Ghost Key (53 page)

Furious, Dominica slammed in another clip and started to fire at them again, but Whit pushed her weapon down. “Don’t waste your bullets, Nica. We don’t have a defense against them. It’s just another sign that we don’t belong here.”

A car screeched to a stop beside them, the doors flew open, and Jill and Joe hurried over, their excitement palpable. “It’s a private plane,” Joe exclaimed. “Did you hear it? We glimpsed it just before the crows surrounded it. It could get us to Mexico, to the Caribbean. One of us can seize the pilot and all of us can get out.”

“
All
of us?” Whit sounded as though he nearly choked on the words, and threw out his arms. “Joe,
all
of us are right here. You, me, Jill, and Dominica. That’s it. That’s what remains of this tribe. You see anyone else around here? Are there any ghosts here in their natural form?
No
. They’ve either fled or joined Liam. We don’t need to seize the pilot. We need to vacate our hosts and go elsewhere.
We’ve lost.
That’s the bottom line.”

Jill slapped the back of her hand against his arm and gave a tight, nervous laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous. No battle is lost until it’s lost. We’re not going to concede. We’re just going to…” She shrugged and drew her fingers back through her hair. “Find some other place, start smaller, right, Nica?”

A horrifying numbness crept through Dominica. She realized Jill was trying to soften the blow of their monumental loss. How many times would she have to repeat this, building a new tribe in a new place? “Whit, would you want to find a new place, with me?”

“Yes.” Unequivocal. He kissed the back of her hand. “And I’ll sacrifice my host for the body of the pilot.”

“Then let’s go check out this private plane,” Joe said.

Dominica hesitated a moment beneath the sky filled with crows. She hated the chasers and their tricks and railed silently against them for violating all the rules that had ever existed for chasers and
brujos.
She despaired that none of these ghosts understood why abandoning Cedar Key was so abhorrent to her. They didn’t know about the ancient ways, the ancient battles, the ancient enmity between
brujos
and chasers. How could they? In the larger scheme of things, they had been born yesterday and died five minutes ago.

But it was also true that too many events had transpired too quickly for her to handle effectively. It had all worn her down, she had lost control. When she’d lost that, her power had been severely curtailed. Now she was just half a
bruja,
trapped in a kind of netherworld, a twilight zone. Perhaps her only way out was through loving the one she was with. Perhaps that love would set her free. Gypsy knew about this kind of passion; Dominica just hoped it would be true for her.

Love or lust, Nica?
She could almost hear Wayra asking her this. The truth was that it didn’t matter. For her, they were one and the same.

The four of them piled into the truck.

*   *   *

Maddie
moved swiftly through the tunnel of crows, her head aching from the smells, the constant, throbbing
whoop
of the choppers, the proximity of the
brujos,
and the nearly crippling uncertainty of everything. Now and then, a giant feather drifted through the air, supernatural flotsam that reminded her this tunnel was not permanent, that it might break up and come apart at any moment. She moved faster, faster, Wayra and Illary right behind her, the others back by the plane, preparing it for takeoff.

The radio she held crackled with voices from the chopper pilots. Delaney had thrust it into her hand as she’d left the plane and told her to keep it on.

What’s with that dark blanket of birds?
one pilot asked.
We supposed to shoot birds?

No, just people,
another pilot replied.
Never seen anything like this with birds, though. Spooky.

Hold positions,
said a third pilot.

Then the tunnel of crows snaked to the right, the left, and began thinning, admitting expanding bands of light. The cawing started up again, louder, urgent, intermingled with shrieks and cries. Up and down the tunnel, greater gaps appeared as crows started flying away. The flapping of their tremendous wings whipped the air into a kind of tornadic frenzy filled with sand and sticks and even burning debris from the fires.

Maddie pressed her arm across her forehead, trying to shield her eyes from the ash, and stumbled forward blindly. The wind bit at her arms and legs and cheeks. When she looked again, the crows were above them, still providing some cover, but many of them faded in and out against the lightening sky. Whatever magic this was, it couldn’t hold together much longer.

Then the tunnel of crows simply ended and she gazed out across a gaping chasm in the marina parking lot. No crows, no fog, just early light and empty asphalt and a couple of black choppers hovering dangerously low. The hovering choppers seemed to be waiting for that gap to fill with people.

“We need a shield,” Maddie said. “Otherwise the choppers are going to mow them down, Wayra.”

“We’re the shield,” he said, and instantly shifted and strolled out into the chasm.

A dog? Is that a dog?
one pilot asked.
I’m not shooting any damn dog. Forget it.

The radio burst with static and half a dozen voices, all of them commenting on the dog and the hawk that appeared behind the dog, and what the hell was this mission about, anyway? Then an authoritative male voice boomed over the radio.
Gentlemen, this is Agent O’Donnell. Your mission is to prevent that plane from taking off. Are we clear on that?

Yes, sir. Could you, uh, advise about the mammoth crows?

They aren’t real,
O’Donnell snapped.

Beg to differ, sir. They appear on radar. That makes them real.

I repeat,
O’Donnell said,
your mission is to prevent that plane from taking off.

Two of the choppers peeled away and Maddie dashed across the three hundred yards, her arms tucked in tightly at her sides, and zigzagged to make herself a more difficult target just in case these pilots decided to fire at her. But no one fired. She made it to the other side, where Kate, Zee, and six others waited. Maddie’s first thought was,
How would the plane accommodate another eight people?
Even with the seats and nonessential equipment removed, it seemed unlikely that the plane would be able to get off the ground with fourteen people on board. But those logistics belonged to Delaney; she couldn’t worry about them. If they had to, they could divide themselves into two groups and Delaney could fly them out separately to Gainesville.

“Maddie,” Kate squealed, and threw her arms around her as though they were long-lost friends. Maybe they were.

“Just run. Flat-out run,” Maddie said. “The plane is obscured by the fog and the crows. But I don’t think it’s going to last much longer.”

“Will the plane be able to fit all of us?” Zee asked.

Maddie’s eyes locked on the old man’s face. “I hope so.” Around them, the fog shifted, hugging them one moment, thinning the next. Maddie looked frantically around for Wayra and Illary, but they were gone. “Just go. Now. Fast.”

And they did.

Maddie watched them, making sure they made it to the other side, then threw out her arms and screamed,
“Charlie, you and your chaser buddies brought us this far. Take us the rest of the way. You hear me?”

Nothing changed. The chasm remained, a gaping hole through which sunlight poured, and she thought,
What the hell,
and started running.

The two remaining choppers fired on her, bullets pinging to her right and left, forcing her to cut from one side to the other, again and again. And then she plunged into the fog, beneath the protection of the giant crows, and fell to her knees, her body heaving and shuddering, hands pressed to her face, her body rocking forward and back, forward and back.

“C’mon, Red,” Sanchez shouted, and yanked her to her feet and pulled her along through the strange, dark tunnel.

Maddie stumbled and lurched, the radio in her hand crackling with static, then voices. Nothing made sense, everything made sense, and making sense of any of it didn’t matter. She gripped Sanchez’s arm and they raced the last few hundred feet to the plane. She scrambled into the crowded cabin, he barreled in after her and slammed the cabin door. Then he yelled, “Get us out of here, Delaney!”

*   *   *

The
fire on Second Street raged so fiercely that they were forced to take an alternate route, backtracking toward the bridge that crossed over to Dock Street. A helicopter was descending at the end of it, a dark forbidding object that looked as if it intended to land in the exact spot where the road curved.

“Go faster,” Dominica shouted. “We can beat it and get past it before it lands.”

Whit opened the truck’s V-6 engine up wide. The truck tore ahead at such an extreme speed that when a hawk and a tremendous white crow swept in front of the windshield, he lost control of the vehicle. It skidded past the entrance to the bridge on its left wheels, slammed into a concrete telephone pole, and plunged into the salt marsh.

Dominica heard shrieking, a horrid, piercing sound, and realized it was coming from her, that she was struggling to unfasten her seat belt so she could pull Whit back into the car. His head was stuck in the broken windshield, jagged edges of glass had nearly severed his neck. His host was dead and he hadn’t escaped before the host had died.

Her seat belt popped open and she struggled to climb out the open passenger window. But her right leg didn’t work the way it was supposed to. She was distracted by screams from the backseat, Jill or Joe or both of them, she couldn’t tell, didn’t care. High tide, it was hide tide and water poured into the truck and her right leg was useless, dead to her.

She knew she should vacate her host now, immediately. But Lynn from Key West was all that was left to her. Without her, Dominica would be consciousness without substance again, her senses limited to shades of gray, muted sounds. Even pain was preferable to that prison.

She dragged herself out the window and fell into the water facefirst, with a graceless splash. Her arms flailed, her useless leg weighted her down, she somehow managed to turn onto her back, and there was Wayra, the hawk riding on his shoulder, the shadow of the immense white crow falling over them.

“Help me, Wayra,” she gasped, coughing up water, desperately trying to breathe.

“With pleasure,” he said, and grasped her shoulders and everything vanished.

*   *   *

Through
the window, Kate could now see the choppers, maybe a dozen of them, and just a scattering of crows on rooftops and flying overhead, above them. With their plane fully exposed now, several of the choppers began to descend—one in the parking lot, another midway up First Street, right in the path of what was supposed to be their runway.

A voice Kate recognized boomed from the radio. O’Donnell, the prick who had interrogated her when she was arrested. “Sanchez, Delaney, I’m just saying this once more. Report immediately. You’ve got sixty seconds before I order the choppers to open fire on the Cessna.”

“Tell him to go fuck himself,” Delaney barked, and started the engine.

“In two minutes we tell him that. Right now, we tell him what he wants to hear.” Sanchez clicked on the mike. “Agent O’Donnell, Nick here. We’ve got injuries and fatalities. We need clearance out of here. These mutants are still closing in on us. We can land on State Road 24 around Roseland. The road is wide there. If you could have a medevac meet us there, we can get the injured transferred to the trauma center in Gainesville.”

“Transfer the injured to one of our choppers. It’ll get them to the trauma center faster,” O’Donnell said.

“Can’t do it. Too risky. The fucks who created this chaos would seize all of us. Tell the chopper to move. Here we come.” Sanchez switched off the radio. “Get us out of here, amigo.”

“Forget First Street,” Delaney said, and made a wide turn and raced through the marina parking lot, past the chopper that had landed next to the pier. Kate watched in horror as the road rushed toward them, as the boat slips vanished from sight, as the children’s playground appeared and vanished, as trees and electrical wires glistened in the morning light. Their weight was too great; she didn’t think they would be able to reach liftoff.
We’re not going to make it.

Then the plane lifted into the air and everyone on board cheered.

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Delaney announced. “O’Donnell may be sending people to Gainesville just to cover his ass. We can be there in twenty minutes. Can you have people there waiting to get you and your group elsewhere, Zee?”

“Absolutely. Give me a cell and we’ll all be out before O’Donnell even knows we were there.”

Kate started to object that the plan wasn’t solid enough, but Rocky slipped his arm around her shoulders and said, “Mom, it’ll be okay.”

She grasped his hand and held on tightly.

*   *   *

The
moment they touched down in Gainesville, Kate pressed her face to the window and saw a trauma chopper flying alongside them. Zee’s contacts. She didn’t have any idea what kind of strings he had pulled for this one, what kinds of contacts he had, where he and his people were headed. And there was no time to ask. Zee and the others were instantly on their feet, lined up at the door. But he came over to her, and for moments, they simply looked at each other.

Her own history lay embedded within the creases in his forehead, at the corners of his eyes, in the quickness of his anxious smile. “You take care, hon. Drop me an e-mail when you get to wherever. Stradivarius111 at hushmail dot-com. It’s encrypted. It’ll ask you a question. The answer is
Anno 1689.
”

The year his Stradivarius had been made, inscribed on the back of it. “You, too, Zee. Thank you. For everything.”