Ghost Key by Trish J. MacGregor Read Free Book Online

from the trees.
    It wasn’t the first time in all these months that Dominica had eluded him. When she’d fled Esperanza, Ecuador, last October, she’d flown to Miami first, then had driven to Chicago, Santa Fe, Denver, Atlanta, using these large cities to confuse him, lose him, and conceal her activities. In each of these cities, she had killed someone—a victim here, two victims there, never enough of them in one place to prompt the local police to make inquiries in other states, for authorities to connect the dots. Each time she killed, he lost her trail. Then he would have to comb through local Web sites, searching for unexplained deaths in that particular area during the last few weeks or months. In most instances, Dominica’s victims bled out, so that was the search term he used for the unexplained deaths.
    But because bleed-outs could occur for a variety of reasons, this process initially had taken him in directions that wasted time. He now knew to discount bleed-outs that occurred in hospitals, since those deaths usually had a natural cause. Besides, Dominica disliked hospitals nearly as much as she did cemeteries; both reminded her of what she was, a hungry ghost desperately in need of a tribe of her own kind. Motels were Dominica’s favorite location—the privacy, the element of the forbidden, the likelihood that the body wouldn’t be found immediately. Her next favorite location was in or around upscale bars and restaurants because they provided her with such a variety of potential victims.
    Wayra pulled back onto the road and continued north toward the town. The horse farms gave way to commercial areas—family-owned businesses, then the usual strip malls and small shopping centers. He passed a few bars, redneck hotspots, and several local restaurants that boasted cuisines of smoked ribs, steaks, and home fries. None of these places would interest Dominica. The best he could hope for right now was that a synchronicity would lead him to yet another location where one of her victims had bled out and died. Whenever these synchronicities happened, they told him he was on the right track, searching for her in the right way.
    In Santa Fe, he had gone into a taco place for a bite to eat and just happened to pick up a free newspaper that featured a story about a missing man. His photo was included; he could have been Wayra’s twin brother. Right then, he knew the man had been one of Dominica’s victims, that she’d seized him because of the resemblance. In her twisted mind, it was her way of killing Wayra.
    He had driven over to the man’s house, picked up his scent, and tracked his body to a spot in the desert, where much of it had been consumed by predators. But there, he had found Dominica’s scent again.
    And so it had gone, city after city, state after state, for months.
    How many times through the centuries had Dominica seized men who resembled him? Their history extended back so far in time that it horrified Wayra to even consider how many hundreds or thousands of men had been seized and bled out simply because they reminded Dominica of him. At times during this long journey, their mutual history and his lapse in judgment had haunted him. How had he ever loved her?
    Yet, when they had been lovers in Spain in the fifteenth century, everything had been different. He had already been a shifter for more than two hundred years and she was a beautiful woman who had not yet been corrupted by the evil of hungry ghosts, brujos.
    Before he entered the Ocala city limits, Wayra noticed a landfill where dozens of tractors were clearing trees and moving great mountains of earth and trash. Three state police cars and an ambulance blocked the entrance to the area. Unusual, but as far as he knew, Dominica hadn’t ever killed anyone in a landfill. However, if she had a tribe already and if members of her tribe had seized humans, then a landfill was an ideal spot to get rid of a body. Was it worth a look?
    In Atlanta when