Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (2 page)

Tess wrenched her arm away and Ricardo just laughed. “You really are quite lovely, Tess Livingston. I love your blond hair, those gorgeous blue eyes, and your elegant height. I would like nothing more than to taste you, seize you, use you. You’re the crème de la crème, the prize every
brujo
hungers for. What wonders we could learn from you.”

His soft voice moved through her, around her, strangely seductive and utterly terrifying. She kept her eyes on the now moving lights on the
autopista,
on the rising moon, on the neon signs that flashed and flickered up and down the highway. Beyond it all rose the majestic Taquina volcano, moonlight flowing like lava down its sides. The power of
brujos
was like that volcano, an unpredictable force of nature.

“Of course I know what that mark is,” he said. “Every
brujo
knows the story. It’s part of our collective knowledge, our lore. The big difference between the living and the dead, Tess, is that we know our lore is factual.”

“This sounds like typical
brujo
bullshit, Ricardo.”

“Four years ago, you were an FBI agent who suffered a fatal gunshot wound, flatlined, and your soul made its way to Esperanza. You met Ian, who’d had a massive heart attack and was also a transitional soul. The two of you fell in love.” He grinned and played an imaginary violin. “You were the first transitionals to be admitted to the city in five hundred years, since the chasers brought Esperanza into the physical world. While you were in your transitional state, waiting at a depot for Bus 13 to Esperanza, a Quechua man who had been seized by a
brujo
grabbed your arm, marking it forever. It became your
brujo
detector and a sign to us that you were a special transitional and couldn’t be seized.”

The old bruise now burned and throbbed like a heart. Tess rubbed at it. “So why’re you here?”

“So why’re you afraid of me?” he shot back.

She laughed. “Who says I’m afraid of
you
?”

“I smell your fear.”

“What you smell is my fear of what your presence here means. The only thing
brujos
have ever meant for Esperanza is death and destruction.”

Ricardo slapped his thighs and exploded with laughter. “You’ve lived here four and a half years and think that qualifies you to speak about the role that
brujos
have played in the long history of Esperanza? Please. You Americans are so insufferably arrogant.”

“Why have you appeared now?”

“Ah. Now you’re asking the right question. Did it ever occur to you that we’ve been here all along, but have simply chosen not to reveal our presence? No, probably not. That arrogance again.”

Tess caught the odd, knowing smile that turned his mouth into some horrifying parody of a mouth. It was like some sort of Pac-Man icon that chewed its way across the bottom of a computer screen.

“And you read signs,” he continued, and reached out and drew his fingers through her thick, long hair.

Tess pulled her head away. “I recognize patterns. And this one is ugly. Stop touching me.”

Ricardo grabbed a handful of her hair, jerked her head back, and leaned in so close to her she could smell death in his breath, the stink of rotting eggs and decaying flesh. His dark eyes impaled hers. “Let me enlighten you, Tess. You don’t have a clue what’s going on. I read that in your hair, your eyes, your very being. I smell it on you.”

His tongue, the color of ash, darted from his mouth. It was strangely long, like the tongue of a frog or a lizard, and touched her neck. Licked. Traveled up toward her ear and down again, but slowly. The tongue tasted her and enabled his essence to sample her memories, needs, desires, terrors. Tess fought him, struggled, slammed her fists against his temples and back, punched him in the ribs. He pulled harder on her hair and tightened his hands around her throat.

She screamed, but the sound never reached the air. Ricardo pressed his mouth to hers and sucked the scream into himself, drawing the texture and truth of her terror into his essence, where he would study it, pick it apart, and somehow weaponize it to use against her later. Then he drew back slightly, one hand still gripping her hair, the other holding tightly to her shoulder. He smiled, licked his lips, smacked them like a kid with an ice-cream cone. “I can taste your ignorance. You don’t know what’s happening inside your own body, don’t understand shit. You aren’t worth my
time.
”

He shoved her away from him and Tess fell against the driver’s door, her heart pounding, her breath quick and shallow. Then something huge and monstrous—a crazed, panicked grizzly bear—reared up inside her and she slammed her arm, hand fisted, across his face.

He gasped, his hand flew to his nose, a liquid streamed through his fingers. It didn’t look like blood. Thick, viscous, white like pus, it ran down his arms and onto his jeans. As it hit the seat, it burst briefly into flame, emitted puffs of smoke and vanished.

Tess grabbed her bag and threw open the door, lurched out of the car and ran through the parking lot, weaving in between cars, scooters, motorcycles, bikes. It didn’t matter
where
she ran as long as she quickly put distance between herself and Ricardo. The mark on her arm now ached and throbbed furiously and never mind that the warning had come too late. How was she supposed to defend herself? Another punch to the
brujo’
s virtual body? What good would that do? Ricardo was already dead. He could bleed and feel pain in his virtual body, the form that Esperanza enabled him to create so that he appeared to be physical. But none of it was
real.

She reached the front of the shopping center, a bookstore and café to her right, a Tibetan restaurant on her left, people seated at tables along the sidewalk. Safety in crowds, she thought, and ran onto one of the balconies, gulping at the air like a dying fish. She dropped forward, hands pressed to her thighs, and struggled to breathe.

You’re safe, he can’t hurt you, can’t seize you.

“Señora, are you all right?”

Tess rose. A waiter, a young Ecuadorian man, stood in front of her, a tray of food balanced in one hand, a tray of drinks in the other. He was frowning, fretting that a
gringa
who might be deranged had lumbered into the area where his customers were sitting.

“Yes,” she managed to say. “Fine. Sorry to intrude like this.”

Then the waiter began to twitch—the muscles in his face and mouth and just beneath his eyes throbbed spasmodically. The twitching expanded into his shoulders and arms, but not violently enough to cause him to lose his grip on the tray. Not violently enough to draw attention from anyone else.

His eyes went completely dark, an oily dark that poured across even the whites of his eyes. She knew he’d been seized and was now possessed by a
brujo,
that the ghost’s essence had entered him and was fully in control of the waiter’s body. Then Ricardo spoke in the waiter’s voice.

“Tess, Tess,” Ricardo murmured. “You can’t escape me so easily. Please tell your father that we all want the same thing, to live peacefully in Esperanza. If the chaser council and the people of this city can’t accept that, then my tribe of three million will attack Esperanza so savagely that not a single person in this city will be spared. We’ll make the dark years of Dominica’s tribe look like kindergarten. And do give Wayra my regards.”

With that, a bit of mist, Ricardo’s essence, drifted out of the top of the waiter’s skull and the young man blinked hard, nearly lost his grip on the tray, glanced around uneasily, then looked at Tess. “How many … in your group, señora?”

“None,” she whispered hoarsely, and spun around and raced away from the waiter, out toward her car.

2.

With traffic now moving again on the
autopista,
Tess drove like a maniac, whipping from one lane to another, her heart still hammering. She exited near the airport and took a shortcut through El Bosque—the Woods—a sprawling residential neighborhood. Tall, thick trees blanketed the area, many of them grown first in greenhouses in Esperanza, then transplanted here. Trees, at an altitude where trees weren’t supposed to grow.

She felt safe in this neighborhood, it smacked of normalcy. Familiar streets. Homes decorated with Christmas lights. Small yards where children played. Schools and sidewalks where teens on bikes sped through the puddles of light the color of melted butter.

She approached Mercado del León, a bodega where she and Ian shopped when they were in the mood for exotic foods imported from all over South America. She pulled into one of the parking spaces between the market and a small church and waited, watching cars that passed. It unsettled her that Ricardo might have seized any of those drivers, that he might be following her even now.

She pressed her fists against her eyes. She could still taste and smell the
brujo’
s breath, his presence, could still feel his essence moving around inside of her, reading her like a comic book. Three million in his tribe?
Three fucking million of these suckers?

The defeat of Dominica’s tribe, supposedly the largest tribe of
brujos
at the time, had required help from churches, light chasers like her father, and from twenty thousand individuals from all over South America who had lost loved ones to the
brujos.
Defeating her had demanded a revolution against tyranny. But what defense would Esperanza’s thirty thousand inhabitants have against three million hungry ghosts that were invisible to most people and could seize the living, possess them, and use their bodies as their own?

We’ll lose
. Even chasers, evolved souls who had overseen the evolution of Esperanza since they had brought it into the physical world, couldn’t take on three million
brujos
. Tess wasn’t exactly sure how many chasers there were worldwide, but suspected their numbers were in the low five digits. Hardly a large enough army to defeat three million
brujos.

Her arms dropped to her sides, she glanced around again. None of the cars stopped, no pedestrian suddenly started jerking like that waiter had. Still, she had to know for sure.

She drove over to the church, Iglesia del Bosque, and parked in the shade of a tree. As far as she knew,
brujos
generally didn’t enter churches and were terrified of cemeteries. She supposed they had individual fears, too, just like the living did. Dominica had been afraid of water because she had never learned to swim. What fears did this Ricardo have?

The church, like every other building in this neighborhood, was decorated for Christmas. Blue, green, and red lights festooned the windows and strings of blinking gold lights spiraled up a tremendous pine tree out front. As Tess stepped into the church, she removed the top of her lipstick tube and dipped it into the bowl of holy water. Just in case. She had no idea if holy water had any effect on
brujos.
But if it did and if Ricardo had followed her in here, she would be ready.

Then again, maybe she had seen too many bad horror movies as a kid. She cupped the lipstick cap in her hand, thumb pressed over the top of it.

Except for an elderly couple lighting candles near the altar, the church was empty. She slipped into a pew and felt strangely comforted by the quiet. A young man emerged from a confessional, then the door opened and a priest walked out, his shoulders so hunched he could barely raise his head. He looked deliberately at Tess and moved toward her. “Are you waiting to confess?” he asked.

“No. I’m…”

The oily dark poured across his eyes and he grinned and aimed his finger at her as though it were a gun. “You can’t escape so easily, Tess,” he said softly. “We are everywhere. Be sure to give your father my message.”

Tess hurled the holy water and it struck the priest in the face. But his skin didn’t burst into flame, he didn’t dissolve or turn to dust. Ricardo just laughed, the sound of it echoing strangely through the church, surrounding her as though it were amplified somehow. “You’re kidding, right?
You,
the legendary Tess Livingston, really believed holy water would turn me to dust or something?”

Tess fled the church, leaped into her car, and sped out of El Bosque.

Two blocks from the Café Taquina, where she was supposed to meet Ian, she nosed Snoopy into the first parking spot she saw and sank back against the seat, into the silence. She slipped her iPhone out of her jacket pocket and texted Wayra.
Who’s Ricardo?
She had no idea whether he and his wife, Illary, were even in the city this weekend, but eventually he would pick up his voice mail, e-mail, text messages. Even a shape shifter understood the value of technology and rapid communication.

She got out of the car, zipped up her leather jacket, slung her bag over her shoulder and hurried up the street, anxious to be around people, in a crowd. Before she reached the café, Wayra replied to her text message:

Can u b more specific?

Brujo. Ricardo. He sends u his regards. Says his tribe numbers three million.

What else did he say?

2 much 2 text.

Where r u?

@ Café Taquina. Meeting Ian 4 dinner.

Will b there shortly. Time 2 talk.

Tess slid her iPhone back into her jacket pocket, speculations churning through her. A
brujo
who supposedly commanded a tribe of three million ghosts had tapped her to deliver messages to her father and to Wayra, a shape shifter who knew more about hungry ghosts than anyone. But first he had tasted her, plundered her memories, moved around inside of her like a lover. Yet he hadn’t tried to seize her and hadn’t bled out the waiter and the priest he’d seized. Ricardo had used both men as messengers.

Since
brujos
rarely told the truth about anything, she wanted to believe that Ricardo’s tribe was vastly smaller than what he’d claimed,
thirty
or
three hundred
tired old ghosts instead of
three million
chafing at the bit to seize the living. In this way,
brujos
were similar to politicians, bovine blowhards who sought to intimidate in any way available to them. It bothered her, though, that when she mentioned Ricardo’s name to Wayra, he replied that they needed to talk.