Texas Gothic (38 page)

Ben dropped his hands to his knees, ready for any suggestion. “If you’ve got some spell for lifting a half ton of truck, I won’t complain.”

I chewed on my lip, thinking hard. “Phin could probably magically MacGyver something, but that’s not my thing.”

“What is your thing?”

“Ghosts.” Saying it aloud seemed to solidify something in my mind. It felt real and tangible. True.

“That’s not particularly helpful in this situation,” said Ben, harshing my moment of self-actualization. “Unless your
ghost
can lift a half-ton truck.”

“Maybe it can.” I didn’t know. Believing one thing had just left me with more questions. “I do know it’s warned me twice about danger,” I told him. “I mean, it nearly froze me to death, but it kept Sparks from finding me the other night.”

Cuidado
. I could almost hear the ghost now. Was that why I was so certain we couldn’t wait on Phin to bring the authorities?

“I’m going to call it.” The idea was on my lips before it had fully formed in my brain. “Maybe if it could warn me before it can help us now.”

Ben raised his hands, as if holding me back. “Whoa. Didn’t you just say this thing nearly froze you to death?”

“Yeah, it did, but I think I can control things now. You said it. I’m the human. This is my world, my rules.”

“Amy, honey.” He rubbed my arm gently, as if telling me bad news. “You shouldn’t listen to me. I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.”

I ignored him—because he was right—and stood, wobbling only slightly. Ben pushed himself to his feet using a stalactite. Or stalagmite. The stone was all dry, which meant this wasn’t a living, growing cave, but stable. Or maybe not, if people were blowing holes in it.

I found the knotted spot in my psyche that had looped tight the night of Aunt Hyacinth’s call, feeling the tug of the bond in that place deep inside. The place where you got hunches, where you dug down deep for courage.

My head pounded with the effort I put into my thoughts—
Come to me. Help me. If I don’t get out of here, I’ll never find you
.

Nothing happened. I opened my eyes, looked around for confirmation that all was still, that the air was cave-cool, not cold.

This was going to suck if I failed in front of Ben. It was
going to suck if I failed and died, but if Ben weren’t here, at least no one would know about it.

He must have seen the doubt in my face. “You controlled it before. I saw you.”

“Yeah.” The stabs of doubt faded to pinpricks.

“Maybe you need to speak Spanish.”

I didn’t quite groan. “Great. Señora Markowitz would be laughing now.”

Shaking myself out, much like Daisy had done, I spread my fingers and toes, the flex of tendon and muscle sending warmth and energy to my extremities.

“Venga aquí. Venga a mí. Ayúdame a encontrarle.”
I hesitated a moment, then added,
“Por favor.”
Because politeness never hurt.

Air currents swirled against my skin, a coolness on my flushed cheeks that stirred my hair and soothed my headache. The air swirled faster as I flexed my fingers again. Controlling the moment, but giving up my stubborn, fearful grip on the mundane world and giving in to the Goodnight one. Falling down the rabbit hole, and not worrying how I would get back out.

The light was electric and white, not luminous and blue.

“Turn off the lantern, Ben.”

After the smallest hesitation, he did as I asked. In the utter blackness, the current strengthened. Icy fingers lifted my hair, and steam collected in front of my mouth. I could see it in the faint glow coming from deeper in the cavern.

Búscame
 …

The word breathed through my mind.

I felt for Ben’s hand and held tight. “I think we need to go that way.”

“I thought you were calling it to you,” he said.

“My Spanish is a little rusty.” I looked up at him, barely able to see his outline in the spectral light. “But do you want to stay
here
?”

He cast a quick look around the cave, the dead end of our current situation, and squeezed my fingers. “Let’s go, then.”

The light led to a passageway, became brighter as we followed it through twists and turns. The passage narrowed until Ben had to squeeze through, and I saw him pale with pain as the rock dug into his ribs.

I wanted to let him rest, but an urgency pulled me forward. When I’d connected with the psychic knot inside me, it had drawn inexorably tight.

When the passage got too low I dropped to my knees and crawled. I finally emerged into a small chamber. The ghostly glow suffused the space, illuminating a dead end, and a dead man.

The skeletal remains of the soldier were dry and ancient and lay sprawled on a fall of earth like a rocky bed. The tatters of a uniform still clung to the bones, but the buckles and buttons and insignia had fallen ignominiously from the scraps of cloth.

Ben, muttering pained curses, squeezed through the entrance into the small cave, falling onto the floor with a grunt. “Your ghost,” he wheezed, “must hate me.”

“Shhh.” I knew better, from working on the dig that
week, but I reached out anyway, picking up a brass crest, marveling at how old it was. It was still shiny under a layer of tarnish. “Ben, look. He
was
a soldier.”

He did look. He looked at the bones, then looked around the cavern, which was barely tall enough for him to stand up and stretch his arms. “This isn’t an escape, Amy. It’s a tomb.”

“y
our ghost,” accused Ben, “has led us to a trap. Maybe the same trap that killed him.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” I said. But he was right about one thing. I couldn’t see an exit. The side of the cave where the skeletal figure rested seemed to have collapsed. Maybe that was why he’d died here. Or maybe he’d been killed by someone and never found.

“His head is resting on something,” I said, crawling closer to look.

“Amy, are you listening?”

“It’s a bundle of black cloth!” With apologies to Dr.
Douglas, I eased a finger under the stiff and rotted material, gently bracing the skull with my other hand so I didn’t dislodge it. “There’s something shiny. I can just see it.”

“Amaryllis!” Ben’s voice seemed far away. “Come back to earth. We are in trouble here.”

He grabbed my arm just as I pulled free a heavy metal object that rasped across the stone. The sound echoed through the cavern and down the passage we’d crawled out of.

In my hand was a solid gold cross, barely tarnished, and inlaid with gems. They didn’t gleam in the ghost light, and I couldn’t see their color. But this was a precious item.

Ben stared at it, too. “Oh my God. It
is
the Mad Monk.”

A faint breeze stirred the dirt on the floor. “I don’t think so, Ben. This was hidden. And it’s not very … monkish.”

“Did you read the story?” he demanded. “The one in the book? About how the Mad Monk—or whoever he was—ran off with the expedition’s treasure and was killed by his collaborators?”

The wind was getting stronger, and colder. “If you knew that story,” I snapped, “why did you follow the light?”

“Because we didn’t have a lot of options.” He chewed on his next words, and spit them out reluctantly. “And I trust you. But I don’t trust this ghost.”

I could see his breath, as the temperature kept dropping. “Ben, now is
not
the time to be a jackass.”

The glow that suffused the cavern seemed to pull in on itself, to gather near the wall closest to the skeleton. It brightened in the center, until I had to shade my eyes against the blue-white light.

Ben’s hand tightened on my arm hard enough that I gasped in pain. Surprise made me drag my eyes from the gathering specter, and I saw that the fog of Ben’s breath had gone still and his other hand clutched his side.

I knew that feeling. But if he struggled against the grip of the ghost, tried to force his lungs to work, and he had a cracked or broken rib …

“Leave him alone.” I didn’t bother with Spanish, but took hold of the knot of connection between the specter and me and pushed my demand through it.

Inocente …

The word bloomed in my mind. Ben swayed on his feet, and I caught him around the waist, staggering under his weight.

“If you’re innocent,” I said to the ghost, “let him go.”

With the suddenness of a snapping bone, the specter released Ben. He gasped in a breath and clutched my shoulders as his strength returned.

“Now,” he panted, “do you believe he’s a traitor?”

Ben learned lessons the hard way. He held me against him, as if protecting me from the specter that had appeared, a colorless figure of light and shadow, across the tiny cavern.

The figure raised its hand, but instead of pointing at me, it pointed to a chest next to the skeleton, half hidden by the fall of earth that had trapped him.

Inocente …

The voice seemed to be only in my head. Ben looked at me for guidance. I collected my courage and edged to where
the ghost pointed. Ben followed me, still watching the figure warily.

We dug it out together, a banded wooden chest the size of a toaster. Finally, exchanging looks and deep breaths of cold air, under the dark stare of the specter, we opened it.

“Empty,” said Ben. He looked from the box to the motionless soldier, sorting through legend and evidence and trying to reconcile what was in front of him. “So he didn’t steal the expedition’s treasure?”

I studied the ghost, who seemed to study me back. I’d never seen his clothes before, but as I took them in now, the pieces began to come together.

“Look at him, Ben. He’s got a monk’s robe over his uniform. Maybe he was in disguise. He could have been a decoy.”

He paused, fitting the idea into a theory. “Let their attackers see a priest with a shiny cross running off with a treasure chest?” He seemed to unbend, admit he could be wrong about the ghost. He nodded at the jewels and gold still in my hands. “I guess if I were a robber, I’d go after that.”

Inocente
.

The ghost faded out, leaving us in utter darkness.

I held my breath for a moment, waiting to see if he would come back, but the connection between us felt slack and unraveled, like a string with no tension on the other end.

In the silence, another sound reached me. I knew Ben heard it, too, because his shoulder, pressed against mine in the close quarters, tensed.

An engine noise, and a scraping, and the murmur of voices.

“Do you think it’s the cavalry?” I barely dared to whisper. Ben murmured back, so close to my ear his voice didn’t even stir the air, “I think we should be very, very still.”

m
y heart tapped out a Morse code of tight, trapped panic. I might have fulfilled my duty to the ghost, but I’d still be linked with him forever, because my bones would lie with his for eternity.

And Ben’s. I could feel his breath on my neck, stirring my hair. A strand tickled my nose, and my legs began to cramp. I ached to move but any scrape of rock would echo through the cave and give away our position.

The voices became clearer as they rose in frustration and anger. Definitely not Phin and the state troopers, but Sparks and Kelly.

“They’re searching for us,” Ben whispered against my ear. “We must have left a trail like a wounded buffalo.”

I could feel his fight-or-flight tension, but there wasn’t room for fight and there wasn’t any place to go.

And then I heard a rustle, something I’d never have heard if we weren’t crouched like mice in a trap. The sound made me notice something else I’d missed while distracted by bones and ghosts and the certainty of my imminent demise.

“Do you smell that?” I whispered. I felt him inhale, then sort of cough. “Guano.”

“If there are bats, then there’s an opening to the outside.”

Ben carefully twisted to check all angles, and I felt the change in his tension when he saw something. “Over there.”

There was a flat opening hidden behind the soldier’s resting place, an infinitesimally lighter darkness against the cavern wall. I’d missed it because I hadn’t wanted to disturb the remains. But there was no helping that now.

We had to crawl over the skeleton to get out. I tried to be careful, but in the dark I had to feel my way across. The fabric disintegrated, and bits of remnant flesh fell like scraps of leather. The bones cracked like dry twigs under my hands.

On the other side, Ben boosted me over a row of stalagmites, and we worked around a bend … and suddenly I knew where we were.

“I’ve been here before.” I looked up in disbelief at the cave opening, shaded with an overhang covered with bats. I’d been only twenty to thirty yards from the ghost’s remains two nights ago. “This is my bat cave.”

Ben stumbled on the uneven footing of the layers and layers of bat guano and followed my gaze to the mouth of the cave. It was a long way up. “But we’re still trapped.”

The rabbit warren of the cave carried Sparks’s voice to us, calling that he’d found our trail. How badly did they want to follow us? If they presumed the cave was a dead end, maybe they’d just let us rot, like the soldier without a grave.

But the voices were getting closer, and Mike Kelly was a small guy—he could probably worm his way right through. I backed up a step in spite of myself, edging up against the nearly vertical cave wall. Ben stepped forward, hands clenched into fists.

Then I felt a hard tug on the knot in my stomach, a wrench of warning.

Cuidado
, breathed a voice in my head.

On instinct, I reached for Ben and yanked him against the wall. The phantom knot in my psyche gave a jerk and came loose, wrenched free by the force of what came next. There was a bang, and a
whump
that shook me to my bones, and the stone sky crumbled with a mighty crack that sent the bats into the air with squeals that made my teeth ache.

I’d pulled us to the one spot without rock overhead, and Ben swung around, putting his back to the thundering stone rain, pressing me against the wall, tucking my head against his chest as he covered his own with his arms. The shaking of the earth melded with the shaking in my bones and the quake of fear even deeper, in the part of me that wasn’t ready to die yet.