Crave the Moon

by Lori Handeland

  “My mom spent her life studying the Aztecs.” He turned to the window. “She gave her life trying to prove her theories.”

  Ah, at last they’d reached the root of that word was.

  “It was my fault,” he said.

  Gina remained silent. Either Teo would continue or he wouldn’t. Urging him to share his pain would only make him clam up about it. On this she was an expert.

  “I should have been there. But I…” He lifted his gaze. She’d seen enough sadness and guilt in the mirror to recognize them instantly. “According to one of her assistants, someone thought they saw Aztec glyphs and called for her. The area was farther into the cavern, not well lighted yet. But she was excited—probably thinking that she could show me—” He broke off with a long, pained sigh. “She ran, her gaze on where she was going, not how she was going there, and—”

  He slapped his hands together, the sound so sharp, so startling, Gina jumped.

  “Low-hanging rock connected with her head.” He tapped his temple. “Out went the lights.” He swallowed. “And they never came on again.”

  Silence settled between them, broken only by muted voices in the hall. Gina knew she should say she was sorry. She was. She also knew how worthless saying it would be.

  “What about the glyphs?” she asked instead.

  “Scratches from falling rocks. Water stains. Not really drawings at all.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Eighteen. It would have been my last dig before I left for college. We planned to keep searching every summer, working our way through a list of places she’d translated from ancient writings she found in the family library.”

  “Aztec writings?” Gina couldn’t begin to imagine what those would be worth. Probably ten times more than whatever they’d find digging around in the earth.

  Of course the Mecates didn’t need the money. Gina wondered what that might be like.

  “Yes,” he said, then: “Well, not exactly. There are only two known codices—” He paused at her curious expression and translated, “Painted hieroglyphic books. Just two predate the Spanish Conquest: the Tonalamatl Aubin, or Book of Days, and the Codex Borbonicus. Some scholars aren’t even sure those are original.”

  “What happened to the rest?”

  “Spaniards burned them.”

  Gina clucked her tongue, although she wasn’t surprised. From what she could remember of her history, the Spanish had burned a lot of things—including people.

  “The conquistadors considered the codices idolatry. You know the Aztec language was Nahuatl, but their written language was direct representation.” He spread his hands. “If you were writing about a cat, you drew a cat. A drum, a deer, the water. Running.” He used his fingers to show the movement. “Flowing.” His hand made waves. “Up. Down. Big. Little.” He continued to act the words out with finger and hand and arm movements. “Nouns easy, verbs kind of hard. But you get the drift.”

  “Then the Spanish showed up,” Gina continued. “Someone opened a book, which was to them just pictures—”

  “Very beautiful pictures—artwork in many cases. They handed it to an Aztec priest, who probably still had the blood of his last sacrifice under his fingernails, and he started reading those pictures.”

  “How very witchy of him.”

  “Now you’re catching on.” Teo made a tossing motion. “‘Burn them all.’”

  “Including the priests.”

  “I’m sure they did. What my mother found in the family library was most likely a codex produced after the conquest, when the Spanish realized the Aztecs were on to something by using those freaky little pictures for words.”

  “Had a bit of a language barrier?”

  “Deep and wide.” He used his hands to illustrate again, and Gina was momentarily distracted by the contrast of his white nails against smooth dusky skin beneath a dusting of curly black hair. Those hands might look like the hands of a scholar, clean and slim, but they’d felt like the hands of a laborer—strong and capable, the palms calloused just enough to entice.

  “They bridged the gap with hieroglyphics,” he continued, and she yanked her gaze, and her thoughts, from his hands. “Pacifying the masses by allowing them to re-create the codices. Under strict supervision of course.”

  “Of course,” Gina murmured. “But re-creations aren’t originals.”

  “So every codex has to be taken for what it is—someone’s retelling of what they, or maybe someone they knew, heard, or saw, or read. Not to mention that many of the priests decided to Christianize the Aztec tales, either by forcing the scribes to do so or by writing their own versions in Spanish.”

  “All in all, not the best source of info.”

  “But the only ones we’ve got left.”

  “And the writings your mom found?”

  “Tell the tale of a superwarrior, birthed by the moon, to protect the People of the Sun.”

  “Pretty.”

  He smiled. “That’s what you get when you turn pictures into words. As the story begins, the Aztecs marched north and engaged the enemy.”

  “What enemy?”

  “To the Aztecs, anyone not them was just asking for it. According to the codex, these natives fought back hard and they began to win. But the Aztecs never lost, and now we know why.”

  “Why?”

  “This superwarrior was also a sorcerer.”

  Gina started to get uneasy. Teo wanted to dig where her parents had died. In a place the Ute believed was cursed. Where she had heard strange whispers and felt … something.

  An Aztec sorcerer perhaps?

  But that was crazy. Wasn’t it? There was no such thing as a sorcerer. Not then and definitely not now.

  “Are you kidding me?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He smiled at her confusion. “I don’t believe the warrior was a sorcerer, but the Aztecs did.” He spread his hands. “Hey, back then the sun was a god. Sorcerers and magic would have fit right in.”

  “Maybe some guy figured out how to throw his voice, use herbs to make people froth at the mouth, then he ‘cured’ them.” She made quotes around cured with her fingers.

  “I’m inclined to agree. But as my mother always insisted, the legend came from somewhere. Something out of the ordinary had to have happened for the story to be repeated and passed down and eventually written down. Take out the sorcerer and you’ve still got superwarrior.”

  “A soldier who was bigger, stronger, or super in some other way,” Gina reasoned. “He went north, kicked some native ass; then the rest of them snatched a few hundred captives and everyone hightailed it south of the Rio Grande.”

  “Except that’s not what happened. According to my mother’s translations the Indians had a sorcerer of their own and he confined the superwarrior to a cavern beneath the earth.”

  Gina’s neck prickled as the bad feeling she already had deepened. “One sorcerer is far-fetched enough,” she managed, “but two? Really?”

  “Hieroglyphics are hard to interpret. For instance, are the colors used just for decoration or do they add meaning to what they symbolize? Does a different color indicate a different direction? Day? Night? Male? Female? A certain connection to the glyph on the right or the left?”

  Gina shrugged.

  “Exactly,” Teo agreed. “Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe yes on this page but no on that one. It can be maddening. In the end, my mother interpreted the location of the superwarrior’s tomb in six different ways. We dug at five of the sites. We didn’t find anything.” He glanced at her. “The sixth translation is: ‘Where the tree of life springs from a land awash with the blood of the sun.’”

  Gina closed her eyes.

  “I don’t know if I would ever have found it if it weren’t for—”

  “That damn photograph.” She opened them again.

  His gaze held hers. “I can’t give up until I’ve checked every site on that list.”

  Gina needed to convince him otherwise. That area was bad luck
. Cursed. Haunted. Dangerous. Unfortunately, he seemed as obsessed with it as she’d once been. Still, she had to try.

  “That isn’t the place,” Gina said, though her lips felt stiff and the words were very hard to get out.

  “How do you know?”

  “If the Aztecs had come to Colorado and the Ute had beaten them, or close enough, old men would be telling that story around the campfire until the end of time. I’ve never heard it. Not once.”

  And she hadn’t. Then again, telling such a story would make people want to go there more, not less. The Ute weren’t stupid.

  “I can’t just quit,” Teo insisted. “My mother gave her life trying to find that tomb. She became…” He took a breath, let it out on a rush. “Kind of a joke in scholarly circles.”

  “Why?”

  His eyes met Gina’s. “She believed that sorcerer was real. And she wouldn’t let it go.”

  “And now you won’t let it go.”

  “I can’t.” His shoulders drooped along with his head. “I told her to grow up. That she was embarrassing me. She was living in a fantasy world.”

  “You were a kid.”

  “We’d looked for that tomb my whole life. The search was exciting, fascinating.” He took another breath. “But I was going off to college. I knew people would laugh at me the instant they heard my name. I wanted her to stop looking. Or at least stop talking about magic.”

  “She wouldn’t?”

  “Of course not. She knew what she believed, and once I’d believed it, too. I refused to go with her on that last dig. And then she died.”

  “You think she wouldn’t have hit her head if you’d been there?”

  “Maybe she wouldn’t have been so distracted by my not being there or so anxious to prove to me that I was wrong that she would have looked where she was going instead of charging into the gloom.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “In here?” He tapped his head. “Maybe. But here?” He tapped his heart. “It hurts.”

  For an instant she felt sorry for him, until she remembered that to assuage his guilt he planned to dig up a place that needed to be left the hell alone.

  “I’ve become kind of a joke, too,” he continued, his scratchy voice even scratchier after having spoken for so long.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in magic or the sorcerer.”

  “I don’t. But I believe there’s a tomb and it’s located north of the border. That would be a find in and of itself and would go a long way to vindicating my mother’s research. She deserves to have her name spoken with respect. Because the Aztecs were here. As soon as I saw that photograph, I knew.”

  Damn her infatuation with cameras. Gina had no one but herself to blame for this fiasco.

  “Proving this theory was her dream.” Teo’s earnest gaze captured Gina’s. “You understand why I can’t give up?”

  “For the same reason I ignored your letters. I couldn’t let you run around putting holes in my parents’ dream. But I guess I have nothing to say about it now.” Which made her feel kind of sick.

  “I don’t want the ranch,” Teo said.

  Gina’s head jerked up. “What?”

  “I’m a professor. What am I going to do with a dude ranch?”

  “Dig it up, then sell it?”

  “Don’t you get it?”

  “Spell it out for me.”

  “You show me the area in the picture…”

  Gina wrapped her arms around herself, trying to stave off the sudden chill his words invoked. She began to shake her head, and he held up one hand, palm facing outward to stop her.

  “Then, once I find what she gave her life looking for, I’ll sign the place over to you, and you’ll never have to see me again.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “Are you fricking nuts?”

  Gina winced at the volume of Jase’s voice and the horrified expression on his face.

  “You can’t let Old Moldy back on the property. You can’t let him dig around. Especially there.”

  “I’m not going to be ‘letting’ him do anything. It’s his place now. And he isn’t old or even very moldy.”

  Jase’s eyes narrowed at her final comment. “You on his side now?”

  “I’m on the same side I’ve always been on. The side of Nahua Springs Ranch,” Gina clarified. “Which will be gone unless I find a way to get it back. I don’t know about your checking account, but mine is tapped. So the only way I’m gonna be able to save our home is by doing this.”

  Jase let his gaze wander from the top of her now-tangled hair, over the low-cut neckline and high-cut hem of Amberleigh’s dress, to Ashleigh’s spiky copper heels. “Looks to me like you’ve been workin’ on that already.”

  Gina started for the door. She really needed to change out of this getup and back into her own clothes. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Did you sleep with him?”

  Gina froze with her hand on the door. “Do not screw with me, Jase; I’ve had a very bad day.”

  “You think mine’s been any better?”

  She turned. “What happened?”

  “What didn’t?” He threw up his arms. “I wake up and you’ve taken off. I’m stuck with the guests.” Jase yanked the ends of his short hair. “Those blondes are enough to drive any man mad.”

  “With desire?”

  He grimaced. “I’m rather stick my dick in a knothole.”

  “Thanks for that image.”

  “At least a knothole’s quiet.”

  He had a point.

  “Then the old folks keep singing campfire songs, when the old guy isn’t reciting dirty limericks. Which the kid likes but his dad does not.”

  “I already caught the matinee of this show. You aren’t going to get any sympathy from me.”

  “I don’t deal with the guests.”

  “At least not very well,” Gina agreed. “Unfortunately, you’re going to have to deal with them from now on.”

  “Oh no.” Jase backed away, shaking his head, waving his hands. “Not me.”

  “You don’t have any choice. I have to show Mecate the place he bought the ranch to find, which means you have to leave with the As, and all their little friends, on the second leg of the program this afternoon. You should have gone this morning.”

  Jase stopped backing away and dropped his hands. “You can’t take Mecate there. Granddad says that place has bad juju.”

  “I have never in all my life heard Isaac utter the word juju.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  She did. The Ute had believed the place cursed even before her parents had died there.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Gina said. “I still have to take him.”

  Quickly she gave Jase the CliffsNotes version of Teo Mecate’s life story, watching Jase closely when she mentioned the sorcerer, the magic, but his only reaction was an eye roll and a sneer. He obviously hadn’t heard a similar tale from any of the Ute elders. Nor had he suddenly remembered hearing insidious whispers during the time he and Gina were buried down there.

  Only she had.

  Should she feel better knowing that or worse? On the one hand, if she was imagining things, then the place they were headed to was just a place. Full of bad memories, sure, but nothing more than dirt and rocks and trees.

  On the other hand, she was imagining things. And had been for nearly ten years.

  “He isn’t going to give me what I want unless I give him what he wants,” Gina finished.

  Jase shot her an evil glare, but thankfully he kept his no-doubt obnoxious comment to himself.

  She’d considered leading Teo on a wild-goose chase until he gave up and went away, but considering what he’d told her about his mother—her life and her death—she’d be wasting her time. Since he owned the ranch now, he didn’t have to leave. Ever. If she wanted it back, she had one choice.

  Take him where he wanted to go.

  Maybe if she faced the place again, saw that it wa
s just a place … watched him dig and find nothing … maybe then she’d start to believe it herself. She’d stop hearing her name on the wind. Avoiding the area certainly hadn’t helped.

  “I’ll do it,” Jase said.

  Oh, that would be grand. One of them would wind up buried in the forest. And she had a pretty good idea which one.

  “You ended any chance of him putting up with you for more than a minute when you blabbed his true identity before God and everyone else.”

  “I shouldn’t have?”

  “There are better ways to handle something like that than an ambush.”

  “You’re just mad because I interrupted him before he could get in your pants.” Jase’s mouth tightened as his gaze scanned her face. “Or did I?”

  “Kiss my ass,” Gina said sweetly. She’d never discussed her sex life, or lack of it, with Jase and she certainly wasn’t going to start now. He might be her best friend, but he was really more like a brother, no matter what Teo said, and that was just icky.

  “Fine,” Jase growled. “Just show him the tree, let him do whatever the hell it is he has to do there, then get rid of him as fast as you can.”

  That was the plan. The longer Teo stayed, the harder it would be for everyone.

  “I’ll distract Granddad,” Jase said.

  “What? Why?”

  “You think he’s gonna let you go anywhere near the end of Lonely Deer Trail again no matter what reason you have for it? I wouldn’t be surprised if he locked you in the barn and used his shotgun to get rid of the professor.” Jase’s lips twitched. “Permanently.”

  “Hell,” Gina muttered. She hadn’t thought of that.

  “Don’t worry about it. Just get Moldy out of here as quick as you can.”

  “No problem,” Gina said.

  Unfortunately, from that moment on problems were all that she had.

  * * *

  For the second time in a week, Matt drove his rental car toward Nahua Springs Ranch.

  Gina had agreed to his terms. She hadn’t really had any choice. Matt should have felt bad about that, but he didn’t. Sure, he’d bought her ranch, but he’d give it back. All she had to do was show him that place.

  The one that made her turn white and swallow back puke.