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ould ever forget, that they had died because of her.

Everything had both started and ended in that cavern beneath the earth.

“Kids will be kids,” she murmured, echoing her father’s inevitable pronouncement whenever she and Jase had gotten into trouble.

Let them roam, Betsy. What good is having this place if she can’t run free like we did?

Gina’s parents had been childhood sweethearts. Boring, if you left out the star-crossed nature of their relationship—Betsy the daughter of the ranch owner and Pete the son of the foreman. Everyone on the ranch had considered them as close as brother and sister. When Betsy’s father had found out they were closer, he’d threatened to send her to college on the East coast, right after used his bullwhip on Pete.

The reality of his coming grandchild had ended both the threat of a whipping and any hope of college. Not that Betsy had cared. She’d loved the ranch as much as Pete had, as much as Gina did now.

Gina and Jase had been kids that day, heading straight for the place Jase’s granddad, Isaac, had warned them against.

At the end of Lonely Deer Trail the Tangwaci Cin-au’-ao sleeps. You must never, ever walk there.

According to Isaac, the Tangwaci Cin-au’-ao was an evil spirit of such power that whoever went anywhere near it died. Basically, he was the Ute Angel of Death, and he lived at their place. What fifteen-year-old could resist that?

Certainly not Gina.

She’d become obsessed with the end of Lonely Deer Trail. She’d crept closer and closer. She’d taken pictures of the flat plain that dropped into nowhere, yet a tree seemed to grow out of the sky. And when that sky filled with dawn or dusk, the tree seemed to catch fire.

How could anyone not want to explore that?

Jase hadn’t wanted to go, but she’d teased him unmercifully. In the end, he’d given in, as she’d known he would. And to Jase’s credit, he’d never once said: I told you so.

Not when the earth had crumpled beneath them.

Not when they’d tried to climb out and only succeeded in pulling an avalanche of summer-dried ground back in.

Not when they’d been buried alive, unable to move, barely able to breathe.

Not even when they’d both understood they would die there.

Because if Gina’s sleep was disturbed by the ghostly, singsong trill, if on occasion the wind also called her name, if she felt every morning in that instant before she awoke the same thing she’d felt in that cavern—the stirring of something demonic, the reaching of its deformed hand in a mad game of Duck, Duck, Goose—pointing first at Gina, then at Jase, before settling its death-claw on her parents, well …

That was probably I told you so enough.

*

Mateo Mecate stared at the hieroglyphics until they blurred in front of his overworked eyes. He might be one of the foremost scholars in Aztec studies, but the letters still sometimes read like gibberish. He shoved them aside, removing his glasses and rubbing a hand over his face.

According to the calendar, May meant spring. As usual, Tucson wasn’t listening. The temperatures had been pushing ninety for a week.

The door to Matt’s small, dusty, scalding office opened, and his boss, George Enright, stepped in. His gaze went to the papers on Matt’s desk, and he frowned.

“Mateo.” Enright’s voice held so much disappointment, Matt expected him to cluck his tongue, then shake his head, or perhaps his finger, in admonishment. “This has to stop. I’ve put up with it thus far because of the respect I had for your mother. But the time has come to move on.”

Enright was the head of the anthropology department at the University of Arizona where Matt was a professor of archaeology—his specialty, like his mother’s before him, the civilization of the Aztecs.

Nora Mecate had been a descendant of that great civilization. She’d been fascinated—some said obsessed—with proving a theory she’d gleaned from ancient writings passed down through her family for generations. She spent her life—no, she gave her life—trying to prove it.

“You could become the chair of this department when I retire. But you need to abandon your mother’s ridiculous theory. You’re becoming a laughingstock.” Enright lowered his voice. “As she was.”

Matt stiffened. Any academic who refused to face facts became an amusing anecdote at the staff water cooler. Matt had noticed a lot of the graduate students staring and whispering lately.

Not that such behavior was anything new. For some reason the women around here liked to fashion him a Hispanic Indiana Jones. He wasn’t, but that didn’t stop them from pointing and giggling and showing up during his office hours with foolish questions they already knew the answer to.

Matt wasn’t interested. Not that he didn’t occasionally date—if the willing women he took to dinner, then back to his bed, then never saw again, could be considered dates—but his life was work, and he had little use for anything else.

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