Esperanza (57 page)

“It ends here, Nica. Now.”

“Oh, please, you and I have reached this juncture too many times. So much of this was unnecessary, Wayra.”

“Everything you have done in the last five hundred years has been unnecessary and cruel. The woman I loved had a good heart, but yours has turned to stone. The woman I loved was compassionate, warm, loyal to the people who loved her. But you lost all of those qualities when you joined the
brujos.
Now you seize the living because it’s the only thing you know how to do.”

“Such sanctimony, Wayra. It isn’t like you.”

“Your seizure of Sara Wells was for display, to boost your standing, to make yourself look good to the rest of your tribe. That’s unforgiveable, Nica.”

She rolled her eyes. “Spare me. The only reason you see it as unforgivable is because you two were lovers.”

There. She’d said it. Let him try to deny it.

His mouth twitched into a slow, sad smile. “We were more than lovers. My relationship with Sara predated yours and mine. Our history was longer and richer than anything you and I ever knew together.”

She just stood there, shocked beyond words or feeling, unable to comprehend that Wayra, born in the last light of the twelfth century, had loved anyone before he had loved her. She started laughing and laughed until phony tears rolled from her virtual eyes. “What? She was a shifter? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Spiritually, she was my other half.” He spoke softly. “I met her when I was twelve years old. In that life, she was the daughter of a shepherd. I was with her the day I was bitten and . . . and when we were confronted by the shifter, I screamed at her to run. And she did. And that’s why, in her life as Sara, she was so drawn to myth, and then to Ecuador.”

Dominica felt many human emotions just then—sorrow, despair, hatred, jealousy, and rage. “Lies,” she hissed, and her arms flew up and she pushed him. He stumbled back, the top of his head scraping against the roof of the cave. “Everything you’ve just said is a lie—to hurt me, weaken me, to . . . to . . .”

“Perhaps. But you’ll never know for sure, will you, Nica? And not knowing will drive you mad.” He laughed at her, the sound of it echoing through the cave.

“You said you loved me. That you loved me as a soul mate, that you—”

“We never loved like that. It was all in your mind, Nica. You fooled Ben with that kind of talk, but you never fooled me.”

His words twisted the dagger in her heart even deeper and her rage propelled her to violence. But as she slammed into him, his arms closed around her, tightening like a hangman’s noose, and he began to shift.

The agony caused her to scream and writhe, to fight for her very existence. She threw up her last best hope, an image of the two of them in the moments after she had died as Dominica de la Reina six hundred years ago, and he had galloped toward her on his black stallion like a hero from a romance novel, and swept her up into the saddle. But the memory didn’t affect him. It was as if, for him, it had never happened. He kept shifting, his grip so tight, so powerful, it threatened to suffocate her even in her virtual form. She suddenly realized he intended to absorb her into his shifter form. Was such a thing possible?
Does it matter?

Dominica shed her virtual form, but it didn’t make any difference. Her essence was being sucked into the shifter, like dust into a vacuum cleaner. As he absorbed her, his sensory abilities became available to her. She could
see
herself being absorbed, could
feel
her own disintegration, could
taste
the strangeness of Wayra’s world,
hear
the whispers of his ancient past gathering around her. But these sensory experiences were intended to distract her so that she didn’t struggle. They were a lure, a seduction, the ultimate trick and betrayal.

Dominica shrieked,
No, never, never,
and as she struggled to break his hold on her, she heard her tribe’s keening, screams of agony, pleas for help and redemption and salvation, all of it echoing her own near-annihilation. This was her tribe, the world she and Ben had built over the last twenty years. It was being destroyed by humans—and, ultimately, by a shifter who had never loved her. Who had never considered her the other half of his soul.

The calls of her dying tribe infused her with strength and she tore away from Wayra, screaming, “You are now dead to me, shifter. Always. Forever.”

Below her, Wayra’s form fluctuated wildly from animal to human to animal again, as if he were trapped in some crazy evolutionary loop. He lunged for her, reared up on his human legs, with his snout and front legs still those of an animal. But Dominica leaped away from him, hoping he died here, and soared free.

Dominica wandered aimlessly for a long time, days, weeks, months, she didn’t know. Time held no meaning for her now. She thought she might be insane, slipping in and out of scenes from her long, strange life as human, as
bruja,
sometimes with Ben, sometimes with Wayra, always loving the one she was with. But in the end, none of the men she’d loved were there for her—not her father, not Ben, not Wayra. So when she was drawn back to the city, she looked for him, for Wayra, trying to understand what had happened, who she really was, what had gone wrong.

Parts of the city looked devastated, trees and parks charred, buildings just scorched shells, windows gone, roads torn up. Bulldozers moved through the city, gnashing their teeth, engines roaring, scooping up wrecked cars, burned trucks, pieces of buses and ravaged lives. In one neighborhood, clothing flapped from trees, children’s toys littered sidewalks. Torn books, ravaged tools, and computer parts were stacked on long tables, as if in preparation for a bargain-basement sale. Throughout the city, church bells tolled, long mournful notes—but not for the
brujos
who had perished.

She didn’t encounter a single one of her kind. Those who had survived had fled.

Dominica finally found Wayra in a neighborhood that looked to be in the throes of recovery. Everything was green, lovely flowers bloomed in ceramic pots. Trees were being planted in the parks, buildings were being constructed, renovated. She believed that months had passed.

Wayra sat outside a café with the horrible woman who had killed Ben, one arm resting on the back of Lauren’s chair, the other slung out along the back of Maddie’s chair, as she tapped away on the keyboard of her stupid laptop. Ian, goddamn his wretched soul, whispered sweet nothings in Tess’s ear and sipped hot coffee from a tiny cup. Manuel Ortega, Juanito, Illika, Granger, all of them were there, talking and laughing, obviously enjoying themselves. Even the ridiculous parrot, Kali, perched on the back of Tess’s chair, seemed content. How she hated them.

Tess sat up straighter and started scratching at that faded mark on her arm. But it was an absentminded scratching, she hadn’t connected it to the mark, and Dominica didn’t intend to give her that chance. She slipped into
the niece, into Maddie with her strong, youthful body, her optimistic heart, and Dominica dispersed herself through the woman’s cells.

No reaction. Maddie had no idea she had been seized. Like the silly woman in Otavalo, she was clueless. Here, Dominica would listen, watch, and wait for the moment when the
brujos
would rise again. Already, she thought she heard them calling from somewhere to the north.

After a few minutes, she prompted Maddie to pack up her laptop, stand, and walk away from the others, toward the north.

“Hey, Maddie, where’re you going?” Tess called after her.

Maddie raised her arm and waved. “Later,” she called back, and crossed the street to the shadowed park.

North, we’re going north,
Dominica whispered, and Maddie walked on.

A small detail, something only a bartender would notice, triggered Kate’s first suspicion that nothing on Cedar Key was what it appeared to be.

It was a chilly night on the island, temps hovering in the mid-thirties. The weather boys predicted frost in Gainesville fifty miles inland, with a promise of snow flurries by Sunday. No snow out here, not on this punctuation point surrounded on three sides by the Gulf of Mexico and connected to the mainland by four bridges. But a heavy fog blanketed the island, great, swelling banks of the stuff, the likes of which Kate Davis had never seen in her forty years here.

The fog pressed up against the windows of the hotel bar with the persistence of a living thing. It eddied, flowed, constantly moved. Through the glass, she could see it drifting across the weathered brick in the courtyard, wisps of it caressing the leaves of the potted plants, and wrapping around the trunks of trees like strings of pale Christmas lights.

The strange fog looked dirty, greasy as kitchen smoke.

It gave her the creeps, even though she’d always been somebody who loved cozy days or romantic nights of fog. But this fog wasn’t cozy; it wasn’t sexy. The thought of entering into it when she left work made her stomach clutch, got her imagination working overtime, as if something malevolent might grab her from out of this nasty grey weather.

But that was ridiculous. This was an island of sunshine and benign, lazy days. There was nothing threatening about it, or hadn’t been until recently, and she hoped she was only imagining those changes in people she thought she knew.

Kate took a breath, braced her palms on the bar, and looked around to steady herself with what was bright, clear, and familiar.

The Island Hotel had stood on Second Street since it was built in 1859. It was small, like the town—something she loved about both of them—just three stories of wood and glass, thirteen guest rooms, the bar tucked like a postscript behind the lobby. The floor sloped in here and the ceiling sagged enough so that most people instinctively ducked when they walked in—and then laughed and looked around to see if anyone had noticed them doing it, embarrassed that they’d let the illusion fool them. It made them feel like old-timers, when they spotted the next tourist doing it, too. The space between tables in the back room was barely wide enough to squeeze through. Kate had worked here for five years and had never been able to shake the claustrophobic feeling of these two cramped rooms. Tonight it was worse because the place was crowded. And because of the fog. The bar seemed more closed in—isolated—than she’d ever experienced before.

“Stop that,” she chided herself.

Locals filled the stools along the bar, the six tiny round tables that lined the walls, and occupied the larger tables in the back room. During the winter, the island’s population usually swelled from seven hundred and fifty to several thousand, but the season had been slow this year. It surprised and pleased her to see half a dozen tourists, folks in shorts, sandals, and lightweight sweaters who probably hailed from some Scandinavian country and thought this weather was balmy. Tourists tipped well, locals did not. Maybe tonight would be a prosperous night, after all.

She hoped so. Her son, Rocky, wanted to take advanced placement courses in Gainesville this summer, as soon as he turned sixteen, so that he could get into college earlier. He would need some sort of car or motorcycle to get to and from Gainesville. It didn’t have to be a new car, just something reliable that wouldn’t break down on that lonely fifty-mile stretch of road that stretched from here to Gainesville.

Her old VW might work for a while, but it had more than a hundred thousand miles on it and the local mechanic had told her already that it was going to need new tires and a new clutch soon. She had a college fund for Rocky, but didn’t want to dip into it for a vehicle. So for the last several months, most of her tips had been going into his car fund. With what Rocky had saved from his job at the Animal Rescue Center, the fund now had about $1,500. She hoped for another thousand before summer.

Her boss, Bean, had offered to loan her the difference she needed. Kate loved Bean like an older brother, appreciated his offer, but considered it a last resort. Bean told her she had too much pride; Kate preferred to call it self-reliance. All she had was herself and Rocky; they needed to be able to make it on their own; she wanted to set a good example for him.

Now and then, music blasted from the jukebox, an old Wurlitzer Bean had restored to pristine condition. Banjos twanged, fiddles screeched, country tunes that made her smile at their lyrics—“Baby, come back to me, or I’ll come back to haunt you, baby!” In between, the constant murmur of voices washed over her; she was used to it. She didn’t need to hear these voices to know the alcoholic preferences of her customers. She knew the regulars well enough to worry about them.

For instance, Marion the librarian—not her real name, but what people called her—loved her Skip and Go Naked, a wicked mixture of ice, limeade, lemonade, Sprite, vodka, and beer. By the end of the night, with a few more of those in her skinny little body, she would be doing the cha-cha without music or a partner. In the past few weeks, she’d been in here every night, hitting on any man alone at the bar. Kate thought it was sad, but she also thought it was odd, because Marian hadn’t behaved like that until lately. Usually, she was nice, kind of shy.