Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) by Trish J. MacGregor

Author:Trish J. MacGregor [MacGregor, Trish J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2013-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

2.

Wayra came to on his side, in a bed of the softest substance he’d ever felt. Twilight clung to the air. It was that magical time in the evening when the edges of things possessed greater clarity—shadows, silhouettes, the sloping line of a roof. The gray sky roiled. It hurt his eyes to look at it.

Odors inundated his senses—sweet and sour, plant and animal, fresh and rotting, brujo and human. Another scent ran beneath it all, a psychic scent, that of chasers. Their imprint permeated everything.

As he pushed up, he saw a muscular black man sprawled on the ground to his right, legs splayed, arms flung out to the sides, forming perfect ninety-degree angles against the emerald grass. Where’d he come from?

Here and there, dead birds lay on the grass around him. Off to his left loomed an empty lot, a playground, and houses on either side. Wayra had no idea where in El Bosque he was.

He didn’t trust himself to stand yet and crawled over to the black man. “Hey, you, wake up.” He shook the man’s shoulder. “C’mon.”

Wayra slapped his cheeks lightly and the man groaned, his eyelids fluttered open. In the moment their gazes connected, Wayra suddenly understood. “You fuck,” he snapped, and grabbed the front of the man’s shirt and jerked him forward. “You hung around to see if I could get in and then followed me.”

Ricardo knocked Wayra’s arms away and bolted upward, gasping for breath in the same way a host did within moments of being seized. “Members … of my tribe … got caught in here,” he stammered between gasps, then slammed his fists against his chest, as if to dislodge something and doubled forward at the waist and touched his toes. He sank to the ground, laughing hysterically, curled into a fetal position, pressed his hands between his knees and sobbed.

Wayra scrambled to his feet and walked around Ricardo, pissed off, bewildered, and alarmed. “Hey, Ricardo, talk to me.”

Ricardo rolled over on his stomach, face pressed into the grass, then sat up, legs crossed Indian style, and knuckled his eyes like a little kid. “I … I can’t shed this virtual form, Wayra. It’s behaving like … a host. I’m breathing with this man’s lungs, his heart beats for me, I control his brain.”

He’d seen brujos do strange and horrifying things, but couldn’t recall anything quite like this. “Isn’t that exactly what brujos want?”

“Well, yeah. But not with their virtual forms. Not like this. I have no choice about a host, Wayra. We brujos can always leap out of a host and either bleed them out or leave them intact. I … I seem to be … shit, I hate this, but I think I’m trapped in this body.”

Wayra’s alarm deepened. He couldn’t move through time, Sanchez couldn’t turn off his psychic switch, Ricardo was stuck in his virtual body, Charlie couldn’t get to where Wayra now was. So were these side effects something the council had known about or was this

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