Esperanza (12 page)

A great clanking and clattering erupted in the bedroom and spread quickly to the rest of the cottage, echoing, vibrating against the walls. Then this, too, stopped, and a silence so profound and strange gripped the building that he and Tess strained to hear anything at all.

They finally tore away the tape, Ian picked up the poker, opened the door slightly. He didn’t hear or sense anything and opened the door all the way. As he and Tess stepped into the bedroom, she flicked the wall switch to her left, turning on a floor lamp.

The room was empty, but something now covered the window—and it wasn’t fog. It seemed to be some kind of metal shutter. “It’s like an aluminum hurricane shutter,” Tess said, coming up behind him. “Electrically controlled. And since it probably didn’t shut on its own, it must be
remotely
controlled.”

“So Granger or someone else knew the cottage was under attack.”

“It looks that way. This is what they do in prisons. At night. Or when someone has escaped. Lockdown. Fuck this. They can’t lock us in here.”

She made a beeline for the bedroom door. Ian turned the lock, raised the window, ran his hand along the bottom edge. Airtight. No sign of fog. He couldn’t even feel the chill of the night air. Impressive. And undoubtedly expensive. Was every building on the grounds equipped with shutters like this?

When he emerged from the bedroom, the kitchen and living room blazed with lights, and Tess was pounding her fists against the shutter across the front door. “Hey, we’re trapped in here, I didn’t sign up for this shit!”

Ian realized these shutters had also closed off the skylights, every window, the rear door to the back porch, even the pet door Whiskers and Nomad used. They apparently were prisoners. He marched over to the fridge, threw open the door and determined, in a quick glance, what might make a good breakfast. Mushroom omelets with cheese. A side dish of sliced mangos. Mugs of rich Ecuadorian coffee. He found celery and tomatoes and chopped with a kind of vengeance. He whipped four eggs with a frantic rhythm, a drumbeat for war. Slammed the knife through a brick of cheese,
chop chop, chop chop.
The preparation of food became his weapon, his defense.

Tess ran into the kitchen. “What’re you doing? We need to get the hell out of here.”

“Out of
here
? Where the hell is
here
? We don’t have any idea where we are with respect to any other point in this country.”

Then an assault began and it sounded as if the hounds of hell had been turned loose. The rooms echoed with the clamor, a battering storm like hail
or rocks pounding the shutters as
something
fought to get in. Paralyzed, he and Tess stared at each other, then Ian forced himself to turn back to the counter, to finish the omelets.

“Are you nuts?” Tess burst out. “You’re
cooking
while we’re under attack? Jesus, Ian, we need weapons.” She jerked open one of the drawers, grabbed a long, sharp knife. “We’ve got to be able to defend ourselves.”

He looked at her, spatula in hand. “Against what?
Brujos
? What the fuck are they? We don’t know. How’d we get here? We don’t know. What’s happening? We don’t know. What’s really going on, Tess?
We. Don’t. Know.
”

Her eyes widened. “You’re deaf? You can’t hear this attack?” She threw her arms out at her sides. “Something is attacking this cottage and if . . . if it breaks through, if . . .”

“We don’t know shit.” He poured the whipped eggs into the frying pan, grabbed the spatula, folded celery, tomatoes, and mushrooms into the eggs. “And I’m hungry. I’m going to eat.”

Just like that, the assault stopped. Silence suffused the cottage. Tess’s arms fell to her sides, she stared at the shuttered windows, the door, and dropped her head back and looked up into the dark belly of the skylight. Then she spun around with the knife clutched in her hand and vanished into the living room. Ian turned back to the stove, the frying pan, the omelets, to what he understood and could control.

With the abrupt cessation of the assault, Tess’s desperation for light and visibility propelled her straight to the front door. If these shutters were anything like the ones at home, then they would have an inside lock, something simple that could be turned quickly.

She threw the door open, ran her hands over the flat, smooth surface. This shutter wasn’t an accordion; it was a metal panel, flush against the door. But down near the bottom, she found a turn lock, flipped it, then leaned into the panel, pressed her hands against it, and pushed. It slid slowly to the left, admitting early morning light, a chill, the sweet scent of pine.

As she started to slip through the opening, Ian grabbed her arm, bellowing,
“No! We don’t know if it’s over.”
He jerked her back so hard she nearly tripped over her own feet.

Tess wrenched her arm free, furious that he had attempted to restrain her. “Don’t
ever
do that.” The vitriol in her voice shocked her. Ian looked as if she had slapped him. “You said we don’t know shit. It’s true. And it’s time to find out what’s going on.”

She brushed past him, pushed the door open wider, and stepped out onto the porch. An overturned cleaning cart blocked the path from the main building, a bank of fog rolled away from her on the left. Then Nomad shot past her, a blur of black, his snarls and frantic barking shredding the air. Behind him thundered an army, thirteen men stampeding down the path, waving rifles, pitchforks, machetes, flamethrowers. Ed Granger was in the lead, a bald John Wayne without a horse, shouting,
“The bitch fled into the fog! Mow her down!”
He gestured wildly at Tess. “Get back into the house, it’s not safe out here!”

Tess hurried down the porch steps, stopped right in front of him. “The cottage was attacked and suddenly we found ourselves prisoners in there.” She stabbed her hand toward the building. “We deserve some answers, Ed.”

“
Brujos
. Juanito, get her into the house.”

Granger and his men raced on and Juanito Cardenas waved his rifle in a vaguely threatening way. “Go inside, please. It is safer.”

“Hey, hold on.” Ian loped over, clutching the iron poker. “We’re guests here. You can’t order us around. You can’t put us into lockdown. You—”

Juanito whipped his rifle up, aiming it at Ian.
“Get inside now.”

“Fine, fine, we’re going.”

But as Juanito moved toward them, Ian slammed the poker down over his rifle, and as it clattered to the ground, Tess hurled herself at Juanito. He was at least half a foot shorter and forty pounds lighter than she and went down like a shoot of trampled bamboo. Tess swept up his rifle and she and Ian raced away from him, following the other men into the fog.

She immediately regretted it. The fog was thicker and higher than it looked, a soup that darkened and curdled, swallowing brush and trees. She couldn’t see more than a few inches in front of her, but shouts and Nomad’s frantic barking rang out clearly. She and Ian kept angling toward the barking, stumbling over flower beds, through trees.

“Quick thinking back there, Ian.”

“Ditto, Slim. But will a rifle kill a
brujo
?”

“I don’t have a clue. Why would they be carrying them otherwise?”

“They’re also carrying flamethrowers. I assume you’ve shot a rifle before?”

“Yeah.” And this one was a Winchester Super X3, a model she and Dan had practiced on last year, during a special training session. It was capable of shooting twelve shells in under two seconds and was touted as the fastest shotgun in the world. “How many of them do you think there are?”

“It sounded like hundreds.”

“We can’t handle hundreds. We’ve got a dozen shots. And that’s only if the rifle is fully loaded.”

“We do what we—”

The rest of his sentence was truncated by a man flying out of the fog on their left, one of Granger’s men swinging a shovel, bellowing and snorting like a wounded animal. He crashed into Ian and they slammed to the ground, grunting and punching, bodies so tightly pressed together she didn’t dare fire. Ian hollered,
“Run, Slim, go, go.”

She tore deeper into the fog, toward Nomad’s barking, but no longer knew why she was running, what the goal was. Her bare feet felt like blocks of concrete, she couldn’t see much of anything, and had no clear idea what was happening or what
had
happened. Her frames of references had been torn away from her.

She clutched the rifle more tightly and moved toward Nomad’s frenetic barking. When the dog went silent, Tess stopped, dropped to a crouch, listened hard. Then shapes appeared in the fog, voices took on volume, substance.

The rest of the
brujos
had fled, so it was just her and Nomad, staring at each other in the dark fog. Despite Dominica’s form as a cleaning woman, he recognized her. His amber eyes fixed on her with such precision and hatred that she knew she would be annihilated if he attacked. But she didn’t think he wanted to fight her. He was warning her. So she tossed him a sock with a note attached to it. Written in Quechua, it read:

Oh, Ed. Really. Give it up. The transitionals are ours. Sooner or later, we’ll get them and then we will take Esperanza back. The land is ours. It has always belonged to us.

Yours always,
Dominica
       

Nomad nudged the sock with his nose, as if its scent might tell him her true intentions, and looked up at her again.

“Take it,” she whispered. “Just take the damn thing.”

But suddenly, Nomad’s bones cracked and popped, his spine elongated, his ears melted into his head, his tail shortened and vanished altogether. His front legs pulled back into his belly, as if through an extraordinary
gravity, and the bones rearranged themselves and extended into arms. His rear legs went through the same process and became human legs. His jaw widened, bones moving and wiggling beneath the skin like something living. His snout shrank, reshaping itself into a human nose, mouth, cheekbones. Then his fur disappeared and human hair raced up his arms and down his legs and across his skull. It happened at such luminal speed that when she blinked, Nomad was gone and Wayra stood before her in all his blinding, breathtaking beauty. Wayra, whose name in Quechua meant “wind.”

“They’re protected, Nica. So give it up. You can’t seize them.”

Shock tore through her—at the sight of him, the sound of his voice, that he was here at all. “How . . . I . . . thought you . . . lost the ability to shift centuries ago . . . when you were wounded. I—”

“That is only a lie you have told yourself. And over the centuries, you came to believe it was true.”

“You . . . you betrayed me, Wayra.”

“You betrayed yourself.”

“You chose . . . the chasers over me.”

“You chose the
brujos
over
me
. It works both ways.”

He moved toward her and slipped his long arms around her, pulling her gently against him. Even though she was only a virtual form, she felt the strength of his arms, inhaled the familiar, wild scent of his skin. When he slid his hands up through her hair, drawing her head back so that she was forced to look into his eyes, she saw him as he had been centuries ago, in the 1400s, when they had both been physical, a proud Spaniard whom she had loved unconditionally.

Her father in that life, a wealthy landowner with a great deal of power, had hated Wayra and forbade her to see him. He then had married her off to a nobleman, who eventually cast her aside when she had proven to be barren. She had spent the rest of her life searching throughout Spain for Wayra, only to discover that her father had killed him. She died at the age of thirty-six from tuberculosis and a broken heart—and Wayra was waiting for her when she had crossed over.

He read her thoughts now. “We are no longer those people, Nica.” Then he brought his mouth to hers, hard, insistently, and her pathetic virtual body melted into his, sobs clawing up her throat, her hunger and lust for him unabated after all these centuries. She ran her hands slowly over the back of his neck, across his shoulders, her memories coughing up the contours of his
flesh, the shape of his bones, all the joy this man had given her. “Join me,” he whispered, his mouth moving against her neck, her throat. “It’s not too late.” His hands slipped under her skirt and between her legs, exciting her. “Together, we can end this ancient battle.”

She pulled back slightly. “We can rule Esperanza, Wayra. I command the largest and most powerful of all
brujo
tribes. We will lack for nothing. And now that two transitionals have arrived, the—”

“No.” His hands dropped away from her. “There is only one way.”

Her heart shattered into a million pieces. “But—”

Suddenly, shouting erupted nearby, men crashed through the brush. For a long moment, Wayra’s eyes held hers, his expression inscrutable, then he whispered, “Run now and you will run forever, Nica.”

She had no choice. The men were too close, their voices too angry. She shed her human form and thought herself upward, watching as Wayra’s body quickly transformed again. As Nomad, he picked up the sock she had tossed him moments ago, and trotted on through the fog, the trees.

Coward,
she thought at him.

She knew he heard her, but he didn’t reply. Crushed and stricken with grief, she thought herself home.