Esperanza (19 page)

Juanito didn’t stop in front of the café, but drove past slowly, talking on his cell, and vanished into an alley. She didn’t like narrow alleys any more than she did underground bunkers, the tightness of boundaries, the tomblike claustrophobia. But when the truck popped out on the other side of the alley and screeched into a right-hand turn, she took notice.

The truck slowed, chugging along the two-lane road through a residential neighborhood—and she spotted Ian, racing up the street, arms bent, tight at his sides. Juanito lowered his windows and shouted, “Hey, amigo. It’s me, Juanito. Manuel sent me. He’s with Tess. C’mon, I’ll give you a ride.”

Ian’s head turned, eyes wild, startled. He looked bad, she thought. His pallor, the way he gasped for breath, even the beads of sweat glistening on his face meant he would not be here much longer. She would be in a strong position to follow him back to his physical body.

He slowed and called, “Why should I trust you?”

“I’ll call Tess. You talk to her.”

Ian stopped, the truck pulled up to the curb, Dominica moved closer.

Juanito whipped out his cell, speaking softly to Ian as he punched out a number. Ian walked cautiously to the truck, frowning, sweatshirt tied at his waist, patches of perspiration darkening his shirt. His breath came in short bursts. He paused at the passenger window, watching Juanito warily. Then Juanito set a cell on the roof and Ian picked it up, pressed it to his ear and turned away. “Tess?”

With Ian’s back to the truck, Dominica seized Juanito with such brutal swiftness that he didn’t have a chance to react, much less fight. She grabbed control of his brain, limbs, lungs and heart, luxuriating in the flow of oxygen through her blood.
I have succumbed to convenience.
But for a male body, it was put together well. Esperanza’s health and longevity benefits had been augmented by Juanito’s care of his physical being—excellent nutrition, regular exercise. Even more important was that Juanito was emotionally and spiritually happy.

I like your body, Juanito.

Silence. She sensed he was busy burying information that he thought she might access, so she reached deep inside him and grabbed what she could. She only retrieved fragments, the linguistic equivalents of prepositions and conjunctions.
Come now, Juanito. Sooner or later your vigilance will slip and I’ll find everything I need.

As will I, Dominica.

I can kill you this second. A tiny bit of pressure at the base of your brain and you’ll end up like Paco Faraday.

Juanito laughed.
Wayra always said the only way you know is death and destruction. You will not win this battle.

It angered her that Wayra had spoken to this despicable little man about
her.
And in that moment of anger, her defenses were lowered and Juanito leaped into the basement of her mind. He flung out one memory after another from her centuries with Wayra, a movie of heartbreaking images so intimate and vivid and ultimately traitorous that an agonizing grief drove her out of Juanito.

Ian was still on the phone when Juanito suddenly shouted his name. He turned to see the man collapse across the roof of the truck, arms flopping like a fish out of water. Alarmed, Ian snapped the cell shut and ran over to him, caught him just as he began to slide off the truck, leaving behind streaks of blood.

Blood poured from his nostrils, rolled from the corners of his eyes, and left a warm, sticky trail from his mouth to his chin. Ian got him into the truck and Juanito slumped against the passenger window, chest heaving as he struggled for breath, mouth moving, trying to form words.

“It’s okay, don’t try to talk.” Ian ran around to the driver’s side, slipped behind the wheel. “I’m getting you to a hospital.”

“No. I can . . . deal with this. Get to Manuel . . . the others.”

“What happened, Juanito? Was it a
brujo?”

“. . . seized me . . . I drove her . . . out . . . But she managed . . . to injure me . . . as she left.”

Ian started the truck and screeched away from the curb so fast he nearly plowed into an oncoming car. The cell rang, he grabbed it off the seat. “Tess?”

“It’s Manuel. What happened? I heard Juanito shouting your name, then we lost the connection.”

“He’s bleeding.” Ian repeated what Juanito had told him.

“Is he conscious?”

Ian looked over at Juanito. “Barely. Where’s the nearest hospital?”

“We can treat him here. He knows what to do until you get him here, Ian. This has happened to him before. Stay on the same road for about ten miles, until you reach Calle Lima. Take a right, go six miles. You’ll see Saint Francis Church on your left, on the corner. Go down the driveway, blaring the horn. Charge through any fog you encounter. That’s important. Don’t stop, don’t slow down, keep the windows up. The door will rise, drive into the garage. Are you in Juanito’s truck?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. He has special seals on the windows, the vents.”

“He’s bleeding badly.”

“Trust me. He knows what to do.”

The line went dead, Ian floored the accelerator, and the truck shot forward. He drove like a maniac, tearing through stoplights, swerving in between other cars until he was outside of the city. Traffic thinned, the countryside opened up to hills and fields where banks of fog climbed toward the sky as if to swallow it. White and gray fog swirled around trees like cotton candy around a stick and rolled toward him from every direction. Somewhere behind him, sirens shrieked.

Juanito coughed, deep, wet, racking coughs. “They’re trying . . . to intimidate you . . . they want you . . . to freak out . . . to . . . lose control, Ian.”

“Fat chance.”

He opened the truck up as wide as it would go. The speedometer needle swung past eighty and the old truck tore up the road, bouncing and clattering until it sounded as if it were falling apart. The needle climbed, the truck was running on empty, the gas light glowed red.

Shit.

Then the truck plunged into the fog. The stuff clung to the glass, pressing so tightly against it that Ian felt it was trying to merge with the glass, to pass through it. A tight, eerie silence claimed the air, a vacuum begging to be filled. Within seconds, the insidious whispering started and quickly escalated into that eerie chant:
find the body, fuel the body, fill the body, be the body.
He slapped a hand over one ear, gripped the steering wheel with his other hand, but it wasn’t enough. He felt as if he were chewing on glass, as if red-hot pokers were being thrust through his eyes, his ears, down the
back of his skull. The high-pitched chant nauseated him, he couldn’t breathe, he started sweating, the world briefly blurred.

“Radio,” Juanito rasped. “Turn it on. Music. Loud.”

He hit the on button and spun the volume dial as high as it would go. In the cottage when this had happened, Tess had known instinctively to shriek, that it would drown out the keening. Now the music hammered through the truck, a Latin beat and a female singer whose shrill voice could shatter crystal. It drowned out the worst of the chanting. But the fog was so thick, visibility had shrunk to a foot.

“Turn,”
Juanito shouted, gesturing wildly with his bloody hand. “Left. Fast.”

Ian swung into a left turn, tires screeching against the pavement. The truck fishtailed and slammed down over roots, brush, rocks. He corrected slightly to the right and they raced on through the ever-thickening fog. He detected the vague shapes of buildings, but couldn’t see any street signs, intersections, landmarks that might tell him where the church was. He glanced quickly at Juanito, but he had passed out.

Ian tapped the brake, struggled to see through the fog. His head ached in rhythm to the loud, pounding music. But he was terrified that if he turned down the volume, he would hear the chanting. That would be worse.

The cell vibrated against his leg and he swept it up and was forced to lower the radio’s volume in order to hear Tess’s voice, a lifeline.

“Ian, I’m about to pull out into the road, so you’ll know where to turn for the church. Where are you?”

The chanting now sounded like a high-pitched electric saw that was slicing its way through his jaw, teeth, skull. “I made the turn half a mile ago. I’m slowing down, may run out of gas. I have to turn the music back up or I’m going to pass out. That chanting, Slim, that godawful chanting.”

He dropped the cell on the seat, cranked up the radio’s volume. He was now running on fumes, and leaned forward, desperately searching the fog directly in front of him, willing the truck to make it to the church before the tank went totally dry.

Inside the garage under the church, Tess readied herself. She felt like a Nascar driver, suited up, primed, with Manuel and Sara Wells and Illika Huicho snapping directions.
Do this, do that, bring them in.
Sara looked like a California girl, all blond and pretty and in charge of—well, something.
Illika seemed ancient, a century old, dark eyes trapped in a chaos of deep wrinkles, her face definitely that of the Quechuans she ruled.

“Wayra will be with you,” Illika said, thrusting a headset into Tess’s hands. “Follow his directions.”

“Do whatever you must to bring in Ian and Juanito,” said Sara Wells.

Manuel slipped his arms around Tess. That crushing sense of familiarity consumed her, that she knew him, that he was not just Manuel the inn employee, the man who had driven her and Ian and Nomad to Esperanza, that they were all
something else.
“Bring them in safely,” Manuel whispered, his breath warm against the side of her face.

“I wouldn’t be doing this if I thought I couldn’t succeed,” she said, and extricated herself from all of them and climbed into a Hummer, the behemoth that Manuel had referred to as their brujomobile. Wayra slid into the passenger seat. She still felt weird about him, about Nomad as a man, but was grateful for his company.

As the door of the church’s underground garage clattered upward, the large fans that stood on either side blew away the swirling fog. Tess gunned the Hummer’s accelerator and it roared up the ramp and out into the road, fast, powerful and sealed against the intrusion of fog. The flip of a switch on the dashboard activated an electromagnetic field around the vehicle that supposedly would repel any
brujo
that attempted to get inside.

She turned up the road, headlights burning a narrow path through the thick, darkening fog. The chanting rose now, a distant, menacing sound, and she slipped on a headpiece that blocked it entirely. Through her left ear, she listened to music from the CD player. Through her right, she heard Wayra’s voice, directing her through the fog.

He sat slightly forward in the passenger seat, this tall, slender man with Nomad’s tea-colored eyes that could see what she could not.
They’re lurching about in the fog, we’ve thrown them off. On your right, a deer. A rhino at two o’clock. These things aren’t real. They’re conjuring; they’re terrified, trying to throw you off.

“Wayra, I need to know something.”

“Drive. Slowly. Carefully.”

“Why are you helping me and Ian?”

He looked at her—the face of an Olympian god, the eyes of a dog that were indescribably sad, tragic. “Because the two of you are our last, best hope.”

“
Our.
Who?”

“The light chasers, the transitionals, Esperanza. There’s—”

Static erupted in her headpiece. Where there had been music in her left ear there was now a menacing female voice. “Wayra, Wayra, so many lies. You want her help, but you tell her lies. You’re in a coma, Tess Livingston. You were shot during a sting. Your friend Ian had a heart attack. You’re the first transitional souls here in five centuries. That scar on your thigh? That’s where you were shot. Everything you have experienced here is supplied by your imagination. Your soul is in flux, not here, not there, and you’re being used by the chasers to—”

Wayra tore away her headpiece and hurled it into the back seat. Tess slammed on the brakes. “Who the hell was
that?”

The fog closed in on them, a living, breathing mass of organic material that throbbed like a heart, spoke in tongues, pressed up against the Hummer’s windows with a terrifying hunger. Wayra hurled open the passenger door, hopped out, kicked the door shut and yelled, “Show yourself, Nica.”

But not to me
. Tess drove on recklessly, too fast, unable to see, the horrifying chant rising again,
find the body, fuel the body . . .
Suddenly, inexplicably, a truck was in front of her. Real or conjured? She didn’t know. She swerved violently to the right, but the truck veered in the same direction and they crashed head-on. The impact jarred her and crumpled the truck’s front end like an accordion.

The Hummer’s engine died, she slammed it into park, leaped out and ran over to the truck.
I can run, I’m breathing, I’m scared, I’m not in any coma.
But she felt as if she were trapped in a nightmare, the fog engulfing her, that high-pitched wailing piercing her to the bone. Ian was already out of the truck, hands pressed over his ears as he stumbled to the passenger side. “Help me get Juanito out,” he shouted.

Juanito was unconscious, his face covered in dried blood. Ian pulled him out of the truck, Tess grabbed his feet, and they carried him to the Hummer, the sounds now so painful that she felt nauseated, weak, her breath trapped in her chest. Ian wasn’t faring any better. By the time they got Juanito into the back seat, Ian’s face was the color of day-old bread, he could barely stand. She grabbed the headset off the seat and shouted at him to put it on. As soon as they were inside the Hummer, she turned the radio to full blast and started shrieking and singing as she had done in the cottage.