Esperanza (2 page)

Were any of them the friends or family members of
brujo
victims? Rumors swirled that a massive retaliation against
brujos
was being planned among such people. But there were always rumors. Even if this rumor was true, it would take tens of thousands of human beings armed with flamethrowers to overcome her tribe, the largest in all of South America. She reminded herself to check the Internet for the genesis of this rumor. But not right now. Ben first. Then everything else.

Dominica sensed Ben’s presence nearby, but couldn’t see him. Her perceptions were now connected to this body, limited in its ability to perceive
brujos,
but enhanced in so many other ways. She didn’t have to see Ben to know he was surveying possible hosts. She knew that he would choose a young man, virile, healthy, someone she would find irresistible.

She pulled out a chair at a vacant table, eyeing three men who would fit Ben’s desires. Black, Asian, Caucasian. She felt attracted to all of them and smiled, wondering which he would select.
Surprise me,
she thought.

Deep down in her metal box, Claire’s essence kept screaming and shrieking and banging her puny fists against its walls. The turmoil distracted Dominica. She pressed an imaginary button and, in the blissful silence that followed, checked out the woman’s health.

During the centuries of her existence, Dominica had learned much about the human body and its physiology. She had once spent a year using the body of a physician, her essence dispersed throughout his cells so that she could absorb his knowledge. Claire’s body felt in excellent health. A nonsmoker, no addictions, heart and lungs perfect. Claire’s pancreas seemed a bit off, due only to all the alcohol she’d been drinking since she arrived in Ecuador five days ago. Kidneys worked well, liver and stomach in good shape. Allergic to codeine, didn’t eat red meat, took a lot of vitamins.

Suddenly, a man barreled around the corner, shouting, “Claire, hey, Claire.”

It took a moment for Dominica to find his name in Claire’s memories. Lewis. Her husband.

He stopped at the table, breathless. “My God, Claire, what’re you doing here? I thought you were going to wait for me just outside the restaurant.”

Down in the metal box, Claire’s essence went ballistic, screeching for help, hurling herself against the walls. Dominica tightened her control. “Calm down, Lewis. I just came here to get a couple of coffees. The hotel restaurant is closed now.”

“You should’ve said something.” He jerked out the chair across from her, sat down. “I didn’t know what the hell had happened to you. Did you order yet?”

Just then, a muscle tick appeared under one of Lewis’s blue eyes and his shoulders jerked, as though his shirt were too small for him. Ben obviously had arrived.

The twitching and spasms lasted for another minute. When Ben fully controlled the husband’s body, a kind of bliss settled across his expression. “My God,” she heard Ben whisper. “I always forget how incredible it is.”

Dominica reached across the table and touched his hand, the first time she had felt the skin of another in more than a month. “We chose well this time.”

He clasped her fingers and brought her hand to his mouth, kissing each knuckle slowly, his eyes never leaving hers. “Where’re they staying? This guy is blocking that information.”

“Posada Andres, three blocks from here.”

They stood at the same time, their hunger for each other urging them on. Dominica tugged back on his hand. “Let’s slow down a little. We don’t want to attract attention.”

She feared the locals knew what to look for—erratic, jerky movements, twitches and spasms, uneven gaits. There hadn’t been a full-scale
brujo
attack here for several months, but people remained wary. And with good reason. For ten years, Dominica and her tribe had terrorized this city, using bodies in a frenzy of sex and excess. Her tribe occasionally attacked en masse, moving within the fog that rolled in from the countryside. But mass attacks led to great precautions, giant fans to keep the fog away, shutters slamming shut across windows and doors, the locals disappearing into tunnels and underground bunkers. So now her kind usually attacked in small groups or pairs, as she and Ben had tonight, seeking the pleasure that only physical life could provide.

For five hundred years, since Esperanza had become a physical place, the prize that
brujos
sought had not existed here. Before that, the city and every place south of it to the Río Palo had been an etheric construct for the dead or the near dead. Souls had journeyed to Esperanza to learn about the afterlife. Those in comas or who were nearly dead could decide whether to return to physical life or to pass on. In those days,
brujos
had seized souls
whenever they wanted to, claimed those souls’ bodies, and lived out their natural lives. Compared to that, her brief excursions into the physical were paltry. But it was all she and Ben could have for now.

Their dream was to claim Esperanza and every place southward to Río Palo by seizing every resident and tourist, man, woman, and child. A city of
brujos,
living out the mortal lives of their hosts. But if they attempted this, Dominica felt sure the
cazadores de luz,
the light chasers, would intervene and the battle that ensued would be far worse than the battle five centuries ago. So for now they satisfied themselves with these small forays, hesitant to do anything that might prompt the chasers to get involved.

“I’m going to devour your body,” Ben said, drawing her closer, nibbling at her ear.

“Maybe we should take it easy, draw out the fun so these bodies last us a while.”

“No, it’s been too damn long for that.”

He pulled her into a narrow, dark alley and they pressed back against a wall of stone, hands and mouths everywhere at once, their lust like that of some starved beast. They broke apart at approaching footfalls and voices, and stood motionless against the wall, his hands trapping hers against the stone, his mouth at her neck. When the passersby had moved on, she and Ben hurried on toward the inn.

A few hours, that was all they would get with these bodies. As they neared the inn, Ben ran his fingers through her hair. “You’re beautiful, Nica,” he said, and kissed her, and they staggered back against a wall.

She and Ben, like all
brujos,
could make love, but it was smoke and mirrors, as was their entire existence. Nothing they could do really equaled this, the raw physicality of lust, passion, and sensuality that humans experienced. His hands were now under her skirt, her breath came in short, staccato bursts, and she kept murmuring, “Not here, Ben, not here.” But she didn’t push him away.

The street suddenly lit up like high noon, sirens screamed, a high-pitched, terrible bleating followed by explosive shrieks. Like air raid sirens during wars, these sirens warned that
brujos
or the fog in which they often traveled had been sighted and shelter should be sought immediately. Tourists who had no idea what the sirens meant panicked and rushed into buildings. A fortunate minority followed locals into the underground shelters.

She and Ben leaped apart, fumbling with their clothes. Certain they would now be hunted down by bands of men armed with flamethrowers, they had to either vacate these bodies or hide. They looked around wildly.
But shutters rolled across windows and doorways, sealing up buildings, closing them out, giving people inside time to get into the tunnels and bunkers where
brujos
loathed to venture.

Ben grabbed her hand. They raced across the road, plunged into the park, and ran beneath the tall pines, the monkey-puzzle trees, into and out of the brilliant glare of the lights. Around them, panicked pedestrians tore toward the public shelters, cars screeched to a halt. Drivers and passengers leaped out and loped toward the nearest building before shutters clattered closed and buildings went into lockdown.

Dominica realized that the chaos worked to their advantage. People were so terrified, so concerned for their own safety, that no one paid attention to them. They would not be robbed of their communion. Ben read her thoughts and they ran toward an abandoned car, scrambled into the back seat, locked the doors, slid down against the cool fabric, and surrendered to their hunger.

Within minutes, their violent lovemaking taxed the bodies they’d borrowed and Ben’s beautiful blue eyes leaked blood, the beads of sweat on his face turned red, and blood oozed from his nostrils, the corners of his mouth. Her body’s heart stuttered and strained. She felt blood rolling down the sides of her face and the back of her throat, and started choking on it. These bodies were used up, bleeding out. Lewis was losing consciousness with shocking swiftness. Unless Ben escaped Lewis’s body before that happened, he would be obliterated.

“Now,”
she gasped, and leaped from Claire’s body, then pulled Ben free.

For moments, they drifted inside the car, nothing more than puffs of smoke next to Claire and Lewis, who twitched and jerked, dying in the back seat. She and Ben were too depleted to move away from the car. Sirens kept shrieking, security lights still flashed and strobed, and tomorrow morning the authorities would find the bodies of Claire and Lewis, and would dispose of them. The true cause of death would never be revealed.

More rumors would circulate on the Internet, on conspiracy and travel sites, and for a while, tourism in Esperanza would drop. But in the twenty-first century, where news consisted of sound bites, memory was short, Dominica thought. Eventually, tourism would pick up again and Claire and Lewis would be forgotten.

Dominica melted into Ben and together they moved through the windshield and out into the bright, empty road. They lifted above the tall pines and drifted off into the darkness, hungry ghosts once again.

Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

—Vladimir Nabokov,
Pale Fire

The back of her neck felt as if insects were burrowing under the skin. She thought she could hear them, too, nibbling through her tissue, a dry, whispery sound, like callused fingertips sliding over paper.

Tess kept running her hand up under her hair, certain she would discover tiny furrows in her scalp, proof that her body was under attack. But the skin felt fine. She realized someone was staring at her, the sensation so strong that she turned slightly in her seat and searched the rows of faces.

The rickety bus that sputtered and backfired its way up a steep and winding road in the Ecuadorian Andes was crowded, three and four people to a row meant for two. She couldn’t tell who was staring. As a tall blonde in a country where ninety-nine percent of the population was short and dark haired with dark eyes and olive complexions, she stuck out. People stared all the time. It didn’t mean anything.

But if true, why had all the passengers avoided her, so that she had an entire seat to herself?

The left side of the bus consisted mostly of Quechua Indians—women holding children in their laps, men clutching canvas bags, all with colorful wool blankets wrapped around their shoulders. Large families traveled with crates of noisy chickens, bleating goats, skinny dogs, even a friendly pig sprawled on the floor in the back.

On the right side, her side, sat the tourists with their electronic toys—iPods, laptops, BlackBerrys, PDAs, DVD players. European, Asian, South American. She saw only four who looked like Americans, a mother and father with two young children.

Tess turned around again and rubbed the heel of her hand against the foggy window, creating an aperture through which she could peer out. Not much to see. Bits of fog threaded through the branches of trees that grew at lopsided angles along the road. No people or animals in the fog—no
donkeys, no dogs, just the white stuff, eddying and moving like a living thing.

Heat burst intermittently from the vents, erratic hiccups that didn’t do much to mitigate the chill. The cold, thin air seeped in through the edges of the windows. When she exhaled, she could see her breath. Tess zipped up her leather jacket, blew into her hands to warm them. The altitude had turned her sinuses so dry that the air she inhaled felt almost abrasive.

The bus’s engine growled, straining as it climbed yet another ridge. How many more ridges lay beyond this one? A dozen? Fifty? Each one would be higher and already she found it difficult to catch her breath. On a family vacation when she was a kid, she remembered throwing up from altitude sickness while crossing the continental divide. She didn’t feel nauseated now, but bands of pressure kept tightening across her chest. Her pulse raced. She tried to relax by sitting back, breathing deeply, shutting her eyes. But as she did so, that eerie sensation crept up her neck; the watcher was staring again.