Free Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) by Trish J. MacGregor

permission to get up.” He gestured at the stone. “Those etchings. That’s what I saw. That’s the oracle part of it.”
    “But how do we interpret it?” Wayra asked.
    Sanchez picked up the stone. His eyes shut, and Charlie knew he went away, he dreamed, he did whatever psychics did when they were tuned in. When he set the stone down, he said, “Can you touch it again, Charlie?”
    “Sure.”
    Charlie pressed the stone between his hands for a few moments, felt the texture changing again, shifting, moving like a living thing. When he set the stone on the table once more, symbols were clearly visible on the surface of the stone, six of them.
    “Sanchez’s sketches show these symbols,” Maddie said.
    Wayra quickly snapped a photo of the stone with his cell.
    “So what are they?” Charlie addressed his question to Illary, the oldest among them.
    “Well, if the stone came from a sipapu, as Sanchez saw, if it popped out of the opening in the earth, then my sense is that the stone comes from the nonphysical world, the place where Esperanza was born thousands of years ago. I’ve only seen two of these symbols before, in the stone forest where Wayra and I took the other shifters after we rescued Maddie and left Cedar Key.”
    With her left hand, she touched one of Sanchez’s drawings, then picked up a pencil with her right hand and used the tip of it to indicate the same symbol on the stone. It looked, Charlie thought, like a square with the upper left-hand corner open, and within the square was a tree.
    “This one, with the tree in it, and this one.” She touched another drawing and its corresponding likeness on the stone. “I think the tree is the tree of life, the ceiba tree. The square is symbolic of the foundation of all things. Perhaps the opening of the square represents the sipapu.”
    “But what do the symbols mean?” Charlie asked.
    Illary shook her head. “I don’t know.”
    Charlie was liking this less and less. Chasers—not brujos —had always been in charge of the city: its location, its physicality, its present and its future. “But ceiba trees grow in the tropics, so why would such a tree appear in this symbol?”
    “When Esperanza was nonphysical,” Wayra said, “ceiba trees grew everywhere. Once the city was brought into the physical world, at this altitude, they couldn’t survive. Except for that old ceiba in Parque del Cielo.”
    “And no one can explain why it flourishes,” Charlie remarked.
    “What’s the other symbol mean, Illary?” Sanchez asked. “It looks like a circle with Shiva inside of it.”
    “That we are many,” Illary said. “And that there is momentum and power in the many. We, the people, must have a say in what happens to this city.”
    Kali’s screech announced her arrival at the porch screen. She squawked, “Hola, amigos. Hola.”
    Wayra laughed and opened the door for her and she swept in noisily. Jessie barked and Kali swooped down over the dog’s head, plucked a piece of cheese from the platter on the table, then landed on the back of Charlie’s chair and transferred the cheese from her beak to the claws of her right foot. She nibbled at it for a moment, then flung it toward Jessie, who gobbled it up.
    “Kali?” Tess exclaimed. “From the posada? But how? I thought she was a spirit, like that cat, Whiskers, who followed us everywhere.”
    “She lives in many worlds,” Wayra remarked. “Right, Charlie?”
    “Apparently,” Charlie replied. “She’s there whether I’m in this form or in my natural form as a chaser.”
    “Awesome,” Maddie said softly. “I only saw her once, at the posada, before I heard she’d flown off. Can I pet her?”
    “Sure,” Charlie said.
    “Awesome,” Kali repeated as Maddie moved closer to her. “ Hola, Maddie.”
    Maddie drew her fingers over Kali’s back, and the parrot made soft, trilling sounds of contentment. “You are one cool bird.”
    “I really need to shove off, folks,” said Charlie. “Please