Esperanza (48 page)

Camilo slammed on the brakes, the doors flew open, and they all stumbled out, coughing from the clouds of dust that settled around them. The pilot motioned them aboard and all five of them raced toward the chopper. Once they were inside, Enrique shut the door and the pilot turned around in his seat, headphones covering his bald head, shades hiding his eyes. Tess suddenly remembered him. Tattoo Man, Ed Granger.

“Tess, almost didn’t recognize you with that white hair.” He shouted above the din of the rotors. “Great to see you again. Now buckle up, mates. It’s going to be bumpy.”

Then the rotors spun faster, the engine hummed, the chopper started to rise.

Just before Dominica slipped back into Dan Hernandez, Pearl brought information that filled Dominica with dread. Tess and her companions had been rescued by Ed Granger, who had whisked them away by helicopter. Dominica doubted that Ed would fly them into Esperanza—the topography made it challenging, the winds aloft were usually a deterrent. But even if he did, her tribe would be all over them as soon as they landed. He probably would fly them into Ibarra, the largest town in the region north of Otavalo, or into Tulcán, Ecuador’s northern border town. From there, they would drive as far as the Río Palo, to the town of Dorado, or even to the Bodega del Cielo.

Then what? She wasn’t sure. She doubted that a rickety bus driven by Manuel Ortega would be an option this time, didn’t think they would risk any sort of vehicle on that isolated road. Too many opportunities for ambush. Perhaps when they neared the Río Palo, the people of Esperanza would venture forth, guarding them as they made the trek toward the city. Cell phones, when they worked at the higher altitudes, made life much easier.

Yet, people who lived in Esperanza rarely left it, they aged too quickly. And when they did leave, it was a quick trip to buy supplies, gather information, visit family in other countries, or for rescues, like Ed Granger’s little trip. Stupid idiot.
The city is ours. The hell with the chasers and this liberation group and Rafael. Fuck all of them.
But even as she thought this, a profound terror gripped her that it was all too late, that the
brujos
might not only lose Esperanza, but would be annihilated as well.

“Pearl, instruct our most reliable to seize any available bodies,” she said. “Our plan has changed. We’ve got our defenses in place against an attack, so now we’re going to seize the city. This should delight Rafael.”

“Are you sure you want to do this, Nica? You don’t think the chasers will retaliate?”

“They might. But I don’t think there’re enough of them to fight us. So we cut off all power to the city, isolate them. Seize whoever we can. It’s time to take Esperanza back. Has Ian, in his time, reached Esperanza yet?”

“No. I heard he was helped by someone and our people lost him.”

“Help from whom?”

“From Wayra.”

Of all the names she might have uttered, this one shocked Dominica. Wayra? Again? Back then? Since when had the shifter been able to travel in time? When had he gained the ability? “That’s impossible. Where did you get that name?”

“It was reported by the
brujos
who followed Ian Ritter.”

“Pearl, tell Rafael my new instructions. Then take a group to 1968. Find Wayra and the American. They’re to be brought to me, just two men. Surely we can capture two men.”

Then she slipped into Dan and tweaked his brain chemistry so that he began to emerge from his deep, Snow White sleep. His eyes opened, enabling her to look around. She sensed that Pearl was gone.
You’re now going to rent a car, Dan, and you’re going to drive very fast for a very long time. Pack your things.

“Damn, how long did I sleep?” He rubbed his hands over his face.

Do you want to find Tess or not?

He scrambled to his feet and spun around the room, certain that someone was here with him. Dominica decided she liked him much better when he just went along with her suggestions. She hoped she would not have to demonstrate what would happen to him if he misbehaved.

Well?
she asked.

Dan stumbled into the bathroom, certain he was losing his mind. He splashed water on his face, leaned close to the mirror, staring at himself. “Must be coming down with something.”

Other than the effects of the altitude, your body is quite healthy.

He staggered back from the sink, genuinely scared now, waves of panic crashing over him. Dominica quickly adjusted his pituitary, releasing a flood of endorphins, and within minutes he began to calm down and talked quietly to himself. “Hey, man, it’s okay. You’re just zapped by the altitude. Got to drink a lot of water, have a bite to eat.”

Excellent suggestions. Buy something on the way. We need to rent the car fast, so we have at least four hours of driving before the sun goes down. Once we’re on the road, you’ll call Tess’s cell and we’ll try to get a fix on her.

He returned to the bedroom, packed, checked to make sure his cell was powered up, then punched out Tess’s number. He reached her voice mail, left a message, and checked out of the hotel. Dominica directed him to a car rental agency, and thirty minutes later they were on the road. He stopped once at a roadside store to buy water, a vegetarian sandwich. By the time they reached Ibarra, it was two-thirty in the afternoon. It would be dark by
six, and because they were practically on the equator, the sun wouldn’t rise for twelve hours. Too long. She had to get him into the higher mountains before then.

She instructed him to enter a general store in Ibarra and buy a host of items that would enable him to cook and eat by the side of the road and to sleep in the car. Pleased with her own planning, she dispersed herself throughout his cells, where she could think about Wayra, and how deeply he had betrayed her this time.

The truck climbed steadily into the mountains outside Otavalo. Ian’s ears popped every few hundred feet, but otherwise the increase in altitude didn’t bother him. The road did, though. Pitted with holes, mostly dirt and stones, it was hardly fit for the donkeys and wooden carts they passed. He worried that the next hole they slammed across might take out the exhaust pipe, an axle, a tire.

He poured water onto a towel and dabbed at his hands. They were badly scraped, the result of stones and branches and thorns and Christ knew what else that he had run across as a dog.
A dog.
Yeah, like he could put that into any kind of perspective.

The cool, sweet-smelling mountain air blew through the open windows. The radio was on, music fading in and out because the mountains interfered with the reception. Wayra sometimes hummed along or tapped his fingers and thumbs against the steering wheel. They had said only a few words to each other since they’d left Otavalo hours ago. Ian finally broke the impasse.

“Ed Granger or Juanito or someone told me you used to run with the
brujos.
Is that true?”

“You remember
that
? You remember
them
?” He looked over at Ian, his eyes intense, a pale amber, like Nomad’s eyes.

“Yeah, I remember them.”

“Interesting. Tess remembered nothing for months.”

“You’ve
seen
her?”

“No. That’s what I heard from others.”

“What else have you heard?”
Does she remember me?
“Is she trying to return?”

“She’s on her way, with her mother and niece, but the
brujos
know it and are after her just as they are after us.”

“How can you even be here? We first saw you outside the bodega in 2008.”

“I have a limited ability to move around in time.”

“As Nomad?”

“In both forms. But I prefer my Nomad form. It’s cleaner, simpler, and a much richer sensory existence.”

“So are you a dog or a wolf?”

“Both. The shifter that bit me was half wolf, so I guess that makes me a quarter wolf. Or something. Whatever. I’m a hybrid.”

Lock me up.
“Am I still locked up in the psych ward?”

Wayra laughed. “You’re quite sane. You’ve just stumbled into a very old story and are now intimately connected to how that story continues or detours or ends.”

“You didn’t answer my question. About whether you ran with the
brujos
.”

“Once, many years ago.”

“How many years ago?”

“Hundreds. I’m the last of my kind.”

Ian heard the loneliness and resignation that echoed in his voice, and decided he didn’t really need to go there. “Were you born a man?”

Wayra looked amused. “How’s your history, Ian? I was born the same year that Thomas à Becket was appointed archbishop of Canterbury.”

Becket?
Ian nearly choked on that one. “Late eleven hundreds.”

“Eleven sixty-two. When I was eighteen years old, I was bitten by a shape-shifter in the English countryside, a creature that was part wolf, part dog, part myth. In Spain, in the fourteen hundreds, I was killed because the father of the woman I loved hated me. I arrived in Esperanza when it was still a nonphysical place. But because I was a shape-shifter, different from anything Esperanza knew, I became part of its knowledge and helped to bring about its expansion into the physical world. Because of what I am, I became physical again when Esperanza did.”

“A kind of Lazarus,” Ian remarked.

“Lazarus minus the religion. Right now, Esperanza straddles many times and dimensions of consciousness. Even though it’s a physical place, it retains attributes from when it wasn’t. That’s part of its magic—and also its
curse. It’s why the
brujos
are able to wreak so much havoc in Esperanza, but also why the people of Esperanza were able to interact with you and Tess when you weren’t physical. It’s why I continue to flourish. Then there’s the slow-aging factor.”

Never mind that what he said smacked of mental derangement so severe that even electroshock and massive doses of Thorazine wouldn’t help this guy. Ian believed him. He’d seen the slow-aging evidence in Sara. “And that’s why most people in Esperanza haven’t fled.”

“Exactly. The choice for them is stark—fight the
brujos
or risk accelerated aging or death if they flee.”

“From what I remember, they don’t do much fighting. Mostly, they seem to hide.”

“They don’t know
how
to fight the
brujos
. Everything they’ve done these past seven or eight years is defensive. So the
brujos
have become bolder. They seize people in other towns, they terrorize communities. There are many in 2008 who believe the appearance of the first transitionals in five centuries is a sign that a nationwide revolt against the
brujos
is imminent, led by a group whose members lost loved ones to them. They number in the tens of thousands. We need numbers. We need an army. So when the revolt happens, the role of physical helpers will become extremely important.”

“What’s a physical helper?”

“Do you remember anything about the light chasers?”

“Just the phrase. What are they?”

“Evolved souls. The chasers set events in motion. But they can only do so much. They aren’t gods, Ian, and they aren’t physical. Right now, the only physical helpers the chasers have are me, Ed Granger, Sara Wells, Juanito Cardenas, and a few others in and around Esperanza. It’s not enough. Every day, somewhere in the world of 2008—and in the latter part of the twentieth century—there are disasters, war, genocide, torture, populations ravaged by disease and bigotry and hunger. Every day, thousands of transitional souls need guidance, insight, direction. The chasers are spread so thinly that they can’t deal effectively with the
brujos.
They’re outnumbered. And none of their physical helpers can do what you can now, interact with the dying and the dead to offer what chasers typically do. To win this war against the
brujos,
we need more physical helpers like you, Ian, who can deal with transitionals. You’ve been one, you understand the landscape.”

“Understand?”
Ian laughed, but even to him the laughter sounded
scared, desperate. “I haven’t
understood
a damn thing that’s happened to me since I came to in a hospital room. And, just to set the record straight, my interaction with the dead has been pretty pathetic. An elderly black man who was a cardiac patient, and a family of four in Quito. They asked me questions I didn’t have answers to, Wayra. And in both instances, they disappeared. Moved on. In Quito, some sort of weird light bubble swallowed them.”

“Weird light bubble.” He smiled at that. “I’ll have to pass on the description. It was a group of chasers. And,
just for the record,
Ian, that elderly black guy you spoke to at the hospital? He’s now working in Rwanda, 1994, during a genocide in which more than eight hundred thousand people, mainly Tutsi, are killed by extremist Hutu militias, and countless thousands more are maimed and injured. And the family of four you spoke to? They’ll soon be dispatched to December 26, 2004, when a 9.3 earthquake in Indonesia creates a tsunami with fifty-foot waves that will sweep across eleven countries and kill nearly three hundred thousand. The little boy is a gifted empath. In Tess’s time, two accident victims that she helped are now working in Darfur in 2006, where drought, desertification, and overpopulation have resulted in a humanitarian crisis in which half a million have died from disease and hunger, and more than a hundred thousand a year are dying from hunger. But we need physical people in these areas who can immediately help transitionals, who—”