanza was going to happen with or without him, and had done the right thing.
Lauren and Maddie made their way forward and threw their arms around Tess, Ian, around each other. Then Ian swerved down the church’s driveway, blasting the horn, and glanced over at Tess. “Do you remember this?”
“Yeah. Last time I was driving,” she said, and he laughed and the garage door began to rise.
Once Dominica and Nomad were inside the mysterious cave at the edge of the lake, he became a man once more, Wayra so tall that he couldn’t stand upright. They regarded each other with open wariness, their long and convoluted history a presence between them. She took solace from the tea-colored eyes of the man she’d loved so long ago and hoped that man still existed somewhere inside of him. Then those eyes darkened with rage.
“It ends here, Nica. Now.”
“Oh, please, you and I have reached this juncture too many times. So much of this was unnecessary, Wayra.”
“Everything you have done in the last five hundred years has been unnecessary and cruel. The woman I loved had a good heart, but yours has turned to stone. The woman I loved was compassionate, warm, loyal t
o the people who loved her. But you lost all of those qualities when you joined the brujos. Now you seize the living because it’s the only thing you know how to do.”
“Such sanctimony, Wayra. It isn’t like you.”
“Your seizure of Sara Wells was for display, to boost your standing, to make yourself look good to the rest of your tribe. That’s unforgiveable, Nica.”
She rolled her eyes. “Spare me. The only reason you see it as unforgivable is because you two were lovers.”
There. She’d said it. Let him try to deny it.
His mouth twitched into a slow, sad smile. “We were more than lovers. My relationship with Sara predated yours and mine. Our history was longer and richer than anything you and I ever knew together.”
She just stood there, shocked beyond words or feeling, unable to comprehend that Wayra, born in the last light of the twelfth century, had loved anyone before he had loved her. She started laughing and laughed until phony tears rolled from her virtual eyes. “What? She was a shifter? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Spiritually, she was my other half.” He spoke softly. “I met her when I was twelve years old. In that life, she was the daughter of a shepherd. I was with her the day I was bitten and . . . and when we were confronted by the shifter, I screamed at her to run. And she did. And that’s why, in her life as Sara, she was so drawn to myth, and then to Ecuador.”
Dominica felt many human emotions just then—sorrow, despair, hatred, jealousy, and rage. “Lies,” she hissed, and her arms flew up and she pushed him. He stumbled back, the top of his head scraping against the roof of the cave. “Everything you’ve just said is a lie—to hurt me, weaken me, to . . . to . . .”
“Perhaps. But you’ll never know for sure, will you, Nica? And not knowing will drive you mad.” He laughed at her, the sound of it echoing through the cave.
“You said you loved me. That you loved me as a soul mate, that you—”
“We never loved like that. It was all in your mind, Nica. You fooled Ben with that kind of talk, but you never fooled me.”
His words twisted the dagger in her heart even deeper and her rage propelled her to violence. But as she slammed into him, his arms closed around her, tightening like a hangman’s noose, and he began to shift.
The agony caused her to scream and writhe, to fight for her very existence. She threw up her last best hope, an image of the two of them in the moments after she had died as Dominica de la Reina six hundred years ago, and he had galloped toward her on his black stallion like a hero from a romance novel, and swept her up into the saddle. But the memory didn’t affect him. It was as if, for him, it had never happened. He kept shifting, his grip so tight, so powerful, it threatened to suffocate her even in her virtual form. She suddenly realized he intended to absorb her into his shifter form. Was such a thing possible? Does it matter?
Dominica shed her virtual form, but it didn’t make any difference. Her essence was being sucked into the shifter, like dust into a vacuum cleaner. As he absorbed her, his sensory abilities became available to her. She could see herself being absorbed, could feel her own disintegration, could taste the strangeness of Wayra’s world, hear the whispers of his ancient past gathering around her. But these sensory experiences were intended to distract her so that she didn’t struggle. They were a lure, a seduction, the ultimate trick and betrayal.
Dominica shrieked, No, never, never, and as she struggled to break his hold on her, she heard her tribe’s keening, screams of agony, pleas for help and redemption and salvation, all of it echoing her own near-annihilation. This was her tribe, the world she and Ben had built over the last twenty years. It was being destroyed by humans—and, ultimately, by a shifter who had never loved her. Who had never considered her the other half of his soul.
The calls of her dying tribe infused her with strength and she tore away from Wayra, screaming, “You are now dead to me, shifter. Always. Forever.”
Below her, Wayra’s form fluctuated wildly from animal to human to animal again, as if he were trapped in some crazy evolutionary loop. He lunged for her, reared up on his human legs, with his snout and front legs still those of an animal. But Dominica leaped away from him, hoping he died here, and soared free.
Twenty-nine
Dominica wandered aimlessly for a long time, days, weeks, months, she didn’t know. Time held no meaning for her now. She thought she might be insane, slipping in and out of scenes from her long, strange life as human, as bruja, sometimes with Ben, sometimes with Wayra, always loving the one she was with. But in the end, none of the men she’d loved were there for her—not her father, not Ben, not Wayra. So when she was drawn back to the city, she looked for him, for Wayra, trying to understand what had happened, who she really was, what had gone wrong.
Parts of the city looked devastated, trees and parks charred, buildings just scorched shells, windows gone, roads torn up. Bulldozers moved through the city, gnashing their teeth, engines roaring, scooping up wrecked cars, burned trucks, pieces of buses and ravaged lives. In one neighborhood, clothing flapped from trees, children’s toys littered sidewalks. Torn books, ravaged tools, and computer parts were stacked on long tables, as if in preparation for a bargain-basement sale. Throughout the city, church bells tolled, long mournful notes—but not for the brujos who had perished.
She didn’t encounter a single one of her kind. Those who had survived had fled.
Dominica finally found Wayra in a neighborhood that looked to be in the throes of recovery. Everything was green, lovely flowers bloomed in ceramic pots. Trees were being planted in the parks, buildings were being constructed, renovated. She believed that months had passed.
Wayra sat outside a café with the horrible woman who had killed Ben, one arm resting on the back of Lauren’s chair, the other slung out along the back of Maddie’s chair, as she tapped away on the keyboard of her stupid laptop. Ian, goddamn his wretched soul, whispered sweet nothings in Tess’s ear and sipped hot coffee from a tiny cup. Manuel Ortega, Juanito, Illika, Granger, all of them were there, talking and laughing, obviously enjoying themselves. Even the ridiculous parrot, Kali, perched on the back of Tess’s chair, seemed content. How she hated them.
Tess sat up straighter and started scratching at that faded mark on her arm. But it was an absentminded scratching, she hadn’t connected it to the mark, and Dominica didn’t intend to give her that chance. She slipped into the niece, into Maddie with her strong, youthful body, her optimistic heart, and Dominica dispersed herself through the woman’s cells.
No reaction. Maddie had no idea she had been seized. Like the silly woman in Otavalo, she was clueless. Here, Dominica would listen, watch, and wait for the moment when the brujos would rise again. Already, she thought she heard them calling from somewhere to the north.
After a few minutes, she prompted Maddie to pack up her laptop, stand, and walk away from the others, toward the north.
“Hey, Maddie, where’re you going?” Tess called after her.
Maddie raised her arm and waved. “Later,” she called back, and crossed the street to the shadowed park.
North, we’re going north, Dominica whispered, and Maddie walked on.
Read on for a preview of
GHOST KEY
Trish J. MacGregor
Available in August 2012 by Tom Doherty Associates
eISBN 978-1-4299-4075-7
Copyright © 2012 by Patricia J. MacGregor
One
February 13, 2009
A small detail, something only a bartender would notice, triggered Kate’s first suspicion that nothing on Cedar Key was what it appeared to be.
It was a chilly night on the island, temps hovering in the mid-thirties. The weather boys predicted frost in Gainesville fifty miles inland, with a promise of snow flurries by Sunday. No snow out here, not on this punctuation point surrounded on three sides by the Gulf of Mexico and connected to the mainland by four bridges. But a heavy fog blanketed the island, great, swelling banks of
the stuff, the likes of which Kate Davis had never seen in her forty years here.
The fog pressed up against the windows of the hotel bar with the persistence of a living thing. It eddied, flowed, constantly moved. Through the glass, she could see it drifting across the weathered brick in the courtyard, wisps of it caressing the leaves of the potted plants, and wrapping around the trunks of trees like strings of pale Christmas lights.
The strange fog looked dirty, greasy as kitchen smoke.
It gave her the creeps, even though she’d always been somebody who loved cozy days or romantic nights of fog. But this fog wasn’t cozy; it wasn’t sexy. The thought of entering into it when she left work made her stomach clutch, got her imagination working overtime, as if something malevolent might grab her from out of this nasty grey weather.
But that was ridiculous. This was an island of sunshine and benign, lazy days. There was nothing threatening about it, or hadn’t been until recently, and she hoped she was only imagining those changes in people she thought she knew.
Kate took a breath, braced her palms on the bar, and looked around to steady herself with what was bright, clear, and familiar.
The Island Hotel had stood on Second Street since it was built in 1859. It was small, like the town—something she loved about both of them—just three stories of wood and glass, thirteen guest rooms, the bar tucked like a postscript behind the lobby. The floor sloped in here and the ceiling sagged enough so that most people instinctively ducked when they walked in—and then laughed and looked around to see if anyone had noticed them doing it, embarrassed that they’d let the illusion fool them. It made them feel like old-timers, when they spotted the next tourist doing it, too. The space between tables in the back room was barely wide enough to squeeze through. Kate had worked here for five years and had never been able to shake the claustrophobic feeling of these two cramped rooms. Tonight it was worse because the place was crowded. And because of the fog. The bar seemed more closed in—isolated—than she’d ever experienced before.
Esperanza Page 41
