Ghost Key (7 page)

Then his limbs transformed and this part was just strange, not painful except when his thumbs were
absorbed
into his paws. But at that very moment, his animal and shifter senses kicked in, as if to compensate for the loss of physical dexterity. And those senses could follow anything anywhere, backward and forward in time, and do it in such amazing detail that he never mourned the loss of his thumbs.

The most painful part of his transformation, even after all these centuries, was when his face, organs, blood, and consciousness changed all at once. It didn’t always happen that way, sometimes these areas changed separately. But when he was in a hurry, as he was now, the pain briefly stole all his senses, human and animal, and he stood there blind, deaf, dumb, beyond redemption, a boy born in 1162 and turned into a shifter eighteen years later. Then, somehow, his transformation all came together and he was a dog/wolf hybrid, the last of his kind.

Wayra trotted through the trees, snout raised into the air, reading it, following Dominica’s putrid stench straight into the landfill. He was aware of Charlie moving alongside him, and of the sparrow hawk he’d seen earlier now circling overhead, spiraling lower and lower. A tractor lumbered toward him and Wayra dashed left to get out of the way. The driver saw him, stopped, bolted upright and waved his arms, shouting, “Hey, someone get this goddamn dog outta here.”

He kept moving toward the source of the stench, up a steep hill blanketed with birds—crows, gulls, blackbirds, vultures. As he neared them, the birds cried out, shrieked, and fluttered upward, a dark mass. At the top of the hill, he started digging, fast, wildly, down through layers of garbage, through a profusion of odors. Some odors held stories, others contained an entire history, all of them whispered,
Follow me, learn who and what I am
. But the overpowering stink of Dominica kept him focused.

Wayra dug deeper, deeper, Dominica’s smell now mixed in with the fetid stink of decaying flesh. Some of the crows and blackbirds returned, settling around him and pecking at the garbage he’d uncovered. Charlie, crouched beside him, kept muttering, “Hurry up, Wayra, hurry up. A couple of tractor drivers are on their way up here.”

Then he found it, about two feet down, a rotting hand protruding from a filthy, bloodstained sleeve. It smelled male, young, early twenties. Wayra grabbed hold of the sleeve and tried to pull the body out, but the weight of the dirt was too great. He moved to the left and dug fast to uncover the rest of the body.

“Scat!” shouted one of the men who appeared in front of him, waving his arms. “You can’t go digging around up— Holy shit. Clem, take a look. The dog found a body.”

Wayra uncovered the front of the young man’s chest, his bloodied shirt. Maggots slithered out from between the buttons, emerged from his pocket, crawled from the dirt around the man’s neck. Wayra knew he had bled out. Dominica’s stink nearly overwhelmed him.

He leaned in closer, inhaling the man’s scent, following it, trying to find the thread of his personal story. But too many smells were mixed in with it. Then Clem and Hank, his companion, dropped down next to the body and Wayra smelled them, too. But their scents were radically different; they smelled
alive
and Wayra was able to filter out their odors and concentrate on the young man.

“Shit, just like the other two,” Hank muttered.

A cop reached the top of the hill, obviously winded from the exertion. “What’ve we got?”

“Another body,” Clem replied, and he and Hank moved aside so the cop could see.

The cop pulled the edge of his jacket over his nose and mouth and peered down. “Jesus. Another bleed-out. I’m supposed to call this in to the feds. Did either of you touch the body?”

“Fuck, no,” said Clem.

“Did the dog?”

“He just dug it up,” Hank replied.

“You sure?”

“What difference does it make?” Clem asked.

“Because they don’t yet know if the virus is host specific.”

“What the hell does
that
mean?” Hank kept his arm across his nose and mouth, breathing into his elbow, muffling his voice. “Speak English.”

The cop looked irritated. “It means they don’t know if the virus is sticking just to humans. If it can leap between species, then the dog could be contaminated. Does he have a collar or anything you can grab?”

“No collar,” said Hank. “And I’m not grabbing for the dog, Sergeant. I’m not getting bit. You want him, you grab for him.”

Wayra started backing away from the body, the men. The cop said, “Nice doggie, nice doggie.” He came toward Wayra, snapping his fingers, speaking softly, and Wayra kept backing away from him, growling, baring his teeth.

“C’mon now, doggie. I don’t want to shoot you.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Hank snapped. “Just let him go. You said yourself they don’t know shit about this virus.”

“Got my orders, Hank.”

“This is such bullshit,” Clem said angrily. “The point is the body, not the dog.”

Wayra whirled around and raced down the other side of the mound, the men still shouting at each other. The hawk shrieked nearby, and when Wayra glanced back, he saw it diving toward the cop, who stumbled back, lost his balance, and tumbled out of sight, down the other side of the hill of garbage. Wayra raced on into the trees, Dominica’s smell still so thick in his nostrils he continued to follow it through time.

She had seized the young man while he was snorkeling in the gulf with his girlfriend. It seemed that Dominica was instructing another
brujo
on how to seize and control humans. Once she had shown her new recruit how to do it, she’d leaped out of the man and into the girlfriend, and the other
brujo
had taken the young man. Neither human realized it until they were on one of the deserted islands and
brujo
lust had overpowered them. Both of them bled out within minutes. Later, the rising tide washed their bodies out into the gulf.

Even though Wayra’s sense of smell provided an abundance of information, it didn’t give him everything. Huge gaps existed in his knowledge. How did the man’s body get to the landfill? What had happened to his girlfriend’s body? Where had Dominica left Maddie’s body while she’d been teaching her recruit how to seize humans? He needed to look at a map and find the quickest way to the gulf.

As he neared the end of the woods, he shifted into his human form again, grateful that the man who had transformed him so many centuries ago had done so while Wayra was clothed. It meant that whenever he moved back to his human form, he would still be dressed in whatever he was wearing when he had shifted. It meant that anything he was carrying in his pockets would still be there. He didn’t know why this was so; it simply was. As he slapped his hands against his dusty jeans, he heard the squeal of a siren—distant, but headed this way.

“They’ll be looking for a black dog, Wayra,” said Charlie.

“Idiots. What’d you make of that hawk?”

“You owe her. She probably saved your ass from being shot.”

“Have you ever seen a hawk do anything like that?”

“No. But hey, you’re a hell of a lot older than I am. Have
you
ever seen a hawk do something like that?”

“Never.”

Wayra emerged from the trees, slipped inside the truck, dug out his keys. He sat there, studying a map. Two cop cars raced past the shopping center, sirens wailing.
No black dog around here, boys.

“So where to next?” Charlie asked, now occupying the passenger seat.

“Cedar Key. It’s the closest island in the gulf.”

“Onward, amigo.”

Four

Dominica pedaled her bike through the dusk, the most magical time of day for her. As it settled across the island, it transformed the old buildings in downtown Cedar Key into a city of gold. She felt as if she were riding her bike through a land of legends and myths, of dragons and knights, kings and queens and princesses trapped in towers. She conjured just enough fog to create an atmosphere of mystery and danger, and imagined herself on horseback, racing toward Wayra in the days centuries ago when they had still loved each other.

But the memories of those days were open wounds. She shook them away and tried to find her way into a better story, one in which Wayra had joined her and they had taken over Esperanza and turned it into a city of
brujos
. That story fit the fantasy of myths and legends, but it wasn’t how it had happened. That blow still plagued her and, in her darkest moments, brought back the bitterness and despair of everything that had gone so horribly wrong.

She stopped in front of the Island Hotel, her headquarters since her arrival in January, and unlocked the courtyard gate. She pushed her bike inside, set it against one of the palm trees. From the basket attached to the back of the bike, she carefully withdrew a small, rectangular wooden box. She held it tightly in both hands and hurried toward the building that formed the northern boundary of the courtyard. It resembled an old barracks and had once housed Civil War soldiers. The front porch sagged, some of the windows were cracked, and the place screamed for a fresh coat of paint.

Dominica sensed the barracks was at least twenty years older than the hotel, dating back to around 1839. In the cosmic scheme of things, 1839 was yesterday. What a difference from Ecuador, where many buildings and plazas dated back to before the time of the Incas. Yet it was one of the oldest spots on the island and she felt at home within the barracks’ chipped, barren walls, surrounded by the smell of its dusty history.

She hoped to eventually spiff up all these old buildings around town, make them more appealing for both tourists and locals. Whit, her expert on American culture, advised her against doing anything until the town was truly a
brujo
enclave. He said that any such activity might attract attention from the county commissioners, who forbade renovations to historical buildings without all sorts of bureaucratic red tape. She knew that for her plan to succeed, she had to avoid scrutiny by authorities.

Dominica entered through the door on the far side, so that no one inside the hotel could see her—or rather, see her redheaded host, Maddie. Today, Dominica controlled Maddie completely—no resistance, no fights, no arguments, just a blissful silence from the young woman’s essence. Today, the ease with which she used Maddie’s body made her feel as if it actually belonged to her. Dominica prompted her to reach into her jacket pocket for a flashlight, turn it on, then directed her to the interior of the building, to what used to be the barracks kitchen. No reaction at all from Maddie. These days, the only times she resisted was when Dominica urged her to have sex with Whit’s host. And then she fought violently for control of her own body.

The linoleum floor was scuffed and filthy, dust covered the counters, a scarred wooden table stood in the middle of the room. Four flickering candles provided enough illumination for her to see the two others seated at the table, waiting for her.

Whit, her second in command, eyed her with such naked desire she couldn’t wrench her eyes away from him. In the lambent light, his host, the island mayor, Peter Stanton, looked like a middle-aged Olympian god. His thick white hair, those smoldering dark eyes, those beautiful hands that scoped out her deepest sexual desires: Dominica drank in the sight of him. A quick, sly smile reshaped his mouth as she set the box on the table. She shrugged off her pack, set it on the floor, and sat down.

“Where’re the others?” she asked.

“Late,” Whit said.

Late. Now
that
irritated her. How could the other members of the committee be late for the first judicial hearing in her new tribe? In the old days, in Esperanza, when she had given an order, it was carried out immediately. But those
brujos
had been older, many of them ancient; the members of her new tribe were, for the most part, young, naïve, recently dead. They didn’t understand the rules yet.

“I’m sure they’ll be along,” said Liam, nudging his host’s glasses farther up on the bridge of his nose. “All our hosts are on island time. You know … no clocks.”

Or the ghosts themselves weren’t entirely adjusted to a twenty-four-hour clock yet. Cedar Key’s perfect isolation—the nearest city lay fifty miles inland—was both a blessing and a curse. The live-and-let-live attitude made the populace more passive, but they could also be fiercely independent.

Inside the wooden box, the imprisoned
brujo
screamed to be released, screams that Whit and Liam both heard. Liam’s host, Sam Dorset, winced as though he found the screams physically painful. He reminded her of a bear or some other lumbering creature, but his haunted eyes peered out from behind his glasses like those of an anxious dog that feared it might not be fed. Sam was editor of the local newspaper and, so far, he and Liam had been a good fit. But when Liam was alive, he’d been a lost human with an alcohol problem and sometimes in the bar at night, he tipped a few too many. That worried her. On the other hand, Liam obviously enjoyed physical existence and maybe that alone would prevent him from blowing it.

“Liam, I thought you posted the time of the meeting on the newspaper Web site,” she said.

“I did. I guess they forgot to check the Web site, Dominica.”

“I can see we need to rectify
that.
”

“Hey, it’s not like this is corporate America, Dominica,” Whit remarked, and opened his arms wide. “I mean, really.” His gesture encompassed not only the old scarred table at which they sat, but the entire dilapidated barracks with the lack of electricity, the faint stink of mold, the filthy floors. “They need an incentive to attend.”

Whit surprised her, as he often did. She liked that, the element of surprise and mystery. Whit had been executed seven months ago for rape and murder, and until he had answered her call, he had been stuck wandering around the lower astrals, wondering what the hell had happened to him.

“The incentive is the vision, Whit. A
brujo
enclave in the U.S. Here.”