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“I understand now why you didn’t want me here,” he murmured. “But I still have to look.”
She almost told him everything—what she’d heard, what she’d felt—except she was trying to convince him not to dig farther. If she told him that, she’d only intrigue him more.
“It’s dangerous,” she said instead.
“I’ve done this before; the people I’ll have helping me have done this before. The machinery and tools we’ll be using are made for this situation. It’ll all work out. You’ll see. We might even find—” He broke off, but Gina knew what he’d been about to say.
He thought they might find her parents. Was that what she wanted?
Gina glanced around the hollow where she’d fallen, no longer pitch-black but beginning to gray with the glint of a rising moon.
She’d never understood the need to bury a body. Her parents’ funeral hadn’t been any less final without twin coffins at the front of the church. The headstones Isaac had insisted they place in the cemetery weren’t any more upsetting because they marked empty plots.
So, no, Gina didn’t care if they found her parents. In fact, she’d much prefer they did not.
But what she wanted didn’t matter. Teo would dig, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it beyond watch.
“I’ll get a rope, some light, the hors…” He paused. “Well, at least the rope and a light.”
“Crap,” Gina muttered. It wasn’t as easy as it appeared on TV to haul a person out of a hole. If there was a horse available to help, you used the damn horse.
Unless the creature planned to behave like the wildest bronc at the rodeo as soon as it came anywhere near.
“I’ll be right back,” Teo said, and then he was gone.
Gina wrapped her arms around herself and kept her gaze on the sky so she wouldn’t be tempted to let it wander around the cavern.
However, creaks and crinkles, whistles, and was that a whimper? tempted her. She cast quick glances—first forward, then up, then to the left, the right, back up, and finally to the rear, where she could have sworn she saw something move.
She began to hum, uncertain at first of the song, until another loud reech forced the words right out.
“In a castle, on a mountain,
Near the dark and murky Rhine,
Dwelt a doctor, the concocter
Of the monster Frankenstein.”
Gina laughed, though the sound gurgled weak and watery. Of all of Mel’s songs to remember right now, it had to be that one.
She hoped singing would make the swirling shadows b
ack off. Instead, the sound of her own voice echoing out of one helluva big empty hole only made them seem to swirl closer, brushing against her skin, cool as fog. So she sang louder.
“In a graveyard, near the castle,
Where the sun refused to shine,
He found noses and some toeses,
For his monster Frankenstein.”
Gina’s gaze flickered downward again. If there were any spare noses or toeses, she figured she’d find them right over …
There.
She yanked her gaze back to the shimmering, silent moon.
