Ghost Key (43 page)

Ebo waved his hand toward Kate. “I … don’t understand … The greyhound, the Great Dane … that other dog that jumped on me … are they yours?”

“Not mine, no,” Wayra said. “But I’m responsible for them right now.”

A cart came toward them, Delaney and Rocky now in their human forms with Delaney driving, the hawk perched on the back of the rear seat. Kate stared at them, mystified that they’d been able to shift. How did they know what to do?

“Get in,” Delaney hollered. “The fire’s catching fast.”

“What happened to the dogs?” Ebo asked as they piled into the backseat.

“They’ll catch up to us later,” Wayra said. “Is the redhead still in charge of these mutants?”

“I haven’t seen her since last night. I think she … she was put into the deep sleep. That’s what they do when they … well, you know.”

Wayra nodded.

The cart whispered forward, not exactly moving at the speed of light, not even moving as fast as she could run. Kate thought of her life as a bartender, as Rocky’s mother, Richard’s lover, her parents’ daughter. None of it made sense anymore. And yet all of it, in some odd way she would never be able to explain, made perfect sense. She was still Kate Davis, but now she was more than that woman, more than all of those roles she had lived. Kate Davis, she thought, had become more than the sum of her parts. She was like that holographic universe she had seen during her transformation.

When they reached the edge of the wooded area, Delaney pulled up just short of the road and they all got out. The road was empty of cars, sounds, empty of humanity. She felt deeply uneasy; the smoke was too close, thick, pervasive. But her real unease stemmed from her desperate craving for her human body, her human senses, her human bones and skin and identity. Suppose she could never change back?

You’ll figure it out, Kate.

Delaney, inside her head. It was one thing to communicate like this with her son, quite another to communicate like this with the man who had kissed her in the Zodiac raft lifetimes ago, making her feel things she hadn’t felt in years, kissing her right before he nearly had bled to death in her arms. She wanted to resist it, just on principle. But what was the point? At the moment, she was a greyhound who could run like the wind, whose sense of smell enabled her to travel into unimagined worlds, a shifter with DNA that seemed to perform like some intricate circuit board, connecting her to others of her kind. Why resist the experience?

How’d you figure it out, Delaney?

It’s not so different from RV.

C’mon, your body changed. Your DNA changed. You became a dog.

I became a shifter. I think it’s the physical manifestation of the work I’ve been doing for more than twenty years. It’s the next step.

What happens now?

His response wasn’t immediate. He stood next to her on the side of the empty road, and let his hand drop to her back. He scratched behind her doggie ears and drew his fingers lightly down her spine. Strange, pleasant sensations coursed through her.

I think Wayra has to give us some guidelines on shifter life, Kate.

Wayra told Ebo how to get to the fourth bridge, Delaney tossed him the key to the cart, and Wayra pressed it into Ebo’s hand. “Go, while you still can,” Wayra said.

“But … what about the three of you? How’re you going to get out?”

“Don’t worry about us.”

Ebo threw his arms around Wayra, thanking him repeatedly, then jumped into the cart with the terrified eagerness of a traumatized puppy. He pulled away from them without a single backward glance. Kate and the others remained where they were, the hawk fluttering above them, until the cart was out of sight. Then both Delaney and Rocky dropped to their hands and knees and began to shift, the most grotesque and beautiful thing Kate had ever seen.

Their hands and feet, arms and legs, went first, bones cracking and popping and rearranging themselves. Their thumbs, then their fingers, retracted into their hands and their hands became paws with claws. Even as fur sped across their paws and up their legs, their spines cracked and popped, their necks thickened and shortened, their heads started to change. It looked agonizing, but neither of them emitted a sound.

In about ninety seconds, their transformations were complete. Rocky howled, and Delaney trotted over to Kate; he was now a magnificent Great Dane, obsidian black except for two perfectly white paws, left front, rear right. He nuzzled her side with his head.
We have to look at this as an adventure or we’ll plunge into madness.

Rocky added,
Madness? Are you kidding? This is awesome.

“We should find a safe place where we won’t be disturbed for a few hours,” Wayra said, and then he shifted, too, his transformation occurring between one heartbeat and the next.

The hawk cried out and flew above them, circling, soaring. They followed her, a pack of very strange dogs loping west across Cedar Key.

Twenty-one

Dominica and Whit thought their way back to the hotel and up toward the attic. Dominica knew she’d left Maddie way too long in the deep sleep. But the excursion in the fog, to the cemetery, had delighted her. Seizing Sanchez, plugging into his memories however briefly, had been an unexpected bonus. Even her and Whit’s experiment in bravery, entering the cemetery, had been illuminating. But they should have returned to the hotel attic sooner. She fully expected to find Maddie and Sam in bad shape. Dehydration, soiled clothes, mental confusion. What she did
not
expect was what they found—empty cots. Her shock incapacitated her, then collapsed into fury.

Without Maddie, she had no weapon against Wayra, the chasers, no means to wreak havoc on the lives of the people who had annihilated nearly everyone in her tribe in Esperanza. No way to get even. She didn’t understand how Maddie had escaped. Dominica was sure she’d put her into a sleep deep enough to last ten or twelve hours. And yet, maybe not. Maybe, in the aftermath of her and Whit’s lovemaking up here, she’d gotten careless, too cocky, too certain of victory.

What the fuck,
Whit said.
I put him way under.

We can find them, Whit. Just focus on Sam’s essence.

Tense, unpleasant moments passed.
I don’t sense him, but I feel the escape route he took.

Dominica focused on Maddie. Due to the young woman’s agitation at the time, her high-strung emotions, she was able to track Maddie’s movement to a storage room, down a laundry chute, and out a side door. She and Whit thought themselves along the escape route, then crossed State Road 24 to the unfinished church. Here, the psychic residue of Maddie’s path was exceptionally strong. She’d been scared, relieved, starved, thirsty, desperate. Her emotional and physical needs had driven her out of the church, leaving stubborn Sam behind in …

Here, Nica, here he is.

Sam was slumped in the nearest confessional, his head thrown back like that of a man in the throes of an epiphany. But the only epiphany he’d experienced was a bleed-out. Someone in her tribe had found him and finished him off. Never mind that bleeding out a host was illegal. The laws she’d laid down were rescinded immediately and good riddance to Sam Dorset, who had been nearly as problematic as Maddie.

Maddie ran west,
Dominica said.
She saw the bleed-out happen.

We can find her.

How ironic that he echoed her exact words about finding Sam.
I’ll seize her and you seize that delectable Sanchez and I guarantee you neither of them will ever object to our having sex.

Whit’s essence rubbed up against hers, a sorry excuse for an embrace, but the best that
brujos
in their natural forms could achieve.
I like that idea, Nica. It may be the best idea you’ve had in the last twenty-four hours. With the right hosts, we can just leave if things get too crazy on the island.

Leave? She had no intention of leaving. Except for the details—holdouts, the mounting garbage, zero infrastructure, dwindling food and supplies, and the fact that she lacked a host—Cedar Key was hers. She wasn’t quite sure yet how she would get rid of the CDC, the FBI, the Coast Guard, and all the other feds outside the quarantine zone. But she had faith that she would figure it out. It disturbed her that Whit even mentioned leaving.

I’m not leaving here, Whit. This is the
brujo
enclave.

Not right now, it isn’t.

But it will be.

He didn’t respond for a few moments.
Do you have any idea what Liam is doing, Nica?

Liam? Who cared about him? He was without a host. He was an outcast, a pariah.
Liam can’t hurt us, Whit.

Not yet. But when he’s passionate about something, he can be convincing. And he has convinced an impressive number of
brujos
that you’re not up to the task of leading us. It all started in the market. His followers grow hourly.

How many followers?

I don’t have exact numbers yet, but at least a hundred. And they aren’t interested in having hosts, at least not here.

Dominica filed the information away, and her mind clicked into gear.
Forget Liam. Right now, the bottom line is that you and I need hosts. We have several dozen backups in the hotel courtyard. Let’s choose and get moving with our plan.

What plan?

The plan that somehow ended with Cedar Key as a
brujo
bastion, the plan that would happen with or without Whit, even though he was the one she loved right now.
I’m not ready to discuss it yet. Let’s go select our new hosts.

As they thought themselves back to the Island Hotel, she felt Whit’s moodiness, his sullenness, his withdrawal from her, the walls he erected. He was pissed that she hadn’t confided in him about her plan. She hated the distance between them. She longed to merge her essence with his, and prompt him to forget his questions and concerns. She had no intention of seizing any feds, of battling them, unless they entered the town again and then they would be bled out, just like the men in the hazmat suits. Her only goal was to secure the town, to make sure that every last
brujo
in the quarantine area had a host. Once that had happened, she would summon others of her kind again, put out a call to them, and invite them to seize the feds. She refused to sacrifice a single member of her new tribe to any fed.

That had been one of her mistakes in Esperanza. Back then, she hadn’t known that she could summon other ghosts. Her tribe had been so large that she never had the need for reinforcements. She felt certain that once she secured Cedar Key, everything else would fall into place. But she couldn’t explain this to someone like Whit who, when he was alive, was victimized by American authority—cops, attorneys, feds, the legal and prison systems.

They drifted into the hotel courtyard, where several dozen men, women, and children were being held as backup hosts. In the light of day, the selection looked pathetic—the elderly whose terror had reduced them to blithering heaps, several young children who fussed and cried for their mommies, and a handful of potential hosts in their late twenties to late forties who looked fit and were in various stages of denial, defiance, grief. This was the group among which she and Whit drifted.

The children were guarded but not restrained as the adults were. Some adults, the screamers, were gagged. So far, one man had attempted to escape and he was now locked in an upstairs room, gagged and tied to a bed.

Choose, Nica,
whispered Whit.

Maybe you should return to the cemetery and seize Sanchez while I seize one of these young women.

Uh-uh, not just yet. I’ll return with a host, thanks. Once we’ve got hosts, then we can herd Zee’s group out of the cemetery and I’ll seize Sanchez.

Then how about if I choose a host for you among these possibilities and you choose one for me?

Whit’s essence rubbed up against hers again.
Perfect.

One moment he was sullen, the next moment he was loving.

They moved from host to host, scrutinizing the backups. It was like a display case in a bakery, where you examined all the delectable choices, the sweet scents driving you nearly half mad with indecision.
I’ll take that one and that one and this one, too
. She finally settled on two possibilities.

One young man, a tourist, looked like a gym rat, a much younger Bruce Springsteen with killer biceps and soulful eyes. He was maybe thirty. He had beautiful hands that spoke of sensuality and strength. The second possibility was a man going gray in the temples, his body lean and mean, that of a runner, she guessed. He looked like an Olympian god, a bold, square chin, eyes a Windex blue, a seductive mouth that, at the moment, held a grim defiance rather than fear or surrender. He looked like a CEO, a commercial airline pilot, a Wall Street banker, a physician. In short, he looked like a leader.

Him. Take him, Whit. Our tribe will listen to him.

Whit studied the man, then drifted in to taste him. The man felt it and tried to wrench away, but his hands were cuffed to the arm of one of the heavy iron decorative benches and his feet were lashed together with rope.
A small dot-com CEO who made millions when the company was sold to Google. Name’s Kevin. He’s here looking for property. And a woman.

He’s come to the right place.

He’s mine.

It delighted her that Whit approved of her choice. Maybe he understood her better than Ben or Wayra had.

What about a host for me, Whit?

Over here.

They drifted across the courtyard to a large oak that dominated the area. Of the four women tied to the trunk of the tree, he chose the one whose body appealed to Dominica, a looker in her late twenties. Short, black hair tucked behind her ears. Dark, angry eyes. She wore hiking shorts and shoes, and a shirt with a low scoop neck that promised a glimpse of her ample breasts. Not a skinny thing, not overweight, but pleasingly tall, perhaps five foot ten. She had a ring in her right eyebrow, wore an armband of metal bracelets that reached halfway up her right arm. She looked, Dominica thought, like some Amazonian warrior. She tasted the woman, something that had been strictly forbidden in Esperanza.