Esperanza (34 page)

On the street where Manuel Ortega lived, she assumed the form of a simple Quechua woman. She had used this humble, nonthreatening form many times to move through Ecuadorian cities. She hoped she would find Nomad with Manuel. She’d last seen them together the day that the dog and Tess, as a transitional, had traveled to Gigante to find Manuel.

But the driveway was empty, the windows dark, and the door swung open into utter emptiness. Everything was gone.
Everything.
No furniture, nothing on the walls, nothing anywhere. The hollow shell seemed to laugh at her, mock her. She left the house and moved quickly into the woods, shouting, “Wayra, I know you can hear me. Show yourself.”

But he didn’t appear in either of his forms. She shed her human form and thought of him, of the shape-shifter she had loved, and willed herself to find him. It took a while to locate his unique frequency, but when she homed in on it, she ended up in the bar of an inn in Otavalo.

Wayra was playing pool with a European tourist. He sensed her presence
the moment she appeared—his shoulders tensed, his eyes darted around the room. “You’ve got it,” he said to his opponent, and laid down the pool stick and went over to the bar to settle his bill.

Wayra, barfly. It would be funny if it weren’t so out of character. Dominica looked quickly around for a suitable host, and slipped into one of the waitresses. No fight from her. Dominica told her to follow the tall, handsome man and she did so, right outside to his truck. When he turned, she said, “Pool? In a bar? Oh, Wayra, you really have descended into mud.”

He leaned against the truck, arms folded across his chest, and laughed. “Hey, I’ve gotten really good at pool. What do you want, Nica?”

“The truth.”

“Right. Which truth? The one you hope to hear or the one you refuse to hear?”

“In 1968, I couldn’t seize anyone. I had to melt into them, gently, and the only time that restriction could be overcome was with a legion of my people.”

“That’s not a question, Nica.”

“What kind of war is this?” she demanded. “What are the rules? Who is this Manuel Ortega? Who is Charlie?”

“Your real question is why are you having trouble meeting your agenda? Why should I help you answer that?”

She wished she could hate him. “Because you have to.”

“Really? Who says I do, Nica? You? Your arrogance is stunning.”

“I learned it from you.”

He burst out laughing. “I’m afraid I can’t take credit for that.”

“Why’re you in Otavalo?”

“It’s where I choose to be.”

“You’re waiting for Ian. Or Tess.”

“I’m waiting for Godot, for garlic and sapphires, Seth, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Jerry Garcia. Leave me alone. Go play with Ben.”

“You’ll regret this. I promise you. I don’t know what you and the chasers think you’re going to accomplish with just two transitionals, but I’ll make sure they never get to Esperanza.”

“Do what you must.” With that, he got into his truck and sped off into the darkness.

Dominica ran after the truck, hollering,
“Coward, you’re a coward.”
Her voice echoed, rising and falling in the stillness. He didn’t return.

Enraged that he had shunned her like this, she slipped out of the waitress
and thought herself back to her town house. Ben paced the living room, a cell phone pressed to his ear. He sounded agitated and signaled he would be off the call shortly.

She realized the retriever pup hadn’t bounded into the room to greet her. He wasn’t on the porch, either, where the animals usually sunned themselves. The Persian looked up at her with those sad amber eyes and meowed. The conure, perched on the railing, whistled and said, “Pup, pup.” Shit. The retriever had left.

“I didn’t expect you back so soon.” Ben stepped out onto the porch. “The pup left during the night,” he added, reading her thoughts. “The cat and bird have been sitting out here for hours, like they’re waiting for the pup to show up again.”

She drew her phony fingers through the cat’s phony fur. Soft, but not like in the physical world. “Where did it go, Ben?”

He shrugged. “No one knows.”

“We need to know. We need to find the answers to those kinds of questions.”

“Yes, but not right this second. That was Pearl. Rafael has been cleared by the counselor and they’re helping the group that’s readying the defensive perimeter. As of right now, three thousand locals have been seized and are being used to implement our defensive measures.”

“Do we know any more details about the liberation group?”

“We will shortly.
Brujos
who have seized priests are returning soon with a report.”

“Then why did you sound so agitated?”

“Because they’re still pushing this idea about launching a massive attack on everything north of Río Palo. They feel we’d be in a stronger position by launching an attack rather than by just fortifying the city. They seem to be gathering support.”

In other words, Pearl and Rafael were stoking the fires of insurrection. “What did you tell them?”

“That you haven’t issued orders about attacking, so we stick to the plan.”

Was he lying or was she paranoid? He could be hiding information from her in the same way that she hid her encounters with Wayra from him, by locking the information away so deeply that no other
brujo
had access to it. Even
brujos
had a right to privacy.

“You’re not telling me everything,” she said.

He gazed off into the distance, at the lakes and volcanoes beyond the
porch, rolled his lower lip between his teeth. “Pearl said they’ve gathered support from nearly half the tribe, Nica. They’re already planning how to launch the attack.”

I knew it
. “Shortsighted assholes.”

“Look, I told her we need three days to find the transitionals and eliminate them. I asked her to give us at least that long.”

Three days? With the way things had been going, she would be lucky to accomplish anything in three months. “You don’t have to ask
her
anything. She’s not in charge.
I
am.”

“Then maybe you need to speak to the tribe. Explain to them what’s going on, why the death of the transitionals is so important.”

“I don’t know why because I don’t know why they were allowed in to begin with. Diversion? Distraction? What? But since the chasers have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect them—as transitionals and now that they’re back in the physical—I have to assume that some significant shift will occur if they’re able to return to Esperanza. So it’s imperative that they die. Their deaths will end whatever plan the chasers have. Then we can attack Esperanza. But until their deaths our defensive measures have to be our priority.”

“It didn’t work in San Francisco. We descended on the city by the thousands, in the fog, and Ian still escaped.”

“We were working against restrictions and rules in 1968 that we don’t have in 2008. This time, Ben, it will be just you and me. We’ll seize two morally compromised individuals and use them to kill Tess. Then we wait for Ian to return here, do the same thing, and kill him.”

“If you’re assuming he’ll be in 2008 by then, how’s he going to move forty years forward in time?”

She didn’t know. Even
brujos
had trouble moving back and forth in time. “When Esperanza was still a nonphysical place, transitionals came here from many different times. It wasn’t a problem. Perhaps that’s what the chasers are banking on now.”

Ben stood there for long, uncomfortable moments, uncharacteristically contemplative, his thoughts hidden from her. Then he flashed that smile that had won her over from the first time she’d seen it nearly a century ago. “I’ll ask Marla next door to come in and look in on the critters, then we can leave.”

As though the animals were alive, in need of cat litter, fresh food, water. Ben’s primary concern—and hers—was the love part of the equation, the
reason these animals had found their way to them to begin with. So while he went next door to talk to Marla, Dominica remained on the porch with the cat and the bird. They usually didn’t name their animals. That made it easier not to become emotionally attached, not to mourn them when they mysteriously moved on. But she’d secretly named the cat Shelley and the bird, Shriek. So she addressed them by name and asked them to please stick around for a while, that she and Ben loved them too much to lose them. She promised that the retriever pup—whom she had named Mole, for her ability to burrow deeply into the heart of a
brujo
—would be back.

When Ben returned, happy that Marla would look in on the animals, he slipped his phony arms around her phony virtual form. His warm breath against her neck felt nearly real. “We’ll conquer because that’s what we do,” he whispered, and then she thought them to South Miami Beach, the best place to find killers.

Too uneasy to wait in the dark, Tess moved to the front of the house and paced beneath the glow of the security lights. She called her mother, but Lauren didn’t answer, so Tess left a voice mail. She felt fragmented and strange, and as soon as she disconnected, couldn’t remember exactly what her voice mail had said. She kept hearing that cold, wretched voice: . . .
you are shielded somehow . . . I can seize any of them . . . if you try to find Esperanza.

A pleasant breeze kicked off the water, stars popped out against the black skin of the sky. Everything out here looked normal, ordinary. But inside her mother’s house a man lying in a pool of his own blood had been possessed by something that had known her name and threatened to kill her mother, niece, and Dan. If she divulged this fact to anyone, she would find herself locked up in a padded cell.

She replayed what had happened, slowing the events down, examining them more closely. She remembered how the underside of her wrist had burned in the moments before she had entered the house and until the mist or smoke or whatever the hell it was had left the man. She rubbed her fingers across the skin there. It felt warm and tingled slightly, but the burning sensation was gone. In the glow of the security lights, it looked as if a bruise had formed.

That’s some nasty bruise on your arm.

Some guy outside grabbed my wrist and told me I was an intruder here.

Tess struggled to follow whatever this was—memory, auditory hallucination, derangement—and suddenly recalled being outside a building, in fog, and stumbling over a dead man, a Quechuan, covered in blood. He looked exactly like the man on the floor, as if he had bled out. The memory seemed no stranger than what she had experienced inside the house or earlier today with the ghosts at the turnpike wreckage. But it couldn’t be her memory. She was certain she’d never seen a dead Quechuan.

The shriek of sirens intruded and within moments two county cop cars sped into the driveway. Tess recognized one of the three men, Frank Cerlane—burly weight lifter, father of two young boys, wife was a teacher. They’d worked together on a case a couple of years ago.

“Tess,” Frank said, shaking her hand. “It’s great to see you. When that call came through . . . I mean, the last I heard, you were still on leave.”

“Got my clearance today, came home, and found the house trashed and the perp still inside. He tried to run, I shot him in the leg, and then he . . . I don’t know, Frank. He went into convulsions and started bleeding out.”

“You sure he’s dead?”

“Yes.”
Something drifted out of him.

He gave her arm a reassuring squeeze. “Stay right here, we’ll take a look. The medical examiner is on the way. Send him up when he gets here.”

He and the other cops moved past her. Tess sank to the lowest step on the stairs and was still sitting there when two more cars arrived—her mother’s Prius and Doc Brian’s VW Jetta. Lauren bounded out of her car as though she were being pursued and threw her arms around Tess. “Christ, Slim,” she whispered. “Are you all right?” She stepped back, eyes searching Tess’s face the way only a mother could. She looked as if she had aged fifteen years since this morning. “Did he hurt you?”

“I’m fine, Mom. Just rattled.”
And you called me “Slim,” again. You channeling Dad?

“My cell didn’t work in the restaurant where Brian and I were having dinner. I didn’t get your message until we were getting ready to leave. Who
is
he?”

“Was. He’s dead. And I’ve never seen him before. He trashed your house.”

Doc Brian stood behind Lauren, a thin man whose body hummed with excessive energy. He paced like a caged animal and stabbed his fingers
through his thick, gray hair. “If you’re hurt, Tess, we can get you over to ER ASAP.”

“I’m fine, Brian, thanks.”

He eyed her skeptically, as though she were a life-form he’d never encountered before. Hell, maybe she was.

“I called Dan.” Her mother. “He’s on his way.”

“Dan? Why’d you call
him
?”

“It was the only thing I could think of doing. Brian and I will find out what’s going on.” They slipped past her, up the ramp.

Tess was reluctant to follow, to enter the house again, but terrified that if she didn’t, the
thing
that had spoken through the man might seize her mother. How could she protect Lauren and Maddie when they slept?