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Until he’d made her remember. Now all she could think about was the time she’d spent underground.
The wind battered her face, whipped her hair, sang to her a name.
“Giiii-naaaa!”
“Hell,” she muttered. One of these days she was going to have to either figure out why she kept hearing that or check herself into a place where she couldn’t.
The sky lit up like a carnival midway, and she stopped so fast she slid several inches in the mud, arms pinwheeling as she tried to avoid falling on her ass. She managed, just barely.
She might not want to talk about what lay at the end of Lonely Deer Trail, but it appeared she was pretty intent on standing at the end of Lonely Deer Trail. She was nearly there.
And the wind kept calling her name.
“Giiii-naaa!”
“Fuck you,” she muttered, but she kept moving.
She didn’t feel any change beneath her feet as she approached. But then she wasn’t a horse.
The night was so dark. Just as it had been back then. No rain that time, but the clouds had covered the moon.
The complete darkness all around made her feel as if she were in space, where gravity was skewed and up could be down or the other way around. The startling flashes of light caused the barren, glistening landscape to resemble the surface of the moon.
The sky flared again, and she started as Teo’s damn tree of life—her harbinger of death—sprang up in front of her. If she’d kept going—half-walking, half-jogging, was that wogging?—she’d have run smack into it.
She slipped, and this time no amount of pinwheeling could prevent her from falling. The movement did, however, keep her from landing on her ass. Instead, she landed on her face. Or near enough.
Despite her disorientation, she brought her arms up and broke her fall. She still smacked her head into the ground. But she turned her neck sharply, so instead of crunching her nose, she felt her temple connect with a dull, squishy thud.
Then she lay there, letting her pulse return to normal. It didn’t matter that she wallowed in the mud or that water sluiced across the ground as if running desperately downhill, despite the flat nature of the plain, skirting her body like a dam in a creek. She was already soaked.
But her pulse didn’t slow, even though her breathing did. She felt fine. She wasn’t hurt. Her heart shouldn’t be beating so fast and so loudly the very earth seemed to shake with its force.
Gina rolled sideways, placing her palm against her chest.
Bu-bump. Bu-bump. Normal rhythm.
She laid her hand on the ground.
Ba-bump-ba-bump-ba-bump.
She snatched her hand away. The earth seemed to be shaking because it was shaking. Or at least beating to the tune of a very fast heart.
No wonder the horses flipped whenever they walked here. The vibration made her teeth itch, and horses had a lot more teeth.
Gina sat up, curling her legs into her chest and wrapping her arms around her knees; then she again touched the ground.
With the exact same results. The heart of the earth beat against her palm with such force her skin crawled.
She wiped her hand against her jeans, but the thud continued beneath, vibrating through her butt and up her spine. She felt as if her hair, despite being plastered to her scalp by the needle-like rain, was actually standing on end.
“Giii-naaa,” whispered the wind, and she shivered, causing the hairs on her arms to dance.
“Hey!”
Her head lifted; her eyes scanned the darkness. Had she heard someone shout? Perhaps the whispers of Gina had actually been the word Gina coming from a human mouth instead of a—
Well, who knew?
