Esperanza by Trish J. MacGregor

life.”
    “Same here. And I don’t think I woke at all.”
    Still whispering, he went on. “What woke me was a . . . I’m not even sure how to describe it. It felt . . . like something was slamming against me. Trying to get inside of me.” He laughed nervously. “Did you experience anything like that?”
    Tess started to say no, but a vivid memory surfaced. A sharp pain in her chest, heart racing, fear so intense that it paralyzed her. She blurted all this, then added: “I was so paralyzed I couldn’t even wiggle my fingers or toes. I must’ve fallen back to sleep. A
brujo
?”
    “Not with Nomad inside,” he said.
    “He left with Juanito after we drank that tea.”
    “I forgot about that. So it could’ve been a
brujo.
”
    “Maybe. But here’s something else that’s weird. I’ve never gone to a foreign country and just hung around my hotel room for days, without venturing out at all. Even when the weather was shitty. Have you?”
    “No. Never.” He put his arms around her, holding her close, their legs intertwined, his hands cool against her spine. “We’ll figure this out.” Then he began to touch her again. “But not right now.”
    Ian bolted upright, heart drumming furiously against the tight, uneasy silence. His eyes darted nervously around the room, through the fading firelight. Nothing moved. Shadows pooled in the corners, blackness pressed up against the windows. Tess sighed in her sleep and pulled the blanket uphigher around her shoulders. Hours ago, they had moved from the rug to the pull-out couch and Nomad had curled up in front of the fire. Now Nomad was gone. But that wasn’t what had awakened him.
    Ian swung his legs over the side of the bed, listening. Suddenly, he heard it, a high-pitched whining, a distant noise, like that of a high-speed drill. Then silence. Then the whining again, but closer. He swept his jeans and sweatshirt off a nearby chair, pulled them on, and hurried across the cold stone floor to the window. It was so chilly in the cottage he could see his breath when he exhaled.
    He pressed his face to the glass, hands cupped at the sides. No starlight, no moonlight, too dark to see anything. The whining stopped, a sixty-second pause. When it started once more, he realized the noise he heard wasn’t the whine of a drill, but the shrill cries of voices out in the courtyard, hundreds of them, a strange, almost melodic sound, like the keening of dolphins.
    “What the hell.” He hurried to the front door.
    Before he removed the chain, ribbons of fog slipped through the crack under the door, eddying, shifting, then whipping back and forth, snakelike, across the floor. Ian leaped back, the keening got louder, a kind of atavistic fear seized him. He spun and ran over to the couch, shaking Tess awake. “They found us,” he hissed.
    She sprang out of bed, swept up her clothes, jerked them on. Ian snapped a blanket off the bed and ran back to the door.
    The fog wrapped around his ankles, a cold that bit to the marrow. He fully expected
campesinos
to materialize, for that insidious whispering and chanting to begin, like what had happened in the field the day they arrived. He quickly stuffed the blanket into the crack and the bands of fog around his ankles abruptly loosened, dropped away from him, then writhed and twisted against the floor as if in agony. Ian grabbed the fire poker, slammed it down through the snakelike streamers, and he and Tess backed away, staring in horror as the streamers split in half and struggled to merge with other streamers. It was like watching beheaded chickens flailing around, wings flapping until their bodies keeled over. In moments, the stuff dissipated.
    “Jesus, Ian, look.” Tess pointed at the windows to their right.
    Fog twisted up and across the glass like rapidly growing vines, each shoot thickening, spreading, until it covered the windows. He glanced quickly up at the skylight. Fog blanketed it. He grabbed Tess’s hand, and they raced