Ghost Heart

  “But that big picture is him, Mama. He must be famous,” she said, skipping her way back to her parent.

  “That’s not him, sweetheart,” the woman explained. “See, he doesn’t have a hole in his chest. That’s not a real person in the picture. It’s a make-believe hero, like Superman. It’s not real—it’s just a story.”

  “But how do we know he doesn’t have a hole in his chest?” the girl insisted, pouting and looking at me over her shoulder as her mother pulled her away by the hand. “He has his shirt on.”

  “Shush now,” the mother hissed as they disappeared down the corridor.

  “David,” my uncle said, striding up to me, his eyes scanning the mural carefully and succinctly, like a man appraising something he doesn’t want you to know he wants to buy. “Let’s go. You and I are sharing a room.”

  “You’re not serious,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be rooming with your wife?”

  “Don’t be an ass,” my uncle said, my jab obviously hitting the mark. Maybe he and Aunt Chloe really were on the rocks. Or, their “issues” were the perfect excuse for him to babysit me personally now that we were so close to whatever prize he was after.

  “I won’t, if you won’t,” I said to his back as he strode away.

  And I followed him because, ultimately, whatever my uncle was up to, I needed to be there.

  It was time to stop running.

  It was time to be the guy Passion had told me I’d become.

  24

  PASSION

  “Can you put that thing away?” Samantha asked. Well, it wasn’t exactly a question. More like a command. “It’s giving me a headache,” she added, coming in from our room’s little balcony.

  “Um, okay.” I wasn’t sure how a magic eight ball could give her a headache, but I tucked it into my camo jacket pocket anyway. I was sharing her room. I was breathing her air. I was even wearing her clothes, but I’d insisted on keeping the jacket because it had pockets big enough for the eight ball. “I’m just so nervous,” I added. “Aren’t you?”

  “Of course I am,” she said, plopping down on the queen bed opposite mine and staring at the clock on the nightstand between us. “They’re late. He said we’d be leaving around five, and it’s 5:09.”

  “I know,” I said, just as the clock rolled over to 5:10. I didn’t point out it was still technically around five, or that her father did whatever he pleased no matter what he’d said, just like she did.

  I didn’t want to fight with Samantha. I wanted to make up with her. I wanted things back the way they’d been before I’d opened my big, fat mouth about her father. I certainly wasn’t going to tell her what Jason had told me, because it would utterly destroy her. So, when I’d heard we were rooming together my hopes had soared, only to be dashed the moment we were alone. She was still pissed at me. She had barely spoken to me the entire afternoon and evening.

  The unspoken tension between us had become so unbearable that, for a few hours, I’d gone exploring the lodge alone, checking out the Warm Springs pool, the little souvenir shop, the restaurants, and the mural of Marcus. I’d hoped to find something about the mural somewhere, maybe in one of the lodge brochures or in a book in the shop, but no such luck. In fact, when I asked the shop clerk about it, I got a very vague but polite answer. “It’s a legend of our people,” she said. “A sacred legend.” I could read between the lines of her emphasis on the word sacred. It wasn’t for tourists like me. It wasn’t for white people.

  Of course, I hadn’t been alone while I’d explored. Butch, from Mr. James’s security detail, had tailed me the entire time. Still, I’d gotten away from Samantha’s silent treatment for a little while. I’d also noticed more people checking in, a huge flush of new guests, mostly men, all trying to look like vacationing sales reps and failing miserably. I recognized a few of their faces from the camp at the farmhouse. Mr. James must have reserved every available room at the resort for his undercover entourage.

  “It’s almost dark outside,” Samantha complained, getting up and walking to the balcony doorway again. The balcony was small, but the view wasn’t. Laid out before us was a vast landscape of red soil, low shrubs, rolling hills, deep gorges, and flat mesas, all slowly being painted in pinks and oranges as the sun went down.

  “It’s beautiful,” I sighed.

  Samantha turned just as there was a knock at the door. “Come in,” she called, giving me a look.

  Pete entered, his eyes immediately going to our feet. “Good. You both have decent shoes on. Because it looks like we’ll be hoofing it.”

  “Hoofing it as in walking?” Samantha frowned.

  “No, hoofing it as in hoofing it. We’re taking horses,” he explained. “That’s the best way to get where we’re going.”

  “Horses? Cool,” Samantha said, grinning widely. “But where exactly are we going?”

  “Neutral ground,” Pete said. “Someplace deep within the reservation. That’s all I know.”

  “Okay,” I said, standing up. Today I’d flown in a plane for the first time and survived. Now it looked like I was going to get my first horseback ride too.

  * * *

  Horses should not let humans ride them. They just shouldn’t. There is no reason I can fathom that an animal so large, powerful, and skittish would let another animal jump on top of it, boss it around, yank its head this way and that, and kick it in the sides. There is no logic to this.

  When you are riding a horse, its muscular body moving between your legs, when you are feeling the fullness of its otherness and selfness, you know this completely. You know what you are doing should not be, that it is some kind of horrible mistake, a temporary anomaly of nature which could, at any moment, reset itself back to the rightful condition that horses are wild, and humans are the things that go flying off the backs of them.

  That is what I kept thinking as I rode a smoky-colored horse named Asher along a dark winding trail under a starry sky. Thankfully, Asher followed the horse in front of him, and the horse in front of him followed the one before him, and so on, their warm breath huffing into the cool night.

  Our group consisted of Reiny and her brother, Lonan, up front as our guides, plus all of us who’d been on Mr. James’s plane. Samantha, her parents, and Dr. Black rode up front right behind Reiny and Lonan. Then came Pete and me, Marcus and Jason, and finally Bo, Butch, and Bruce, taking up the rear. Reiny and Lonan’s horses didn’t stay in the rut of the trail like the rest. Their horses didn’t even have saddles or reins. It was weird. I’d always thought of Reiny’s natural environment as an ambulance or a hospital room, so modern and stark and technical. And I’d first seen Lonan behind a hotel desk, checking in customers. Now, I could see this was where they belonged, this land. Maybe Reiny had always been a healer of some kind. Maybe Lonan had always welcomed visitors to the reservation. They were true to themselves wherever they were.

  My horse stopped in the middle of the trail.

  Jason’s horse, behind me, didn’t even skip a hoof beat. It went right around us.

  “What’s the hold up?” Marcus asked, smirking, as he went by too.

  “I don’t know,” I said, tapping Asher gently in the sides with my heels.

  Then I heard the plop and the phhtt of exiting gas as my horse dumped a load in the middle of the trail. It was steaming. I could actually see the steam rising up from it, and he wasn’t done yet. There was more plopping and farting happening.

  “Hey,” Butch protested mockingly as his horse stepped around us. “What are you doing? We’re supposed to take up the rear. Get it? Take up the rear?”

  A lance of pain shot through me. That was just the sort of cheesy butt joke Nose would have made about Yale. God, I missed them.

  “It isn’t me,” I said to Bruce, swallowing my pain as his horse meandered around us too.

  I turned and looked in front of me.

  The rest of the party was cresting the hill ahead of us.

  “We’ll wait for you,” Bo said, his h
orse skirting mine.

  Finally, Asher was done and probably about ten pounds lighter. He must have felt it too, because he suddenly leapt forward, charging up the hill.

  I lost hold of the reins and grabbed the pommel of the saddle. I was bouncing all over the place, up and down, side to side, holding on for dear life. I could feel myself sliding toward the ground, but I dug my feet into the stirrups and pushed myself up.

  Asher crested the hill, stopping short so fast I almost flew over his head. Then, he stomped around, sidling up between Reiny and Pete’s horses and blowing a raspberry with his big hairy lips.

  “Asher, be good,” Reiny scolded, pushing him away with her foot as he tried to crush my leg between him and her horse. “Are you okay?” she asked, grabbing the dangling reins and handing them to me.

  “Yeah, I think so. He just got really frisky all the sudden.”

  “Good job staying in the saddle,” Pete said.

  “The horses don’t like this place,” Lonan said, coming alongside us. “The people don’t either, for that matter.”

  I looked down the hill, following Lonan’s gaze.

  In the valley below us, lit up by bright lights on its exterior, was the strangest building I’d ever seen. It was round and flat with a glass dome rising out of the middle of it like some kind of weird observatory. The rest of it was made of stone, making it look both ancient and modern all at once. It didn’t appear to have any windows, except for the dome, and I couldn’t see a door. The ground surrounding it was strange too—all barren looking, as if it had been scoured clean of foliage or life of any kind. All that was left were a few twisted tree stumps, black and charred, as if someone had taken a blowtorch to them. I glanced back at the building and noticed a dark slit in the exterior wall facing us. Maybe it was some kind of door or entrance.

  “What is that?” I asked Reiny.

  “That’s The Roundhouse.” She glanced sidelong at Lonan as she said it. “At least that’s what we call it when we’re being polite.”

  “And when you’re not being polite?” Pete asked.

  “Then we just call it The Zit,” Lonan answered, smiling grimly and glancing toward the group, his eyes finding Mr. James. “It doesn’t belong here,” he told me in a hushed voice, obviously not wanting the other man to hear. “It never has. It’s a festering boil, but it will be lanced soon enough.”

  “Let’s go,” Reiny said, gesturing for us all to follow as her horse ambled down the hill.

  At the bottom of the steep incline we all dismounted, and Reiny, Lonan and Mr. James moved away to have a brief discussion. They kept their voices low, as if they didn’t want the rest of us to overhear, but sound carried easily in the desert.

  “What if we have a medical emergency? Mr. James said to Reiny. “He’s your patient. How can you just leave him like this?”

  “You have Pete,” she said. “You hired me to nurse him back to health, and I did. And I brought you here. The rest is on you. That was always the deal. Once this is taken care of,” she gestured at The Roundhouse, “the tribes will consider your other requests.”

  Go, Reiny. Way to put Mr. James in his place.

  I looked at Marcus. He had definitely heard. Samantha and Jason too. They were probably wondering the same thing I was. What deal had Mr. James struck with the tribes of Warm Springs, and how were we all going to help him pay for it?

  Reiny and Lonan were leading the horses away. I hadn’t even gotten a chance to say goodbye to them or Asher. Reiny turned once, looking back at us, her eyes finding Pete and nodding at him before she and her brother mounted their horses and rode into the darkness, leading the other animals behind them.

  “She’ll be okay,” Pete said, his voice thick with emotion. “She’s a smart woman.”

  What was going on? I wanted to ask Pete, but Mr. James was already ushering us forward. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve been out here too long already. We need to get inside.” He was right. We were exposed. The three Bs were looking nervously up at the hills and taking defensive positions around us. The whole group must have felt it because we picked up the pace, approaching the recess in the strange structure, which I could now clearly see housed a large metal door.

  “What is this place?” Dr. Black asked, sounding appalled. And no wonder. It was like approaching a spaceship or an ancient ruin at the bottom of the ocean. Except for the lights and the security cameras in the corners. Those were decidedly modern and of human origin. “Please tell me they aren’t keeping my daughter here,” she added, her voice hushed and terrified.

  “I don’t know where they’ve been holding her,” Mr. James said, putting his hand on her shoulder, “but this is where the exchange will take place. If she wasn’t here before, she is now.”

  “And why is that here?” Samantha asked angrily, pointing to a symbol on the door. It was a blue circle with a pair of hands clasped in the middle of it. I had seen it before at The Warren Gun Club. It was the symbol for The Hold.

  “When we get inside, I’ll explain,” Mr. James said, stepping up to a large security panel next to the door and beginning to punch a code into it.

  “No,” Samantha said, inserting herself between him and the panel. “Tell us now. We deserve to know what’s going on before we set foot inside this place. This building belongs to The Hold, and I’ve never even heard of it before—”

  “Samantha,” her mother said, joining the fray, her voice a warning. “Your father will answer your questions when we get inside.

  “I’m surprised at you,” Mr. James added. “You’re putting everyone in danger by—”

  “I’m putting everyone in danger?” Samantha interrupted, laughing bitterly. “Oh, that’s rich coming from you. You wouldn’t tell me on the plane how you knew Jason, or what you’d hired him to do, but I’m not an idiot. Passion overheard the two of you talking, and I know it had to do with the Eidolon. Does mother know? Does she know you had full knowledge the CAMFers were coming that night?”

  Mrs. James was looking confusedly between her daughter and her husband.

  Great. The James’s family shit was about to hit the fan, and I was definitely going to get pulled into it.

  “I said we’ll talk about this when we get inside,” Mr. James said, trying to push past his daughter to the panel.

  “No!” Samantha cried, whirling around and jabbing random numbers into the keyboard. “You owe me an explanation.” The panel began to flash red, but she’d already turned around to confront her parents again. “Both of you. I know you’ve been lying about everything, even your breakup. Why would you do that to me? Why would anyone do that to their daughter?”

  I glanced to my right at Marcus, wondering what he made of all this, but he wasn’t even paying attention. Instead, he was staring at the big metal door with The Hold symbol on it. No, he wasn’t just staring. He was fixated on it, and something was wrong. His body was perfectly still, his muscles rigid, but his eyes were flicking back and forth, right to left, really fast, like someone dreaming with their eyes open.

  “Hey, are you okay?” I asked, reaching out to touch his arm.

  He flinched and looked down at me, his eyes normal again except for the confusion and desperation in them. “I—I remembered something,” he said, his voice a hushed whisper.

  “What?” I whispered back, hope soaring in me. “What did you remember?”

  “This place,” he said, looking up at the building again. “I’ve been here before, but the door was different. And the approach. They brought us in from the other side.” His eyes rose to the landscape beyond The Roundhouse. “They brought Danielle and me here. This is where—” He stopped, his eyes focusing on something up in the hills I couldn’t see.

  Did he remember the rest of it? Did he remember his sister was dead?

  The stone wall next to us made a strange ping, rock crumbling off of it to the ground.

  “Get down! Get down!” Bo yelled, as he and his brothers drew their guns, returning fire.


  No, please, God. Not this again.

  Dirt was spraying up all around my feet, the hiss of bullets whizzing past me in the dark.

  I threw myself forward into the door recess, smashing into Samantha and her parents and Dr. Black, who had already taken refuge there. They pulled me in among them, and I turned to see Marcus still standing out in the open.

  Thankfully, Jason was charging toward him, a gun in his hand. He barreled into Marcus, propelling him forward.

  My hands joined the ones grabbing Marcus and pulling him in, and Jason followed soon after, quickly taking up a position at one of the outer corners of our hidey-hole and returning gunfire.

  Mr. James was crouched near the door’s security panel, jabbing at the buttons, but it was still blinking red. He turned, casting a look of fury at one of the security cameras, and yelled, “Override it you fucking idiots! Get this door open, now!”

  I looked out across the desolation of the moonlit desert.

  Butch and Bruce were shambling toward us, Pete held between them, slumped and unmoving. Bo was running behind them, still laying down fire.

  Not Pete, please not Pete.

  When they were almost to our little nook, Jason and Marcus ran out and helped them drag Pete in. There was blood, lots of it, pouring from a gaping hole in his neck. The three brothers scrambled to stanch it with hands and pieces of their own clothing.

  Marcus looked at me, then wiped the blood from his hands onto his shirt.

  The gunfire had slowed, just a few occasional shots ringing out, a reminder we were pinned down and outnumbered.

  Behind us, the door hissed and began to lift, causing those of us plastered against it to jump forward in alarm.

  Light shone out, blinding me as I turned to see what new danger might accost us from inside.

  Mr. James stepped around me, striding into a huge warehouse-like room, bustling with people and computers and equipment.

  “Get these people inside!” he bellowed, as forms ran forward, grabbing us and helping us into the building. There were men with guns and a medical team put Pete on a handheld gurney, whisking him away.