Ghost Key

by Trish J. MacGregor

  They aimed for the tip of the peninsula, where the runway was, and would travel along the eastern shore, through marsh and reeds, and come out behind Amy’s house. It was the most logical place to begin their search. Rocky had supposedly been with her when Kate had gone to work at the café. If Rocky wasn’t there, then they would continue into Goose Cove to the animal rescue center, the only other place he might be. Kate kept hoping that Liberty would show up and lead them to Rocky. But the hawk hadn’t been back since she had flown off last night. She desperately needed to believe Liberty was with Rocky, protecting him.

  As they neared the island, Kate was shocked to realize Dock Street was mostly dark. Always in the past when she had approached Cedar Key from this direction, at night, the glimmer of lights along Dock Street burned brightly, an invitation. Business and restaurant owners who hadn’t been seized had probably gone into hiding and taken their food and supplies with them. Now they were hiding not only from brujos, but from the government as well.

  By the time they reached the tip of the peninsula, the fog was thick, but low. It didn’t seem to be coming in off the water, but clung to the land like a transparent layer of earth and rock. Even though it made her uneasy, she didn’t feel it was an imminent threat. If anything, it provided a convenient cover for their canoes.

  “Is it brujo fog?” she whispered.

  “Yes.” No hesitation from Wayra on that one. “But it’s confused, disoriented, it doesn’t seem to have any direction.”

  His canoe bumped into hers and he came alongside her, turned off his motor, tilted it back out of the water. Kate did the same. “You make it sound like it has a consciousness, Wayra.”

  “It usually does. But this fog is more like a self-organizing system that vaguely recalls being conjured. And right now, it’s not threatening us. How far up the runway is Amy’s house?”

  Kate studied the shoreline. She had never approached the house by water, at night. She brought out her flashlight, turned it on, and shone it off to her left, locating the runway. It looked weird, misshapen, as if an earthquake had torn apart the asphalt, then someone had come along and tried to slap it back together again. “Wayra, something’s wrong with the runway.”

  “Yeah, I see it. Let’s stop here. I’m going to take a look. Take this.” He passed her the small bag that held the four grenades, then his canoe pulled out ahead of hers, and bumped against the shore. He grabbed onto something, secured his canoe, stepped out. “Be back in a few.”

  With that, he dropped to his hands and knees and began to shift. It didn’t freak her out like it had the first time she’d seen him do this. If anything, his transformation possessed a curious kind of beauty, each detail precise, perfect, sculpted from some arcane mathematical magic known only to nature.

  His skin went first, black fur sprouting from the pores until it covered every part of him. Then his arms changed into a dog’s legs, his hands became paws, his human legs shortened, his feet turned into paws. His bones cracked and popped and his spine seemed to rise and twist, as though it were actually some sort of serpent whipping from one side to the other. His nose, ears, and head went last, the bones moving, shortening, rearranging themselves so quickly that it looked as if his entire face were coming apart.

  When the shift was completed, he moved along the runway, his slight body visible in the starlight, nose to the ground, to the upheavals in asphalt. Kate wished she could believe she had lost her mind. But her life had taken a sharp turn into the impossible that night back in February, when Bean and Marion had put on their spectacle in the bar, and now it was veering into such high strangeness she couldn’t imagine where it might all be headed.

  When Wayra returned minutes later, he was once again a man. “It’s covered with the debris from Annie’s Café.” He climbed into his canoe and pushed quickly away from the shore. “It’s a smart move on Dominica’s part. Only a helicopter could land here now. Dominica made Maddie pick up body parts that were mixed in with the debris and Maddie fought her and lost.”

  “Lost how?” Kate paddled after him. “What do you mean?”

  “Her consciousness left her body.”

  “She died?”

  “No. She traveled out of body. It may be why she’s been able to survive all these months.”

  When Wayra spoke about these kinds of things—out-of-body travel, shapeshifting, the history of Esperanza—Kate felt like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. Yet, she remembered that during the awful times at the end of her relationship with Rocky’s father, she had taken up yoga and meditation, and one morning, she had found herself outside her own body, staring at herself as she meditated. She had sat down in front of her body and watched and listened and eventually couldn’t stand the division anymore and had dived back into her flesh and bones. But the things Wayra spoke of went well beyond her brief out-of-body excursion.

  As their canoes drifted along the shore again, moving toward Amy’s home, Kate said, “Have you ever turned anyone else, Wayra?”

  “Once. During the plague years. I came upon a heap of bodies waiting to be burned and saw two people in that heap who weren’t dead. A mother and her son. I turned them both. It cured them of the plague and for ten years, maybe longer, the three of us made our way across Europe together. But the boy was never right in the head. He committed suicide, his mother blamed me and left. I never saw her again.”

  “How do you transform someone?”

  “Do you always ask so many questions?”

  Was he kidding? “Hey. I’m entitled. When we left Cedar Key yesterday, you were a skinny dog. Then I find a man on my living room floor and our hawk likes you. I really need some info here, Wayra.” She knew she sounded nearly hysterical, that her voice had risen. But facts always helped her to accommodate what she didn’t understand. “I need to know what the hell I’ve signed on to here.”

  “You haven’t signed on to anything. You’ve just stumbled into a very old story, Kate.”

  They continued paddling parallel to the runway, speaking softly. “You didn’t answer my question, Wayra, about how you transform someone.”

  “I don’t know how. I haven’t done it in centuries. I think it has to do with need, intent, and some profound instinct that I can’t explain when I’m human, but which probably makes perfect sense to me when I’m not human.”

  “So are you dog or wolf?”

  “Both. The man who transformed me was seventy-five percent wolf. What percentage does that make me? Does it matter?”

  “You bet your ass it does. Are you, like, a werewolf? Is that it?”

  “You already asked me that, Kate. Werewolves are rare. So are vampires. But shifters are the rarest.”

  “Where did the original shifter come from?”

  “Shit, Kate, is this an interview?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand everything.”

  “I’ve been led to believe that the first shifter was created in a lab in Lemuria.”

  “What’s Lemuria?”

  “A legendary continent like Atlantis that probably existed between 75,000 to 25,000 BC. It was located somewhere in the Pacific. Are we close to the house yet?”

  “Just ahead. See those lights on that dock there? Her place is on the far side.”

  He moved out ahead of her, making it clear he didn’t want to answer any more of her questions. She couldn’t blame him. Kate paddled faster to keep up with him, her paddles splashing noisily. As she approached the property, she was struck by the size of the house, a sprawling place by any standard, the long, wide roof showered in starlight. Huge windows overlooked the water. No lights shone in the windows. But smoke spiraled out of the chimney, sweetening the air. She hoped Rocky and Amy were locked up inside with her parents, roasting hot dogs over the fire.

  Please let it be true.

  Their canoes bumped up against the empty dock. Kate tied hers to the ladder and climbed up, Wayra following closely behind her. They moved swiftly, angling throug
h the dark shadows created by numerous trees along the side of the house—live oaks, pines, all of it thick enough to provide them with some cover. Then they approached the rear porch at an angle.

  “Wayra,” she whispered. “One more question. Have you loved anyone since you were turned?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “It makes a difference to me.”

  “I’ve loved two women. Dominica, before she joined the brujos, and a professor at Berkeley, Sara Wells, whom I also knew in the life after I was transformed. But Dominica killed Sara during the battle for control of Esperanza.”

  He paused and glanced at her. In the dim starlight, his profile seemed majestic, and he looked as mythic as Maddie had when the dolphins had rescued her, not quite of this world.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “If we run into these brujos, how do we protect ourselves?”

  “The same way you did at the café.”

  On the porch, Kate pressed her face to the glass in the French doors, but couldn’t see anything. The door was unlocked, and the hinges squeaked as it swung open. She drew her weapon and she and Wayra entered together. The beam of his flashlight struck a tiled breakfast room, then the kitchen. The cocoon of silence felt tight, uncomfortable. The pantry door stood open, the packaged and canned goods in disarray, as if someone had gone through them rapidly, knocking stuff off the shelves.

  The icemaker churned, puncturing the silence with staccato bursts like gunshots. They continued through an arched doorway to a family room, where heat from the fireplace kept the room snugly warm. Amy’s naked parents lay in front of the couch, their bodies still intertwined. Both had bled out and their blood had pooled beneath them, turning the tile a tomato red. Kate’s stomach turned inside out and she wrenched back, nearly gagging on the bile that surged into her throat.

  “Rocky?” she shouted. “Rocky?”

  She whirled around, clutching the gun, and moved quickly toward Amy’s bedroom, terrified that she would find her son’s dead body. Battery-operated night-lights along the hallway provided just enough illumination for her to see where she was going. The door to Amy’s room was shut. Kate kicked it open, sighted down the gun, and stepped into the room. Empty, Christ, empty. Relief flooded through her, then horror. Had both Rocky and Amy been taken?

  Kate checked the other bedrooms, but they all looked as if they hadn’t been slept in for days. She opened the door to the garage, slapped the wall until she found a switch, flicked it. A dim light flared, revealing a Lexus and an electric cart. Kate went over to the cart—plugged in, the key in the ignition. It would get them to the animal rescue facility much faster than the canoes.

  She hurried back into the family room, where Wayra was crouched next to the bodies. He had shut their eyes, covered them with a throw. “They’ve been dead a few hours.”

  “And the brujos who did this? Where are they?”

  “Probably looking for new hosts. Let’s get outta here, Kate. The moon is going to rise in a few minutes. It’ll make us more visible out there in the marsh.”

  “There’s a cart in the garage, charged up, with a key in the ignition. It’ll be faster.”

  Wayra considered it, then shook his head. “We’d be too exposed. We don’t know what sort of chaos is happening on the rest of the island. I think the canoes are actually safer.”

  Worried sick about Rocky, she yielded to Wayra’s opinion, and they left the way they’d come in. Moments after they pushed off into the salt marsh, the moon crept up over the horizon, a bright yellow sliver, and she thought she saw Liberty circling through the light. But it couldn’t be her. This bird didn’t make a sound and didn’t drop down to check them out, as Liberty usually did.

  They paddled east, where the salt marsh was thickest, the reeds taller. Just as they neared it, lights suddenly impaled them, bright glaring lights that seared away every dark pocket of safety.

  “Halt right where you are.” The man’s voice boomed through a PA system, then engines roared to life.

  Kate glanced back. An airboat bore down on them, its engine so loud she could feel the sound of it in her teeth. Coast Guard? Redneck? She paddled faster, harder, but was moving against the current now, an ant struggling through a pool of honey. Wayra, still ahead of her, slowed and glanced back. She gestured frantically with her paddle, Go, go, and his canoe vanished into the marsh.

  She paddled wildly, but when she was within eight yards of the marsh, the airboat cut in front of her, its turn kicking up such turbulence that the canoe tipped, spilling her into the shallow water. Kate half swam, half stumbled, the bright light blinding her. She came up alongside her canoe, her weapon gone, her pack gone. Then the airboat swept in behind her and something sharp bit her between the shoulder blades. It stuck there, in her skin, her muscles, they’d shot her, my God, they’d shot her with a tranquilizer dart, as though she were some wild, intractable animal.

  Kate reached back, trying to reach the dart, yank it out. Already, she could feel the effects of whatever was in it—time screeched into slow motion, her limbs felt weighted, as if filled with wet concrete, everything listed to the right, the left, and the world blurred. The airboat’s engine went silent. The shouts from the men on board sounded drawn out, vowels and consonants rushing together. Grrraaaaaaabbbbbbbbb heeeeeeerrrrrrr beeeeeeeffffffffooorrrreeee sshheee goooessss uuunnndddeeerrr.

  She pitched forward, the water closed over her head, and then there was nothing.

  * * *

  Wayra shifted as soon as he was out of the canoe and now raced through the marsh, tore across Airport Road, and plunged into a wooded area on Gulf Boulevard. He ran north, putting as much distance as quickly as possible between himself and the airboat. When he could no longer hear its shrieking engine, he slowed to a trot.

  He worried about Kate, what had happened to her, but he couldn’t go back there and risk being caught himself. Right now, his job was to find Rocky and Maddie. In a little while, he would double back toward the cove and check out the animal rescue center. If the kid wasn’t there, he wasn’t sure where he would look after that.

  Wayra approached the edge of the woods to orient himself. Not a chance. None of the streetlights were on. He suspected it was Dominica’s doing to keep people who hadn’t been seized yet off balance. What else was she planning? Public beatings? Hangings? Executions? And how would she keep her new tribe in line?

  He struggled not to despise her, but it was difficult to feel otherwise. She had killed people he loved, seized Maddie, and hurled his life into perpetual turmoil. For that, she deserved annihilation. Yet, even as he thought this, he knew that such emotions would continue to bind him to her energetically, just as he had been for centuries. He needed to gain a deeper understanding of why he had once loved her and why she had been such a fixture in his life for so many centuries after she had joined the brujos. And once he understood, he would have to forgive her. Only then would the tie between them be truly severed.

  Wayra walked along the shoulder of the road, senses alert for the sound of cars, voices, the whisper of carts. But the road remained empty of any sign of humanity. Even though many of the dark homes he passed had cars parked out front, he guessed the residents were in hiding—in an attic, someone else’s home, a condo—or they had fled weeks ago.

  As he cut back into the woods, he suddenly heard a familiar keening and dropped his head back and howled. Moments later, the hawk fluttered down through the trees, landed on a low-lying branch, and dropped a large fish at Wayra’s feet. It was wet, still alive, flopping around on the ground. Wayra bit off the head, killing it. Liberty flew down from the branch and landed on the ground. Wayra pushed the fish toward her with his nose and she pecked straight across the fish’s midsection, creating what amounted to a dotted line, so that Wayra was able to tear it in half. He nudged the larger half toward her and they both got down to the business of eating.

  In the centuries of his existence, particularly in the earl
y years in Europe, he had shared food with other mammals, but never with a bird. It raised all kinds of questions about the hawk. Where had she come from before Rocky had rescued her last year? Why did she stick around the houseboat with him and Kate? Was she hosting a brujo? Was it all some clever ploy? But that seemed unlikely. Animals generally didn’t provide the stimulation that brujos craved, and besides, he didn’t sense any ghost inside of her.

  When she finished her piece, she preened and made that same soft, trilling noise she’d made last night on the upper deck of the houseboat. Wayra licked his paws and cleaned himself, then stretched out against the cool ground, wondering how to communicate with her. She hopped over to him and touched her beak lightly against his nose, as if to say, Hey, dude, listen up. Then she took off, wings flapping, and flew low through the woods so that he could follow her.

  When the woods ended, they crossed to another street, another block, and entered yet another thicket of trees, working their way back toward the airport. But on Airport Road, she turned east toward Goose Cove and the animal rescue place. As they turned into the loop around the cove, a pair of carts whispered by, their rear seats loaded with cardboard boxes that held food. He could smell it all, rice and beans, pasta and jars of sauces, even the frozen meats, chicken, turkey, fish, hamburgers, pork. They had potatoes, too, and fruits and vegetables that smelled like they were a bit too ripe.

  He understood what Dominica was doing. She’d instructed her little army to raid every house on the island and take whatever food they could find. She knew that hungry hosts might endanger her plans and was preparing for a siege.

  Even if Dominica had told her tribe to be on the lookout for a skinny black dog, they didn’t pay any attention to him, and they never even saw the hawk.

  As soon as the carts were out of sight, the hawk flew lower and touched down on the top of the facility’s front gate, the only part of the fence where there was no barbed wire. Wayra considered shifting into his human form so that he could scale the gate. But he was exposed out here and no telling how many more brujos would be passing by with their carts loaded up with food and supplies.