Texas Gothic (26 page)

The panicked gallop of my pulse had become a lurching stumble. I was going to die in this hole, and no one was ever going to find me. I knew it with a certainty.

Tears blurred the pale figure of the ghost; it ran like a chalk painting in the rain. The tears were for my mother, who wouldn’t know what happened to me.

The sob of fear and fury was for me. I was so scared and so
pissed
.

Only the wall kept me on my feet. My vision was nothing but pinpricks as I raised a trembling hand, fingers outspread, warding off the cold that the specter had brought with him from beyond the veil of death.

And the ghost vanished, leaving the cave so black and silent, I thought for a moment I
had
died. That this was now my grave.

But I could feel my aching lungs taking gasping breaths, and hear my heart, pounding but steady. The air was warming slowly to a normal cavelike chill.

Where had the specter gone? And why?

In the restored quiet, the nonsense syllables that had rattled my brain settled into a pattern in my mind. Not nonsense at all, but a foreign word.

Cuidado. Cuidado
.

Be careful.

Was it a warning or a threat?

c
uidado
. The ghost had frozen me and choked me and nearly wrecked my car. A threat seemed redundant.

But why warn me? Was there something
else
going on, other than skeletons and neighbor feuds and haunted pastures and Mad Monks bashing people on the head?

The last thing jolted my runaway thoughts to a halt.
My
specter hardly ever moved. I wasn’t sure it could. How could it hit people on the head when it seemed barely able to lift an arm?

I jumped as the UT fight song echoed through the cave.
My cell phone. My hands were still shaking so badly, I could barely get it out of my pocket.

I had never been so happy to hear a human voice as I was to hear Ben’s. “According to the GPS, I should be right near you. Can you yell or something?”

“Hang on.” I used the glow of the phone to locate the flashlight. “Watch for a light. There’s a ledge over the cave opening, so you might not see it from the wrong way. I’ll flash you.”

“That’s not necessary. Just blink the light.”

He’d already hung up before I realized he’d made a joke. The world was clearly coming to an end.

The phone rang again, and I didn’t need to look at the caller ID. Especially when she started speaking before I could get a word out.

“Amy! What’s going on?”

“I’m okay, Phin. But we’re going to have a talk about this letting calls go to voice mail—” Call waiting buzzed in, and I glanced at the screen. “I’ll talk to you back at the house. Mom’s calling. The heebie-jeebies are going around.”

I hung up before Phin could ask more questions, then reassured Mom. I didn’t have time to do more than tell her I was okay before the crunch of footsteps on rock drew my gaze up to the mouth of the cave. Ben’s face appeared. He flinched at the flashlight in his eyes and put up a hand to shield them.

“Boy,” he said, “I’m going to
love
hearing this story.”

Ben took a good look at me—whiff, rather—after I’d climbed up the rope he’d tied to the bumper of his truck and
lowered down the hole. My options, he said, were to ride in the bed of the pickup or strip down and wrap up in a horse blanket to sit inside. It wasn’t much of a choice for the risk-adverse.

I sat on the tailgate and toed off my sneakers. “What would your mother say?”

He returned from the cab of the truck with a thick felted-wool blanket. “That I’m being practical.”

“Is that an
actual
horse blanket?” I asked as he held it up like a curtain, closed his eyes, and turned his head.

“Don’t worry. Rusty won’t mind if you borrow it.”

I took my phone out of my pocket, set it on the tailgate, then shucked off my cargo pants and shirt and threw both in the bed of the truck. That got most of the actual gunk off me. Except—

I must have made a little whimper, because Ben started to look, then quickly averted his eyes again. “Are you hurt?”

“It’s in my hair.” I held the strands miserably between my fingers and tried not to cry. It would be stupid to cry at this point. I was safe, just really stinky.

He made a sound halfway between laughter and sympathy. “It’s probably in worse places than that.” He shook the blanket. “Wrap up and I’ll drive you home so you can shower.”

I wrapped the blanket around me like a big, ugly, scratchy towel. My bra straps still showed, but considering how much he’d seen of me in the past, I was positively prudish.

Wherever
he’d
been, it had been casual. He wore jeans and a vintage-looking T-shirt. But he smelled really nice. Spicy and woodsy with a hint of horse. Well, that last part
was probably the blanket. But it wasn’t an unpleasant smell. Certainly not in contrast to me.

“You seem very calm, under the circumstances,” I said warily.

Shoving his hands in his pockets, he raised his brows in sedate inquiry. “Will it make any difference if I yell? Or tell you what an idiot you were, or how badly you could have been hurt? Or how this is
precisely
why you shouldn’t be out here ‘ghost hunting’ or whatever the hell you were doing?”

By the end of that speech, he wasn’t so sedate, and I self-consciously tucked the ends of the blanket more securely. “Will it make any difference if I explain?”

He sighed. “I doubt it. Get in. Let’s get you home.”

I followed him to the cab of the truck and climbed in, smoothing the blanket primly around my legs. It wasn’t much help; it only came to the middle of my thighs. But at least it covered that much. “I have to get Stella,” I told him, once he’d climbed behind the wheel.

“Who’s Stella?” he asked, starting the engine.

“My car. I left her on the road where I saw the—”

I bit off my words, but didn’t fool him. “Saw the what?” he demanded. “The ghost? Is that what you were following across the pasture?”

“Actually, no.” The word came out freely, because it was true, even though it hadn’t been a completely ghost-free adventure. Not by a long shot. “I did see something strange, but it turns out it was a truck.” I frowned, focusing on the difference between the chug of Ben’s pickup and the throatier rumble of what I’d heard. “A diesel engine. Twice, once while I was in the cave.”

He thought that over. “Steve Sparks drives a diesel. Maybe he was out here checking on something. It’s been known to happen. Fence down, cow in trouble, birthing gone wrong …” He slid a glance my way. “Crazy girl in her underwear, running around, falling down sinkholes.”

Before I could do more than glare, the truck hit a bump and I had to grab for the door handle and the blanket at the same time. When things leveled out, so did I. “If someone was out here on ranch business, wouldn’t they have their headlights on?”

He was slow to answer, and glanced at me again, as if judging my veracity or my sanity. “Probably.”

I subsided with a thoughtful “Hmmm.” I would say I was playing my cards close to the vest, but I didn’t really know what kind of hand I held. Lots of people drove diesel pickups, so that wasn’t much of a clue. And what
non
-legit reason could someone have to be out here? Tearing down fences, maybe? Pulling up survey stakes? I couldn’t imagine
why
, but it was clear the ghost—the real ghost—was only one piece of the McCulloch Ranch puzzle.

We’d reached the dirt road and I could see the gate ahead, and Stella on the other side. I only had a minute to say thank you, and you wouldn’t think gratitude would be so hard to put into words. For answering the phone, for coming to get me out of the hole I’d gotten into, and for not being nearly as awful about it as he could have been.

“I appreciate the help,” I said, and should have stopped there. “Sorry if I interrupted your date.”

He didn’t look away from the road, and the barometer of his brows was hard to read in the dashboard light. He
seemed to contemplate a couple of responses, then settle on “It wasn’t a date like that. Caitlin and I know some of the same people at UT.”

“Oh.” What was the appropriate response here? My silly, girly self was doing a joyful dance, and the rest of me was telling her to sit down and shut up because this changed nothing.

We’d reached the gate, freeing him to stop the truck and give me a look I couldn’t read. “What about you? Where are your ghost-hunting buddies? For that matter, where’s your sister? What kind of idiot let you run around in the dark all by yourself?”

“Just this one.” I pointed to myself. “I was headed home to feed the goats, and stopped when I saw …”

“A ghost.” He caught my second verbal fumble.

I lifted my chin primly and pretended I was above responding, when really I couldn’t. Stupid triple-promise spell. My subconscious knew it had been the ghost that stopped me on the road, even if the deep sound and distant light had more mundane explanations.

I skipped ahead to the part I
could
talk about. “I saw a light out in the pasture, and heard a noise, and just … rushed in.” I didn’t have to fake chagrin. It had been stupid, but I hadn’t quite been myself.

Ben watched me, reading the emotions that flitted over my face. Finally he sighed—a weary, heavy sound. “Amy, you could have been killed tonight. Or at least seriously injured. You can’t keep doing this. If those had been poachers out there, you could have been shot, mistaken for an animal in the dark. I’m not just saying this to be a jackass.”

I hadn’t even considered poachers. I heard the ghost again in my head.
Cuidado
. Had he purposefully kept me from signaling whoever was in that other truck?

Taking my silence as assent, Ben got out to open the gate to the highway. The one I’d jumped over earlier. I hadn’t told him where Stella was; she just happened to be at the closest entrance to the pasture.

He got back in and pulled through, and I jumped down from the truck while he was closing the gate again behind us. I’d reluctantly put my shoes back on, because there would be rocks and glass on the side of the road. I did scuff them as I walked, however, to get as much bat crap off as I could.

The pickup’s headlights lit our path as Ben insisted on walking me over to the car. But as we neared it, my steps slowed, because Stella was listing slightly, and I hadn’t parked on a slope.

Ben noticed, too, and went around the driver’s side, putting out a hand as if warning me to stay back.
That
was not going to happen. Rounding the car after him, I saw that her rear tire was flat and somehow … lifeless. I’d had a flat tire before, but tonight there was something chilling about the way the black rubber seemed to pool ominously in the gravel.

“Could that have happened when I slammed on the brakes?” I asked, too tense to even curse. “Or maybe I ran over something when I pulled off the road.”

“I don’t think so.” Crouching by the wheel, Ben sank his finger into the two-inch hole in the sidewall of the tire. There was no way that had been made by anything other than a knife.

Stella had been stabbed.

I stepped back, as if I could distance myself from this sickening fact. As I did, a flutter of white on the windshield caught my eye. With trembling fingers, I pulled a folded slip of paper from under the wiper.

Leave the dead in peace
.

“g
et in the truck.”

Ben’s voice left little room for argument, but I tried to squeeze one in anyway. “I don’t think—”

“Amy, I am not messing around.” His face was grim, and he held out his hand. “Give me your key so I can get your purse and whatever else you want. I’ll drive you home.”

“I am not leaving her here on the side of the road.”

“You did before, to hare off across the pasture.”

“That was different. I didn’t think I’d be gone long. I wasn’t expecting your land to be booby-trapped.”

He took my arm, turned me toward the truck. “I’ll call Triple A from your house.”

“
I
can call them from right here,” I said, pulling out of his grip and turning toward Stella.

He turned me right back. “At least call from in the pickup. In case whoever did this is still around.”

I could have pulled away again—he was persistent, but not rough—only his words distracted me. “What? You think someone is waiting in a tree to snipe me?”

We reached the truck and he backed me up against its side before I could react, taking my shoulders in his hands—my bare shoulders in his hands, and oh my God, the places that made me shiver. He seemed blessedly ignorant of that, unobservant of the blush spreading up from the blanket or the hitch in my breath as he gazed intently into my wide eyes and said, “What kind of idiot are you?”

That snapped me, mostly, out of my haze. Before I could form words, however, he went on. “Someone slashed your tire. With a
knife
. Not a ghost, a person.”

“I know that.” I met his stare, willing him to see the
reasonable
Amy beneath the flake I knew I must seem.

He studied me for another moment, his thoughts visibly shifting in patterns I couldn’t read. His hands, though—I didn’t think he realized his hold on my shoulders had softened, and that as he was thinking his thoughts, his right thumb was sliding back and forth over my skin in an unconscious motion that, if we had been any other people in any other situation, would have been a caress. The traitorous flutters in my pulse didn’t know the difference.

Or maybe he did realize it, an instant before he dropped
me like I was hot, and not in a good way. His gaze zipped away from mine as he stepped back and cleared his throat. “So. Your key?”

“I’m not leaving Stella here,” I said, putting iron in my voice. “I bought it with my own money when my dad didn’t want me to and my mother said she’d pay for it for my graduation present. It was almost new, and it’s not a Goodnight car, it’s
mine.
”

I broke off—hell, I nearly slapped a hand over my own mouth—because some insight clicked behind Ben McCulloch’s eyes and I realized I’d given too much away somehow.