Esperanza (6 page)

Tess pressed him. “Why would he want to take us off the bus?”

“Quién sabe?”
Who knows? Manuel made a dismissive gesture. “Please, watch the movie. Have something to eat and drink. In a little time, we will be in Esperanza.” Then he fiddled with dials on the dashboard and the screen in the back of the closest seat flickered and there was Dustin Hoffman, a young kid in
The Graduate,
dubbed in Spanish.

Ian hesitated, then made his way back down the aisle, the black Lab following him. He sank into his seat. Tess continued to the rear, craving foods that were familiar, known, and discovered all of them. Gala apples, containers of yogurt, bags of Fritos, a brick of sharp cheddar. The situation wasn’t just strange. It had gone well beyond that when she was booted from the first bus. She now felt as if she had walked into
The Twilight Zone.

Hours later. Ian didn’t know how many hours, but Manuel had pulled off the road for a long time because the fog was just too thick to proceed safely.

The Graduate
had ended and his body felt sluggish, thick, welded to the seat, as if he had been onboard for weeks. Blackness pressed up against the windows. The bus’s headlights burned through a lighter fog now, glanced off trees. Here inside, the noise of the tires against the road seemed abnormally
loud, deepening his concern that they were, including the dog, only four. His ears kept popping, a sure sign they were climbing higher into the mountains. The bus churned on through the darkness.

Shortly after the movie had started, he had moved across the aisle to sit next to Tess and now she dozed with her head resting against the window, hair falling like a veil across the side of her face. Bacall in repose. Jesus, she was easy on the eyes. He found himself staring at her for long periods of time, his mind a merciful blank.

When she pressed her stocking feet up against the chair in front of her and yawned, stretching her arms over her head, he looked quickly away from her to the dog, snoozing and snoring on the floor just up the aisle. Tess raised the armrest. He hoped it was an invitation to intimacy. But it might be nothing more than what happened on airplanes sometimes, when you and the stranger next to you acknowledge that the sardine space you share might be improved, however slightly, by raising that armrest. So he probably read too much into it.

But as their arms brushed, he felt the electrical connection like a series of shocks throughout his body. It was then he knew his first impression was correct. Intimacy, not just more stretching-out space.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Beats me.”

Tess leaned toward him. “Just curious. But do you get the feeling that something is wrong with this picture?”

His eyes pinned her, an insect under glass. “Which picture?”

“The whole damn thing.”

“I get the impression that nothing here is what it appears to be.”

“Most of South America feels that way to me. It’s like the myths are alive, reaching out to us, and if we find a story that resonates for us, we get to stick around and explore it.”

“What do you do?” he asked.

“You mean, like, for a living?”

He nodded.

“I’m . . .” She laughed. “I want to say that I’m a woman who hides out in South America when stuff goes wrong in her life.”

It sounded like something Bacall would say, he thought, and waited for her to continue.

“I work for the FBI. I’m tracking a counterfeiter who is supposedly in Tulcán. What about you?”

“I teach journalism at the University of Minnesota. I also write a weekly column in the
Minneapolis Tribune.
This week’s column is on empanadas in Ecuador.”

They cracked up, snickering and snorting like kids who had just heard a fart joke. Ian reached for her hand and turned it over, looking at the ugly bruise. He liked the softness of her skin. “It looks like a neon sign of fingerprints.” He withdrew his hand. “You said the dead guy was covered with blood, Slim. But what’s that mean? Had he been shot? Stabbed? What?”

She had explained in more detail during the movie. “He looked like he had bled out. Not exactly empanada material, is it?”

“Why do you use that term? Bled out? How do you know that’s what happened to him? Do you have medical experience?”

“My mother’s a nurse. When my dad was dying, he bled out—not exactly like the dead man, but similar. I know what it looks like when someone bleeds out, Ian.”

He heard the defensiveness in her voice. “Sorry, it’s the journalist in me. I seem to have this obsessive need for objective proof. When I suspected my ex was having an affair, when everything pointed to that, I hired this private detective to follow her, take pictures, document it. He did. Pictures don’t lie. I filed for divorce.”

Divorce. Why did he tell her that? Why divulge it? Well, that was easy. He’d said it to let her know he was single and available.

“Actually, pictures
do
lie,” she said. “Any image can be altered. But if we know there’s something really wrong with
this
picture, how come we’re still on this bus?”

He tapped his knuckles against the dark, frosted window. “Hey, I don’t have any idea where the hell we are. It’s dark and cold out there. In here, it’s warm, we have food, a restroom. We even have a
dog.
And the company is great. That’s why we’re still on the bus.” He didn’t know what her quick smile meant.

“When we get to this town,” she said, “I think we need to consider how to proceed. How I can get to Tulcán. How you can get to the Galápagos.”

You go your way, I go mine.
“Sounds like a good plan.” The thought that they would head in different directions depressed him. He broke eye contact and stared at the snow-filled TV screen.

Then he astonished himself by looking at her again, touching her chin, turning her head toward him. Their eyes locked, the air crackled with sexuality, and he brought his mouth to hers. The kiss was light, exploratory, a
scene from one of the old black-and-white movies that they both loved. But in those movies, he thought, it didn’t go beyond this kiss, not on screen. Ian pulled back.

“Hey, if your counterfeiter can wait a few days, how about if you take a detour to the Galápagos with me?” he suggested. “Are you allowed to do that?”

“Allowed?”
She seemed to nearly choke on the word. “The last time someone asked me that, I was maybe six years old, allowed to walk
here
but not
there,
allowed to do
this
but not
that.
Fuck the Bureau. I can do whatever I want to do, whenever I want.”

“What about the counterfeiter?”

“Hey, if I don’t find him, so what? The world won’t end. The Bureau won’t collapse. Sure, I’m allowed, I’m a grown-up.”

When he kissed her again, an image bloomed in his head of the odd angle of the dead man’s feet, out there by the outhouses.

Inside the greenhouse, Dominica followed the peasant woman beneath the soft lights as she pruned strawberry plants, plucked ripe papayas from the trees, picked weeds from a garden of herbs. She loved the certainty with which the woman’s fingers moved, how she hummed quietly as she worked, patting the rich, black dirt with her hands and talking to the plants, urging them to grow more quickly. But what was she doing alone in the greenhouse at this time of night? Even in the countryside, the locals knew the dangers.

She contemplated seizing her just to sample the details of who she was, the flavor of small-town rural life. But she felt a disturbing rift in the web that connected the
brujos
of her tribe, and was compelled to follow it. She thought herself toward the disturbance and it led her to a narrow, twisted road high in the mountains. A lone bus chugged upward through the starlit darkness, the bright glow of its headlights glancing off the sheer faces of the peaks. Puzzled by why a bus would cause any disturbance in the
brujo
web, she drifted in closer and read the words on the side:
ESPERANZA
13.
A tourist bus?

She drifted alongside it, peered in through the dark windows. Except for the driver, it looked empty, yet she sensed three other bodies inside, probably asleep. Dominica hovered over the roof for a moment, moving right along with the bus, then drifted down through the packages and bags strapped to the top, down through the metal and into the twilit interior.

A man lay on his side, body stretched out across three seats, jacket pulled over him, head resting on his pack. On the other side of the aisle, a woman sprawled across three other seats, long blond hair hanging over the edge, jacket bunched up under her head, arms clutched tightly against her body. Tourists who had caught the last bus out from wherever? But why would these two draw her here?

Dominica moved in closer to the man, intrigued by the shape his body assumed as he slept—a lightning bolt. It meant that he attracted the unforeseen, that he himself was a lightning rod. She liked that. She also liked that he was as handsome as a movie star. Could she take him? Could Ben? Wouldn’t these two make ideal hosts for her and Ben?

She considered assuming a tenuous human form, something any
brujo
could do north of the Río Palo, so that she could follow his breath, the smell of it, back through time. She wouldn’t be able to hold the form very long, but it would provide her with temporary sensory ability—more than what she had as a
bruja,
yet pitifully short of what physical life offered.

The problem was the driver. If she assumed a temporary form, she would be visible to him. And he had a flamethrower tucked nearby. Fire was the preferred weapon against
brujos
when they were in their phony human forms. Or in their natural forms. It didn’t matter. It could obliterate her. So she satisfied her curiosity by leaning in closer to the man—and suddenly wrenched back, shocked to realize he wasn’t physical. His body was elsewhere, dying, in a coma, at the brink between life and death.
You’re a transitional. The first in five centuries.

Impossible.

Dominica stared at him, unable to wrap her mind around it, around him. She finally moved closer to the woman and realized that she, too, was a transitional, nearly dead in the physical world. It meant that both were in deep comas in their respective physical bodies, perhaps on life support machines, and what she saw here were their souls, the essence of who they were.
Two in one day.

Would Esperanza accommodate their illusions? Of course. It already had. They looked as solid and physical as any human being and would be seen as such by any people with whom they came into contact. They would believe they were alive, that their encounters with people and everything they experienced and felt were real. Their cell phones would respond to conditions of altitude and weather, just as they did in the physical world. Reception would be spotty, but when their cells had signals, they would be
able to send and receive text messages and would be able to leave and receive voice mails, all of it based on their own memories and expectations. They wouldn’t be able to have actual conversations with loved ones, but everything else would be like physical life. They would be able to touch each other, make love, converse, eat and sleep, even dream.

But how had they found their way here? Five hundred years ago, when Esperanza had been brought into the physical world, it had been closed to transitionals. So who had thrown open the gates? The chasers? If so, why? What did it mean? And if two transitionals had gotten through, then perhaps more would, too, and the feasting days of the distant past would return. Her hope soared at the thought. But caution instantly intruded.
It may be a trick, a ploy by the chasers.

Dominica moved swiftly up the aisle and suddenly a black dog leaped off a seat, blocking her way to the driver, and snarled, back hunched, fur rising along his spine, teeth bared.

The driver’s head snapped around as he reached for the flamethrower.
“Epa, perro, qué pasa?”

She recognized the driver. Manuel Ortega lived outside Esperanza, in one of the rural communities, and worked part-time for various inns and hotels in Esperanza. But she knew little else about him. He slowed the bus, glanced back at the road, then eyed the dog in his rearview mirror. “Are we good? Are we safe?”

Low, feral sounds issued from the dog. Dominica couldn’t tell if the animal really saw her or only sensed her presence. Didn’t matter. She drifted back, not willing to provoke the dog into attacking. It couldn’t hurt her, she was already dead. But its attack would signal Manuel that a
brujo
was nearby and the call would go out to Esperanza and all the defensive measures would be taken. Sirens, shutters, bunkers, cops with flamethrowers.

“Is something here, Nomad?” Manuel asked.

The name shocked her.
Nomad? Here?
Why hadn’t she recognized him? Because there were thousands of black dogs in Ecuador. Because it wasn’t like their paths crossed frequently. Because she hadn’t laid eyes on Nomad for decades. But there was only one black dog with the eyes of a wolf, and seeing him here, now, tore at her.

For nearly a century, they had run together, Nomad her most trusted companion, not a
brujo
but a shape-shifter capable of transforming into a man with the face and body of a god. And one night in battle, he was critically injured and given a choice.
Join us or die.
And when he had joined the
chasers, he had lost his ability to shift and was forever imprisoned in the body of this skinny black Labrador with the eyes of a wolf and the mind and heart of a man.