Well? Whit asked.
I’ll take her, and Dominica ordered both Lynn and Kevin to be released. Then Dominica slipped into the woman on her left side, seizing her so swiftly and expertly she didn’t have a chance to react, to fight. It took Dominica a few minutes to adjust her essence to the woman’s body, to seize control of her lungs and heart. But once those lungs breathed for her and that heart beat for her, she located Whit on the other side of the courtyard, adjusting his essence to that of his host. Dominica was so attracted to the host she had chosen for him that she hurried over and took his hand.
Lynn and Kevin. Kevin and Lynn. “We chose well, Whit.”
“Oh, but is he ever pissed, Nica.”
“He’ll get over it. He likes the way my host looks.”
“He does. He really does.” His eyes traveled the length of her body, head to toe and back again. Then he grinned. “Just the promise of something with your host makes him compliant.” He slung an arm around her waist and pulled her against him, whispering, “Nica, assure me that you have a plan, that’s all I’m asking.”
She realized this was Whit’s way of making up to her, of apologizing for his sullenness. “I do,” she said. “I have a plan.”
He nibbled at her ear, igniting such desire in the body of her new host that she felt like making love to him here, right now, in the courtyard. But Gogh interrupted them, the expression on his host’s face tense, tight. He still occupied Richard, Kate’s ex-boyfriend, the bartender at the Island Hotel. “We’ve got some problems.”
“Lighten up, Gogh.” Dominica spoke dismissively. “It’s never as bad as it looks.”
“Yeah,” Gogh said. “It’s worse. Along Gulf Boulevard, the woods are burning.”
“Get the fire department—”
“There is no fire department, Dominica. There’s no garbage pickup, no police, no city government at all, okay? Anything goes here. If that fire is going to get put out, we have to do it. If the garbage is going to be picked up, if food and supplies are going to be delivered to stores, if anything is going to be imported or exported, it’s up to us to do it.”
His face turned beet red, he was nearly shouting, and she suddenly understood that she had overlooked the obvious. In order for Cedar Key to be a brujo bastion, it had to be a tourist bastion as well, with a booming economy. Who would want to visit a place where the garbage wasn’t picked up, the fire department didn’t work, and the police department was dysfunctional? All the chinks she had identified in the abstract a while ago now became quite personal, immediate, urgent.
“Fix it,” she snapped. “You and Whit fix it now.”
Whit linked his host’s arm through Gogh’s and they sauntered off like a couple of Wall Street shysters to discuss nuances, ramifications, details. Dominica went inside the hotel, delighting in her new host’s body, in its quiet compliance. Lynn from Key West had an excellent body, young and fit, and might prove to be an excellent host.
Dominica headed for the lobby computer. She went online, to gypsy woman’s blog. The latest entry inspired her. It showed a bare-breasted woman dancing, a flowing scarf entwined in her arms, and Dominica could almost feel the sensual touch of that scarf against the woman’s skin. And the simple words struck to the core of Dominica’s heart: In dreams I taste you still.
Even though she no longer slept or dreamed, it was how she’d felt about Wayra for centuries after he’d left her. These days, not so much. During those moments in the salt marsh, Dominica had understood the depth of his hatred for her and of his commitment to rescuing Maddie and defeating her and her new tribe. His heart was just as vengeful as hers, she thought. He intended to get even with her for killing Sara Wells, the woman he’d supposedly loved longer and more profoundly than he’d ever loved her.
Apparently she had been deluding herself for centuries by thinking that the best relationship of her existence had been with Wayra. It was her oldest relationship, but the one with Ben had been the best, the most stable, the most normal. They had even enjoyed a full married life in the fifties, both of them as attorneys. He had understood her. He had never sought to change her, as Wayra had. And Maddie’s aunt Tess had annihilated him in a hotel in Key Largo.
That deserved retribution, bleeding out Maddie, an act of retribution for Ben.
She started to type a comment, but a new post suddenly popped up at the top of the page, an image of Dalí’s melting clock, a place where time no longer counted, then the words:
Nica,
Once upon a time,
When you were mine,
Love was a lie,
Our phony tie.
Now your lust
Is a tragic bust
And we are just
Dust to dust.
Yours always,
Wayra
Dominica read the entry twice, certain he had written it. That tongue-in-cheek closing—“yours always”—was the same one she had used in letters she’d written to him over the centuries. Had he posted it by hacking into Gypsy’s blog? Of course he had. She couldn’t imagine him contacting a stranger and asking her to post it on her blog. He would never willingly draw an outsider into this battle.
Then it hit her. Wayra hadn’t posted this. He hadn’t even written it. Maddie had. She knew which of Dominica’s buttons to push, knew how to phrase things, to make Dominica doubt the validity of her own perceptions, knew how to rip open her heart—and she knew how to hack. In her life before Dominica had seized her, Maddie used to write software and freelanced as a hacker specialist—someone who went after hackers.
Dominica hit the comment button and typed: Maddie, Maddie, you are so fucked.
Then rage overtook her. She shot to her feet, lifted the lightweight monitor and hurled it. The monitor shattered against the far wall in a satisfying display of glass and plastic, a forensic treasure trove of rage. She jerked open the door to a storage unit, grabbed a baseball bat that someone in this hotel once used with his or her son in Little League games, and went after the remains. She slammed the bat against the monitor again and again, reducing it to smithereens. Then she went after the computer itself and felt the first blow all the way to her toes.
“Nica?”
She paused, glanced at Whit. She realized her host was sweating, breathing hard, her heart hammering. “What is it?” she asked crossly.
His gaze flitted across the bits of plastic and metal that littered the desk, the floor. “What’re you doing?”
“Getting even.”
He didn’t ask what she meant. He knew better. “A fire truck and one of the police cruisers are on their way to the fire in the woods.”
“We still have cops?”
“We do now. Hosts who think they’re cops, who’re armed. We’ve got eight dump trucks, enough to crash through that cemetery gate and take those holdouts. If you conjure fog during the attack, it will help lessen the collective fear of the cemetery.”
She dropped the bat. “And we have plenty of weapons? Real weapons?”
“We, uh, do, yes.”
She heard the hesitation in his voice. “What else?”
“A small group had a confrontation with some dogs—and a hawk.”
She disliked what this bit of information told her. Dog and hawk implied that Wayra had found support with Kate and Rocky. Had Maddie found them? Did it matter? What were these pathetic few against her larger tribe?
“We herd Zee’s people, we don’t bleed them out,” she said. “They’re to be brought to the hotel courtyard and kept here as backup hosts.”
“Those were my exact instructions.” Whit took her hand and brought it to his damp, cool mouth. His eyes, shining with a kind of primal wildness that excited her, locked on hers. He pressed her back against the edge of the lobby desk, his hands on her breasts, her buttocks, his mouth teasing hers. She felt such an intense and abrupt desire for him that when he unzipped her host’s shorts, she didn’t resist, didn’t push him away, didn’t admonish him about sex in s
uch a public place. What the hell did she care about a public place? She craved Whit’s touch and his passion for her only ignited her passion for him.
“Not so fast,” she whispered.
But it was as if he hadn’t heard her. He took her with several hard thrusts, grunting, shuddering, and she was left high and dry, her disappointment so acute she felt like screaming. Afterward, Whit clung to her like fire, his breath hot against her neck, his mouth burning against her skin.
Beyond them were other hosts, scurrying around, everyone with a job, a task, an assignment. No one looked at them, no one noticed her shorts pooled around her ankles. No one cared. It doesn’t matter. Dominica recognized a kind of beauty in that blindness, that indifference to her and Whit’s particular yearnings, and felt she had entered Gypsy’s world of unbridled lust.
But Gypsy reminded her of the poem from Wayra that he hadn’t written—but might have—and she pushed Whit away and jerked up her shorts, zipped them. Then she sank her index finger into his chest. “Next time, it’s a bed, and you satisfy me first.”
Whit looked mortified. “You weren’t satisfied?”
“No,” she snapped, and moved away from him, through the lobby to the waiting vehicles outside.
* * *
The soil, loose and dry, made it quick and easy to dig graves for Fritz and his wife. But for Sanchez, the preparation of the bodies for burial seemed to take forever. They had to be cleaned up, the blood washed away, their clothes changed, rituals observed. Sanchez finally wandered away from the group, into the trees, and sat on the cold, hard ground. He crossed his legs lotus style, shut his eyes, and struggled to contact Fritz’s spirit or that of his wife, but failed to connect with anything at all. He tried to contact Maddie, his mother, Charlie, but every avenue was blocked to him.
He finally opened his eyes and looked slowly around the camp. Trucks and trailers and cars encircled the cemetery like wagons in a caravan. Open pit fires kept pots of food and coffee warm, women carried laundry hampers in between trailers, hung clothes out to dry on a makeshift clothesline, or hurried with their partners or spouses into and out of the trailers where the bodies were being prepared for burial. Then there were the guards, dozens of them positioned at various points outside the camp, vigilant, ready.
But not ready enough. He understood that Zee planned to attack the brujo stronghold after dark, when he felt they would have the advantage. But Sanchez couldn’t squelch his rising anxiety that they needed to get out of the cemetery long before then. When Dominica had seized him and he had read as much of her as he could stand—he had caught snippets of her intention to raid Zee’s camp. But it seemed she had to overcome her fear of cemeteries to do so. And it wasn’t just her fear; this fear apparently was endemic to all of these hungry ghost mutants.
Sanchez felt guilty for suggesting this place to begin with, but at the time, Maddie had told him that brujos feared cemeteries and it had seemed like their safest bet. That element had obviously changed. One of the things he’d learned when Dominica had seized him was that she—and perhaps some of the other ghosts as well—could conquer her fears and aversions. It was the equivalent of a living person breaking a habit like smoking—not easy, but not out of her reach, either. She’d conquered her fear of fire long enough to help extinguish the blaze at Annie’s Café, and it wouldn’t surprise him if she conquered her aversion to cemeteries long enough to enter and attack the camp.
Sanchez got up, whistled for Jessie, and they loped back to their tent. He shoved his clothes and belongings into his pack, checked the clip in his Glock; it was full, eighteen rounds. He slipped it into his jacket pocket and put three additional clips into his pack that had come from Zee’s munitions supply. More than seventy rounds, enough to make a difference, he thought, and felt disgusted it had come down to this, weapons and ammo. He suddenly longed for the RV room in Homestead, for the relative simplicity of his life then, a life that he knew might be forever lost to him now.
He slung the pack over his shoulder and made his way across the camp to Zee’s trailer. Just as he started up the steps to the front door, it slammed open and one of the women swept past Sanchez with clothes draped over her arm. Zee stuck his head outside, his face cherry red with anger. “Her clothes have to be beautiful, you hear?” he yelled. “No jeans, no T-shirt, something feminine and soft!” Then he blinked and looked at Sanchez. “You off to somewhere, son?”
“You have a few minutes, Zee? We need to talk.”
“Not a good time, Nick. We’re trying to get the bodies prepared for burial.”
In a soft, urgent voice, Sanchez said, “You need to bury the bodies fast so we can get the hell outta here. I have a bad feeling about staying here.”
Zee rubbed his unshaven jaw and stared at Sanchez for a moment longer, his rheumy eyes so unspeakably sad that Sanchez had to look away. Then he shut the door and came down the steps to where Sanchez stood. “Is it God talking through you, son?”
“I never said God spoke through me, Zee. I just feel we need to leave immediately. Bury your son and daughter-in-law now, tell your people to get ready to move out, into town, and to be fully armed. We’ll burn the town and take them down.”
“That’s our plan, but for after dark when we’ll have the advantage of—”
“That goddamn fog was already aggressive this morning. They’re just regrouping, Zee. Give me some of your men and we’ll move out now, giving you time to bury Fritz and—”
Gunfire cut the rest of his sentence short, a continuous, explosive chatter from the AK-47s the guards carried. Zee’s head snapped up, the Bluetooth connected to his ear burst with chatter that even Sanchez could hear, and he raced into the middle of the camp, waving his skinny arms. “We’re under attack, get to your posts.”
But for long, terrible moments, no one in Sanchez’s field of vision moved. People glanced around in confused terror, as if none of them knew where their posts were supposed to be. Sanchez dived for the ground and rolled under one of the trailers, his dog following him. They scrambled along on their bellies until they were behind one of the massive tires. Jessie trembled with fear and Sanchez flung one arm over her back, murmuring, “Good girl, stay close.” Then he peeked out from behind the tire.
Eight dump trucks had crashed through the cemetery gate, flattened part of the fence, and now tore into the cemetery, spreading out like a cancer. Fog thickened and rose on either side of them, then in front of them, creating a shield of white soup that obscured their precise location. But before the vehicles disappeared, Sanchez saw enough to know that Zee’s people were seriously outnumbered. The trucks all had rear beds that held eight, ten, maybe as many as a dozen people. And within the fog, he could hear dozens more brujos, their litany so horrifying and alien that fear paralyzed him. Run or stay? Cower or fight and hope for the best?
No-brainer. He now knew what it was like to have one of these things inside his body. He didn’t intend to ever have a repeat experience.
Sanchez rolled out from behind the tire again. He could make out vague outlines within the fog, dark, rapidly moving shadows, and he targeted the closest one, and opened fire, emptying his clip. The vehicle suddenly veered off to the right, the fog parting like some biblical sea, and flipped over. Two men in the truck’s bed were hurled out, struck the ground, and didn’t move. Sanchez rolled back behind the tire, tore off his pack, dug inside for the additional clips. He slammed one into the Glock, rolled again, and fired at whatever he saw, one side to another. When he emptied the clip, he loaded again, took hold of his dog’s collar and moved toward the far end of the trailer.
Jessie got the idea and nipped at his hand, making it clear he didn’t have to restrain her; she knew the drill, she would follow him. They crawled quickly over dirt and grass, chaos bursting around them: blaring horns, shrieks, shouts, gunshots, explosions, total pandemonium. At the far end of the trailer, Sanchez spotted one of the dozen mausoleums in the graveyard and knew he could make it. “Okay, Jess, y
ou have to stick close.”
She whimpered, drew her tongue over the back of his hand. When he crawled out from under the trailer and leaped up, so did she. They raced through a thin fog, through the stink of smoke. He heard several of the vehicles closing in on him, and dived behind the mausoleum. Jessie landed beside him and Sanchez leaped up, the massive marble structure shielding his body, and shot blindly. A heartbeat later, a truck careened past the mausoleum and crashed into a small, wooden structure, tore a hole in the side of it, and slammed into the mechanism that powered the cemetery sprinkling system.
Suddenly, sprinkler heads all across the cemetery popped up out of the ground like living things and whipped into action, shooting great, powerful gushers of water in every direction. The hosts who were nearest to the gushers were knocked off their feet, others were driven back, some ran for cover. The stupid brujo fog didn’t seem to know what to make of these gushers, so it—or Dominica—used the moisture to create more fog, thicker fog, fog that both blinded and shielded him and Jessie.
They dashed through the fog to Cemetery Point. Jessie leaped into one of the canoes and Sanchez frantically pushed it off the beach and into the water and jumped in. He switched on the electric motor, but nothing happened. “Shit, shit,” he muttered, and checked the battery connection. He hit the switch again and again, then the engine hummed to life.
He opened the engine up wide, but the boat was just a simple canoe with a puny electric outboard—soundless, but puny—suitable for fishing on a calm day, not for escaping the madness in the cemetery. Long ropes of fog pursued them, whipping away from the land and across the surface of the bayou like water serpents. One strand lifted up out of the water, dropped into the boat next to Sanchez’s feet, and quickly wrapped around his ankles. He tore the shit away with one hand and with the other he fired the Glock into that part of the strand that still trailed in the water.
The fog there didn’t just break apart—it fell apart, as if he’d struck its brain. The boat whispered on through the salt marsh, sometimes hidden, sometimes exposed. Sanchez brought out his BlackBerry and activated his GPS so he could see exactly where he was in relation to land. Not only did the service work, but it was like looking at a map during an RV session in which he was supposed to pinpoint a target. He suddenly believed that Maddie was somewhere below the third bridge, and that she’d broken free of Dominica.
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