Ghouls Gone Wild

“Someone’s taken your baby?” Heath asked gently. I didn’t know if he knew whom he was talking to, but I wasn’t taking any chances. The moment I got my fingers on a grenade, I was going to explode that ghost right out of the room.

  Rigella nodded. “The child’s come early,” she gasped. “I tried to hold it inside a little longer, but the wee one wanted to come out.” The witch’s eyes darted about the room, as if she was searching for any sign of her child.

  “Tell me about the baby,” Heath offered just as my fingers closed on something metallic and cylindrical.

  Rigella’s eyes came back to him, and a look of pure joy overcame her face. “The most beautiful face you’ve ever seen!” she gushed. “Me sister would be so happy. She always loved children.”

  I eased my other hand over the top of the cylinder, gripping it tightly, and tugged. It held fast. “Your sister?” Heath asked, encouraging her to continue.

  I risked looking down and realized I’d grabbed the flashlight, not the grenade, but my eyes also landed on one of them right at my kneecap. Taking great care not to make any sudden movements, I eased my hand to the grenade, lifting it off the floor and curling my fingers around the cap.

  “Oh, Rigella would have loved the babe!” the woman said. “Me oldest sister was always such a caring woman.”

  “M. J.!” Heath hissed suddenly, and I looked up from the cap at the top of the grenade right before I was about to tug it free. “Wait!” he whispered.

  I felt my brow furrow, and I glanced back at the woman hovering near us, who was the spitting image of the witch who’d entered my dreams. She was as real as any human being, although there was a bit of hollowness to her eyes that told me more than anything that she wasn’t as real as she looked.

  “What’s your name, sweet lady?” Heath asked gently.

  “Isla,” she said distractedly while continuing to look about the room.

  “That’s beautiful,” Heath told her. “I’ll bet your baby also has a beautiful name?”

  Isla fixed her hollow eyes on him. “Aye,” she said. “Royshin. The tot’s name is Royshin.” Isla tugged at her woolen dress. “Have you seen where they’ve taken me babe?” she asked again, a note of desperation in her voice.

  Heath shook his head slowly. “No, but I can help you look for Royshin if you’d like.”

  Isla seemed to brighten. “Oh, you’re a kind sir, you are!”

  But just as soon as she accepted Heath’s help, a shadowy mist wafted into the room, and a sense of intense foreboding hit me hard in the solar plexus. “Um . . . ,” I said, all my senses tingling in alarm. “Are you feeling that?”

  “Something else is here,” Heath said, and the moment he finished speaking, a door down the hallway slammed, and we both started.

  “Look at the doorway!” I whispered.

  The entrance to the room was thick with a gray fog that was starting to roil and swirl like an angry thundercloud before something parted it and began to emerge from the mist.

  At first I had no idea what it was, just a small black circle edging its way out of the fog, but then the angle changed and I realized it was a long, black handle that I’d seen before. “Oh, no!” I gasped as the rest of it cleared the fog and came slowly into the room to hover right next to Isla, who was looking at it in confusion. In the next instant a smoky shadow grew out of the handle, and formed the willowy outline of a woman straddling the broom.

  “Rigella?” Isla asked. “What are you doing here?” I held my breath as the spirit of Rigella must have answered her baby sister because the younger girl began shaking her head. “No, Rigella!” she said. “They’re causing me no harm! They’re going to help me look for Royshin!”

  But apparently, Rigella wasn’t willing to listen to her sister, and the broom reared up as if it was winding up for a strike and I had no choice. I uncapped the grenade, pulled out the spike, and held it right up to the broom.

  Next to me, Heath dived for the other grenade, and faster than I would have thought possible with his injured arm, he got the cap off and tipped out the spike, also holding it out toward the two sisters.

  For nearly five full seconds after I held up my spike, nothing happened other than Isla curling away from us. But once Heath’s grenade joined mine, there was a terrible snapping noise, a burst of air so powerful that it pushed us both flat on our backs, and then silence . . . which was eeriest of all.

  “You . . . okay?” I asked, panting heavily from the rush of adrenaline.

  “Yeah. You?”

  I sat up and looked around. Isla and the broomstick and the mist were all gone. The room was empty of anything but the two of us and some cobwebs. “Fine,” I said, getting to my feet. “How’s your arm?”

  Heath sat up as well. “Throbbing, but I’ll probably pull through.”

  That got me to smile. “What now?” I asked, helping him to his feet.

  “Let’s check out the rest of the castle.”

  We retrieved the magnetic spikes, placing them back in their canisters, before leaving the room. I followed behind Heath again, making sure to give him a little more space this time as we made our way back to the main hall, where we eyed the stairs. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “As long as we don’t find any more broomsticks, I’m game.”

  “At least we know that two grenades will do the trick,” he said, moving to the stairs and beginning to climb.

  “Yeah, but did you feel her strength, Heath? There were a couple of seconds before she actually reacted. I think that spook is one of the most powerful we’ve ever encountered.”

  “And one of the most determined,” he added, and then he stopped, as if he’d just thought of something. “Gilley,” he whispered.

  I felt a jolt of shock go through me, and immediately dug into my back pocket for my cell phone. With shaking fingers I tapped the contacts icon and scrolled to Gilley’s number. I had to tap it twice to get it to dial, but after only two rings my partner answered, “What’s wrong?”

  I let go of the breath I’d been holding, but hesitated while I struggled to find the right words to say to him. “M. J.?” he said, his voice sounding concerned. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I assured him. “But I wanted to let you know that we encountered Rigella’s ghost here at the castle.”

  “Ohmigod!” he yelled, so loudly that I had to pull the phone away from my ear. “Should I send the police? An ambulance? Fire department?” He’d squeaked that last part, which caused me to let out a small giggle. “What’s so funny?” he demanded, switching immediately to a defensive tone.

  I struggled to hold in my laughter, and failed. Heath was looking at me curiously, so I placed a hand over the mouthpiece and repeated what Gilley had said. Heath also seemed to think it was funny, because he started laughing too. It was just so ridiculous that we should need to call any one of the public-safety departments he’d just named, but this bust had in fact required all three. I wondered whom we’d have to call next. “Do you by chance have Batman, Superman, or the Green Hornet on speed dial?”

  “I’m serious!” my partner shouted into the phone.

  And that made me laugh even harder. Here I’d been beaten, frightened, battered, and taunted by an evil spirit who clearly wanted to kill me, and everyone I held dear, and yet I was laughing. Somewhere in the back of my mind I considered whether I might be losing my mind.

  When I had recovered myself, I simply said, “We’re okay, honey. Just wanted you and Gopher to be on high alert. We chased her out of the room where she cornered us—but it took two grenades. So do me a favor: Take all the spikes you have and place them around the perimeter of the van until we come back, okay?”

  Gilley didn’t answer me right away, and I had the mental image of him gripping the phone with big wide eyes and nodding his head agreeably. “How soon will you guys be back?” he wanted to know.

  I looked up the stairs. We were halfway to the first floor. “Soon,” I promised. “We’re almost done here.”

  It turned out I was a big fat fibber. The castle took Heath and me two more hours to explore and during that time we disc
overed at least a dozen more spooks. We could feel each energy that we encountered and took turns getting its information and documenting it for the camera. None of them were particularly malevolent, but all seemed to be greatly attached to that fortress, and almost all were active—in other words, they made a great show of displaying themselves by clomping along the stone corridors, or knocking, or moving pebbles and rocks, or making other sounds. And we were able to search every corner except at the very top of the highest tower, which was the last place we had to check, and by then we were really beat. So when Heath gave a halfhearted push on the old wooden door, which was warped with age and had rusted-out hinges, and it didn’t give way, we left it and called it a day.

  In all, the castle was a ghost hunter’s paradise. “We should have shot here,” I said wistfully as we left.

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Heath agreed. “I mean, besides Rigella, not one of those spooks wanted to physically harm us.”

  “My kind of ghostbust,” I said ruefully.

  The day had turned gray and windy. I looked up at the thick black clouds hovering overhead and pulled the collar of my coat up around my neck. “Feels like rain.”

  Heath held up his cast. “It does,” he agreed. “I think I need to get back to the hotel and take a pain pill. My arm’s throbbing like crazy.”

  “I’m so sorry for making you trip,” I told him, a wave of guilt washing over me again.

  Heath surprised me by throwing his good arm around my shoulders. “Don’t sweat it, M. J. It was an accident.”

  “I still feel bad.”

  “Make it up to me later?” I looked up to see a twinkle in his eye and he bounced his eyebrows playfully.

  “Um . . . yeah . . . about that.”

  Heath tilted his chin and laughed. “Or not,” he said, letting me off the hook. “But there is something going on between us, right?”

  I sighed and took his arm off my shoulder, but still held his hand. “Heath,” I said, trying to sort out my feelings as I talked. “I don’t know what’s going on. I will admit that I’m attracted to you, but I can’t tell if that’s just my reaction to what’s happened to us in the past couple of days, or because Steven’s not here and I really do want to get close to you.”

  “Ah, yeah,” Heath said. “The S word.”

  I stared at my feet as I walked. “I’m sorry. I know I’m sending you mixed signals, but I’ve been seeing him for a while now and I genuinely care about him.”

  “It’s cool.”

  “Don’t be like that.”

  Heath cut me a look that was cold and hard and pulled his hand out of mine. “I’m not being like anything,” he insisted. “Really, it’s cool. Figure it out and get back to me, ’kay?”

  He said that last part like he couldn’t care less if I actually ever did get back to him, and part of me knew it was just Heath trying to salvage his ego, but another part really wanted him to care. “Okay,” I said after a long pause. “Whatever.”

  “Whatever,” he repeated.

  I looked up at him again, but he was staring straight ahead, and he’d also quickened his pace to walk a few steps ahead of me. I sighed and let him go, wishing that just one thing about this ghostbust weren’t so hard.

  The moment I got back to the van, Gopher was all over me about leaving him with Gilley for over two hours. “The guy’s driving me crazy, M. J.!” he hissed. “He’s done nothing but jump and yelp at any noise, no matter how small. And when he’s not doing that, he’s complaining about how hungry he is. I mean, what am I supposed to do about that when I’m parked in some guy’s driveway? Wave a magic wand over my hand and produce a hamburger?”

  “Cut him some slack, Gopher,” I muttered. “He’s been through a lot.”

  “Can we go eat now?” Gilley moaned from the back of the van. I looked over my shoulder as Gopher pulled out of Joseph’s driveway back onto the road. Both Gilley and Heath were pouting in their seats like dejected kindergartners.

  “Sure, Gil,” I said, then leaned over to Gopher and whispered, “Get us to the nearest burger joint you can find.”

  About twenty minutes later we were seated at a no-frills Wimpy restaurant awaiting our lunch order. Gilley was twirling his Pepsi with a straw while he wore one big frown. “This place sucks,” he grumbled.

  Like Gopher, I was quickly losing patience with him. “You said you were hungry. And I know you like hamburgers, so what’s the problem?”

  “I’m not talking about here,” he replied moodily, tapping the tabletop. “I’m talking about Scotland. It sucks. And I want to go home.”

  I laid a hand on his arm. “Scotland doesn’t suck, Gil. After all, this is where your ancestors came from, so there has to be something good here.”

  Gilley’s mouth worked its way into an award-winning pout. “My ancestors left here, remember?”

  “Maybe they just wanted to explore America.”

  “Or, maybe this place sucked and they wanted to go someplace better.”

  I leaned back in my chair with a heavy sigh and looked up at the ceiling. I hated it when Gil got into one of his moods. And knowing him as I did, I knew that there wasn’t much that could pull him out of it.

  Except . . .

  Maybe . . .

  . . . a project.

  I leaned forward again just as our waitress brought the tray with our food. “Say, Gil,” I began nonchalantly.

  “Here we go,” he growled, clearly not in the mood for further chitchat.

  Gopher looked at him before taking the plate the waitress was handing him. “Here we go what?”

  “M. J. never starts a sentence with ‘Say, Gil,’ unless she’s about to put me to work.”

  I smiled tightly, debating whether to give my partner a slap upside the head or just propose my project. I wisely decided on pitching my idea. “I need some intel,” I said.

  Gil picked up a fry and began to nibble on it, doing his best to look bored. I waited him out and he finally paused chewing the fry long enough to say, “Intel?”

  I took a bite of burger, which was incredibly greasy, but in a good way, and waited to swallow before answering. “Heath and I encountered Rigella’s sister Isla. I think she’s the one the mob spared, well, after raping her and leaving her for dead, that is. Anyway, Katherine said that Rigella’s little sister had died in childbirth, which fits with what Heath and I discovered when we met her, because she kept looking for her baby.”

  Gilley was working his way through the fries, one by one, listening to what I had to say but not appearing especially interested, so I kept going. “Anyway, Isla said that she named the baby Royshin.”

  “Roy who?” Gopher asked.

  “Royshin.”

  “Weird name for a kid,” Gil grumbled.

  “It’s probably Celtic or something,” I said with an impatient wave. “The point is that Katherine said the only person who could call up the witch early would be someone who was within the bloodline. That makes me think that this Royshin lived. And if he lived, then I need to trace his line up through the past couple hundred years to find out who might have called up Rigella’s spirit.”

  “How the hell am I supposed to find some dude from the seventeenth century named Roysomething? I mean, you don’t even have a last name for me to run with, do you?” Gilley complained.

  Normally, Gil would have been all over that challenge, but nothing about the last few days had been normal. Still, an idea occurred to me. “Oh, but I think we might,” I said. “That castle on Joseph’s property is where I believe Isla lived out her final days. She hasn’t left it since the day she died, because she’s still looking for her baby. That makes me think that whoever took her in had power and money, especially since they kept her son safe from the angry villagers who killed the rest of her family.

  “I know I might be taking a leap here, but if we can trace the family of that castle back—we might actually find Royshin within the family tree, or at least perhaps on the servants’ roll call. At the very worst they might have made him a stableboy or a farmhand or something.”

  Gilley scowled and took an angry bite out of h
is burger. He chewed without saying anything, glowering at me. I merely smiled winningly back at him.

  Finally after several heavy sighs and a long pull of his Pepsi he mumbled, “Fine.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  “Do I really have a choice?”

  “Of course,” I snapped, finally out of patience. “You can sit in your hotel room hoping it doesn’t catch fire while we try to bust this case, or you can help us get the job done that much sooner by doing your part!”

  Gilley lowered his lids at me and smacked his lips. “Well, when you put it like that,” he muttered.

  Gopher and Heath snickered and pretended to be really interested in their food, and that was the end of the discussion for a while.

  When we got back to the hotel, Heath went immediately to his room to take his pain pill and a nap. I was pretty exhausted myself, so I handed the camera over to Gopher to look at the footage we’d gotten from the castle, asked Kim and John to keep watch over Gil, and hunted down Meg and Wendell.

  Meg was only too happy to hand Wendell over to me for some prime puppy love and a few z’s. Half an hour later, I was fast asleep.

  “M. J.,” someone called to me softly. “M. J., can you hear me?”

  I sat up and looked around. I was in my hotel room with Wendell cuddled up next to me; however, sitting in the corner was none other than Samuel Whitefeather.

  “Hey!” I said, a little startled and still sleepy. “How’d you get in here?”

  Samuel chuckled and I found myself smiling. “I climbed in through the window,” he joked. For the record we were two floors up.

  “Ah,” I said. “Right. You’re dead. You can go anywhere.”

  “One of the perks,” he quipped. “That and you can get into any show or concert for free.”

  “No joke?”

  “No joke.”

  I nodded. “Good to know.” I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and blinked a few times. “So what brings you by, Mr. Whitefeather?”

  “I’m worried,” he said. “And please, call me Sam.”

  “ ’Kay, Sam. What worries you? The fact that your grandson had his arm broken by a spook-wielding broom, who then tried to kill me, or the three-alarm fire that nearly took my partner’s life?”