Ghost Key

by Trish J. MacGregor

  The grass around them was tall and soft, the color of celery. Dominica, still inside her host, lay between him and Illary.

  “She’s still got a host,” Illary said.

  “If Dominica releases her, we’re obligated to return her host to her own time.”

  “I know. But her leg’s broken. And she’ll be crazy.”

  “She’ll go crazy here, too. And this body doesn’t belong to Dominica.”

  He took Illary’s hand as Dominica stirred. Her eyes opened, she looked around slowly, eyes widening with horror, and rubbed her hand over her broken leg and cried out. “You … you can’t leave me here, like this. There’s nothing here. What have you done to me, Wayra?”

  “What I should have done long ago. You’ll survive here, among the hunters and gatherers.”

  “You may even have your own tribe,” Illary said.

  “Who the—” She stopped. “The hawk. You were the hawk.” Then, much more softly, she said, “A shifter? You aren’t the last of your kind, Wayra? But how can—”

  “The how doesn’t matter. Release your host, Nica. We need to take her back.”

  “No.” She tried to jump up, but her broken leg crumpled beneath her and she hit the ground. “She’s mine. She’s staying here with me. She’s all that’s left.”

  Wayra’s pain was abrupt, unexpected, something from centuries ago, a residue of feeling for Dominica—not love but pity, not concern but compassion, not yearning for the past but an eagerness to put it behind him so that he could embrace the future. He crouched in front of her and put his arms around her. “Nica, Nica,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry…” That you moved into the darkness.

  When his arms went around her, her body tightened for a moment, tense and unyielding, then she relaxed and Dominica’s essence drifted out of the top of her host’s skull. The young woman slumped against Wayra, dead before he set her against the ground. Dominica hadn’t bled her out; she’d simply died.

  They didn’t have any shovels to dig a grave for her, so he and Illary carried her to the shade of one of the few trees in sight. Dominica flitted about, shouting and diving at them as they covered the young woman in leaves.

  You can’t do this to me, Wayra, Dominica screamed. You can’t leave me out here. How can you be so cruel?

  Wayra ignored her and looked at Illary. “Let’s find the others and head home.”

  “That sounds wonderful, mi amor.”

  They held hands again. Dominica’s screams echoed briefly in the air, rising and falling on a gentle breeze that flitted across the tall savannah grasses. Then even that was gone, the last vestige of his past.

  Twenty-six

  Five hours after they left Gainesville, the Cessna landed on a strip of grass in the middle of the Everglades. Maddie motioned O’Donnell to his feet and asked for his BlackBerry and wallet. He passed her the items without argument. She tossed the BlackBerry to Sanchez, then removed O’Donnell’s federal ID and driver’s license and pocketed them.

  “You’re about fifteen miles from the Seminole Indian reservation,” she said. “If you keep walking west, you’ll eventually get there.”

  O’Donnell glanced through windows on either side of the plane, then looked at her, at Sanchez, at Delaney. “What the fuck, man. This is the goddamn Everglades. How the hell am I—”

  “You’ve got two feet,” Delaney said. “We figure it will take you about five hours to walk to the reservation and that’s if you don’t get lost. By then, we’ll be out of the country. And since you don’t have any ID, it’s probably in your best interest not to mention hungry ghosts, shapeshifters, or any of the rest of it unless you don’t mind ending up in a psychiatric unit.”

  “It … it’ll be dark by then,” O’Donnell stammered. “Alligators and shit are out there.”

  “It won’t be dark until six or seven,” Sanchez said, and opened the cabin door. “It’s not even one P.M. yet. You’ll make it before dark.” He handed O’Donnell a bottle of water. “You’re lucky it’s spring. You won’t roast out there.”

  Maddie motioned with the gun. “Out, Mr. O’Donnell.”

  “Jesus,” he murmured, and moved toward the open door. He stood there for a few moments, staring out at the desolation, the utter absence of anything except a dry flatness in every direction and a dome of blue sky. He glanced back, his eyes stricken with terror. “Listen, can’t we—”

  “No,” Sanchez snapped.

  “Bye-bye, O’Donnell.” She cocked her weapon.

  O’Donnell pointed his finger at Maddie, then Sanchez, then Delaney. “You. And you. And you. You’re fucked, all of you.”

  Sanchez pressed his hand to O’Donnell’s back. “You going to jump or should I push you?”

  O’Donnell cast a hateful look at Sanchez, then leaped to the ground and loped away from the plane. Maddie shut the cabin door. “We’re good,” she called to Delaney, and she and Sanchez stepped back from the door and sat on the floor again.

  Sanchez immediately started making calls—to his sister, his father. Maddie borrowed Delaney’s cell to call her aunt Tesso in Ecuador.

  Forty minutes later, they landed in Homestead. They had less than four hours to get to the Miami airport, where a private jet owned by an Ecuadoran church would take them to Quito. Sanchez’s father, Emilio, and his sister would meet them there.

  Delaney’s car was in the parking lot. He drove them to Sanchez’s place and said he would be back in two hours to pick them up.

  Maddie, Sanchez, and Jessie got out and stood for a few moments in the driveway, watching Delaney drive away with his fellow shifters. Then Jessie barked and trotted to the front door and they hurried after her.

  “What the hell should I take?” Sanchez asked, fumbling with his door keys.

  “Your computer,” Maddie said. “Clothes. Books. Shit, I don’t know, Sanchez, what do you value most?”

  “Jessie,” he said, and then looked at her. “And you.”

  They were inside the house at that point and when he said those words, “and you,” electricity raced between them, a chemistry so palpable she felt it in the roots of her teeth, the marrow of her bones. He slung an arm around her waist, his mouth met hers, and they stumbled back against the wall.

  For long, strange moments, they simply held each other, then his hands moved down her back, through her hair, and his mouth slipped to her throat, her breasts, upward to her nose and eyelids, and fire burned wherever he touched her.

  They stumbled back into a couch and fell onto it, kicking the cushions away, tearing at each other’s clothes until they were skin to skin, bone to bone, his mouth and fingers and hands everywhere, ubiquitous, igniting such fierce desire in her that she knew it would happen too fast unless he slowed down.

  She whispered, “Not so fast,” and nibbled at his ear and pressed her hands against his chest, pushing him back, away from her, so she could see his face, explore it, and sink into the dark landscape of his eyes.

  But suddenly, everything went haywire, she was in the attic again, when Whit had made love to Dominica, when Sam Dorset had raped her. She wrenched free of Sanchez and bolted upright and covered her face with her hands and struggled not to sob out loud.

  “What?” Sanchez whispered, sitting up beside her, his hand sliding from the crown of her head and down her naked back.

  “It’s not you,” she finally managed to say, her voice a harsh whisper. “It’s—”

  “Whit.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s long gone, Red.”

  Her hands dropped to her thighs, and she stared at them, at these hands connected to her wrists, her arms, and saw that the nails were bitten to the quick, were raw, ugly, the cuticles torn. Once upon a time, before Dominica, her nails had been long and beautiful, her cuticles soft and perfect.

  “In my head, Sanchez, he’s still there, Whit the fucker, Whit the perv, Whit who actually loved Dominica in spite of everything, but he could love her only through my body. Do you ha
ve any idea what that’s like? What I’m talking about?”

  When she said this, her hand was sandwiched between his hands, and he flinched, then gasped, then doubled over, struggling for breath. “Yes,” he whispered. “I get it.”

  Maddie suddenly understood that he grasped who she was in a way she couldn’t comprehend, that she would never fully integrate into her worldview. She realized that when she suffered, so did he. When she grappled for answers, he did, too. His ability enabled him to crawl under her skin, to experience what she had, to suffer as she had suffered. She couldn’t stand it, that another human being should be subjected to what had nearly broken her.

  Maddie pressed her hand against the back of his head and stretched out against the couch, whispering to him, asking him, “Can you stand this? Can you take it? Do we have any sort of future together?”

  When he lifted his head, when he looked at her, she saw the truth in his eyes, then heard the truth in his words: “Give me a chance, Maddie. That’s all I’m asking.”

  A chance. What did that mean, exactly? She didn’t know. It didn’t matter. She had fallen in love with a man who had found her when she was possessed by Dominica and didn’t have any hope of ever escaping the imprisonment within her own body. He had found her, liberated her, and here they were, two people perched at the edge of a precipice.

  She drew his head toward hers, kissed him, whispered, “Make love to me, Sanchez,” and it began again, her body burning with his touch, their mouths and hands everywhere. She felt him inside her head, beneath her skin, fitting himself into her bones, as if trying her on for size. He brought her to the edge repeatedly, then held her there, her body arched, his hands cupped beneath her, his tongue slipping into her, tasting her.

  Shudders swept through her, she cried out and clutched his shoulders, her heart singing, and urged him inside of her. They moved swiftly, effortlessly, their bodies locked together so tightly she couldn’t tell where his skin ended and her own began.

  They tumbled over the edge of that precipice together, and then they soared.

  Epilogue

  ESPERANZA, ECUADOR

  SUMMER 2009

  Each morning, Kate awakened to sunlight that spilled down the sides of magnificent peaks and spread across the city of Esperanza in dreamlike colors. Delectable scents from the kiosk around the park drifted through the open windows of the house she shared with Delaney and Rocky—freshly baked breads and pastries, cornbread patties stuffed with black beans, rice, chicken, fish, roasting on open grills. An orchestra of sounds played constantly—birdsong, a musician in the park strumming a guitar, the low hum of traffic.

  For most of her first several weeks here, she felt as if she were actually inside a dream where history lived and breathed in the ancient, narrow streets, in the parks filled with monkey-puzzle trees, in the magnificent faces of the Quechua people. Some days, she wandered through the city for hours, absorbing shapes and textures, words and images and tastes. She often stopped at the outside kiosks for a tiny cup of coffee and one of the delicious pastries, tried out her paltry Spanish only to discover that the language you spoke was less important than the smile in your eyes.

  She, born and raised on an island as flat as Columbus’s view of the world, didn’t miss the ocean. She took to the mountains like a bird to an open sky. But the altitude demanded stamina and it was weeks before she could breathe without the sensation that she was suffocating. The locals advised her to drink coca tea, but it upset her stomach. Her canine lungs were better suited to the altitude and the chill that persisted even in summer, but she felt weird trotting around town as a greyhound. Eventually, her human body adjusted.

  In mid-July, Wayra arrived at the house in Old Town and said he had something to show them. He suggested they wear good hiking boots, warm jackets, and bring basic camping gear. She, Delaney, and Rocky left town with Wayra in an old VW bus. They traveled for three hours on an unpaved, precipitous road without a guardrail that twisted up the side of a mountain. The road emptied into a village at the base of the peak they would ascend. Here, they met up with Illary, Maddie, Jessie, Sanchez, and his father, Emilio, who had horses and additional supplies.

  They trekked another thousand feet up the mountain, Jessie leading the way. Kate didn’t know what she felt about their destination, the plateau where the stone forest and the mysterious cave were located. The cave, she thought, that supposedly held the living history of Esperanza and of the shifters. A part of her eagerly embraced discovering who and what she was now. But another part of her, perhaps the human part, didn’t want to know. Her son didn’t share her misgivings, but she knew Delaney did.

  The transition to life in Esperanza had been more difficult for him than for any of them. It wasn’t the physical aspects of life here that had proven challenging, just everything else—what you sensed and felt, that special something you tasted in the very air of Esperanza. Its history somehow felt immense, alive, and as a remote viewer, he sensed it more than she and Rocky.

  They reached the stone forest by mid-afternoon, a barren place of rock and sky that was three miles long and a mile wide. They set up camp in the amphitheater, a spot on the plateau shielded on three sides by sheer stone cliffs that protected them from the chill and the wind. They built a fire, brought out food and cooking utensils, and Illary gave them a tour of the huge monuments of stone animals and figures, none of them indigenous to Esperanza or to this part of Ecuador.

  “So this is our excursion through shifter history?” Rocky asked. “There’s nothing here except rocks and cold wind.”

  “There’s a great deal more than that, Rocky.” Illary walked over to a spot between two stone sculptures—one that resembled a huge frog and the other that looked like Moby-Dick. She glanced out at the horizon, where the bright yellow sun was sinking quickly. “In a few minutes, the light will reveal a doorway between these two figures. Inside that door lies the secret of shifter history. You can enter or not, your choice.”

  Delaney leaned in close to Kate. “It could be anything,” he whispered. “Maybe it’s stuff we don’t want to know.”

  “Maybe.” She noticed that Maddie, Jessie, Sanchez, and his father hung back, that they seemed to understand the cave wasn’t intended for them, that they were here to maintain the camp if and when the others went inside. “But maybe it’s stuff we should know.”

  Wayra joined them, blowing into his hands to warm them. “This isn’t an initiation or anything, Delaney. No one’s demanding that you do this.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Delaney said.

  Kate slung an arm around Rocky’s shoulders. “What do you think?”

  “A big yes. We have to know, Mom. Who we are. What we are. What we were. What we may become. The truth.”

  Then the light hit the space between these two figures and Kate actually saw a door carved into the stone with such precision and intricacy that she went over to it and ran her fingertips around it. She glanced at Wayra, his expression frozen somewhere between belief and abject skepticism. Yet his eyes shone with passion. He had told her about the place he had gone to when he was dying, the place where Victor had healed him. This place.

  She felt confident that he would enter the cave.

  “Well?” Illary asked. “We have to go in while the light is on it. In another minute or two, the door will be invisible again.”

  Kate took Delaney’s hand. “It’s a gift.”

  “Or a curse.”

  “Or both.”

  Wayra and Rocky moved toward the door and Jessie suddenly darted after them despite Sanchez’s calls and whistles for the retriever to return. Illary glanced at Kate and Delaney, her brows lifting. Well, yes or no?

  Delaney rolled his eyes toward the sky, as if to say it was all so foolish. Yes, maybe it was. Maybe the mystery and the promise of magic and insights and wisdom was nothing more than a pipe dream. But hey, Kate thought, what was a bartender if not a purveyor of pipe dreams?

  Kate dropped Delaney’s
hand and whispered, “Yes, absolutely yes.”

  And when she glanced back at Delaney, he mouthed, What the hell, and hurried to catch up with them.

  TOR BOOKS BY TRISH J. MACGREGOR

  Esperanza

  Ghost Key

  About the Author

  Trish J. MacGregor was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and has an ongoing love affair with South America. She lives in South Florida with her husband, novelist Rob MacGregor, three cats, and a noble golden retriever. She can be reached through her website: www.trishjmacgregor.com.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  GHOST KEY

  Copyright © 2012 by Trish J. MacGregor

  All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph by Marta Bevacqua

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2603-4 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9781429948173 (e-book)

  First Edition: August 2012