Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (17 page)

“No word from Tess or Ian yet?” Leo asked.

“Nope. Nothing. Just the text from Juanito, asking us to meet him at the posada, cottage thirteen.”

“That’s where Tess and Ian stayed.”

“I know.”

She suddenly wished for a bowl of hot vegetarian chili from that wonderful vegan restaurant a few blocks from her and Leo’s apartment. She wished she were sitting on the back deck of their apartment with that chili, a glass of wine, and a soft blanket draped over her shoulders. Or that she was in front of a fireplace, roasting marshmallows on a stick. She wished she and Leo were anywhere other than where they were right now, hurrying through the nicotine-colored light that bathed the hospital parking lot.

She could still hear the sirens. Smoke blanketed the air. She knew Leo was as spooked as she was by what had happened at the Pincoya. But Leo didn’t verbalize his fear, and in that way he was quite different from Charlie, who had verbalized nearly everything he had felt. Yet, even Charlie had had secrets.

Foremost among those secrets was that during the last several years of his life, he had begun meditating to reduce his stress and high blood pressure and apparently had tapped into something involving the chasers and Esperanza. After he’d died suddenly of a heart attack, she’d found a handwritten journal he’d kept about his impressions during these meditations. The entries read like the ramblings of a madman.

Eventually, Lauren had moved forward in her life and forgotten about the journal. She had settled into her life in Key Largo, where she was in charge of the nursing staff of a local hospital. She’d started dating. Then her granddaughter, Maddie, had moved in with her and not long afterward, Tess had been injured in a bust that had gone south and remained in a coma for months. During that time, Tess’s soul had traveled to Esperanza and met Ian. And when she had returned, she was changed. As Tess had begun to remember what had happened to her while she was in a coma, some of her memories correlated with the entries in Charlie’s journal.

Now here Lauren was, more than four years removed from the events in Key Largo, from her flight to Ecuador with Tess and Maddie, from the annihilation of Dominica’s tribe. And she was faced with the same questions, the same dilemma:
What’s real? What am I doing? Why am I here? WTF is going on?

Before she and Leo reached the car, Lauren spotted a low fog snaking across the asphalt. She sensed it was ordinary fog, but asked Leo for confirmation. “
Brujo
-induced?”

“Nope. Too thin. Did Tess say she and Ian saw fog at the café before the black stuff started swallowing everything?”

“She didn’t mention fog. And there wasn’t any indication of fog on Raul’s video. Why?”

“If the blackness that encompassed the café was caused by
brujos,
I think there would have been fog. Did Juanito give you any indication about the meeting?”

“None. We don’t have to go, you know. We can go home and curl up in front of the fireplace and I can ravage your body.”

Leo laughed and slipped an arm around her shoulders. “That’s the most tempting invitation I’ve heard all day. But given everything that’s been happening, I think we should go. Juanito has close ties with the Quechua community and their connection to Esperanza has always been powerful. They may have information that we don’t. The police are going to be looking for Ian and Wayra and the priest, you know.”

“So the mayor implied.”

Minutes later, Leo turned the VW Jetta out of the lot and onto the road, and at the first intersection, turned left instead of right. “I’m betting Calle Central is jammed with cars because of the explosions and fire. We’re taking side roads.”

“Diego’s blood work came back clean, Leo. No
brujo
bacteria.”

“Yeah, I saw your note. It’s damn amazing.”

The way Lauren understood it, the bacteria that showed up in the blood of people who had hosted
brujos,
who had been abducted and seized, was a substance that made the physical environment of a body more comfortable for a
brujo
while using a host body. Leo had been studying the substance for fifteen years and believed that it might actually hold the secrets to the accelerated healing that many hosts experienced. Maddie had hosted Dominica for nine months, she would have the substance in her body for the rest of her life, and, as Lauren had learned, her granddaughter healed from any injury with extraordinary swiftness.

Last year, Lauren, Tess, and Maddie had gone to Otavalo for a few days, to chill, shop, explore. One evening, while chopping veggies in the place they’d rented, Maddie had sliced her finger right down to the bone. Lauren could have stitched it up, but urged Maddie to go to the clinic for an X-ray, to find out if she had nicked the bone. But Maddie simply let it bleed for a while, poured Betadine on it, bound it tightly with gauze. Within six hours, her finger had healed so completely there wasn’t even a scar. After that, Leo began to study her blood chemistry more closely. Over the years, he had studied blood samples of other hosts who had survived
brujo
possession, but no one they knew of had survived a possession as long as Maddie had.

“Maddie always said that Dominica kept her healthy—thin but healthy. She never got sick during those nine months.”

“Even if she left Esperanza forever, the amount of
brujo
stuff in her blood would probably keep her healthy for the rest of her life.”

“Then why treat people for it?”

“Because we think it makes these individuals easier for a
brujo
to find again, that it marks them in some way, it enables
brujos
to track them like branded sheep.”

“Only if they’re lucky enough not to be bled out.”

“Well, for the last four and a half years, that hasn’t been an issue.”

As they climbed deeper into the hills, most of the traffic fell away, she could no longer hear the sirens, and there were fewer street lamps. Just as Leo clicked on the brights, Lauren felt a sudden chill, as though all the windows were open. “Wow, did you feel that, Leo?”

“Feel what?”

“Maddie never appreciated what Dominica did for her,” said the man who materialized in the backseat. “She’ll probably live to be two hundred. Aren’t they silly, Naomi?”

“Silly, but they’ll do just fine, Ricardo.”

In the moment before Leo slammed on the brakes and the Jetta died with a shudder, Lauren glimpsed them—the handsome Quechua man leaning forward between the seats and his striking female companion. Their virtual forms weren’t complete yet, so parts of their bodies were transparent. But their faces looked as solid and real as Leo’s.

Lauren hurled open her door and stumbled out into the road, aware that Leo was behind her, shouting something. But she couldn’t hear it over the hammering of her heart. She tore uphill, arms tucked in close to her sides, shoes slapping the pavement. Four days a week, she ran for half an hour up and down the city’s hills, through its cobbled streets, into old town, and she was hauling ass now. She might not be able to outrun a
brujo,
but running would buy her a little time.

She tripped over something in the road, pitched forward, and her arms shot out in front of her. She landed hard on her hands and knees, her breath rushed out of her, she gasped for air.

Locusts suddenly filled the darkness, thousands of them buzzing around her head, crawling through her hair, covering her face, nearly smothering her. She slapped at herself, felt the locusts crunching beneath her hands, and doubled over, arms thrown over her head and face, struggling to keep them out of her eyes, nose, mouth.

These locusts were created by the goddamn hungry ghosts.

A biting chill drilled through the crown of her head, and she knew what it was, one of the ghosts trying to get inside of her, seize her, use her. Panic exploded through her, but Lauren remembered Tess’s advice, to laugh furiously, hysterically.
No brujo, no darkness, no demon can last long within laughter, Mom.
Lauren forced herself to laugh and yelled at Leo to do the same and rolled across the ground, down a slope, crushing the locusts’ bodies, her ribs aching.

She felt the
bruja,
Naomi, trying to extract information from her or to stimulate her brain to create the substance that would make her possession of Lauren easier. Her laughter made it impossible for Naomi to seize her.

The air abruptly burst with the caws of hundreds of crows. Their wings beat the darkness like hands against drums, a fast, steady beat,
three-two, three-two-one, three-two,
over and over again.

Lauren stopped rolling and scrambled to her feet, forcing herself to keep laughing, terrified that if she stopped, the
bruja
would dive through her chest and seize her. The massive crows, their wings impossibly long, blocked out the starlit sky, and moved through the swarms of locusts, gobbling them up.

She ran back toward the car and found Leo lying on his side, in the glow from the headlights. She dropped to her knees, slid her hands under his head, raised it. “Leo,” she whispered. “My God, please wake up, snap out of it…”

He twitched, shuddered, twitched again and went still. Then he bolted upright, his eyes a thick, oily black, and the
brujo
inside him spoke in Leo’s voice: “You can’t do anything for him. He’s mine, Lauren. I can bleed him out, make him dance, vomit, sing, or rip off his clothes.”

“Laugh, Leo, laugh,”
she screamed.

A white crow with a wingspan of fifty feet or more swept down over Leo, hooked its claws into his jacket, and lifted him off the ground.

Lauren rocked back on her heels, staring at this impossible sight, at Leo’s legs pumping impotently at the air as the crow lifted up higher, higher. Then only the white crow was visible, a kind of phantom against the night sky, flying toward a thicket of trees at the bottom of the hill.

3.

Charlie dropped Leo in a bed of pine needles, then quickly shed his virtual crow form and thought himself into his usual attire—white pants, shirt, and hat. He lit a cigar with his Zippo lighter, and lowered himself to the ground, sitting cross-legged, waiting for Leo to come around.

Ricardo was long gone to wherever he and his tribe hung out when they weren’t creating chaos, and wouldn’t come near Leo or Lauren as long as the crows were around. Even so, it took Leo a few minutes to regain consciousness and then he snapped to his feet with such ease that Charlie envied his dexterity.

Leo looked around frantically, his eyes sort of wild. “What … just happened? I … it … shit … Charlie?”

Charlie got up and blew a cloud of smoke in Leo’s face. “Sniff it in, Leo. Secondhand smoke and all that. It won’t kill you right now.”

Leo waved his hand through the smoke. “I’m really delighted you can smoke cigars and eat carbs and sugar twenty-four/seven in the afterlife, Charlie. It’s great to know we actually get to do that at some point. But what the fuck are you doing here? Where’d these huge crows come from? What’s going on?”

Charlie puffed on his cigar again and this time blew the smoke away from Leo. “When Lauren and Maddie and Tess got here, Leo, and I asked you to help Lore get a job at the hospital, I wasn’t inviting you to
sleep
with her. It frankly never occurred to me that you two would hit it off. You and I have known each other how long? Eleven of the twelve years I’ve been here? I mean, c’mon, I ask you to help my wife get a job and you end up
sleeping
with her?
Living
with her? And now you’re
engaged
to her? That’s soap opera country, Leo, and fucked up big-time.”

Leo drew his fingers back through his thick gray hair, thrust his hands in his jacket pockets, and stared at the ground. It was an Eddie Olmos moment from the original
Miami Vice,
detective contemplating shoes, ground, grass, hoping to remember his lines—or trying to get into the
zone.

When Leo looked up at Charlie, those blue eyes reminded him of when he had been on a hurricane-hunting plane with a potential client and had gazed into the eye of a category 5 storm. He had felt then, as now, that if that untapped power hit land, massive destruction would follow. To his credit, Leo replied in a quiet, measured voice. “You’re dead, Charlie. What did you expect her to do? Spend the rest of her life trying to make love with a ghost?”

He didn’t know what he had imagined, that was the problem. You lived, you loved, you died. But you eventually realized your consciousness had survived death, that it could draw on certain powers in the afterlife and that those powers, with the proper attention and focus, could create worlds. But remove the high and mighty from the equation and the bottom line remained: Leo, whom Charlie had considered a friend and an ally, had proposed to Charlie’s wife and he felt like strangling the bastard.

“Yeah, I get it. But that doesn’t mean that what you did was right, Leo.”

“You’re a goddamn voyeur, you know that? How many times have you checked in on us, Charlie? How many times have you
watched
us?”

Quite a few, actually. One of the greatest temptations that any recently deceased person faced was dropping in on loved ones, spying on them, listening to them, feeling for them. He hated himself for doing it, but didn’t stop. Lauren had been the love of his life when he was alive and death hadn’t changed that. In the early months after he had passed, he had dropped in on her every day, struggled to communicate with her, to let her know he hadn’t been obliterated.

He was no Patrick Swayze in
Ghost,
had never mastered the movement of objects in Lauren’s physical universe. But in the years before she had arrived in Esperanza, he had figured out other ways to speak to her. One day when she was headed to Miami for a workshop, he managed to manipulate events so that she saw three license plates of passing cars that bore his initials—CL—and his date of birth, 429. A fourth car had a license plate that read, C429LMIA. MIA: the airport symbol for Miami, where he had been born and raised.