by Allie Mackay
The two men collided.
Bran’s beef ribs went flying.
Gibbie and several of the other castle dogs came running. They leapt to catch the bones in the air before they could land on the stone-flagged floor. Only one beef rib escaped their snapping jaws and skittered into the shadows, leaving a trail of grease in its wake.
Bran stared after the disappearing rib and then whipped around to glare at his friend. “A hag’s bones, MacSwain!” Bran roared the words, not caring who heard. “Have you lost your wits?”
“Mayhap!” Saor shoved a hand through his hair, glanced over his shoulder.
He’d gone white as a ghost.
Truth be told, he looked like he’d seen one.
Bran stepped back and jammed his hands on his hips. His mood was now thoroughly ruined. “Have done - out with it.” He decided to speak plain. “You look like you’ve seen a bluidy ghost!”
Bran expected his friend to laugh.
Instead, Saor threw another glance behind him. When he turned back to Bran, he pulled a hand down over his face, knuckled his eyes. “It wasnae me.” He leaned close, his voice low. “The cry and thud abovestairs. It was-”
“I thought it was you careening down the steps.” Bran flashed a glance at the stair tower’s darkness. “Figured you hit your elbow or something and shrieked like a woman.”
“You almost have the way of it.”
“You stubbed a toe rather than smashing an elbow?” Bran couldn’t resist.
The look Saor gave him dashed his levity. “Nae, you loon. I meant the crash and the cry did come from a woman. It was Serafina. She saw three ghosts in the long gallery.”
“Humph!” Bran thrust his arms out to the sides and pretended to examine them. “Last I looked there isn’t anyone at MacNeil’s Tower who isn’t a bogle!”
He refused to tell Saor about Mindy Menlove.
She was his business alone.
So he feigned an expression of innocence and cleared his throat. “We’re often visited by newcomers to our realm. If I dare say it myself, we’re renowned for our hospitality. Thon three ghosties will have heard of our revelries and feasting and decided to drop in.”
“They weren’t just any ghosts. No’ like us, anyway.” Saor craned his neck to peer at the nearest window arch as if he expected to see the three ghosts staring in at them. “They were see-through!”
Bran’s lips twitched. “Any one of us can appear that way if we wish. It’s one of the first intricacies of ghostdom to be mastered.”
“There’s more.” Saor sounded truly alarmed. “Serafina said they were MacNeil chieftains. But they weren’t any MacNeils she’d ever seen. She doubted they were of our own fourteenth century. In her well-traveled estimation, she believes they were haints of fifteenth or even sixteenth century ilk.”
“All the better.” Bran folded his arms and smiled. “If they’re MacNeil chieftains who lairded it after me, they can tell me how the clan fared after my demise.”
“Aye, and that’s what fashed Serafina.” Saor almost choked on the words. “She claims they were stomping up and down the long gallery, ranting and raving because the keep was no more. She said-”
“She misheard them.” Bran waved away such fool prattle. “MacNeil’s Tower exists sure as the day is long. In this realm or in any other day, these stones still stand.”
He shot a glance at the window, reassured by the drizzly rain blowing past the stone-edged arch, the crash of the surf on the rocks beyond the castle walls.
“This tower will stand a thousand, even two thousand years. That I know!” He crossed his arms again, sure of it.
He just wasn’t going to tell his roguish, dazzle-every-woman-he-met friend how he knew.
It stood to reason that Mindy Menlove was an American tourist who’d been poking about the keep in her own day. Everyone knew such folk loved nothing better. The wench was no doubt one of the moony-eyed ones. The worst of the lot who thought old castles and mist-hung hills were romantic. To be sure, she’d been snooping about, ooh’ing and ahh’ing, when some glitch in the veil between the times had allowed her to suddenly appear in his world.
That she’d done so, was proof that his tower yet stood.
Bran’s chest swelled on the thought.
His heart squeezed.
He did love his home.
But he wasn’t going to get misty-eyed in front of Saor, so he flipped back his plaid in a most manly flourish and hooked his thumbs in his sword belt. “I’d like to speak with these three ghosties,” he announced. “If they are MacNeil chieftains, they deserve a proper Barra welcome.
“Go fetch them down to the hall.” Bran nodded, ending their discourse.
Saor didn’t budge. “That’s no’ possible. They’re gone.”
“Eh?” Some of Bran’s beneficence faded. “What do you mean they’re gone?”
“They left in a huff.” Saor rubbed the back of his neck, looking miserable. “That’s why Serafina cried out and dropped the jug of scented oil she was carrying. She was offended because the three chieftains didn’t pay her any heed. Recognizing their worth, she said she smiled and started to invite them to the hall, but” – he paused dramatically – “they were arguing so heatedly amongst themselves that they told her to ‘stop batting her lashes at them and step out of their way, that they were about important business and had no time for her.’”
“No time for Serafina?” Bran could scarce believe it. Men had fought to the blood for an hour of the temptress’s attentions. “You are certain?”
Saor nodded. “Aye, that’s what they said, just. Then they scowled at her and vanished.”
“I see.” Bran tried hard to do so. “Perhaps the three ghosties weren’t here because of our warm fire and fine viands at all. Could be they were walking the long gallery in their own time and Serafina just happened upon them.” He nodded sagely. “I have heard and seen stranger things.”
Saor shrugged. “Could be,” he agreed. “I once stumbled across a prune-faced MacNeil widow woman in the undercroft. She, too, was of a different century than ours.” He shuddered. “The glare she gave me made me full sorry I’d somehow sifted myself into her time.”
He rubbed his arms as if the memory had the power to give him chills. “Barra’s a fair place, but the layers betwixt the ages are thinner here than elsewhere.”
“Aye, ‘tis all too easy for one like us to land where he shouldnae!” Bran nodded again, aware that it was so.
“I think you should go see to Serafina,” he suggested. The Saracen beauty could be temperamental. “I’ll no’ have her moods ruining the high fettle of the others. Folk dinnae come here for intrigues and mayhem.”
“As you wish.” Saor couldn’t quite keep the smile out of his voice.
Bran knew his friend had a weakness for the dusky-skinned siren, with her raven locks and exotic perfume. The speed with which Saor turned and flew back up the stairs, taking them two at a time, proved it.
Bran frowned.
There’d been a time when he, too, would have raced to Serafina’s side.
Indeed, he might have knocked Saor out of the way to get there.
Now…
His scowl deepened and he flicked his fingers. Not to conjure a beef rib - though he was still mightily famished - but to snatch a brimming cup of ale from the kitchen’s cold, smoke-tinged air.
He quaffed the frothy brew in one quick gulp.
He should help himself to an entire ewer of ale. Or perhaps a bracing swig of uisge beatha. The fiery Highland spirits would surely banish the gooseflesh that was beginning to prick his nape. Uisge beatha was, after all, Scotland’s cure for every ill known to man.
But he, Bran of Barra, prided himself on taking matters into his own hands.
He didn’t need to toss down a bolt of firewater to bolster his courage.
A Barra MacNeil feared nothing.
So he swiped a hand across his mouth, ensuring that no ale flecks clung to his fine red
beard, and then prepared to do what he’d never done before.
Take a peek at modern day Barra.
Even if the thought soured his stomach and was as appealing as tumbling, naked, in a patch of stinging nettles.
He was anything but a fool and he’d sifted himself in and out of other Highland locales often enough over the centuries to know that keeps like his didn’t fare well through time. Almost all once-mighty abodes lost their roofs. Many saw good, solid walls crumble and sag. Some were even reduced to shameful piles of rubble.
Praise the gods he knew through Mindy Menlove’s appearance that his tower yet stood.
An American tourist wouldn’t be interested in an out of the way place like Barra otherwise.
Even so, if three MacNeil chiefly ghosts and Mindy sent-to-tempt-him Menlove had all pierced the carefully wrought shields he kept around his beloved fourteenth-century keep, it followed that great activity must be going on in Barra of modern times.
Bran put back his shoulders and took a deep breath.
It was his duty to discover what was amiss.
Eager to be about it, he closed his eyes and concentrated on sifting himself into his bailey. But not the bustling courtyard of his own day, a colorful, noisy place he knew and loved so dearly that it sometimes hurt his heart just to stride across its cobbles.
Nae, he sifted himself to whatever was left of his bailey in Mindy Menlove’s time.
He knew he’d made it when he could no longer feel the cobbles beneath his feet.
He was standing on grass.
Bran swallowed. His heart began galloping. He wasn’t quite ready to open his eyes, but the chill, briny air comforted him. Also familiar was the sound of the wind churning up the sea beyond his curtain walls. They were noises he knew and loved and that meant home.
It didn’t matter the century.
Or that his courtyard had lost its cobbles somewhere in the long passage of time.
A buffet of wind tossed his plaid, reminding him of why he’d come here. So he drew another deep breath and opened his eyes. Unfortunately he saw nothing but blowing mist and – if he wasn’t mistaken – a few straggly clumps of heather.
Whatever remained of his walls was hidden behind the drifting sheets of mist. Chills sped down his spine and for one maddening moment, he wondered if he’d hied himself to the wrong place. But the cold, damp air was so thick with the smell of the sea and the ground – with or without cobbles – was his.
That he knew to the roots of his soul.
It was just a matter of getting his bearings and then peering through the damty fog.
He took a few steps forward, mindful of any tumbled stones or suchlike he might encounter. But when the mists did part long enough for him to see more than a few feet in front of him, he realized he needn’t have bothered. Nothing surrounded him but the heather-and-bracken strewn ground and the tossing, white-capped sea.
MacNeil’s Tower was gone.
Bran blinked and turned in a disbelieving circle. He didn’t want to accept the truth before his eyes. But it was there all the same. And the brittle horror of it was worse than he’d ever dared imagine.
His home had been wiped from the earth as if it’d never existed.
Not a single stone remained.
Only the cold night, the waves, and the eerie, wind-driven mist looked on as terrible pain pierced his heart and punched holes in his soul. Anguished, he threw back his head to roar denial, but a scalding thickness closed his throat, cutting off his cry.
He did fist his hands, barely aware of the soft drizzle beginning to fall. The chill droplets clung to his hair and rolled down his face, but did nothing to cool the burning agony inside him.
He’d expected at least one ruined wall.
Tears blurred his vision, but like all Highlanders, he was man enough not to shame his feelings. He did bend to scoop up handfuls of damp, loamy-smelling earth, clutching the peat to his chest as if doing so might make his home rise up out of the whirling mist.
But nothing stirred except the sudden blur of gray racing toward him across the springy turf.
Bran’s heart gave a leap.
It was Gibbie.
The dog hurtled into him, almost knocking him down. Bran dropped to his knees and reached out, pulling his old friend hard against him. He rumpled Gibbie’s shaggy coat and rubbed his ears, some of the pain in his heart lessening.
“Ach, laddie, did you follow me here, too?” Bran lowered his head, pressing his cheek against the great beast’s rain-dampened shoulder. “‘Tis no’ fine place for us just now, our Barra. But I’m glad to be seeing you!”
As if that was all that mattered – and Bran supposed that, to Gibbie, it was – the dog barked happily and pressed closer to him, slathering Bran with kisses.
“Come, you, let us be away.” Bran pushed to his feet and forced a smile, not wanting Gibbie to see his distress and think he was upset because the dog had joined him.
In truth, Gibbie was his salvation.
As was his ability – praise the ancients - to sift them both back to fourteenth-century Barra, where they belonged. In their own merry keep with a roaring fire, jovial friends, and all the finger-flicked beef ribs their ghostly hearts desired.
And as Bran reached down to curl his fingers around Gibbie’s collar – just to be sure he didn’t lose him on the way home – he vowed to never again visit Barra of modern times.
Once had almost undone him.
He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
***
The first thing Mindy did upon walking into Newark Liberty International Airport a month later was to throw away the six outdated Scotland guidebooks and several faded and well-thumbed maps of the Highlands and the Isles that Margo had insisted on giving her as must-have reading material for the flight to Glasgow.
Margo Menlove had never been to Scotland. But as a die-hard Scotophile, she had a ton of tartany paraphernalia clogging her tiny apartment and considered herself an authority on all things Scottish.
She meant well.
Her eyes had flashed with such excitement when she’d dug her treasures out of her oversized handbag and presented them to Mindy.
Margo just didn’t understand that Mindy wasn’t going to Scotland as a tourist.
She wasn’t one of the gazillion genealogy-obsessed Americans whose ancestors emigrated from Scotland two hundred years ago and viewed their package-deal-see-Scotland-in-seven-days coach-bus tour as a journey that was taking them home.
She wasn’t into cold, rain, and sheep.
Nor was she a Kilt-o-maniac.
Not anymore, anyway.
She was going to Barra for one reason only. And her greatest wish was to leave as quickly as possible. Though she would be sure she took time to pick up some newly printed guidebooks and maps for Margo’s collection. Perhaps, too, a nice length of heathery-colored tweed that Margo could whip into something stunning.
Mindy smiled. She wished she had her sister’s sense of style. But having spent her entire adult life wearing an airline uniform left her a bit spoiled. To her, a top was a top was a top. As for some women’s passion for shoes, she just didn’t get the thrill.
She paused to let an air crew hurry past, the flight attendants smartly elegant in stewardess blue and with well-polished heels to match. Looking after them, she felt a pang as they disappeared into the crowd, the rattle of their wheeled crew luggage and the click-click of their heels bringing back memories.
She looked down at her own shoes, bought especially for this trip, and almost laughed.
Thick-soled black leather walking boots too bulky for her checked bag, they were like nothing she’d ever worn before. She hoped they’d protect her from turning an ankle in some Godforsaken Hebridean bog.
Nothing else mattered.
Except perhaps getting checked in and to the gate before she changed her mind and made tracks straight for Global’s Newark crew lounge, friends she missed, and – one could dream
– a fast ticket to her old job!
Go on, Mindy. You know that’s what you want. You miss flying so much you can taste it.
Long Honolulu layovers, then off to Fiji, Bali, and Bora Bora. Days on scorching sand and frolicking in the surf, nights at tiki hut bars, sipping tropical delights. She took a deep breath, her pulse quickening as she imagined warm, frangipani breezes. Her pulse quickened. She remembered the way to the airline crew lounge better than she knew the back of her hand.
She could be there in minutes.
She was so tempted.
Especially when – nearly an hour and much hassle later – she reached the boarding gate and had the bad luck to sit down next to a talker.
“We’re going on a history and heritage tour,” the middle-aged woman gushed, her eyes lighting with the zeal of a die-hard Scotophile. “We’re all Scottish” – she indicated the little group standing close by, each one wearing badges proclaiming their name and that they were on a Celtic Twilight tour – “and we’ll be visiting the ancestral castles of each one of us.
“Treading in the footsteps of our forebears and” – she heaved a great sigh, getting misty-eyed – “breathing in the air of our native land.”
Mindy nodded. She wished she’d noticed the woman’s ‘Kiss me, I’m Scottish’ pin before she’d sat beside her. Years of suffering Margo’s endless pining for the Highlands had put her off such people. She started to say something, anything to be polite, but before she could, the woman leaned close.
“You must have Scottish roots.” She pulled a card from her jacket pocket and pressed it into Mindy’s hand. “I have an online business that sells Scottish memorabilia. We do everything from T-shirts and coffee mugs emblazoned with your clan name and crest to teddy bears wearing your own family tartan.”
“I’m not Scottish.” Mindy resisted announcing that she, like the woman herself, was American. “But-”
“I must tell you” – the lady spoke right over her – “we’re ending our trip with a gala weekend at Ravenscraig Castle near Oban. They have a state-of-the-art genealogical research center called One Cairn Village where we can reference everything we learn on the tour. They even do-”