Authors: Trish J. MacGregor
Ghost Key (55 page)
“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 have
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. M
AC
GREGOR
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
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