Ghost Key (29 page)

Bean, can you hear me? It’s Maddie. Don’t freak out, don’t act surprised.

He didn’t react at all. His hands kept moving and Joe kept using Bean’s voice to converse with Dominica. Maddie tried again, pushing up against Bean’s mind more forcefully.
Bean? You there?

Holy shit, Maddie. I can hear you. Can they hear us?

Not while they’re distracted with each other and everything that’s going on. If any of us are going to live, we need to start fighting back.

Hey, I’ve seen what they do, these bleed-outs. No, thanks. And we both saw what they did to poor Von. Shit, they burned him alive.

He was already dead, Bean, and he didn’t burn. He moved on in the afterlife. I saw him while you all were standing around the fire pit. He was with a guide. That’s why you didn’t hear him wailing. Dominica tried to make an example out of him, but it didn’t work. He was a good man. There are forces at work here that are more powerful than she is.

Yeah? Where? All I see is death and destruction and chaos.

Fear is how they control us and fear is how Dominica controls them, so the first thing you have to do is stop being afraid.

You can’t fight them. I’ve tried. Every time I fight this fucker, he inflicts so much pain on me I wish … I was dead.

One by one, we have to escape. The next time Joe puts you into a deep sleep, hold on to your anger and try to stay conscious so that when he leaves your body, you can bring yourself to full consciousness. Then run like hell and hide in one of the empty houses. Or race up State Road 24 and get out of the quarantine area if you can. Or better yet, start burning the town. That’ll chase them out faster than anything.

Have you tried to contact anyone else?

I‘m going to try Rich. Like you, he still holds on to some of his humanity.

If there’s anything left of the man I know, he’ll be on board. I think it would be more effective if we could all escape at the same time and burn these freaks out of here.

The only way to coordinate something like that is if we acted up simultaneously and forced them to put us into a deep sleep. But they each have separate places where they put us and I don’t know if we can communicate like this when they aren’t inside us. Let me work on it, Bean.

A commotion outside grabbed Dominica’s attention and Maddie instantly pulled back from Bean, optimistic for the first time that there might be a way out for all of them. “Nica,” shouted Liam, lumbering into the market, waving a camera. “There’ve been three more bleed-outs, two at a house over on the runway, and a body at that animal rescue place. But no one has come forward yet.”

Liam, still hosted by Sam Dorset, the editor of the newspaper. Liam, who tried to force Sam to rape Kate the other night in the hotel restaurant. The revulsion Maddie felt for this
brujo
was up there with the revulsion she felt toward Whit.

“Who were the hosts?” Dominica asked when Liam reached her.

Other
brujos
gathered around to see the digital photos on the camera. “According to Sam, the ones in the runway house are the parents of a girl named Amy, Rocky Davis’s girlfriend.”

“Kate’s son?”
Dominica exclaimed.

“Yes.”

“Excellent.”

Liam clicked through the photos. In the first, the man and woman on the floor near a fireplace were covered with a quilt. Even so, it was obvious they had bled out; their bloody faces were fully visible. In the second, the quilt was gone, exposing their intertwined bodies, bloody and naked. The
brujos
murmured with excitement. They loved the carnage.

“Who covered them?” Dominica asked.

“Not me,” Liam said. “I found them like that. I was checking the place for food and supplies.”

“Was anyone else in the house? Human or
brujo
?”

“Nope.”

“Let me see photos of the third body, of Amy.”

“She was found in the freezer at the rescue facility.”

He clicked to several photos of the girl. The
brujos
really enjoyed this one, crooning over the photo, oohing and aahing their approval. Amy lay on her side, which struck Maddie as oddly as her parents being covered by a quilt. Dominica seemed to find this strange as well, perhaps one of the few times she and Maddie had agreed on anything.

“These people weren’t known hosts to anyone, were they, Whit?” Dominica asked.

He stepped forward clutching a sweating Coke bottle, his face so pale he looked as if he’d been locked inside a cellar for months. “I have no member of the tribe on record for these hosts. In all fairness, Nica, yesterday morning you instructed our members to raise the number of hosts to four hundred. I suspect that’s why they were seized.”

“I also said the rule still stands for not seizing anyone under the age of sixteen. So as of this moment, I’m asking anyone who knows about these blatant violations to come forward. The offenders will then be brought before the council.”

Silence gripped the crowd. Liam pocketed the camera and suddenly leaned in toward Dominica and actually poked her in the chest; Maddie felt it, his fingernail pressing against her sternum. “
You
have misled this tribe, Dominica. You’ve been promising us a true ghost key, a place for our kind, but I don’t think you can deliver. I think it’s just all empty promises.”

“I second that,” shouted a woman on the other side of the market, someone Maddie didn’t recognize. “Let’s see a show of hands for everyone who thinks Dominica is misleading us.”

Of the hundred or more people in the store, a definite majority of hands shot upward.
You’re cooked, Dominica,
Maddie said and laughed.

Shut up, just shut the hell up.

You’re cooked,
Maddie shouted again and again.
Cooked, cooked, cooked.

Dominica erected a barrier between them, so she couldn’t hear Maddie’s voice. It was exactly what she’d hoped the bitch would do. She immediately reached out to Kate’s ex-boyfriend.
Rich, can you hear me? It’s Maddie.

He didn’t seem to hear her. His
brujo,
Gogh, was too busy trying to calm the crowd. “Hey, hold on, people. Just hold on. Dominica has been honest with us from day one. From the beginning she told us this wouldn’t be easy or simple, but that it was possible.”

“That’s bullshit,” Liam shouted. “What she said was that if we followed her rules, she would show us how to use the power of the dead to control the living. From where I’m standing, people, it looks like the living are controlling the dead. The island has been
quarantined
. Did you see the pamphlets that were airdropped in town today?” He waved one. “Well, take a look. Everything south of fourth bridge is under a quarantine. The Coast Guard is patrolling the island so no one can escape. They think Cedar Key has been attacked by a biological weapon.”

“Shut up, Liam,” Dominica barked.

But Liam kept right on going, his voice progressively louder, uglier, stoking the frustration shared by many in Dominica’s new tribe. “How the hell does a quarantine help us turn Cedar Key into a
brujo
paradise? Look at us, just look at us.” He threw his arms out dramatically, a gesture that encompassed the madness in the market to shelve and store all the food and supplies that had been taken from homes all over the island. “Why’re we doing this? Because Dominica told us to. What’s the purpose? Dominica said it’s to prevent our hosts from starving if the quarantine continues indefinitely. But what’s next? Rationing of food and supplies? Is that the next step, Dominica? Rationing, with you or the council deciding who gets what?”

Keep shouting, Liam, Maddie thought, and suddenly, in spite of everything, she admired him, the only
brujo
to stand up to Dominica.

Whit strode into the middle of the crowd. As the island mayor, hosts knew him, recognized him; as Dominica’s lover and her second in command,
brujos
knew him. But everyone, Maddie thought, also knew that Whit would need a new host soon. You could see it in his face, in the way he held himself, in his pallor. The
brujo
net trembled and shook with the realization that the essence of the mayor was gone, and that his body might not survive till dawn. He already looked like the walking dead.

“People, c’mon,” Whit said in a soft, gravelly voice, patting the air with his thin, pale hands. “Give Dominica the benefit of the doubt here. Look what she has done for us this far. Until she arrived, we were a pathetic group of astrals, clinging to the physical plane because we didn’t know shit from shinola. Now look at us, more than a thousand strong. Many of us are enjoying physical existence again through our hosts. We have purpose and direction. Dominica showed us how to do this. With a community as large as ours, there have to be rules, parameters.”

“And that’s why Von was obliterated? To enforce some goddamn rule that Dominica laid down?” Liam shouted.

“Von was annihilated because he saved his host and killed two of our own.” Whit now shouted, too, but his voice sounded pathetically weak and Maddie knew the other
brujos
heard it, that weakness, that ebbing of his life force.

“Von was used as an example for the rest of us,” Liam snapped, facing Whit, his host’s face cherry red. “And how’s she protecting
us,
Whit? We suffered several more annihilations tonight by that rogue group on the other side of the island. Have any of us heard her even mention
that
?”

More shouting erupted in the crowd. Insurrection in Dominica’s tribe, Maddie thought, could only be a positive turn of events for her. But would it really come to that?

Whit raised his arms like an umpire calling for a time-out. “Pipe down.” He sounded angry now. “Give her a chance to address this.”

“I was about to mention it when you so rudely interrupted me, Liam,” Dominica said.

“Then what about it?” demanded Jill. “How’re we going to retaliate against Zee Small’s group of Bible thumpers?”

“Right now, we’ve got them exactly where we want them,” Dominica said. “They’ll be easy to seize or herd in that cemetery. We need to get our supplies squared away first.”

Liam turned to the crowd. “Is that good enough, people? Hell, no.”

“Hell, no, hell, no,”
the crowd chanted.

“Chief Cole,” Whit hollered, glancing around. “Take Liam into custody until he’s cooled off.”

Frank Cole, the police chief, marched forward, hoisting his cop belt like the self-important prick he was. Maddie couldn’t remember the name of the
brujo
he hosted, but it didn’t matter. Cole looked annoyed, angry, and clearly wasn’t on Dominica’s side. “I’m fed up with this whole stinking arrangement. For starters, someone outside the council needs to run the market, Dominica. I’ll appoint two people to do it.”

“You aren’t the leader of this tribe.” Dominica stabbed her finger at him.
“I am.”

“And you, Dominica, can be overthrown,” Liam yelled.

Dominica’s rage was so palpable that Maddie
tasted
it—an awful sourness along the surface of her tongue, a thickness in the back of her throat, a coating like plaque against the back of her teeth. Then her temples pulsed and ached, her nostrils flared, and Dominica leaped out of Maddie and into Sam, driving Liam out of his host and leaving Maddie stumbling around, floundering, her legs and arms like putty.

The last shred of civility in the crowd ruptured. Everyone shouted now and no one paid any attention to Maddie. She slipped down an aisle, her heart beating only for her again, her lungs breathing only for her. And with each beat, each breath of air, she reclaimed control of her limbs, her body.

She navigated her way through the crowd, up an aisle filled with bottled water, wine, beer, closer and closer to the door. She could smell the clean, chilly air from here. Beyond that door lay her freedom, Sanchez, Wayra, and a way back to Esperanza. Beyond that door lay her life, waiting for her.

As she approached the register, she forced herself not to move abruptly, erratically. She couldn’t appear to be in a big fat hurry to escape this madness. She tucked her hair behind her ears and moved without looking around, moved through the chaos of
brujo
against
brujo,
through the screaming and shoving. Not much father. Three yards, she was just three yards from the door. Someone jostled her from the left, but she kept walking, eyes fixed on the floor.

Two yards.

The shouts and pandemonium reached a new level of madness.

Then she pushed open the front door and that first breath of freedom intoxicated her, left her almost giddy with glee. She flung herself across the street, faster and faster, arms tucked in tightly at her sides, legs eating up the pavement, her heart singing.

She charged up a shallow hill, certain she was going to make it, that she would find deep pockets of darkness where she could hide, that she would find Sanchez and Wayra, that they would defeat Dominica somehow. Winning was no longer the point. Maybe it never had been the point. After all, what did it mean to win against Dominica? Wouldn’t there always be another Dominica somewhere to take her place? Another ancient
brujo,
another corrupt politician, another phony avatar who only enslaved the people? Wouldn’t evil always be present, staking out its territory among the vulnerable and fearful?

Her only goal was to remain free, to survive. She ran faster, gulping at the air, drawing it deeply into lungs that breathed
only for her;
she must never forget how this felt.
Her
lungs,
her
heart,
her
organs,
her
body,
her
soul.

Just then, a truck barreled around a corner, four
brujos
inside, two holdout captives tied up in the back, a man and a woman who were gagged and blindfolded, dozens of luminous orbs floating in the air around them. The headlights exposed Maddie like a tumor on an X-ray.