Addictive Paranormal Reads Halloween Box Set

by Nana Malone

  “You too, Leatherby,” Elisabeth forced herself to return the smile she did not feel. She carried her grandfather’s cane, but nine weeks of boot camp had strengthened her body, and her resolve, in a way that years of nonstop physical therapy never had. The drill sergeant had groused about the lax standards the military had adopted in order to recruit personnel into an active war, but towards the end, even he had been forced to acknowledge her will to succeed forced her fragile body to toe the mark.

  Once Elisabeth set her mind to something, it was as good as done…

  She tugged her service coat close to guard against the cold and made her way out past the harsh spot lights and layers of barbed wire to the pockmarked remnant of a paved road. Once out of sight she granted her leg the concession of leaning on Opa’s cane, wood tapping lightly against rocky ground like a third footstep. Cautiously moving through the shadows, she wandered through abandoned neighborhoods to the river which provided a lifeline for the surrounding area.

  Dry. Absent irrigation, Afghanistan more closely resembled the cold, lunar landscape which stared down at her from the waning moon than anyplace people might wish to live. In a bizarre way, both the terrain and its people, excepting the crazy ones, of course, had grown on her. Finding excuses to slip the confines of the base and mingle with the locals, binding wounds, administering vaccines, even delivering twin calves, gave her life meaning. The people of this town had come to know her and treated her with respect. Elisabeth liked it here.

  She sat down on a rock, alone with her thoughts. Joining the Army had enabled her to become a registered nurse in record-breaking time and provided something she’d sorely missed in her life. If there was one thing the military fostered, it was a sense of family. Or as the C.O. called it, ‘battle buddies.’ In the field, you needed to depend on the soldier next to you to watch your back.

  So deep was she in her thoughts that she didn’t hear the rustle from the brush behind her.

  “You move,” the barrel of a rifle pressed between her shoulder blades. “We kill you.”

  Elisabeth exploded into action the way she’d been taught in basic training, swinging her elbows and the cane up behind her as she twisted around and jarred the barrel from her back milliseconds before the Taliban fired.

  “Enemy insurgents!!!” Elisabeth screamed at the top of her lungs. She finished spinning the rest of the way around to slug the insurgent in the face, hoping a patrol was within earshot, and then landed the cane solidly on the insurgent’s head. Three more dove at her as she reached for the service pistol clasped to her hip. The only reason she was still alive was because they hadn’t expected her to be carrying a cane.

  “Infidel whore,” one of the Taliban snarled. He used his weight advantage to disarm her before she could pull her gun and threw her to the ground. “We teach American scum what happens when they bring their whores with them.”

  Two of the Taliban pinned her so she kneeled facing the AK-47 aimed directly between her eyes. The two, plus the third, picked up round river rocks from the shore while the fourth kept the gun aimed at her head.

  “Go to hell!” Elisabeth hissed, expecting to be shot.

  A fist-sized rock hit her off the side of the head.

  “Umph!” she grunted, knocked to one side as she saw stars.

  A second rock hit her in the chest.

  “Help!!!” she screamed, trying to lurch to her feet so she could run away.

  “This what happen to woman who wander streets at night without male escort,” the Taliban with the gun sneered, kicking her behind the knee she used to get to her feet and picked up his own rock to hit her squarely in the chest. “Punishment for adultery is stoning to death!”

  Elisabeth raised her arms to protect her head as a stone slammed into her jaw. The moon appeared double. What on Earth had ever convinced her that just because she wandered amongst these people during the daytime helping them, that they would treat her with the same compassion with which she treated them?

  “Help?” She crawled towards the water and realized she wouldn't make it as she began to lose consciousness. No patrol heard her screams. Blood spurted from her mouth and something ejected from one side as she tried to plead for her life. A tooth?

  “Ahhhh!!!” the Taliban leader screamed.

  The others screamed, too. Anger?

  Silence.

  The scent of the river filled her nose as she lost the battle to remain conscious and keep her head above the shallow water.

  “Please, Elisabeth. You must get back to the shore. I cannot help you.”

  Water. Freezing from the December temperatures. She tried to move and slipped on the rocks. So easy to just let go. To let the gentle whisper of the river carry her away, carrying her pain with it.

  “Elisabeth!” the voice said again, his tone urgent. “Please! I won’t take you unless I have no choice. But I cannot help you! You must help yourself!”

  The voice was familiar. Compelling. Salt. Blood. Elisabeth’s head spun with the sharp pain of bone grinding bone as she tried to move her mouth to answer. Her hands moved helplessly on the rocks, unable to push herself up to her hands and knees to crawl out of the river. She was drowning in less than a foot of water. Of all the stupid, asinine ways to die!

  “Please, Elisabeth!” A frantic edge belied the speakers panic. “I’ll fetch help, but you’ll drown before they get here. Pull yourself closer to the shore.”

  “Help … me,” Elisabeth whispered, reaching one hand towards the voice.

  “I can’t,” the voice was filled with remorse. “If I touch you, you will die. You must do this thing yourself because I cannot do it for you.”

  She knew who spoke to her now. The invisible ‘friend’ Kadima had spent the past nine months trying to convince her was not evil. The black man who always allowed her to fall, stepping back as she drew near. Always watching. Was he here now to watch her flounder in the river and die? Taking notes in that great book he scribbled in the few times she’d caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye? Anger motivated her to force her numb limbs to move towards the edge of the river. Anger at him!

  “Good!” he urged. “Keep going! You can do it!”

  His voice sounded very far away, as though he were speaking under water. The moon faded as she collapsed, face-down on the rocks.

  “Go to hell,” she muttered, moving her head just enough so a rock kept her nose was out of the crevasse where water still trickled.

  “I’ll go get help,” the black man said. “Just hang on … okay? I’ll be right back. I promise.”

  The world went black.

  Voices. Thick Cockney accents and shouting. Hands picked her up and put her on a litter.

  “We’ve got you, Elisabeth,” Kadima took her hand. “Our friend told me where to find you.”

  Elisabeth tried to move her mouth. Pain stabbed through her jaw. It felt as though one of her teeth had been knocked out.

  “They’re all dead!” a thick British accent said. “Not a mark on them. Who is this gal? Special forces or something?”

  “Just a nurse,” a familiar voice said, Harold, Kadima’s husband. “Let’s get her back to the base.”

  “I told her not to wander out here alone,” another familiar voice said. Corporal Leatherby?

  “She’s been spending a lot of time amongst the locals,” Kadima squeezed her hand. “Trying to win their support. I warned her the Taliban would target anyone who undermined their grip on the local population, but she didn’t believe me.”

  “She’s not the first one who got taken in and screwed,” Harold said. “Okay, boys! Patricia’s! Get off your asses and help the Brit-boys get our star trauma nurse back to the infirmary. She’s all banged up, but I think she’s going to be okay!”

  “Hey … Colonel … Sir!” one of the Brit-boys called to Kadima’s husband. “All four of these insurgents have an ace of spades tucked into their shirt pockets!”

  “That’s his calling card, boys
,” Harold said glibly. “Just be glad it wasn’t you he came for today.”

  Several of the men carrying Elisabeth laughed nervously.

  “Kadima’s friend,” one said, his Canadian accent sounding more akin to Midwestern-America than the thick Cockney accent the British troops had, marking him as one of the Patricia’s. “I saw him once. One second this guy with a gun to my head starts ranting in some strange language I never heard before. The next there’s this flash of darkness and the guy just drops dead to the ground. Not a mark on him.”

  “Really?” another soldier said with a thick British accent. “I thought that was just a ghost story the Patricia’s like to tell to spook the newbies?”

  “Do they look like ghost stories to you?” Corporal Leatherby asked. “Four of them. No weapons. No blood. Not a mark on them except for his calling card. Shit! Talk about death from above!”

  “I seen him once, too,” another Canadian accent said. “Scariest motherfucker I ever saw. Real tall and thin. Got a black cape with a hood just like the Ghost of Christmas Future in that Christmas Carol movie. The one with George C. Scott. Only I didn’t see no grim reaper scythe or nothing. Just him reach out and touch a guy and he drops dead.”

  “You’re fucking with us!” the British-accent guy laughed nervously. “Patricia’s! You guys been hanging around the Americans too long!”

  Elisabeth slid the rest of the way into unconsciousness. Had he really finally spoken to her?

  * * * * *

  Chapter 34

  I am black, but comely,

  O ye daughters of Jerusalem …

  Look not upon me, because I am black,

  Because the sun hath looked upon me.

  Song of Solomon, 1:5-6

  Earth - AD December 24, 2002

  Lashkar Gah, Helmand Province, Afghanistan

  Azrael hovered nervously in the corner, his cloak wrapped tightly so no one would bump into him. He’d been busy helping the Archangels track down Agent-possessed Al Qaida leaders in a network of caves when he’d sensed her cry for help. He wasn’t sure why he’d sensed her need, but he had. Thank the goddess he’d been able to break away!

  He almost hadn’t made it in time…

  Kadima tucked a blanket around Elisabeth’s neck.

  “I’ll sit with her a while if you don’t mind,” Kadima said to the other nurse, Lucy. “You go get some eggnog and see if you can’t call home before they use up all the minutes on those calling cards. I’ll come get you if she needs anything.”

  “Thanks,” nurse Lucy said. “She’s damned lucky. We warned her the locals will thank you for fixing their kids broken leg one minute and turn you over to the Taliban the next, but it was like talking to a wall. You can help them, but you can never, ever trust them.”

  “We’ve all been burned,” Kadima said. “Now … she’ll listen.”

  “I sure hope so," Lucy said. "For a newbie straight out of nurse training, she’s the closest thing we’ve got to a third doctor on this unit. She’s saved more lives than they have.”

  “She spent a lot of time in rehab and her foster mother was a nurse,” Kadima said. “From the time she was nine years old, she’s been reading medical journals and volunteering at the hospital. They wanted her to stay in Chicago and continue onto medical school, even offered her a full scholarship, but she turned them down. She wanted to come here.”

  “Foster mother?” Lucy said. “I had no idea. We all thought, well, she’s so aloof. We just assumed she thought she was better than us.”

  “I think it’s more she’s afraid to let anyone get too close,” Kadima said. “First her entire family dies. And then her foster mother dies, too. Cut her a little slack. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” Lucy said. “I will. Nobody ever said anything to me.”

  “Go get some eggnog,” Kadima ordered. “I have it on good authority Private Wallaby has a few nip-bottles of contraband to spike your cup if you’re nice to him. Tell Harold I’ll be along shortly.”

  The nurse left. Thankfully the infirmary was empty tonight. Kadima pulled the privacy curtain around Elisabeth’s cot and looked him right in the eye, knowing that to make eye contact she needed to look up.

  “Malak al-Maut,” Kadima gestured to her head, her lips and her heart as a sign of respect. “You can show yourself now. There isn’t anybody here to see you who hasn’t already seen you before.”

  Azrael solidified into his preferred form. He had reshaped himself to appear the same height as the other Archangels, so tall that had this been a normal building instead of a tent his wings would have scraped against the ceiling, but he had not made himself burly the way angels were often depicted in the Christian church. If the General was a German shepherd, Azrael preferred to think of himself as looking like a greyhound.

  “Her life signs appear to be stable,” Azrael moved to the side of her bed, concern etching his face. “I’m glad I was able to get your attention in that crowd. My superiors would have been very upset if I’d been forced to appear in front of an entire regiment of Coalition peacekeepers.”

  “Thank you for saving her,” Kadima said. “You left your calling card?”

  “A small act of rebellion on my part.” Azrael allowed a hint of humor to light up his face. “The ace of spades was the symbol of my old military unit. There’s not a lot to do on long tours of duty, so we played cards.”

  Azrael moved within a foot of Elisabeth’s bed. He listened carefully, inhaling her scent, as he ran his hands six inches above the length of her body to ascertain the strength of her life force.

  “I sense no injury that won’t heal,” Azrael said, relieved. “Her life energy dipped so low at the riverbank I was worried we might lose her, but now it feels even. I never know with this one. She has always clung so tightly to her mortal shell.”

  “Why do you follow her?”

  “The same reason I check in on you from time to time,” Azrael made eye contact. “I like to make sure you’re both okay.”

  “You’re here every single day,” Kadima gave him a knowing look. “Sometimes more than once per day. Even when we don’t have incoming wounded. It’s not me you’re here to visit.”

  “Sometimes I’m here to see you,” Azrael's mouth curved up in a guilty grin. “I visited you even before you crossed paths with Elisabeth.”

  “You should let her see you,” Kadima said. “It’s not right, letting that poor girl think she’s responsible for everyone around her always dying.”

  “She hates me!” Azrael's expression was troubled. “I watch over her, but she doesn’t understand.”

  “She said she once touched your hand?” Kadima asked. “Is that why you’re so intrigued by her?”

  The slight tremor of ebony feathers was his only answer. Azrael lifted his right hand and touched his fingers to his thumb, noting the faint tingle of physical sensation, asking himself the same question.

  “No mortal has ever survived my touch,” Azrael said. “Even the gods fear me. You have no idea what it’s like … being unable to touch the people you care about. I’d … I’d given up hope of ever feeling the simple sensation of touch again until … until she touched me and survived.”

  “You’re obviously quite smitten by her.”

  “I am?” A guilty expression crossed his face. Although he often played poker against the Sata’anic descendants, he’d never been able to actually win. Unlike his Cherubim-trained brethren, every aspect of his body betrayed what he was feeling.

  “You should speak to her,” Kadima said. “Make her understand. I think it will comfort her to know she has meaning to you.”

  “She can be volatile when she’s angry,” Azrael said. “If she strikes me before she understands I have no control over my power, she’ll be dead before I warn her not to touch me. Once your soul is severed from your body, that’s it. There’s no putting the genie back into the bottle.”

  “She’s bedridden,” Kadima said. “If she leaps at you, you have time to step
away. You can’t keep shadowing her like this and never speak. It’s … strange.”

  “I’m afraid anything I say will just make things worse,” Azrael said nervously. “What if she tells me to just … go away? Completely? I tried that once and I was miserable.”

  “And so was she,” Kadima said. “You are the only constant she’s known since her parents died. Whether she wishes to admit it or not, she finds comfort in your visits.”

  Azrael looked up, surprise showing in his black eyes.

  “You just saved her life,” Kadima continued. “Try to talk to her. Please? I can tell you want to. You need to let her know you have feelings for her.”

  “I …” Azrael stammered. “I’m kind of … not used to … um … I’m a little … shy?” The combined look of pure longing and fear in his expressive dark eyes and tremor of feathers betrayed what he really meant to say to the perceptive Kadima. He was terrified if he made himself known, Elisabeth would order him to go away for good.

  “The last time somebody shadowed me that much,” Kadima said. “He ended up asking me to marry him. I’m not an idiot, you know?”

  “I will remain corporeal until she wakes up,” Azrael said. “If it appears she will hurt herself, I will dissipate again.”

  “I’ll be in the mess tent singing out-of-tune Christmas carols,” Kadima said. “Harold and I have a deal. I go with the flow for Christmas, while he doesn’t eat bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches in front of me when I am fasting for Ramadan.

  “Kadima?” Azrael asked, his expression intently curious.

  “Yes, Azrael?"

  “You had a husband before Harold,” Azrael asked. “And yet you married again. I could never understand how humans can have more than one … mate. We’re … different.”

  “Rahim was a good man,” Kadima said. “I still miss him. But he is gone and I am still here. I had two daughters who needed a father and Harold wanted to be that father. Harold understands my first husband will always hold a place in my heart.”