Ghost Clan

by Heather Walker

  The Highlanders made it a few paces into the passage before all hell broke loose. A door crashed back and slammed into the wall. At first, Angus thought the floating apparitions might be more wraiths. When they got closer, he saw these had faces.

  Faces of men and women hovered before his eyes. They sailed back and forth, rushed at his eyes, and retreated to whirl down the passage once more. Jamie lost his composure and slashed one of them with his saber, but the blade only wisped the smoky specter apart before it reformed and went on its way. It wasn’t a wraith at all. It was a ghost.

  While the band still struggled to come to grips with this new adversary, another door slammed open farther down the hall on the other side. Thousands of swarming bees buzzed down the hall in a cloud heading straight for the men’s heads.

  No amount of slashing and stabbing would do anything against this foe, either. Angus dreaded another door opening. All these powers conspired to stop his party fighting the witch, and she hadn’t even made her appearance yet.

  A third door flew open, and a great cloud of the whizzing fire balls Gahkra used poured into the hall. They woofed past Angus’s ears. They raced between his legs and blew their fiery hot air up his kilt. In vain he fought them with his sword.

  The bees stung his arms and hands and neck. He couldn’t stand this anymore. Somewhere far away, another door smashed open. He didn’t have time to see what came at him next.

  He caught sight of Ross off to one side. Ross fought the things somehow, too, even though he didn’t use a sword. The bees, the fire balls, the ghosts, and whatever else crowded around Ross’s head.

  Angus’s heart sank. If Ross couldn’t defend himself against the witch’s power, what chance did Angus and his people have?

  All at once, every door in the passage blew open at the same time. Thousands upon thousands of projectiles rocketed out in torrents. Angus never knew what hit him. Pain smarted all over his skin. First hot and then cold burned him whichever way he turned.

  The forces attacking them dragged Jamie to the ground. He screamed in terror until the bees and the ghosts covered his face. The sound died under a muffled blanket of solid mass. The saber fell out of his hand, and he clawed at his face to free himself, but to no avail.

  Callum let out a maniac bellow and sprang to help his brother. He straddled Jamie’s fallen form, and his saber whistled through the air in all directions. Flaming fire balls exploded into powder and rained down on the floor at Callum’s feet. The ghosts sailed away somewhere else, but the bees still swarmed all over Jamie’s face so no one could see his features.

  A solid cloud of the spears they saw in the booby-trapped room whizzed down the passage. One of them struck Callum in the thigh. He let out a cry of pain and rage. One hand clamped around his leg, but he stayed on his feet.

  Another spear impaled Ewan through the chest. He staggered, but he couldn’t catch his balance with the long shaft tugging him every which way. Angus spun around. “Ewan! No!”

  He battled his way through the fog of weapons, insects, ghosts, and hundreds of other things he couldn’t see. He couldn’t lose Ewan, not now. He already lost Robbie. He couldn’t lose his best friend, too. No Throne was worth this loss.

  He waded two paces through the chaos when an iron grip stopped him. He whirled around to find Ross at his shoulder. The brown hood obscured the wizard’s shadowy face. Only his beard moved when he hissed between his teeth. “She’s ‘ere! She’s comin’.”

  Angus quailed. All these things attacking him and his party came from the witch. He could get rid of them by destroying her. His hand fell on his sporran, and he burrowed inside. His fingers closed around the ruby.

  “Stand ye ready!” Ross murmured.

  Angus tensed all over. His muscles stretched to the breaking point. He had no idea how to use the ruby, but that didn’t matter now. Ross waved him toward a single door standing closed against the far end of the hall.

  Angus left his brother and his friend behind. He cared about only one thing right now. He would meet the witch in all her fury. He withdrew the ruby from his sporran and cradled it in his hand. Its power ran up his arm and filled him with murderous rage.

  Halfway down the hall, Ross let go of his arm. The two men faced that door, ready for whatever came through it. Angus spread his feet wide. His power roiled and churned inside him in search of any way to get out.

  All of a sudden, the door flew open. The torrential wind of a thousand wings and fire balls and disembodied hands hurling spears everywhere blasted through the door. Angus clapped his eyes on a tall, thin woman. The wind hit her in the face and blew her wild long hair back. Her eyes narrowed at him, and her billowing skirts and sleeves rose out from her sides like wings.

  In that moment, the image of an enormous dragon spread all around her. It extended its wings, and its bright colored skin flashed in the wicked light coming from the hall. The witch raised her arms on either side, and the dragon flexed its claws to grab Angus. Its mouth opened to scorch him in a jet of fiery breath.

  The witch glided into the hall amid her furious powers assaulting these men on all sides. She flew straight at Angus in all her ferocious might. He raised his hand to point the ruby at her. At that moment, Carmen appeared out of nowhere. He didn’t see her holding the door open to let the witch through. The witch filled his whole awareness so he saw and heard nothing else.

  Before he could stop it, all the power surging inside him exploded out of his hand. It blasted through the ruby and sent a beaming ray of red light shooting down the passage. Carmen screamed out, “No!” She jumped in front of the witch to protect her, and the ruby’s power struck her square in the chest.

  Chapter 23

  Voices assaulted Carmen from all sides. “Lie still. We’re starting an IV, so you’ll feel a prick in your arm. Try not to move while we get you loaded into the ambulance.”

  Carmen couldn’t pry her eyes open. The American accent clanged against her ear. It didn’t sound right, but her whole body ached so bad she couldn’t form the words to respond.

  People moved all around her. Hands groped along her arms and legs. They compressed her ribs until she flinched in pain. “She’s got a fractured sternum and a bunch of busted ribs. She must have hit that steering column going pretty fast.”

  “Just look at the car wound around that lamppost. The other car blew through that red light and slammed her in the rear fender. Sent her spinning out of control, and the rest was history.”

  Carmen fought her way up from semi-consciousness to understand what they were saying. She didn’t get in any car wreck. Whatever that bright red thing was Angus had in his hand went off. He intended to shoot Hazel with it, but Carmen dove in front of it to stop him killing her.

  She tried to speak, but her jaw wouldn’t move. A female voice murmured close to her ear. “We’re taking you in, honey. Just lie still. It’s gonna hurt when they load the stretcher in the ambulance, but I’ve given you some morphine. You’ll be just fine in a minute.”

  Before Carmen could reply, the surface on which she lay lurched and wobbled. The most terrible bumping and jarring followed. Searing pain shot through her whole being. She tried to grit her teeth, but she ended up screaming out loud. Another massive jolt, and it all came to a blissful end.

  She managed to pry her eyes open just enough to catch a glimpse of a normal city street outside the ambulance’s doors. The next minute, one of the crew slammed the doors closed to cut off her view. The ambulance motored away. Through its rear window, Carmen caught sight of a twisted hunk of metal wrapped around a lamppost across the street. The car’s roof craned back where the fire crew cut it off with their extrication tools.

  The ambulance vibrated away, but the morphine kicked in and Carmen no longer cared about anything. She struggled against the deluge of drug-induced haze to keep a firm grip on Angus and the men she left behind. What happened to them? Did Hazel get zapped back to the present at the same moment?

  If Carmen
was here, that meant the curse was broken. She wasn’t dead. Had she dreamed the whole sequence of the enchanted castle and the rough band of misfits determined to stop the witch?

  Now that normal modern America surrounded her on all sides, the whole scenario struck her as too preposterous to believe. The smoke of Hazel’s spell must have given her hallucinations, and when she tried to drive home, she wrecked her car. Yes, that must be it.

  Still, Angus wouldn’t leave her alone. The depth of her feelings for him crushed her heart. She loved him. She loved him in a way no mortal human could love another. Maybe that’s because it was all a dream. Emotions always seem stronger and more real in dreams.

  The ambulance braked, and the crew went through the familiar sequence of unloading their patient, giving a complete history to the ER staff, filling out their paperwork, and retrieving the gear they used to stabilize Carmen.

  She followed it all from the hospital bed where they parked her. She saw it and heard it hundreds of times, but never before as the patient. Doctors and nurses buzzed all around her to stabilize her chest. They gave her CT scans to make sure she didn’t puncture a lung. They gave her X-rays to find out where the fractures were.

  Carmen watched it all from a remove from herself. Did the morphine cause that, too? Was this really happening, or was she back in Scotland dreaming this instead of the other way around?

  When it was all over, the hospital staff determined she fractured three ribs and her sternum, but no other injuries. Two doctors carried on heated discussion right next to her head.

  “You know we can’t just leave it like that,” argued one. “A fracture to the sternum could escalate to compromise her whole respiratory system. We have to operate right away. We have to pin the fracture to stabilize her breathing.”

  “Her breathing couldn’t be more stable if she was asleep in her bed at home,” countered the other. “Just look at her. She’s stable enough to transfer to the General Medical Ward. Operating on her would put her in more danger than leaving her the way she is.”

  “Are you crazy?” barked the other. “Just wait until the Director hears about this. You could lose your license.”

  “Are you threatening me?” snarled his companion. “I’m responsible for her, and I say she doesn’t need surgery. You’re trying to cash in on her insurance. You know these cops have the best coverage in town.”

  “You son of a….

  Carmen rallied all her strength to raise her voice. “Do you mind? I can hear every word you say, and I can make my own decision about my medical care, thank you very much.”

  Both doctors stopped their arguing to stare at her.

  “I don’t want surgery,” Carmen told them. “Just transfer me to the Medical Ward and leave me alone to heal up. I just need peace and quiet to rest right now, not to listen to you two going at it in my ear all night long.”

  They blinked. Then they left the room. A few minutes later, a nurse came to transfer Carmen upstairs. In half an hour, the orderlies stuck her stretcher in a private room and left her alone.

  Carmen closed her eyes. She would heal from these fractures. Pretty soon, she would be able to breathe without pain unaided by massive doses of drugs.

  The greater challenge she faced was puzzling out exactly what was real and what was not. Had she just spent the past week in medieval Scotland or not? Which world was real? Did she fall in love with some haunted Highlander born to be King of a magical realm no one ever heard of?

  Carmen would give anything to believe Robbie Cameron never fell into that sink hole. She prayed to High Heaven the whole thing was a dream. Then again, if she never went to Scotland, she never would have met Angus. If she never went to Scotland, that must mean Angus never existed. He was a figment of her imagination.

  He wasn’t exactly the kind of guy she would choose to fall in love with. Maybe in a few days, she would start to be glad she didn’t get herself saddled with a guy so loaded down with baggage. Once she got back to her own house and her comfortable bed and her computer and Netflix and all the comforts she craved, she would wonder how she could ever wish she’d stayed in that barbaric, brutal world.

  Yes, that’s what she would do. She would heal up and go home. She would enjoy all the benefits of the modern world, and she would put Angus Cameron and his business out of her mind. He wasn’t real. She imagined him. She would get herself a boyfriend from the Force. They would understand each other a lot better than she could ever understand Angus.

  Carmen drifted off to sleep on a delightful opiate cloud. She hovered between reality and fantasy, but she never really dreamed about Angus or Hazel or that strange world she left behind.

  After a week in a morphine coma, she asked the doctors to take her off the painkillers. They didn’t want to, but when she insisted, they agreed to taper her off. They acquiesced to her suggestion that they give her painkillers only when she asked for them, and they left it at that.

  The second week was hard, a lot harder than Carmen expected. Her chest hurt so bad she wanted to cry. At least once a day, she broke down and begged the nurses to give her some morphine, but when she woke up the following day, she gritted her teeth and set her sights on another day drug free.

  People from her precinct came to visit her every day. One day, her Captain strutted into her room. “Well, here you are. You are one lucky lady, I can tell you that. The doctors can’t say enough about your recovery. They say you’ll be back at work in another two weeks. Can you believe that? I couldn’t believe you walked out of that wreck alive. Did you see the car? We caught the other driver, and he was drunk as a skunk. Phew!”

  Carmen didn’t bother to tell him she wasn’t in a car wreck. No one would believe her story, so she kept it to herself. Besides, she had enough to worry about just healing up. She could sit up in bed now, but it still hurt to breathe. She wasn’t going to be good for much if she went back to work.

  Another week, and she was strong enough to push herself around the hospital in a wheelchair. She pushed it backward with her feet since she couldn’t use her arms. She made quite a sensation scooting around in her bathrobe and socks. She waited for the elevator to open and rolled inside. She visited every floor of the hospital.

  She made her peace with the dream she had about Scotland. It marked a turning point in her mind. She wanted to love like that again. She just needed to find a guy suited to her, but she no longer doubted the reality of the car wreck. She never went to Scotland. That would be ridiculous. Her logical brain accepted that now.

  She developed a fascination with the prosthetics clinic. She watched the technicians creating and fitting replacement limbs. She watched depressed, wizened amputees hobble into the clinic and walk out beaming and ready to face the world again. She spent more time there and neglected her visits to the other hospital departments.

  Her presence became a joke to the prosthetics team. “Carmen is a wannabe amputee. She must have been an amputee in a former life.”

  Carmen smiled at their jokes, but she didn’t stop coming. One afternoon, the clinic director came out of his office to find Carmen sitting in her wheelchair in the waiting room. She read one magazine after another like she was waiting for an appointment.

  He chuckled. “You still here? Why don’t you come and have a cup of coffee with me?”

  She tossed her magazine on the table and pushed her chair after him. He held the door to the doctor’s lounge for her and placed a paper cup in her hands. He sat down across from her and rested his arms on the table. “Now, then. Don’t you think it’s time you got back into your old interests instead of mooning around the prosthetics lab?”

  Carmen started in her chair. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not an amputee. You’re not even involved in the medical field. You’re a detective. You should be studying your own field, not something completely unrelated to your own work.”

  Carmen blinked. “I never thought I was studying someone else’s field. I was just amusi
ng myself until my ribs heal up enough for me to get out of here.”

  He leaned back. “Do me a favor, will you? Go down to the research lab on the seventh floor and hunt up Dr. Albert Montgomery. He’s a friend of mine. He’ll give you more to do than you ever wanted.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s a medical researcher. He specializes in cold cases and forensic mysteries. You want something to amuse yourself? You’re a detective, and so is he. He’ll give you some of his old files to study. That will keep you busy, and you can focus on your own field instead of mine.”

  She opened her mouth to reply, but he got to his feet before she could form the words. He crushed his cup in his hand, pitched it into the trash can, and jerked his head toward the door. “I gotta get back to work, and so do you. Come on. If you’re too tired, I’ll push you back to your room.”

  Carmen set her foot on the floor. “I can do it. It’s the only exercise I’m getting at the moment.”

  She paddled out of the doctor’s lounge. He held the door open for her again. Out in the hall, she cast a glance both ways before starting back to the Medical Ward. At the moment she turned her head, she caught sight of a sliding glass door farther down the hall. “What’s that?”

  “That’s the Public Health Department. They handle communicable diseases, outbreaks—that kind of thing.”

  Carmen stared at the door.

  “Are you coming?” he asked.

  She waved him away. “I can find my own way back to my room. You go ahead. There’s someone here I want to see.”

  He disappeared, and Carmen pushed herself into the Public Health Department. Why hadn’t she thought of this sooner?

  She rolled up to the reception desk. “I’d like to see Dr. Sadie Cole, please.”

  “Doctor Cole isn’t here at present,” the receptionist told her. “I can give her a message.”