Ghost Clan

by Heather Walker

  At least it would keep her warm. He had to give her that much. Even if she dressed like a boy, at least she was dressed to travel. He couldn’t fault that—not that she came prepared to travel.

  He waited, but she didn’t catch up. What was she doing back there, anyway? In the end, he had to walk all the way back to find her. When he did, he scowled at her sitting on a fallen trunk. She stared at her surroundings in stupefied confusion.

  Angus sighed. “What are ye doin’ all the way back ‘ere? Don’t ye ken the others are camped fer the nicht? Catch up an’ get warm by the fire lik’ a sensible lass.”

  She barely looked at him. “You shouldn’t have taken me with you. I’ll only slow you down. You should have left me where I was. I can take care of myself.”

  “Tak’ care o’ yeself!” Angus snorted. “That’s a muckle joke if I e’er heard one. Just look at ye! Ye cinnae e’en keep up wi’ the likes o’ us. Tak’ care o’ yeself! Ye’d be dead within an hour.”

  Her head whipped around, and she narrowed her eyes at him. “What are you doing out here, anyway? What makes you wander all over the place? Don’t you have homes or anything to go to.”

  “Oh, I ha’e a hame, all richt. It’s ye as dinnae, unless I miss me guess. What are ye doing out here? How did ye come to be in that wood?”

  She looked away. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Anyways, it’s too stupid to talk about.”

  He pretended to look all around him. “As I figure it, ye got naught and nobody to talk to about naught, so ye might as weel tell me. What happened? Where did ye came from?”

  She rubbed her hands together between her knees. Tension racked her shoulders and back. “All right. What difference does it make, anyway? My friend—well, she’s not really my friend, just someone I know—she got up the idea to cast some kind of spell—I don’t understand it. She just gets these ideas every now and then. She said she wanted to cast a spell to transport us all to King Arthur’s Camelot. I know it’s stupid. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t think she’d be able to. I thought it would fall flat like all her other idiot experiments. So she made us all chant these magic words and some mumbo jumbo—it was stupid. Then poof! I wound up in that wood.”

  He frowned at her even more. So that’s how it happened. They cast a spell to send themselves here. If she was telling the truth, there could be more of these outsiders somewhere around here. He would have to be careful.

  So why did Ross tell him to go find her? Ross specifically ordered him to take her with him. Ross said he couldn’t succeed without her.

  Angus studied her more closely. As nervous and confused as she was right now, she seemed sturdy enough. Something of the fighter clung to her. Her eyes darted around the trees in search of any threat. He spent enough of his life around fighters to recognize the way they acted. This woman never spent any time around the hearthside in any sod house. She probably never washed a tub of laundry in her life.

  Her eyes snapped to his face. “Now it’s your turn. What are you doing out here? You and your guys are all armed for war, and I’d say you found it more than once in the last few days. Where are you going and what are you doing? Are you some kind of traveling samurai or something?”

  “I dinnae understand that.”

  Her tone changed. She was used to barking orders and firing questions and getting answers. “You understand my question well enough. Where did you come from and where are you going?”

  Angus closed his eyes. It was bound to come to this. He couldn’t keep her around the way Ross wanted him to without telling her the truth—the whole truth. Still, he hesitated to put it into words. He didn’t want to frighten her more than she already was.

  The sad reality was that he didn’t want to believe it himself. He didn’t want to say it out loud for fear the words would make it true. Even after all he’d been through, after seeing so many men fight and die, he wanted to preserve the illusion he was just out for a casual stroll in his ancestral lands around his home castle.

  He pointed toward the east where the sky already darkened in twilight. “I come from the east country, o’er there. My brothers and I left our hame castle, and a few of our friends came wi’ us. We’re on our way…somewhere else, somewhere we hope we can find the answer tae a problem we ha’e.”

  Her sharp eyes drilled into him. He knew this would happen once he started talking about himself. She saw straight through him. She heard the words he didn’t say.

  When did he ever talk to anybody about this? He never talked to his family. He never talked to his brothers or his companions or even Ewan, who was supposed to be his best friend. They all maintained this silent understanding. They packed up and left without ever discussing why or what they would do.

  She waited until he stopped talking. She waited a long time after that. When he didn’t say anything else, she pursed her lips. “Who are you fighting?”

  He made another big show of looking around him. “We ha’e a wizard wi’ us. He’s no ‘ere at the moment, but he’s bound to turn up one o’ these dark nichts. He allus does. He guides us an’ tells us where tae go and how tae accomplish our mission. He told me where tae find ye. He told me I cinnae succeed if I dinnae tak’ ye wi’ us. Do ye ha’e any idea why he’d say that?”

  “No, I have no idea. As I said, as far as I know, it was just a fluke that I wound up here.”

  “It was no fluke,” he returned. “Ye cast a spell, an’ that’s just the sort o’ thing he senses. He mun’ ha’e detected the spell an’ ye comin’ through it intae that wood. He kens ought about spells, does Ross. Somehow he mun’ ha’e realized you had summat tae do wi’ our mission.”

  She rose to her feet and faced him, all her tension and confusion gone. “And I told you, I’m a cop. It’s my job where I come from to deal with bad situations like yours. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? If this Ross of yours is right, there must be something here I’m supposed to do to help you. Tell me the truth, and maybe we’ll figure out it wasn’t a mistake at all.”

  His shoulders slumped. She was right, of course, but he already knew that. “Awricht. I’ll tell ye, but ye winnae believe it an’ I dinnae blame ye. I dinnae believe it meself. It’s too preposterous for anyone to believe.”

  She didn’t reply. She just stood there with her dark eyes locked on his face. She should have made him uncomfortable, but she only made him ache all over to tell her—to tell anybody—what was really going on.

  The truth dawned on him in a lightning flash of realization. He trusted her. As alien and curious and dangerous as she was to his whole situation, he trusted her. He had to.

  “Back at our hame castle, we started ha’ein’ a few problems. Little things. Cows turnin’ up dead in the field. Sour milk comin’ out o’ the sheep. Tools broken in the nicht. Water trough o’returned wi’ no explanation. No one paid it any mind, ye see. We did our best to ignore it, but it ainly got worse.

  “After a time, it got so’as every mornin’ we’d find dead livestock, walls o’ the stable torn down. It got bad—real bad. All a’ sudden, here’s Maggie MacDougal found wi’ her pretty head torn off down the river. Here’s Bridey Munro, Ewan’s sister, found impaled on a tree branch richt under me faither’s windae. One thing followed another. No one kenned what tae think or what tae do. The whole district went too sceered to leave their houses.”

  Carmen listened in silence. Angus drew a shuddering breath. “And then all hell broke loose. One nicht, all us Camerons was sittin’ round the family hearth, just the way we used tae do when a tempest kicked up—as we kenned it were a tempest. The wind banged the gate, and me faither sent Rob to check the latch. Rob comes back a-runnin’ an’ a-screamin’ like you ne’er heard. We all ran out to see, and there was this muckle cloud of white things comin’ o’er the hill in a great swarm. They flooded all o’er the castle. They poured through the windaes and down the drainpipes. None of us kenned what tae do about ‘em. Then all a’ sudden, one o’ ‘em wraps its
elf about me faither’s neck and strangles the life out o’ him right in front o’ me an’ me brothers.”

  Carmen’s eyebrows went up. “What did you do?”

  “We one and all grabbed our weapons and went tae fightin’ ‘em as hard as we could. We slashed and cut every which way. We found out we could cut ‘em. It wouldnae kill ‘em—not proper, lik’. It just cut them in half, an’ the two halves would float away an’ disappear. That’s how we got rid o’ ‘em that nicht.”

  “So what happened? I guess they came back.”

  Angus nodded down at the ground. “They cam’ back, the next nicht and the next nicht and the next. They came back e’ery nicht until we dropped from tiredness. The whole district rallied to help us fight ‘em, but too many men died doin’ it. We ha’ tae leave. We ha’ tae leave for the sake o’ the district an’ everybody in it.”

  Carmen sat back down on the log, but Angus couldn’t stop talking. Once the words started pouring out of him, he couldn’t contain them anymore. He had to talk to somebody.

  “The night we chose to leave, Ross showed up on our doorstep. He tol’ us a witch put a curse on our Clan for some-ought slight me faither done her in the past. He tol’ us we had tae go find her to break the spell. We left wi’ fifty men. The wraiths attacked us almost every nicht since then. They barely left us a moment tae catch a wink o’ sleep, and now we’re reduced to ten, an’ that including Ross.” He stole a peek at her face. “So now ye ken. That’s what we’re doing.”

  She no longer looked at him. She went back to staring into the distance, but a curious calm hung around her. She nodded. “I see. Unfortunately, I never learned how to fight with a sword, but I guess I could learn.”

  “Ye better learn in a hurry,” Angus told her. “We’ve had two days’ peace, so they’re bound to attack any second now. I would advise ye to stay here, back from our camp, and let us fight ‘em wi’out ye.”

  “It sounds like your friend Ross doesn’t want that,” Carmen remarked. “Besides, if he’s right that I’m somehow involved in breaking this curse, those things will come after me, too. If they caught me alone, I wouldn’t stand a chance against them.”

  Angus nodded. “I kens it, but I want ainly tae protect ye from it. I’s had to stand an’ watch upwards o’ forty men go to the grave o’er this business, an’ I dinnae want tae watch ye go there, asweel.”

  Carmen bit back a grin. “That’s very chivalrous of you, but under the circumstances, I think I better join you in your camp. Maybe you can teach me something about sword fighting before they attack again. One more fighter might tip the scales in your favor.”

  “One more fighter winnae do ought for us,” he countered. “It’s the magic we need to break. If Ross is richt about ye, that’s the best ye can do for us. The witch’s castle an’t more than twenty miles more across this country. If ye wanna come alang o’ us, we’ll see what’s what when we get there.”

  She stood up one more time. “All right. Let’s go.”

  Chapter 5

  Carmen did her best not to notice the strange looks the men gave her when she came into their camp with Angus. Now that she knew their situation, she recognized the grim resolution in their faces. They faced certain defeat and death, and another sword, no matter how skilled, couldn’t stand against this enemy.

  Carmen sat down by the fire. One of the men—she didn’t know his name—carved a hunk of meat off some dead carcass spit-roasted on the fire. He slapped it into her hand and cut off another piece for himself.

  All the men talked so fast back and forth in their strange accent she couldn’t understand a word they said. They did their best to relax, but none of them ever really laughed out. They all cast questioning glances into the dark surrounding their camp. They knew what was coming, and they didn’t like it one bit.

  Carmen never believed in magic. She prided herself on logic. Magic and mystery and all that malarkey never helped anybody solve a murder case. Cold, hard facts—that was Carmen’s bread and butter.

  Still, she couldn’t ignore the cold, hard fact that Hazel transported her across time to some historical backwater in Highland Scotland. Carmen spent enough of her law enforcement career interviewing witnesses and questioning suspects to recognize the expression on Angus’s face when he told her that story.

  He told her the truth. She never doubted that for a second. The situation disturbed him to tell as much as it disturbed her. He didn’t like it, but he had to tell the truth.

  She eyed him across the fire. Every now and then, she caught him looking back at her, but for the most part, he ignored her. He acted exactly like a man who unburdens himself of a dangerous truth and then shuns the person to whom he confided.

  That was okay. She understood. She trusted him, and she believed him. So many things about this crazy situation didn’t make sense, but the fact stared her in the face. These men were on the run from something horrible. Something threatened their lives and killed four-fifths of their party on the road.

  She only wished she could be more use to them. They carried only as many weapons as they could on their persons. From the look of them, they were all hardened warriors. If they survived this long, the nine men out of fifty, they must be good. They wouldn’t want to part with their weapons for her.

  Her mind raced around the campfire for any solution. She wouldn’t cower in the middle of their circle while they fought to defend her. No way! She sensed the same foreboding presence hemming them in on all sides out there in the dark, and her hands itched for some kind of weapon. She never backed down on a fight in her life, and Angus’s story sparked her inborn rage against injustice.

  Who was this witch who killed so many people and destroyed the lives of so many others? What did Angus’s father do to her, that she would exact such a bloody and devastating revenge?

  None of that mattered now. Whatever the senior Mr. Cameron did, none of these men should be held responsible for it. Five of them were his sons. The others had nothing to do with it.

  Carmen studied them all more closely. She could tell them apart now, especially the Cameron brothers. Angus talked most with that tall red-haired one. Angus called him Rob, and that big fella brooding in silence was Callum.

  The youngest, Jamie, did his best to make a big joke out of their situation, but his barbs fell flat. He couldn’t get anyone to smile or even respond.

  After a while, the conversation died. Fatigue stole their desire to talk anymore. One by one, they lapsed into silence, but Carmen couldn’t settle down. Something was coming. She knew that now, but she couldn’t figure out how to face it. Swords might cut those things in half, but a semi-automatic Colt .45 probably wouldn’t help much.

  She didn’t have a .45 anyway, and she wasn’t going to get one. She wouldn’t see a .45 again in this country, so she better get used to that. She made a mental inventory of the weapons she could see—sabers, daggers, and one or two small hand axes.

  Just when she thought she might lie down and grab a wink of shut-eye, Angus came over and sat down next to her. “We allas tak’ it in turns tae keep watch at nicht. Tonicht it’s me turn, but ye’ll ha’e tae get in the line-up wi’ the others. I’m sorry it has tae be that way, but….”

  “That’s all right,” Carmen interrupted. “I expected that, and I’m very willing to take my turn. If you want me to take my turn tonight, I don’t mind. You look like you could use some sleep. I’ll watch.”

  “Nae. I’ll tak’ me turn in order. Ye go to sleep like a good lass. Yer turn’ll come soon enough, mind me.”

  She had to smile at him calling her a lass. His accent endeared him to her. He really was a nice-looking guy under all that brooding, smoldering scruff. Pale rough whiskers covered his chiseled jaws, and his eyes burned in their sockets. He looked like he hadn’t slept in months, even on the nights when somebody else kept watch. That’s just the kind of leader he was. He never rested on his responsibilities.

  “I realize it’s asking a lot,” Carme
n ventured, “but I’d really like a sword. I don’t like facing this unarmed. Do you think one of your guys would be willing to part with something?”

  His eyes brightened. He opened his mouth to answer when a low note sounded in the oak trees beyond the flickering firelight. The whole party rocketed to their feet. Sabers scratched out of their scabbards. The nine men backed into a circle around the campfire, facing outward.

  The note sounded again, louder this time. It rose in pitch to a steady moan. Anybody would have mistaken it for the wind in the branches, but it electrified the men to full tense fighting readiness.

  Carmen groped for Angus’s arm. He crowded close to her where she took her position in the circle with the others. “Give me a weapon. Give me anything. Don’t make me face them empty-handed.”

  He pressed something cold and hard into her palm. “Tak’ this. It’s all I got.”

  Her fingers closed around a small dagger. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. The moaning drifted all around them now, just out of sight. The note jumped another register to a spine-chilling howl, and the sound didn’t die this time. It kept rising higher and higher, louder and closer. It set Carmen’s hair on end, and she flexed her knees and extended her small blade in front of her to face whatever might come.

  A flash of light winked across the trees. Was it a trick of the firelight? Carmen focused on that spot, but the light vanished before her eyes. The next minute, it reappeared off to her left. She glanced that way, only to catch sight of another apparition to her right. Carmen couldn’t make out any distinguishing feature of the things, just white shapes hovering in the dark.

  The next thing she knew, dozens of white forms floated out of the trees. They whirled around the fire in every direction. Tension crackled through the small circle. Carmen turned one way and then the other, but she couldn’t face them fast enough. She thanked Heaven for the men at her back. She never trusted any cops back home the way she trusted those men right now.