Ghost Key (41 page)

Wayra looked into her eyes again and suddenly understood. She had the eyes of the hawk. “It’s not possible,” he breathed.

“You were never the last of your kind, Wayra.”

She slipped under the blanket with him, fitted her body against his and, for long moments, simply held him. He could feel the beat of her heart, the warmth of her skin, the soft whisperings in her mind as she reached out to him, one shifter to another. Slowly, hesitantly, his arms wrapped around her, and for the first time ever, Wayra embraced one of his own kind, ending centuries of loneliness.

A breeze skipped through the trees, rustling the branches, rearranging sunlight and shadows, and a strange peace suffused Wayra. It was as if all these centuries of his existence had culminated in this single discovery, that he was not the last of his kind, that somewhere along the nonlinear progression of his existence, he had accepted a lie as truth.

“But how can you exist?” He whispered the words, afraid that if he spoke too loudly, this fragile reality would shatter and she would disappear. “No chaser has ever spoken of you.”

“There’s a great deal the chasers don’t know or understand.” She kissed him and the intimate contact enabled their minds to instantly open to each other.

He learned that her name was Illary, Quechua for “rainbow,” and that she was aeons older than he was. When she was changed at the age of sixteen, she was a close friend of Mary Magdalene and one of Christ’s disciples, part of a group of noblewomen who supported Christ financially as he traveled through Galilee and Judea. He saw her early years as a human disciple of Christ, then as a hawk that was never far from Christ or Mary Magdalene. After the Crucifixion, Illary and her creator, the man who had turned her, had left the Holy Land and gone in search of others of their kind.

During their journey to Esperanza seven hundred years later, Illary’s creator had been killed by a hunter’s arrow. She had finished that journey alone and had arrived in Esperanza shortly after the city was brought into the physical world five hundred years ago. In all the centuries of her existence, she had turned only one person, a man whom she had loved as Wayra had once loved Dominica. He, too, was killed by a hunter’s arrow and had joined the
brujos,
just as Dominica had done. But her lover, unlike Dominica, had left Esperanza willingly and now ruled the largest tribe of
brujos
in Europe and Asia. Illary had not seen him for more than a thousand years.

Her loneliness throughout all these centuries had so far surpassed his own that he didn’t understand how she had managed to remain whole, sane. She heard his unspoken question and another chapter of her life opened to him—centuries spent in Europe in her human form, when she had nearly forgotten her shifter history and rationality was her refuge. He saw that she had been married and widowed dozens of times and none of her partners had ever known the truth about what she was.

Their clothes slipped away, her naked body covered his, and Wayra felt as if he’d fallen into a dream from which he never wanted to awaken. She drove out the bitter taste of the
brujos
he had taken into himself. In their lovemaking, each delicate taste and sensation enabled them to travel more deeply into each other’s respective histories, down through decades, centuries, millennia, until they reached the collective memories of their race. Images swirled through them, around them, some of them so strange and alien that Wayra had no context for them: red rivers, a sky with twin suns, glacial peaks, oceans of unimagined depths, a continent of bold, pulsating blues at the edge of time.

A magnificent bird with a seventy-foot wingspan flew between the twin suns. On a vast savannah beneath those suns loped a gigantic African bush elephant. In a rushing scarlet-colored mountain river, a monstrous-sized wolf hunted for fish. On a sunlit leaf as big as a full-grown man, a Goliath beetle soaked up the day’s warmth. Just above it, a tremendous butterfly suckled from the center of a gigantic orchid, its luminous red and blue wings opening and closing with elegant grace. At the edge of a vast ocean, a huge saltwater crocodile lay in the shoals, water lapping at its sides. In the depth of that ocean, a whale-shark moved with a stealthy silence, and alongside it swam a Chinese giant salamander and a colossal squid, its tentacles ten miles long.

Mammals, amphibians, insects, reptiles, invertebrates, fish, birds, all excessive in size: Were these the original shifters? The prototypes? Where was the place with the twin suns?

Still locked together, they rolled through the fallen leaves and pine needles, their bodies now slick with sweat. His fingers tangled in her hair, his mouth moved against her neck and breasts, his tongue inscribed secret codes against her skin. When her body arched against his and she cried out, her voice rose into the murmur of the breeze, the whispering of the leaves. Wayra drove on to his own completion and all the exhilarating and alien images instantly evaporated.

A long time later, they lay side by side, fingers intertwined. “So tell me how it can be that you exist,” he said.

lllary rose up slightly, one hand supporting her head, the other hand resting lightly against his chest. Her dark hair cascaded over one shoulder. Wayra drank in her beauty; she intoxicated him. “Shifters predate humanity on the planet, Wayra, and everything you think you know about your genesis is wrong and you’ve been lied to—by your creator, by the chasers.”

Wayra wished he could feel anger about this, but in truth, it didn’t surprise him. She explained that in the beginning, there were seven tribes of shifters, the ones he’d seen. But by the time of Lemuria, science was intervening and some of the shifters’ kind became genetic experiments, created in laboratories. But the dog/wolf shifters were not created in any lab; they were among the original seven tribes.

She talked for a while about the ancestral memories of shifters, how those memories stretched back to the dawn of time before humanity, before chasers,
brujos.
“And ultimately, those memories, the knowledge we carry, makes us more powerful than chasers.”

He threaded his fingers through hers and held their hands up to the light. Her hand was lovely, the fingers perfectly formed, her skin a pale brown, café au lait. “But if the chasers are the ones who rewrote our history, can we trust them?”

“
You
tell
me.
You’ve worked with them, I never have. It’s why I didn’t reveal myself when they were around.”

It took Wayra a while to answer his own question. “Over the centuries, I’ve met six of the thirteen who sit on the chaser council. Charlie and Victor are the only two I trust but that trust isn’t constant. I’ve known Victor since shortly before the decision was made to bring Esperanza into the physical world. He voted against it, as I would have if I were a chaser. He was overruled. So yes, I trust him in that sense.”

“And Charlie?” she asked.

“I met him in the year or two before he made his transition. The chaser council had been observing him for a long time, studying the connections in his life. They knew there was a possibility that his daughter, Tess, would be critically wounded in her work and felt she would be an excellent candidate to be the first transitional soul in five hundred years to enter Esperanza, thus breaking the
brujo
stranglehold over the city. So the chasers recruited Charlie before he died and my job was to guide him during his meditations and dreams. Once he made his transition and joined the council, I came to know him well. Of all the chasers on the council, at least from what I know of them, he’s closest to human life and obviously still has family here in the physical. He means well, I trust him to do the right thing, but he can be manipulative. He hasn’t been a chaser long enough to have anything to do with burying our true history. I doubt if he even knows about it. During my travels here, he’s been helpful.”

“And both of them were responsible for those huge fabulous crows.”

“I’ve never seen them do anything like that before. I suspect they violated chaser rules by meddling like that, but it’s long past the time to violate the chasers’ unfathomable code.”

“They may be helpful to us. But for now, it’s best to keep my existence a secret from them.”

“These other shifters. Do you have any idea where they may be?”

“None. But until the day I saw you at that landfill, I didn’t know you existed, either, Wayra. My sense is that a confluence of events and circumstances will eventually make them known to us.”

Maybe, he thought. But maybe not. Maybe there would be no confluence in their lifetimes. It exhausted him to try to follow the timelines, the connections, the magnitude of what he had just learned. He changed the subject. “How did you end up on Cedar Key? With Rocky and Kate?”

She stretched out against the leaves again, one arm tucked under her head. “I left Europe after the Second World War broke out and returned to Esperanza. I spent weeks at a time in a place called the stone forest, searching for direction, guidance. One night in a cave, I had a vision of a place on the water. A fishing village. I felt it was an island to the north, in the U.S. In the distance, across an expanse of water, I could see twin stacks that emitted smoke. These structures were huge; I had no idea what they were. Or where they were. But I knew that in this place, I would uncover more about shifter history, that it was part of my destiny. So I stayed in the cave until I had another vision, of a long finger of land surrounded on three sides by water. I later realized it was Florida.”

“How did you narrow it down to Cedar Key?”

“Patience and time. I had nothing but time. In the late seventies, I ended up in Gainesville. In graduate school. One weekend, in 1978, I came to Cedar Key. From the fishing pier, I saw the twin stacks that had been in my vision. It was—”

“The Crystal River nuclear plant,” Wayra finished. “It’s visible from the pier.”

“Yes. It became operational in March 1977. It took me more than twenty years, Wayra, but I found the place in my vision. Cedar Key pretty much became my hawk home from then on. When I went back to the stone forest five years ago, I had another vision, of a young woman and her son. Kate and Rocky. The first time I saw Kate, I recognized her—but not him, he was too young. In my vision, he was older, as he is now. I studied them, watched him grow and mature. I was desperately lonely and considered living with them as a hawk, just for the companionship. I also knew they were connected somehow to my destiny.

“Last year I was out on one of the smaller islands, feasting on crabs. A group of drunken fishermen saw me and thought it would be fun to snare a hawk. The hook went through my wing. I managed to bite through the line, but the hook was deeply embedded in my wing. I could barely fly. I somehow made it back to Cedar Key, to the beach in front of the animal rescue center where Rocky worked. That’s where he found me.”

Wayra stroked the underside of her wrist, his heart aching for her.

“You realize that he and Kate and Delaney are the new generation of shifters, Wayra.”

“If nothing goes wrong.” He explained what had happened when he had turned the mother and her son during the plague years. “I couldn’t bear for that to happen this time, Illary.”

“That was long ago.” Her fingernails traveled lightly down the side of his face. “Everything has changed since then. I don’t know Delaney, so I can’t speak for how his transformation may evolve, but I don’t think Kate and Rocky will be a problem.”

“Except that the only reason I turned her was so that Rocky wouldn’t be alone.”

“It was the right thing to do.”

“She may not agree.”

“You don’t understand the depth of her love for her son. Trust me, you did the right thing.”

He hoped she was right, but it wasn’t as if he could change anything at this point.

Leaves fluttered down through the air and caught in Illary’s hair. He wanted to know everything about her, every piece of her long history, every emotion, every twist and turn in her journey. “Europe. Tell me about Europe in the twenties and thirties.”

“Exciting. But strange. For a time, when I was married to a man in Zurich and barely remembered my own history as a shifter, I went through therapy with Carl Jung. I told him my dream about the scarabs. Do you know that dream, Wayra?”

Wayra had read everything Jung had written. He owned a copy of Jung’s
Red Book,
which wouldn’t be sold until next year. He had read the eloquent calligraphy in German. The dream to which Illary referred had triggered the basis of Jung’s theory of synchronicity. And it had come from a woman whose insistence on logic and rationality had become so rigid and dominant in her life that it choked off her cure. He couldn’t imagine Illary as that woman and said as much.

She laughed and turned her head, bits of grass and leaves and pine needles stuck to her hair. “Wayra, by that time I had been alive for a thousand years. I had lost count of how many times I’d been widowed. I can’t have children. Rationality was my sanctuary. Yes, I was that woman. And when the beetle appeared at the window, I suddenly understood what I am. All my dim shifter memories burst forth with vivid brightness and rushed back. I’ve never allowed myself to forget any of it again. It’s why I’ve spent more time as a hawk than as a woman.” She paused. “Should we check on the new shifters?”

Wayra pulled her closer to him. “They’ll be fine for a while longer. I want to know more and it’s easier when we do this mind to mind.” He kissed her once more and lost himself again.

*   *   *

Kate
knew something was happening to her mind, body, and soul. But she couldn’t stop it, couldn’t mitigate it. It felt like a force of nature, something so powerful and transformative that she could only be swept along, swept up, and had no choice but to endure the excruciating pain.

The pain was sometimes specific—her hands and feet, for instance, felt as though they were burning. Her head pulsed and throbbed, the migraine to end all migraines. Her nose ached, her skin felt as if it had been set on fire, her tongue and teeth felt as though they had been cut out, extracted, and replaced with something else.