Ghost Key (19 page)

In that instant of hesitation, she had fled. But she doubted if even her most intimate memories would prompt him to hesitate next time. After he had assaulted her in Punta, she had exacted her revenge by seizing Sara Wells, the woman he had loved then, and had killed her. He would never forgive her for that.

Her fear of the shifter remained, but as long as she occupied Maddie’s body, he wouldn’t dare attempt to annihilate her. He knew all too well how quickly and effortlessly she could bleed Maddie out. But Maddie’s stunt deserved punishment. She had humiliated Dominica, who only last night had decreed that any
brujo
who couldn’t control his host didn’t deserve a host. She somehow had to turn this incident to her advantage.

She reached the rocky beach in front of the Old Fennimore Mill condos, grateful that the darkness hid her from the spectators on the balcony and along the beach who had witnessed Maddie’s antics.
I should just bleed you out and be done with you, Maddie.

Maddie didn’t reply. Dominica sensed she was curled up in her virtual room, sobbing.
Save your tears. You’ll have plenty to cry about when we get back to the house.

Pain and more pain. Bring it on, bitch.

Such rage, Maddie. Here I thought you were weeping.

I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.

Dominica laughed, anticipating how she would make Maddie suffer, how she would break her. Yes, it might come to that. Breaking her spirit so completely that she would be the most compliant host Dominica had ever had.

Who was the handsome young man who gave you mouth-to-mouth, Maddie?

Silence.

Well, it doesn’t matter. And I wouldn’t get your hopes up about Wayra. Even the shifter can’t fight a thousand brujos by himself.

Maddie had nothing to say about that. Just as well. Dominica didn’t feel like talking to her, anyway. She climbed a shallow, grassy slope, hurried into the driveway in front of the house where she and Maddie had been living since their second week in town, and bounded up the creaky steps. She tore off her wet clothes and left them where they fell. She rushed into the bedroom for her spare cell phone and immediately called Whit.

“Nica?” He sounded anxious.

“I have her again, Whit.”

“Password?”

“Pensacola.”

She felt his relief.

“Excellent. The net is humming like crazy, though. Since you were unable to control your own host, many in the tribe are asking if last night’s decree still stands.”

She had expected this, but nonetheless felt angry and irritable that she now had to create some colorful fiction to explain what had happened.
You’ll pay for this, Maddie.

“What happened to me is precisely why it’s vital that hosts are tightly controlled. I used myself as an example to illustrate the point.
I allowed her to escape
. There was never any doubt she would be seized again. The decree still stands. But additional training will be available for anyone who wants it.” As soon as she spoke, the
brujo
net hummed and buzzed with the tribe’s reaction.

You’re such a goddamn liar, Dominica. You lost control of me because you weren’t paying attention. And regardless of what you do to me, this body is still mine. If you do something that I find personally abhorrent, you won’t be able to control me. Pervert asshole Whit copping a feel isn’t going to happen again.

Dominica ignored her. “Whit, meet me at the house.”

“Be there in a few minutes.”

Dominica disconnected and stood there for a moment, staring out through the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the gulf. The house sat on pilings fifteen feet above the water, and although it was small—just eight hundred square feet, most of it in one room—the view compensated for the lack of space. Stars popped out against the black skin of the sky, lights from downtown danced against the water, a slice of moon moved upward against the sky. It all looked lovely and oddly peaceful, but didn’t lighten her mood.

She peeled off her damp panties and padded into the bathroom to shower. Within moments of stepping under the hot spray, of picking up a bar of organic soap, her irritation began to ebb. During the months she had used Maddie’s body, she had developed a taste for
products
.

This century offered so many varieties of everything. The organic soap, scented with jasmine, soothed her. She loved the expensive organic shampoos that left her host’s hair as soft as an infant’s skin, and organic creams that kept her beautiful skin youthful. She even used a special foam product for shaving her legs and underarms, plucked her brows regularly, used a beet-red polish on her fingernails and toenails.

She tried to take good care of Maddie’s body, but without making herself crazy. Maddie would argue that point, would say that
brujos
were unhygienic slobs who didn’t bathe frequently enough, but Dominica felt it was a matter of perspective.

When Dominica had initially seized her, Maddie was a vegan. Within a few weeks, that diet proved too boring for Dominica and she gradually introduced fish, chicken, eggs, and dairy products into Maddie’s diet. Maddie also had been a runner, her thighs and calves beautifully sculpted, hard as rock. Running didn’t interest Dominica, so she compensated with daily bike rides, plenty of walking.

How different from her last physical life in the fifties, a kind of half life, forty years that she and her lover, Ben, had spent in the bodies of a husband and wife who were lawyers. In the fifties, exercise freaks and vegans were a rare breed. But because the ancient
brujos
were able to keep their human hosts at an optimum level of health, she and Ben didn’t have to be runners and vegans.

Ben. She still missed him. Other than Wayra, he had been her lover the longest. Maddie’s aunt Tess had annihilated him in Key Largo, in his host body, when Dominica and Ben had been pursuing Tess to kill her. She had seized Maddie, in part, to get even with her aunt.

Dominica took great care to keep her thoughts hidden from Maddie. She suspected the young woman was doing the same thing. In the early days of their relationship, memory bleeds were frequent and worked both ways. Now, it rarely happened. A part of Dominica missed those early days, when she and Maddie were just getting to know each other.

She scrubbed away the unpleasantness with Wayra, with Maddie’s escape, all of it. When she was finished, she wrapped a thick, fluffy towel around her body, wrapped another around her hair, and stood in front of the closet, debating about what to wear. Something casual, perhaps with a shawl, since it was supposed to get considerably cooler tonight. She put on a khaki skirt, wrapped a black shawl around her shoulders, then folded the ends over her breasts and tied them in back. She brushed out her host’s hair and blew it dry, eyeing herself in the mirror.

“You’re really quite lovely, Maddie,” she remarked.

Silence.

Footfalls echoed on the stairs outside and Whit strolled into the house without knocking. “Nica?”

“Back here,” she called, and stepped into the bedroom doorway, one finger at her lips, her other hand lifting the skirt at one side, revealing Maddie’s beautiful leg, thigh, making it clear she wasn’t wearing panties.

His host’s eyes went dark; Whit peered out of them completely now. He kicked off his shoes, tore off his sweater and shirt, and came toward her quickly, unzipping his jeans. “What’re we doing?”

She untied the shawl so that it fell away from her host’s shoulders and breasts. “We’re going to break Maddie,” she said, and dropped back onto the wonderfully soft bed, threw her arms out at her sides, and Whit ripped off the rest of his clothes and fell on her like the hungry beast he was.

*   *   *

Maddie
didn’t struggle. Her essence, her consciousness, vaulted from her body.

From the moment Dominica had called Whit and told him to meet her at the house, Maddie had suspected what her punishment would be. So when Whit had walked into the house, she was prepared. The moment they fell back onto the bed, she soared away.

Her consciousness moved upward into the early evening, looking for Sanchez, Wayra. Without consciousness, her body would function at a physiological level, just as it did when people traveled out of body during sleep. But its animations, sensations, and emotions would originate in Dominica. Since Maddie refused to experience what amounted to rape, Dominica’s ploy wouldn’t break her. And she would be sure to block Dominica’s memories of this encounter from her own awareness when she returned to her body.

She thought herself through town, focused on Sanchez, then Wayra, then Sanchez again, waiting for a telling tug. But the only tug she felt was north along State Road 24, the single road to or from the island. She seemed to be able to regulate her movement and altitude through her thoughts and desires.
Go here, turn there, lift up, drop lower.
She passed familiar landmarks—the Island Market, the Back Bayou, the first two bridges, then the third, and finally the fourth bridge. A cluster of bright lights beyond the fourth bridge drew her down. She hovered like a butterfly just above several large trucks and two dozen workmen who were erecting a barbed-wire fence across the bridge. Behind them was another crew putting up a concrete wall. A foot or two separated the two barriers. On either side of the bridge were two Coast Guard cutters.

It looked as if the area were being blocked off. But why?

Maddie thought herself west across the water to the Cedar Key cemetery, a place that everyone in Dominica’s tribe avoided; cemeteries reminded them that they were dead. She drifted along the coast to the farthest reaches of the island, then south toward the island airport. She counted six more Coast Guard vessels, strategically placed around the four bits of land that comprised the island. She drifted over the airport, expecting to see choppers, planes, evidence of an invasion. But there were only three planes tied down, two single engines and one twin, and nothing on the runway. The airport didn’t have a tower and the only planes that landed here after dark were those that belonged to the people who lived in the ritzy homes along the airstrip. They controlled the landing lights.

She picked up speed, returned to the fourth bridge, and thought herself to the other side of it. Access to the fishing pier was denied. Ditto with the boat launch. A handful of cars waited in front of a concrete wall while cops walked from vehicle to vehicle, talking with drivers, who handed over something, probably licenses and registrations. The first car made a U-turn and headed back toward Gainesville.

What the hell.

Maddie drifted in closer, hoping to hear what the cops were saying. At first, the voices sounded muffled, as though people were underwater. But the longer she hovered there, the clearer the voices became. The words they said differed somewhat each time, but amounted to the same message:
You’ll have to turn back. This area is now under quarantine.

Quarantine?

Her thoughts raced, and pieces of Dominica’s immense and complex puzzle slammed together. Maddie guessed the bodies of people killed here in town had been discovered in the landfills. She suspected the autopsies had revealed an unknown virus or bacteria in every single victim. But it was actually a substance
brujos
created within their host bodies to facilitate their existence in the physical world. Her own body was filled with it. The mayor’s body reeked of it. Bean, Rich, Sam, Marion, all of them had it. They were all contaminated with this
brujo
shit. She had no idea what the long-term effects might be. Dominica didn’t seem to know, either. But if that was what the quarantine was about, then life on Cedar Key was about to take an abrupt ninety-degree turn into hell. Quarantine the place, isolate the people who hadn’t been seized, drive them into hiding not only from the
brujos
but from the government as well. A quarantine would make it just that much easier for Dominica and her tribe to take over the island.

Alarmed and terrified, Maddie retreated—and snapped back into the bedroom. She stared down at her body and that of the mayor, grunting and humping each other like a couple of dogs. She felt strangely removed from her physical self, as though she were watching a movie, some clip of a porno film. She suspected the mayor’s mind and soul had been broken some time ago. She hoped so, for his sake.

She thought herself away from the sordid scene and concentrated on Sanchez, on the way his mouth had tasted when he had kissed her, on what he’d said to her.
I’ll find you.

I’ll find you first,
she thought, and wheeled up through the roof of the house, out toward the moon, the stars, and then across town again. She found Sanchez leaving his motel room, an old motel that dated from the fifties. Most of the
brujos
ignored the place. It just wasn’t the kind of motel where they would find hosts worth their time and effort. Even these young, reckless ghosts sought hosts who were young, fit, and sexually active. Tourists that fit that description didn’t stay in this motel.

But idiosyncratic men with dogs did.

Sanchez and Jessie were walking toward a lime-green VW. Like before, the dog sensed her before Sanchez did. The retriever wagged her tail, barked, and tried to rub against Maddie. Sanchez whispered, “I feel her around, too. Red? You here or am I nuts?”

The island’s being quarantined. That’s going to make it easier for the
brujos
to take over Cedar Key. Get out of here while you still can. Go by boat.

“I’m not going anywhere until you’re with me.”

You don’t even know me, Sanchez. You kissed some spaced-out chiquita who rode on dolphins. I’m a fucking mermaid, okay? Just leave. Now. Fast.

“For Chrissake, Maddie, don’t tell him to leave.”

Her grandfather, Charlie Livingston. Man in white. Man in white with cigar tucked behind his ear. Man in white who was no more substantial than she was. Man in white who was a member of the chasers and stood right next to her. Ghost, chaser, grandfather, whatever, his body looked solid. Did she even have the illusion of a body?