Crave the Moon

by Lori Handeland

  “No. The movie.”

  “I don’t see many movies,” he admitted. “Raiders of the Lost Ark once.” He shrugged. “I liked it.”

  Gina stared at him. No movies? What kind of life was that?

  One in which more exciting things happened to him every day than he could ever see on the screen.

  “There was a movie about a mummy,” she said. “Brendan Fraser.” Teo opened his mouth, and she shook her head. “Never mind. Anyway, this guy boinked the Pharaoh’s honey, and they—the Egyptians, I think—buried him alive.”

  “Never boink the Pharaoh’s honey,” Teo murmured.

  “I think that was the lesson they were going for. Anyway, they buried him and his minions with all these booby traps so that anyone who came across the crypt had bad things happen and then the tomb raiders would run away before they got to the big prize.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Acid flew out of some of the graves when they opened them. And there were these creepy-monkey priests.”

  “Creepy-monkey?” he repeated.

  “You had to see them. They could run sideways on walls. Very scary. Then there were these nasty beetles that crept under your skin. They’d crash through your toe and scuttle all the way up to your—” Gina shuddered. She’d always hated that part of the movie. “Believe me, you wanted to leave soon after you came.”

  “Explain to me why you think this movie connects to…” Teo waved his hand at the empty room.

  “What if the howl was a booby trap, or at least a sound effect to frighten away the amateurs? Open the door, a howl erupts.”

  “That might explain the smoke, too.”

  “Okay,” Gina agreed. She was willing to agree to anything if it would explain that smoke.

  Who knew? If they could logically explain howling, freezing black smoke, maybe they could also logically explain the unwolves and the singsongy Gina voice.

  However, Gina doubted she’d be that lucky.

  “Show me where you were when you heard the click and the howl.” Teo moved into the hall, crowding Gina forward, sweeping her along with both his body and his enthusiasm. “What did you do? What did you say?”

  She tried to remember exactly what had happened and in what order and in doing so fell behind. Teo simply reached back, snatching her hand in his as if he’d done the same a thousand times before and therefore knew where both she and her hand would be.

  Gina’s throat went thick with need, not for sex but for this. A connection to someone that went beyond sight, beyond mind, beyond body—the kind of connection her parents had had.

  Before she’d killed them.

  Teo squeezed her fingers, rubbing his thumb along the base of hers, a comforting gesture that aroused feelings that went beyond comfort.

  Had she made an involuntary movement? Had she gasped or whimpered? She didn’t think so. Nevertheless, he had sensed her distress and answered it. Her longing intensified.

  What was wrong with her? She should hate him. He was a liar, an imposter, a thief. Her mind knew these things, but her body didn’t seem to care.

  Teo arrived at the wall of glyphs. Lifting the lantern, he squinted, then he dropped her hand, and Gina had to clench hers until her nails bit into the palm to keep from reaching out and taking his back.

  “The dog-headed man and the la symbol.” Teo tapped his fingernail, usually so clean and white but now slightly tarnished with dirt beneath the glyphs. “You stood here?”

  He turned, his eyes more spring leaves than winter moss, and tilted his head. His hair slid over his shoulder. She clenched her other hand to stop herself from touching it.

  “Um.” Gina took a breath, striving for calm. Instead her heartbeat increased in tempo as her nose filled with the scent of dust and oranges. She glanced at the floor, where his boots stood right next to the imprint of hers. “Yeah.”

  “Show me.” Gina blinked, and he made a “be my guest” gesture with one long-fingered, dirty hand. “Where you were, what you did.”

  Gina stepped forward, positioning her feet directly atop the prints she’d made earlier. “I was looking at the pictures, thinking about what you’d told me. You said this…” She put her finger beneath the man-dog figure. “Might be an indication of an army and not a single man. Which made me think Nahua.”

  “Except the Aztecs called themselves Tenochca.”

  He leaned over her shoulder to see better, and his hair brushed past her cheek, causing a shiver. His hands landed on her shoulders and he rubbed her arms, quick and fast, as if to warm her. Gina couldn’t help it; she leaned into him, pressing her back against his front. They’d both been drenched; they should be equally cold, except he gave off heat like a bonfire.

  “Wh-what does Tenochca-la mean?” she whispered, afraid if she spoke too loudly he might move away.

  “Diddly.”

  Teo leaned closer. Gina had to bite her lip to keep from arching into him. He was just too hot, and she was oh, so cold.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. But boy, did she want it.

  “Me, either,” he muttered, and now his breath brushed her cheek, the heat of it warming Gina all the way to her icy, stiff toes. “These are Aztec figures. But I don’t know why any Aztec would draw this.”

  He reached past her and tapped the man-dog head, then the la symbol. His arm rested on her shoulder; she wanted to turn her head and rub her cheek against it.

  “Is there any such thing as a Nahual?”

  “There is. I don’t know that much about it, since my specialty is the history and writings of the Aztecs. The Nahual is more a mystical thing.”

  “A god?”

  “No. A Nahual was a spirit that took the form of an animal. A guardian. Everyone received a different Nahual, which was tied to the day of his or her birth in the ancient calendar. If you were born on the dog day, for example, your Nahual would take the form of a dog.”

  Gina frowned at the figure. “You think this guy was born on the dog day?”

  “Could be.”

  “So that would mean this glyph refers to a single person, rather than an army of them.”

  “Maybe. A Nahual was considered extremely personal. Not something to be advertised, or drawn on walls. An Aztec would only speak of his Nahual to a very close friend or relative.”

  Gina shrugged, the movement rubbing the back of her all over the front of him, creating a friction she wanted to continue so badly she immediately stopped. “That just means whoever drew this was his pal.”

  “Hmm,” Teo murmured, the reverberation in his chest trailing up her spine and settling at her neck, causing goose bumps to erupt everywhere.

  He rubbed her shoulders and arms, again almost absently. Had she shuddered? She didn’t think so.

  “I’m gonna need to talk to an expert on this.”

  His right hand left her arm. She wanted to reach for him and bring it back. He cursed, and she turned her head to find him staring at his cell phone.

  “No bars,” he muttered.

  She let her gaze wander over the ceiling of the cave they were in. Why on earth would he think there would be bars? The man was so smart yet sometimes, also, so dumb. Why did that make her want to hug him?

  Gina sighed. She was in so much trouble.

  Teo put away his phone. “We need to go back.”

  She started to move away, and the hand still on her arm tightened.

  “First,” he said in that ruined voice that made her yearn, “finish telling me exactly what you said, what you did.”

  Gina contemplated the glyphs in front of her for several seconds, remembering. “I combined what I thought was Nahua and that symbol, which you said was an ‘l’ sound at the end of a word into Nahual. Then I heard a click—” She jerked her chin in the direction of the tomb. “Down there. Something howled; then this dark smoke barreled past and disappeared out the hole I put in the ceiling.”

  “Hmm,” he repeated. “Words wouldn’t open a tomb.”


  “They did in the movie,” she muttered.

  “I don’t think the Aztecs saw it.” Gina glanced over her shoulder to see if he was kidding, but Teo continued to stare at the glyphs. She doubted he even knew what he’d said. All he cared about was the wall. “Did you touch something?”

  “Yeah.” Gina pointed to the area below the man-dog figure, and Teo reached out to touch it, too.

  Their fingers met, hers leaving, his going. Teo’s breath caught; Gina’s did, too. Then several soft thuds from above were followed by a louder, lower thump to the right.

  “What was that?” Gina asked, just as Teo muttered, “Shit,” and Jase called out, “Gina?”

  * * *

  Matt stepped away from Gina, stifling a groan. When their hands had touched, he’d felt it all the way down to his toes. For just an instant, he’d entertained the notion of spinning her around and taking her against the glyph-strewn wall.

  Thankfully, he’d refrained. What if he’d been buried deep inside of her when McCord showed up?

  Matt winced and rubbed a hand over his face. How in hell had the guy found them and why?

  McCord’s boots begin to stomp down the corridor in their direction. Light bobbed to the right, and Jase McCord appeared an instant later. His frantic gaze went directly to Gina; then so did he. He wrapped his huge hands around her arms, his wide shoulders blocking Matt’s view. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What the hell, Gina?” He scraped his fingers through his short, glistening hair. “I found your camp, the horses, then the hole. I thought I’d have a heart attack. When you didn’t answer—” His hands fell back to his sides, and he turned, his cool, dark eyes narrowing when they encountered Matt. “Why didn’t you answer?”

  Matt couldn’t help it; he smiled.

  McCord took one step toward him, and Gina grabbed his arm. She would never have been able to hold him back; he was built like a bull, and he wanted Matt to be his own personal china closet. But the instant she touched him, murmuring, “Hey,” the man stilled. Talk about taming the savage beast.

  “I’m sorry you were scared.” She rubbed McCord’s arm, and all the tension flowed out of him. His broad shoulders slumped; his thick neck seemed to lose strength so that his head fell forward. “But why are you here?”

  McCord’s head came up, his nostrils flaring like that bull. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “I fell in a hole, Jase. There isn’t much to interrupt except an extreme need for TYLENOL.”

  The fight went out of him. The guy changed directions so fast Matt was starting to get whiplash. “You said you were okay.”

  “I am.”

  “Why are you…” He peered around the cavern, seeming to see it for the first time, and his perpetual scowl deepened. “Where did this come from?”

  “Must have been here all along.”

  He stared at the wall and the icons. “I never saw it.”

  “We never saw anything but dirt.”

  He turned in a circle. “And where is that dirt? It was supposed to be filling this in forever.”

  “A cavern’s a cavern,” Matt said. “Filling it in won’t change that.”

  McCord cast a withering glare in Matt’s direction. “We did change it. This place has been buried for ten years.”

  “After it caved in.”

  McCord glanced quickly at Gina, and she shrugged, which only made the man’s face darken. McCord wasn’t happy she’d told Matt about their experience here. Matt had to wonder if she’d ever told anyone, and the thought that she might not have, that he was the first, made him bold.

  “You can fill this place with dirt over and over again,” he said in his Dr. Mecate voice, “but what the earth wants to be it will be. There’s some underground stream or drain or soft spot that makes the ground above collapse. You should just leave it alone.”

  “Fat chance,” McCord muttered. “Granddad’s gonna fill this back in the instant your ass is out.”

  “Jase, you’re supposed to be leading the second half of the tour, and that isn’t on this side of the ranch.”

  McCord glanced down. “Well, we— I mean, they—”

  “He changed the itinerary,” Matt murmured.

  Gina’s brow creased. “Why?”

  “So he could keep an eye on us.”

  “Eye?” Gina repeated, then glanced from Matt to her childhood friend and back again. “Huh?”

  “He’s jealous.”

  “I’ve told you before, Teo—”

  “His name’s not Teo!” McCord erupted. “It’s Dr. Mecate. Matt. Moldy to you.”

  Gina’s lips tightened. “I met him as Teo, and Teo he is to me. You call him whatever you like. Now, explain why you brought paying customers to the shitty side of the ranch.”

  McCord’s own lips went tight. His face turned dark red. In an instant, steam might come out of his ears.

  Matt should have known better, but sometimes he just didn’t. “Tell her what you did,” he said. “How you’ve warned every man away from her. How you warned me.”

  McCord might be big and bulky, but he moved faster than a thin, lithe snake. He stepped forward, popping Matt in the chin before anyone could stop him.

  As if anyone could have stopped him.

  Matt’s head snapped back and Gina cried out, but he didn’t go down. He was quite proud of that. Because his face hurt like a bitch.

  He was able to stare calmly at the man, whom Gina held by the arm. “Hitting me doesn’t make what I said any less true.” Matt transferred his gaze to Gina. “Doesn’t it seem a little too weird that no one’s ever come back after a first date? You aren’t that bad.”

  She laughed. Just once, a sparkling, happy sound, and Matt realized he’d done that. He’d made her doubt there was something wrong with her, made her consider there was something wrong, instead, with all of them. What man would let another warn him away from Gina? She was worth fighting for. Hell, she was worth dying for.

  Gina’s laughter faded, and her forehead creased as she added two plus two and got, of all things, four. “Jase.” She let go of his arm. “Why are you here?”

  The man’s gaze met Matt’s, and in it Matt saw coming retribution. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday, and someday soon, McCord was going to get him.

  “We’ve got trouble,” McCord said. “Someone’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 16

  “Dead?” Gina repeated. “Who?”

  For an instant she thought of Isaac, of Fanny, and she couldn’t breathe. Then she realized that if Jase’s granddad or his mother were dead, he certainly wouldn’t be questioning her and punching Teo.

  Would he?

  The Jase she’d thought she knew wouldn’t. However, the Jase who’d emerged lately, the one Teo insisted had been there all along … him she didn’t know at all.

  A shadow passed over Jase’s face. There and then gone, disturbing because she’d never seen that expression before. It made him appear young and uncertain—a boy’s expression, not a man’s.

  She couldn’t help it; she reached out and took his hand. “What happened?”

  His fingers tightened around hers, clinging, also something he’d never done. “We were camped by the stream. We had to go around and then it was late, getting dark.”

  “We were there,” Gina said, hoping to speed things up. Who was dead?

  “Everyone was headed to their tents. Mel had taught us a new song.”

  “Uh-oh,” Gina murmured, and Jase’s lips tilted just a bit before they stopped, straightening again into that tight, stressed line.

  “Yeah. The first one was about a guy named Frick who tried to balance on his—”

  “Got it!” Gina interrupted.

  “I made him teach another. ‘Ghost Chickens in the Sky.’ It was catchy. People liked it. They were still singing, which made it easy to hear when—” He broke off, gulped. “They stopped.”

  “What do you mean they stopped?” T
eo asked.

  Jase’s hand in hers jerked. He’d forgotten Teo was there.

  “They stopped,” Jase snapped. “First singing, then not.”

  “Okay,” Gina soothed. Had Jase’s hand begun to shake? “What’s so bad about that?”

  “That wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was the screaming.”

  “The bad part is always the screaming,” Teo muttered. “You probably should have started with that.”

  Jase shot him a glare. Gina squeezed Jase’s fingers until he returned his attention to her. “Go on.”

  “The screams were coming from all directions. I—I didn’t know which way to run first. I went to the As because, well—”

  “They were the loudest?” Gina guessed.

  “No.”

  “They weren’t?” Gina asked. “No way.”

  “Not they. When I got there, only one of them was left.”

  “Which one?”

  “Who knows?” Jase put the heel of his free hand between his eyes and pressed. “Who cares?”

  Gina let that go for the moment. “Where was she?”

  “Gone.”

  “She couldn’t just be gone,” Gina insisted. “What did the other one say?”

  Jase lowered his arm. “After she stopped shrieking like someone was sticking an ice pick in her eye?”

  Gina could imagine. She was surprised she and Teo hadn’t heard the girl down here.

  “Yeah, then,” Gina agreed.

  “It didn’t make much sense.”

  “Which would make it equal to a lot of what the As have said so far.”

  Jase’s lips curved again. Making jokes seemed to help him focus or at least calm down enough to continue. “She said they were singing, then there was a whoosh, a swirl of black, and—” He paused, then snapped his fingers. “Ashleigh was gone.”

  Gina and Teo exchanged a glance. He opened his mouth, but she shook her head. Better that she asked the questions of Jase.

  “A swirl of black?” she asked. “What’s that mean?”

  “How the hell should I know? Amberleigh said the darkness took her. She’s still gibbering about it.”

  Gina couldn’t blame her. She was starting to feel a little like gibbering herself.