Esperanza (49 page)

“Stop,” Ian said. “Please.” He suddenly felt weak, nauseated, just as he had in those final hours in Esperanza. He understood the implications of what Wayra was saying, but couldn’t process anything. “I’m gonna be sick.”

Wayra swerved to the side of the road, slammed on the brakes. Ian stumbled out and made it as far as the line of trees before his knees buckled and he doubled over and puked. He dug his fingers into the soft earth, breathed in its fecund scent, and sensed the emergence of the larger picture, the plan the chasers had set in motion.

Behind him, Wayra said, “Your nausea is probably the result of your brief jaunt as a, uh, hybrid.”

Ian rose up, rocked back on his heels. “Or it could be my body’s reaction to the way you people used Tess and me. You allowed us into Esperanza as transitional souls in the hopes that if we survived the journey back to our physical bodies and returned to Esperanza, it would embolden the masses to revolt against
brujo
tyranny. You did this to
start a war
between the living and the dead. And the subplot is that you hoped our near-death experiences
would enable Tess and me to interact with . . . transitional souls, and then we would become the first of the new human helpers who would begin to assume some of the chaser chores. Clever, Wayra.” He pushed to his feet. “Did it ever occur to you that your war against these
brujos
is not
our
battle? Did you ever think that maybe we wouldn’t want the job? That maybe you shouldn’t have interfered in our lives? I had a life. A profession. Relationships. You and these chasers fucked it up big-time.”

Wayra didn’t deny any of it. He just said, “You never would have met Tess.”

It infuriated Ian that Wayra’s voice remained calm, even. “Since we’re separated by forty years, maybe I wasn’t meant to meet her.”

“We didn’t expect the two of you to fall in love, Ian. That was a bonus. It gave both of you a powerful incentive to survive your physical injuries and to remember what had happened.”

The gall, Ian thought. “You’re talking about Tess and me like we’re some sort of metaphysical experiment. So forget it,
muchacho.
”

Wayra now looked exasperated. “Look, Tess’s father, Charlie, knew there was a strong probability that she would be shot in the line of duty, so he made it possible for her to enter Esperanza, the only place where she might find the will to return to the physical. He also knew she had the qualities we look for in helpers—a strong sense of right and wrong defined by conscience rather than religious beliefs or dogma, a need to serve a cause larger than the self, a great capacity for love and compassion. Charlie wanted a second person with similar attributes, and I suggested you.”

“How the hell could you know anything about me?”

Wayra hesitated. Sunlight and shadows ebbed and flowed across his face, changing its contours. He ran his fingers through his hair, started to pace. “I was with a group of chasers who helped your father after he died. Suicides always deserve extra attention. I was curious how his suicide would sculpt the man you would become, so I kept an eye on you through the years. Your need to prove your father wrong about what kind of person you are drove you to write about social and cultural issues. It helped to develop your social conscience and landed you a Pulitzer prize at the age of twenty-eight, for your investigation into the rape and murder of a black woman. It drove you to—”

“I know my own history. Just because you’ve been alive for centuries doesn’t give you the right to try to psychoanalyze me. You’ve got a lot of goddamn nerve, Wayra, and where the hell does Charlie get off, trying to mold his daughter’s destiny from the afterlife?”

Wayra’s expression suddenly changed. “Move quickly,
muchacho.
” He spoke softly. “Fog. In the woods behind you.”

Ian glanced back. Ribbons of fog snaked along the ground through the trees, wrapped around trunks, brush, and drifted into the lower branches, where it seemed to flutter like a flock of white birds. Already, Ian could hear a soft, insidious sound, like palm fronds dragging against pavement. Then a kind of lewd whispering suffused the air and a bank of the stuff rolled out of the trees, twice as tall as he was, perhaps a quarter of a mile wide, and the chanting exploded through the air.
Find the body, fuel the body, fill the body, be the body.

Ian whipped around and tore after Wayra, heart hammering, blood pounding in his ears, memories of the chaos in San Francisco vivid. He threw himself into the passenger seat and Wayra careened onto the road, tires kicking up stones, clouds of dust. The fog rolled on through the dust, gathering speed, growing in size until it filled the side mirror.

“Jesus, Wayra. We’re not going to be able to outrun it.”

Wayra eyed the speedometer, barreled into a curve, then tapped the brake, slowing the truck as the road dropped into a steep descent. “Grab your pack, Ian.”

Ian didn’t like the sound of that. “Why?”

“Just do it!”

The tires shrieked, the engine roared, and Wayra swerved sharply to the right. The truck crashed through a flimsy wood railing, splinters flying like spears in every direction, then the tires left the road and they suddenly were airborne. The engine conked out, air whistled past the windows, sunlight exploded through a field way below. For moments, they seemed to ride the currents, suspended between heaven and earth like one of the giant condors Ian had seen in Esperanza. Then the truck’s nose dipped forward, the field below rushed toward them, and Ian knew he was about to die.

Wayra threw his arms around him, hugging him so hard he couldn’t breathe. His body felt as if it were collapsing, skin and organs turning to mush, bones and cells compressing, eyeballs popping from their sockets. He went blind, deaf, and dumb. Then there was nothing.

When he could see again, he was flat on his back in a field, a chilly wind blowing over him. He stared into the belly of a twilit sky, heard distant strains of music, smelled smoke and food from a barbecue.
What just happened?
Ian pushed himself up. Across the field lay a paved road crowded with traffic—buses, vans, trucks, a line of tidy, colorful concrete buildings.
Somewhere nearby, a church bell tolled, its sonorous chords echoing through the moonlight.

He leaped to his feet, looking around for Wayra, and saw him curled on his side a hundred yards away, his body caught between wolf and man, a kind of chimera. The sight fascinated him in a bizarre kind of way, the compression and extension of bones, snout and head rearranging themselves until the skull and face were human. The fur vanished in a flash, human skin and hair appeared, limbs and paws gave way to two legs, two arms and hands, tail pulled into the body. It happened between one heartbeat and the next. When Wayra peered up at him, the tea-colored eyes were Nomad’s.

“Explain,” Ian burst out. “Please. Where’s the truck?”

Wayra sat up with considerable effort, exhaustion apparent in the circles beneath his eyes, the twitch at the corner of his mouth, the soft popping of his joints. “Calm down. You’re making my head hurt.” He rocked slowly onto his knees, brought a cell phone from his back pocket. “Shit. No signal. Let’s go. We need to find a phone, car, weapons.”

As they strode through the field, Ian said, “Where are we?”

“The village of Punta in, uh, 2008.”

“What?”
Ian stopped. “You . . . can
do
that? All this time you could’ve brought me
forward
? What the hell were you waiting for?”

Wayra kept moving down the hill toward town. Ian loped after him, caught his arm.
“Talk to me.”

“Okay, okay.” He wrenched his arm free of Ian’s grasp. “I’ve never tried it before. I didn’t know if it was possible to take someone else forward or backward or anywhere in time. It was our only option.” Then he grinned. “But hey, it
worked
!” Wayra flung his arm around Ian’s shoulders. “And getting here was half the battle.”

Ian wasn’t feeling quite as magnanimous as Wayra. He shook off the other man’s arm. “Hold on. My son is back in 1968. How am I supposed to get in touch with him? The last time I talked to him, he was on his way to Quito.”

Wayra paused. In the starlight, his features looked more wolflike than human, his teeth seemed pearl white, sharper. Ian instinctively stepped back, putting a little more distance between them.
Shit, suppose he bites me? Will it turn me into a shifter?

“I wouldn’t,” Wayra said, as if reading Ian’s mind. “I never have. That’s why I’m the last of my kind. We’ll figure something out about your son. I’ll know more when we get into town. But you must do everything I tell you,
follow my instructions to the letter. I know Dominica. I know what she’s capable of, and she’ll find us.”

With that, he walked on ahead, quickly, as if he couldn’t get away from Ian fast enough. Ian stared after him, mortified and ashamed that he had hurt Wayra’s feelings.

Dan drove through the twilight with a CD playing, fingers tapping against the steering wheel. He kept worrying about the voice in his head that he’d heard earlier, so Dominica urged him to sip more water and eat some of the snacks he’d bought. She made minor adjustments in his blood chemistry that calmed him. She wished she could do the same for herself.

She felt increasingly anxious and wasn’t sure why. Perhaps she had to get out of Dan to explore the feeling. But she didn’t dare do it while he was conscious. She couldn’t risk that he might recover all his memories and take off.

When they reached a lonely stretch of road, she put pressure on his bladder, released more endorphins, and Dan pulled to the side of the road. Yawning, he got out and relieved himself by the side of the car, taking in the glorious moonlit landscape around him. The majestic volcanic peaks, the steep slope covered with trees, the silver ribbon of a river meandering way below him. He glanced at his watch, frowning, and wondered what he was doing out here, miles from any town or village. Dominica quickly censored these doubts by tweaking his pituitary gland again. Now he could barely keep his eyes open.

She urged him to remove the keys from the ignition and toss them off to the side of the road. Now, in the event that he awakened, he wouldn’t be able to flee in the car. Dominica erased his memory about the keys. She would remember, that was all that mattered. She coaxed him to the trunk.

He removed the sleeping bag, and spread it out on the back seat. Then he climbed into it, zipped himself inside, a caterpillar in a
cocoon,
and fell asleep. Dominica quickly went to work on him, making sure he would sleep soundly and deeply for several hours. Then she slipped out of him and immediately heard Pearl calling to her. Dominica located her at the edge of a nearby village.

“Nica, I wasn’t sure if you could hear me,” Pearl said. “We found Wayra and Ian. They were arguing and . . . Ian seemed to be ill. We pursued them as they drove away from us and something . . . unprecedented happened. Wayra drove their truck over the side of a cliff and it crashed into a field a
hundred feet below. We searched through the debris, but found no sign of either of them.”

“That’s impossible. You must not have checked the area thoroughly.”

“We checked a five-square-mile area.” Her voice turned to steel.
“They are gone.”

Even Wayra couldn’t take a human being through time. He certainly couldn’t do it while the car he drove plunged over the side of a cliff. “Then we shall go to Tulcán to find Tess and her group.”

“What about Dan?”

“He’ll sleep for hours yet. What does Rafael report?”

“By dawn, the entire city and the surrounding villages will be completely shut down. No power, total isolation. We believe the liberation group may make their move on the solstice, during the nationwide celebration in honor of Inti.”

The ancient Incan sun god,
Dominica thought.

“Much of the tribe now believes that the insurrection is in full force,” Pearl went on, “that Rafael has overthrown you. He hasn’t told them otherwise. To maintain your position as tribal leader, Nica, you’ll have to address the tribe and do something impressive that really fires their hunger and passions, that shows your strength.”

“I appreciate your honesty. What sort of impressive feat do you suggest?”

Pearl told her and Dominica smiled.

They dropped off the Otavalo cop and his son in Ibarra, where they also refueled, and landed in Tulcán just after dusk, as the moon pushed up from the horizon. It was the northernmost city in the country, a popular border crossing between Ecuador and Colombia, located at just over three thousand feet. Tess didn’t know how far it was from Esperanza, but in the Andes, distance was less important than topography.

The Andes—nearly 23,000 feet above sea level at their highest point—ran like a spine down the middle of this country, with Esperanza folded somewhere within those impossible peaks at 13,200 feet. They would have
to ascend more than ten thousand feet. Even if Esperanza was seventy miles from here, the trip could take hours. It would depend on the weather, the treachery and general condition of the roads, whether there were landslides, fog.

Ed Granger already had said they would go the rest of the way by car. Although it was possible to fly into Esperanza, darkness and the crosscurrents right now created too much risk for a chopper. But Tess wanted to know who was driving what kind of car, how far it was, and what sort of weapons he had to protect Lauren and Maddie from
brujos
. So as they crossed the tarmac, she said, “How about some details on all this, Ed?” And enumerated her questions.