Free Haunted Honeymoon by Marta Acosta

out bands.
    My junior suite was a medium-sized room with a love seat, a narrow desk, a view to the street, and an all-white bathroom with a deep tub.
    I walked to a French café, bought a latte, and took a stroll to the park, trying to remember to look to my right when crossing streets. When I returned to my hotel, I called Don Pedro.
    “ Don Pedro, why don’t we meet at one of the local attractions so I can sightsee while you tell me whatever?”
    “Alas, I have so many followers all over the world, those who come to me for guidance in the ways of the shapeshifter. I fear that we would be interrupted and I want to give you my undivided attention.”
    “Gotcha, no witnesses.” I was tempted to tell Don Pedro that I actually knew a real shapeshifter—it had something to do with biology and optical illusions—but he’d insist that he was one himself.
    “May I come to your room?” he asked.
    “Only if you promise not to put the moves on me.” I was joking since he was a little bug of a fellow that I could crush between my fingers.
    He tittered and said, “I shall treat you with the utmost respect even though you are certainly a most enticing young woman and if I were younger—”
    “Stop or you’ll give me brain cooties. I’ll see you at noon.”
    There was a knock on my door exactly at noon. I opened it to see Don Pedro Nascimento, officially the author of Spiritual Transformation: Adventures of a Shapeshifter.
    He was a tiny brown man with enormous chocolate eyes behind oversized black-framed glasses. He wore khaki pants, a white shirt with colorful yarn embroidery of birds and flowers, and a brown and white woven jacket with a llama motif and fringe. He carried the same worn leather satchel he’d had when I’d first met him.
    “¡Mi Milagro!” he said, and reached out to hug me.
    I moved away and said, “Come in, Don Pedro.”
    He walked into the room and sat down on the love seat. He smelled of coconut oil, and I had a sudden craving for a piña colada, a sunny beach, and a Rupert Holmes tune playing ona boom box. I turned the desk chair to face Don Pedro and sat down.
    “Your aura is even more brilliant than when we last met!” he said. “I hope that your journey is astonishing.”
    “Yes, first-class is definitely the way to go.”
    “I meant your journey on this astral plane , Milagro, exploring and discovering your spirit self. Your power glows from you like the sun rising over the red rocks of Sedona, where I once met a shaman in the form of a javelina—”
    “That’s utterly enthralling. Let’s talk business.”
    He crossed one toothpick leg over the other and said, “I have watched you in my dreams, and I am both enraptured and fretful.”
    “That’s kind of you. Do you mind saving the caca for people who pay for your seminars and private consultations?”
    “There are different truths, Milagro. There is the truth that you think you know about me, and there also exists the truth of your book as I lived it.”
    “How could you live something that I fabricated?”
    “It could only happen through the magical meeting of our minds, my Milagro!” he said ecstatically. “This is why you and only you can help write my second book. It explores life in different realms.”
    “Like the earth realm and space realm? Aliens?” I said, suddenly interested. “I’d love to subvert the clichés of aliens as long-armed, big-headed pixies. What about swarms of nanorobots that can cluster together to mimic any other life-form? I could tie that into your shapeshifter mythology.”
    Don Pedro held up his weathered hand. “I was speaking of the realms of life and afterlife and most especially the Middle World. Life after life and before deathly death. I traveled to an island in the azure Caribbean, and a tribe gathered to make a feast for me and …”
    I dazed off at this point, because all of Don Pedro’s stories followed the same plot: he was treated as a wise elder by indigenous people who had