Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (3 page)

When she was confronted with a potential horror show, her former FBI training always kicked in.
Pick it apart. Detail by detail. Piece by piece.
First detail: the shifter wasn’t a talker. When he shared information and insights, it was only because he felt you absolutely needed to know or because he’d been backed into a corner and had no other choice.

More than three years ago, when Dominica had seized Tess’s niece, Maddie, as her human host and fled Esperanza, Wayra had pursued her without telling Tess, her mother, or Ian. He had cut them out of the search as cleanly as a surgeon excised a tumor. Tess now understood he’d done it for fear they would screw things up because of their emotional connection to Maddie. But when it had been happening, she had grown to resent Wayra for excluding them. Tess’s mother had refused to speak to him for months. Only Ian had maintained contact, doing what he did best, building bridges in spite of differences.

Esperanza versus the
brujos.
The battle in 2008 hadn’t ended anything. It had only delayed what suddenly seemed inevitable.

The thought was so depressing, she paused on a corner near the café and shouted, “Hey, Dad, you there? I could use some help.”

A breeze carried her voice through the street and out across the lake to the volcano. Charlie never answered.

Two

Dark Matter

1.

Until tonight, Ian had been to the Café Taquina only once, an embarrassing admission for someone who had lived in Esperanza for more than four years. Known for its cuisine, music, and magnificent view, it was the most famous restaurant in the city. It seemed like a fitting place for him and Tess to celebrate the news that would turn things around for them and the newspaper.

The café, perched at the edge of a hill, overlooked Lago Taquina and the volcano of the same name that rose beyond it. Moonlight turned the volcanic lake into a lustrous mirror that reflected the star-studded sky. From where Ian stood, waiting to enter the back deck, the Milky Way looked close enough to taste. Lean forward slightly, extend tongue, and lick. No wonder people flocked here. When you drank in the view, it was as if you peered back in time more than five hundred years, to the first few moments after the chasers had brought Esperanza into the physical world. Until that moment, the city had been nonphysical, a place where transitional souls came to decide whether they would return to their bodies or move on into the afterlife. For centuries,
brujos
had preyed on those souls. The chasers had brought the city into the physical world and closed it to transitional souls to end the
brujo
feasting. The
brujos
simply evolved to the point where they learned to seize the living.

He spotted Tess at a table at the rear of the wide back deck, loose dollar bills tucked under a candle. Steeped in shadows that the soft, delicate lighting along the floor didn’t penetrate, the table was private. The small heaters mounted above the tables kept the air comfortable. She sat alone, a tall, lovely blonde fiddling with her phone.

From the moment he’d first seen her in that bus depot outside Esperanza, when they were both transitional souls, their physical bodies in comas, near death, and separated by forty years in time, she had reminded him of Lauren Bacall in
Dark Passage
. Bacall’s nickname in the movie was Slim, and it was what he’d called Tess since the beginning, only to later discover it had been her father’s nickname for her, too.

“Can I buy you a drink, Slim?” he asked in his best Bogie voice.

She laughed, glanced up from her phone, crossed her legs at the knees, and in her best Bacall voice, said, “You bet, handsome. Have a seat. Snacks and munchies are on the way.” She nudged a glass of wine toward him and raised her own glass. “
Salud,
Clooney. To the
Expat News.
” They clicked glasses. “I heard from Maddie. She and Sanchez are going to meet us for coffee in town when we finish dinner. They were planning on leaving for Quito today, but have postponed the trip for a few days.”

Ian was relieved to hear they would be in town a while longer. It meant they could probably get the next edition of the
Expat
out on time and Sanchez could help with the Spanish translation for the paper’s website. Ian disliked leaning too heavily on Sanchez. He and his partner owned a remote-viewing consulting firm, and with his partner out of town, everything would fall on Sanchez. In a pinch, he could hire Wayra or Illary to do the translations. They had helped out in the past and were always delighted to be involved. But again, he hated to ask.

He noticed that Tess seemed distracted, not quite present. “You okay?”

“Something happened on my way over here.” She dropped her voice. “A
brujo
materialized in my car and tried to choke me.”

Ian nearly gagged on his sip of wine. For the first time in more than four years, a
brujo
had shown itself in Esperanza. In Tess’s car. “Does this
brujo
have a name?”

“Ricardo.” The rest of it spilled out, Ricardo’s message, his threats. “My sense is that he’s one of the ancient
ghosts,
Ian. It means they’re here, that the city has been invaded and none of us knew it.” She knocked her knuckles against the table. “Not you, me, not even Wayra or Illary. And my dad apparently didn’t know, either.”

The waiter came over just then with a platter of tapas—baked plantains, avocado salad, and two bowls of fresh fish soup. As soon as the waiter left, Ian leaned toward her, his voice quiet. “It doesn’t make sense. If they’ve invaded, why haven’t they seized anyone?”

Tess tucked her hair behind her ears, fidgeted in her chair. “When … he licked my neck…”

Christ.

“… and sucked my scream into himself, he … read me inside out. And when that happened, I realized I could read him, too. Not like he read me, just bits and pieces. I don’t think he’s lying about the size of his tribe. He knew my dad’s a chaser. He mentioned Wayra. And Wayra is on his way over here.” She passed Ian her iPhone, so he could read the text exchange between her and Wayra.

When Wayra had rescued Maddie three years ago and taken Dominica back to the edge of time, Ian had hoped there would never be a threat from
brujos
in Esperanza again. Now here it was.

The band started playing, four Quechuan men and a woman, all on string instruments and flutes. Andean music. The beauty of it wrapped around them, but the music was too loud for him and Tess to speak without shouting, so they got up to dance.

He pressed in close to her, his mouth at her ear. “What were you thinking about before he appeared?”

“I was thinking about doing a column on the NDE that brought me—us—to Esperanza.”

He tightened his arm around her and breathed in the scent of her skin, her hair, read the nobs of bones in her shoulders and along her spine, and shut his eyes. What he really wanted to do just then was drive home, start a fire, and make love.

When his eyes opened again, he saw something odd over Tess’s shoulder, something that didn’t look right, a thick, expanding shadow the moonlight didn’t penetrate. He whispered: “Don’t whip around or anything, but there’s something strange happening to the air just past the railing, where the hill’s slope begins. It could just be a trick of the light, but given what you just told me, maybe it’s something else. Let’s head back to the table and you take a look.”

Tess drew back. “Shit, Clooney, you’re freaking me out.”

He gripped her hand and they made their way through the crowd, back toward their table. “See it?” He gestured beyond the railing and Tess leaned against it.

“I see light and shadows, Ian. That’s physics, not
brujos.
” Then the massive blanket of shadows against the slope of the hill darkened and moved, undulating like a giant wave, and crept steadily uphill, toward the café’s deck. She hissed, “What
is
it?”

“Nothing good. Move back, Slim.”

But even as he said it, the monstrous shadow swallowed everything it touched, like some special effect in a movie, digital magic. The closer it got to the deck, the colder and stranger he felt. A kind of primal terror scrambled around inside of him, as though he were locked in an empty room with a deadly gas pouring through the air vents.

“We need to warn people and get the hell outta here,” he said.

“Without creating panic.” She stepped away from the railing, plucked her bag from the back of the chair.

Ian spun around and hurried over to where the band was playing. He whispered to the guy on the flute, who immediately glanced over his shoulder, passed the mike to Ian, and whispered something to the female in the band. The musicians fell silent and Ian’s voice boomed across the deck in Spanish, then English: “This is not a drill. Please proceed in an orderly fashion off the deck. Take your personal belongings with you.”

Murmurs rippled through the crowd, people looked around uneasily and started getting up from their tables. Then a woman somewhere on the deck shrieked, “
Brujos, son los brujos …
In the darkness, see? See the blackness moving toward us?”

Brujos
. For the locals who had lived through the dark years and lost loved ones, no word was more powerful. They shot to their feet and frantically grabbed their stuff. Tourists who probably didn’t have a clue what was going on were nonetheless swept up in the bedlam. Chairs crashed to the floor, panicked diners tore toward the stairs, shrieks and screams ripped through the air. The chaos seemed to cause the blanket of shadows to widen, deepen, and move lightning quick, as though the collective panic of the crowd fueled it. It swallowed up earth, brush, trees, then the corner of the deck.

Ian glanced around wildly for Tess, but didn’t see her. He watched in horror as a man he recognized—Javier, who owned the bakery in town where he and Tess went most mornings for coffee—tripped and sprawled on the floor. The blackness, now thick as syrup, consumed him to the waist and he clawed frantically at the floor, shrieking, “
Help, someone help me, oh God, please…”

Ian shoved his way through the panicked crowd, dived for the floor, hooked his feet around the legs of the closest table, and grabbed Javier’s forearms. “Hold on, Javier,” he shouted. “Hold on, c’mon, good, that’s right, hold on tight.”

Javier’s handsome face contorted in agony. He kept sobbing, struggling. Some people behind Ian held the table in place, and men on either side of Ian grabbed Javier’s shoulders and attempted to pull him out of the maw of the abyss. But the force that held Javier’s legs was so powerful the table tipped forward and one of the men catapulted headfirst into the darkness, his screams echoing.

Ian’s hands, slippery with sweat, began to lose their grip on Javier’s forearms, and he yelled, “Hold on, Javier, c’mon, I can get you out, please, hold on…”

Javier sobbed, “No, let me go, my legs are gone, shit, gone.” Then his eyes rolled back in their sockets, his hands slipped away from Ian’s, and he vanished into the darkness.

For a horrifying instant, Ian stared down into the dark matter, a blackness that swirled clockwise, faster and faster, as if it were drilling its way to the center of the earth. It looked slick, almost shiny, like wet asphalt, and the funnel created by the swirling seemed bottomless. Then the swirling stopped and the darkness surged forward again and Ian flung himself back and bolted to his feet.

Around him, pandemonium. A tidal wave of humanity surged forward to escape the deck and everyone inside the restaurant tried to flee as well. Tables and chairs and bar stools overturned, shattered glass blanketed the floor, screams riddled the air. Squeezed from every side, Ian vaulted over the railing and dropped to the narrow rug of earth on the other side. Less than a foot in front of him, the ground dropped off several hundred feet. He turned carefully until he faced the chaos on the deck, and moved quickly sideways along the railing, gripping the wood tightly.

He glanced back once and saw the blanket of shadows flowing behind him, as if following him, and he moved faster, faster, hand over hand, sidling like a crab. When the railing ended, he swung around it and ran into the parking lot, looking anxiously around for Tess, for her blond head bobbing in the panicked crowd.

He didn’t see her. The crowd thrust him forward and he made his way left, away from the café and the black wave, toward a nearby field. Sirens screeched, drowning out the shouts and the pounding of feet. Ian stumbled into the field, ran farther, and finally dropped to his knees on a patch of grass and vomited.

His body had reacted the same way when, more than four years ago, Wayra had brought him forward in time from 1968. It told him that whatever was happening here was triggered by something beyond human control—
brujos,
light chasers, or something else.

He didn’t have any idea what
something else
might be.

When he rocked back on his heels, a black Lab raced toward him and a sparrow hawk circled overhead. The shifters. Ian leaped up, loped toward the dog, and together they ran across the street and down the block, into a deserted cobblestone alley. The dog instantly shifted into his human form, that of a tall, dark-haired man in jeans, a jacket, running shoes.

“Is Tess with you, Wayra?”

“No. Illary’s looking for her.”

“I need to go back and find her.”

“Illary will find her, amigo. C’mon.” Wayra touched his arm. “My truck is a couple blocks from here. We don’t want to be here when the police arrive. They’re probably going to cordon off the entire area and may try to detain people to question them.”

As Ian ran alongside Wayra, he tried to ignore the endless visual loop that played through his head, of Javier slipping away from him, screaming in agony.

2.

Swept up by the crowd, Tess managed to remain upright so she wouldn’t be trampled. Then she was outside, running, dashing away, and couldn’t remember where she’d left her car. She reached a front yard and her knees buckled and she went down in cool, damp grass.