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She couldn’t do that. What if he went there? What if he found … it?
Gina crossed to the open back doorway of the barn, drawing in a deep breath of spring air as she stared at the ebony roll of the distant mountains and the new grass tinged silver by the wisp of a moon.
Giiiiii-naaaa!
Sometimes the wind called her name. Sometimes the coyotes. Sometimes she even heard it in the howls of the wolves that were never, ever there.
The singsong trill haunted her, reminding her of all she had lost. She’d come to the conclusion that the call was her conscience, shouting out the last word her parents had ever uttered in an attempt to make sure she remembered, as if she could 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 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 he used his bullwhip on Pete.
The reality of the 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 him 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 appeared 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. 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.
