Ghost Key (6 page)

In Atlanta when he had lost her trail, he had started his Google search with broad terms:
unsolved deaths southeast U.S. 2009.
This had yielded a ridiculous number of links, so he had whittled them down by narrowing the time frame to the last four months in the Atlanta area, and stipulating the cause of death. By checking each link, each story, he had found two possibilities that fit her MO: a convenience store parking lot north of Atlanta and a seedy motel in downtown Atlanta. The first location yielded nothing. But the motel surrendered its secrets—her distinctive echo, the imprint of her essence, her scent. He even found the room where the death had occurred, number 1313. Since thirteen was significant in the history of Esperanza, the room number had been confirmation. A Mexican cleaning woman he’d befriended had told him the death happened in late November, around the holidays.

Once he had found Dominica’s imprint in Atlanta, he was able to track her southward to Florida and then across the state to Naples and northward along Florida’s west coast. It seemed a long way for her to go without indulging her sexual needs, but perhaps she knew he was close. After all, the connection between them was not easily broken. It spanned centuries and worked in both directions.

He passed the landfill, intending to drive through downtown and wander around in some of the neighborhoods to see if he could get a fix on her. But the landfill nagged at him. A quick look, he thought, that was all he needed.

Wayra turned into a shopping center, nosed into a parking spot, and got out. His pickup wouldn’t attract any attention here and he doubted it would be stolen. Ocala didn’t impress him as a high-crime area. But in the event he was wrong, car thieves wouldn’t find much. He traveled lightly—no laptop, a prepaid cell phone, a pack with three changes of clothes and shoes, a few toiletries. His money, a debit card, and passport were zipped inside a pocket in his jeans. He purchased anything else he needed.

He slipped his keys in another zippered pocket, then headed toward the thicket of trees between the shopping center and the landfill. His long, narrow shadow moved alongside him, a silent companion. His shadow profile looked crisp, long hair gathered in a ponytail that bounced against the collar of his jacket, his nose and long legs visible against the ground.

“You again,” he murmured to his shadow.

The shadow didn’t reply; it never did. At one point in this journey, his loneliness had been so profound that he’d started talking to his shadow, speculating about what Dominica was looking for, what he would do when he found her, how long this pursuit might last, and why the hell he was bothering. In voicing everything he’d been thinking, he realized he already had some of the answers.

Dominica wanted what she had always wanted—a city of ghosts, specifically those ghosts known as
brujos
that knew how to exert power over the living by seizing them, controlling their bodies, and living out their mortal lives. Dominica and her kind lusted for physical existence and all its sensual pleasures. In Esperanza, where her tribe of
brujos
had supposedly been the largest in the world, more than sixty thousand strong, she had nearly succeeded in creating such a city. But last June, on the summer solstice, she was defeated and most of her tribe had been annihilated or had fled Ecuador. Her arrogance had been so great that she’d never considered the possibility that the thousands of individuals who had lost loved ones to
brujos
would coalesce into an army of twenty thousand and fight her kind.

Her other desire was someone to love. Nearly anyone would do. For a hundred and thirty-seven years, that someone had been Wayra. Then there was Ben, a man she had seized at the turn of the twentieth century, bled out, and, when he had died, he and Dominica had spent more than a century together. He had been annihilated in a hotel room in Key Largo by Maddie’s aunt.

Shortly after Dominica’s defeat, in July or August, Dominica had seized Maddie Livingston as retribution against her aunt for obliterating Ben, for aiding in the liberation of Esperanza. Wayra hadn’t sensed that Maddie had been seized and no one in her family had realized it, either. He guessed that Dominica had scattered her essence through the young woman’s cells, tissue, and blood, and hidden like a dormant virus. She undoubtedly had spied on him, on all of them, biding her time until she could figure out what to do next.

Then in early October, Dominica forced Maddie to write her aunt Tess a note that she was going to Quito for a week and had left. Or, at any rate, that was how Wayra had pieced things together.

Several days had passed before Tess’s suspicions had taken hold, and by then, Dominica had a significant head start. Tess, her lover, and her mother planned to team up with Wayra to search for Maddie, but they were so involved emotionally he felt they would only slow him down. So he’d decided to do it on his own. He’d left suddenly the second week in October and had been on the move ever since.

He reached the edge of the trees, mostly pines and oaks. A cool breeze strummed the branches, his shadow companion melted into the shade. He could hear the tractors now, growling beasts that churned through the landfill, stirring up dust, old smells. Vultures circled overhead, smaller birds cried out.

“You’ll have to get right into where they’re digging, Wayra.” Charlie Livingston materialized beside him, decked out as usual in his white shirt, slacks, hat, and white shoes. His Ben Franklin glasses stuck up from his shirt pocket, a fat Cuban cigar was tucked behind his right ear, and he snapped his silver Zippo lighter constantly. “And you’ll have to shift to really get a sense of it.”

“I’d appreciate it, Charlie, if you would save me a whole bunch of time and just tell me where Dominica is.”

“I don’t know where she is. Just because I’m dead, it doesn’t mean I know everything. Besides, even if I
did
know, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. The chasers are threatening to kick me off the council. I’m on probation and now they’re monitoring me.”

“On
probation
?” Wayra laughed. “What’s that mean?”

“Nothing good, I can tell you that.”

Charlie, dead more than ten years, looked as solid and real as the trees. They’d traveled together intermittently since he’d left Esperanza, and Charlie often provided hints and clues about where to go, new insights into Dominica’s agenda. As Maddie’s grandfather, he had a vested interest in Wayra’s search. But he was also a member of the light chasers, the consortium of evolved souls who had been fighting
brujos
for millennia. Charlie and the other chasers knew that unless Dominica was annihilated once and for all, she would surface elsewhere. She would organize hapless ghosts into a formidable force and the struggle between good and evil would continue ad nauseam.

Wayra often wondered what was more important to Charlie—finding his granddaughter or finding Dominica. “Why’re you on probation?”

Charlie made an impatient gesture, slipped out the cigar, lit it with a flourish, and puffed. The smoke was real enough so that Wayra could smell it. “For meddling, that’s what they called it. But honestly, Wayra, if I hadn’t meddled, if the chasers hadn’t opened Esperanza to transitional souls, where would we be?”

Maybe in a better place, Wayra thought, but didn’t say it. For centuries, Esperanza had been a nonphysical location for transitionals, the souls of people at the brink of death. There, they decided if they wanted to return to their bodies or move on into the afterlife.
Brujos
, the ancient ones like Dominica and her former tribe, had preyed on these souls, seized them, and lived out their mortal lives. Five hundred years ago, the chasers had brought Esperanza into the physical world in the hopes this would end
brujo
domination. It had, for a while.

But in those intervening centuries, Dominica and the ancient ones had evolved, learned to seize humans, control them, had used them in despicable ways. They had built a virtual city outside of Esperanza, gained numbers and power, and a decade ago had begun preying on the people of Esperanza again. And last year, the chasers had opened the city to two transitional souls—Tess and the man who became her lover, both of whom were in comas. And that was the beginning of the end for Dominica’s tribe.

“Don’t the chasers want Dominica found?” Wayra asked.

“Of course they do. But the council has all these incredibly arcane rules about how things should be done. And, well, I’m sorry, but a lot of the council members haven’t been physical for centuries. They don’t understand what the physical world is now. I do.”

True enough. But even ten years outside of physical existence was a long time in today’s rapidly changing world. “Do you tweet, Charlie?”

“Shit, no. I don’t see the point of a hundred-and-forty-character limit. But I taught them about the Internet, Wayra. I told them they’d better learn the technology if they wanted to keep pace with the twenty-first century.
I educated these council members on what social networking is
.” He threw his arms out to his sides. “And I learned what I know from my granddaughter
after I died
. Most of them lack curiosity, Wayra. It’s their greatest failing. I mean, please, if you want to be in charge, you’ve got to be curious, right?”

“I hear you, Charlie. You’re preaching to the choir.”

“I’m the most recently dead on the chaser council and the only one who still has physical ties to the living. Ten years is a blink in the cosmic scheme of things. It’s probably why they haven’t already kicked me out.”

They were now deep in the trees. The tractors sounded louder, more invasive. Beyond where he stood, Wayra could see a sparrow hawk circling the landfill. “So tell me, Charlie. How badly are chasers outnumbered by
brujos
?”

Charlie puffed deeply on his cigar, then lifted his foot, stubbed it out on the bottom of his shoe, and stuck it behind his ear again. “It’s not like anyone has taken a census, okay? But the way I see it, the ones we call
brujos,
like Dominica, are either so ancient or so aware that they know how to manipulate energy in the afterworld, they use the energy to their own advantage. Since Dominica’s tribe in Esperanza was annihilated, their numbers are far fewer than they used to be, but still formidable.”

Wayra should have known that asking Charlie what seemed like a simple question would not render a simple answer. But this was the first time any chaser had attempted to explain the nuances to him. “Give me a number, Charlie.”

“Call it eight to ten thousand of the truly ancient, evil ones, the hungry ghosts, the
brujos
.” He whispered now, as though he thought one of the other chasers might be eavesdropping. “There are tens of millions of ghosts in the lower astrals who would just love to hook up with an ancient one like Dominica and join a tribe where they could learn what she knows. They hang around close to physical existence because of guilt, confusion, anger, hatred, revenge, lust. Here you find criminals, some suicides, religious, social, and political wackos who propagated hatred and intolerance when they were alive.
Brujos
recruit easily from this group and teach them what they know and turn them into hungry ghosts. But among the astrals you also find souls who are just lost. They might not have had any kind of spiritual beliefs when they were alive, so when they died, they had no idea what was supposed to happen. Some in this group have tremendous fears and issues to overcome. We’ve recruited among them. They usually need rehab, but turn out to be quite proficient.”

Eight to ten thousand Dominicas running around in the afterlife was eight to ten thousand too many. And that other figure,
tens of millions
of ghosts from which
brujos
could recruit, whom they could convert, staggered the imagination. The odds against success suddenly seemed impossibly huge to Wayra and that terrified him. “No offense, but your descriptions resemble personality types in physical life.”

Charlie looked disgusted. “There’s not much difference. One group is alive, the other group is dead. Do you have any idea how many people live their lives without any thought whatsoever about their own mortality? Death is the shadow that drives physical life. Eventually, you all die. Even you, Wayra.”

Maybe, Wayra thought. For centuries, he had wondered if his battle with Dominica was what kept him alive. Following this line of thinking, what would happen if he finally caught her and annihilated her so she was free to move on in the afterlife? Maybe, in the deepest recesses of his heart, he didn’t want to find her for fear it would mean the end of his own life. He and Charlie had discussed this in depth before. He didn’t feel any need to go into it again.

“It sounds like some of the dead can’t move beyond a certain point in the afterlife anymore, Charlie.”

“More and more of them are getting stuck and we’re not sure why.”

The implications of stuck souls troubled Wayra. It meant the
brujos
would have even more ghosts to recruit. “Any other groups of ghosts I should know about?”

“Hundreds of small, independent groups and unorganized loners. They often act as guides and helpers for the living. They aren’t involved in the battle against
brujos
. Only the chasers do that. But the largest category of ghosts consists of mothers and fathers, children, sisters and brothers, lovers, friends, even animals who hang around close to physical life because of their love for the people they left. This category holds our best candidates for recruitment.”

“You’re avoiding my question, Charlie. What’s the present number of chasers?”

He looked utterly miserable. “About four thousand.”

“Christ. We’re outnumbered two to one.”

“Yeah, it sucks, doesn’t it?”

“It means we’ve got to work that much harder.”

It also meant they couldn’t afford any snafus, Wayra thought, and dropped to his hands and knees on a bed of pine needles and leaves, and started to shift. His spine crackled and popped, bones shifting, strengthening, rearranging themselves. The first few dozen times this had happened, after he had been transformed at the tail end of the twelfth century, the agony had nearly driven him, howling, into death. Now that his threshold was higher, the pain didn’t register. His human skin went next, rapidly replaced by fur. This part had never hurt, but it should have. The skin was the largest human organ and kept dermatologists and plastic surgeons rich even in tough economic times. He much preferred his animal fur, the color of coal and softer than an infant’s skin.