Ring Twice for Ghosts by Linda Maye Adams

Author:Linda Maye Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: haunted house, ghost party, haunted antiques, ship graveyard, friendship, standing up for yourself, ghost, spirit, haunting, ghost fiction, pirates, magic, cartography fiction, metaphysical fiction, wish fulfillment, feel good, positive, heroine saves the day, faith vs. doubt, family, friendship
Publisher: Turquoise Sunset Publishing
Published: 2022-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

The burst of magic had exhausted Ariana. Pap wrapped her in a patched blanket and gave her trail rations to work through. He didn’t like the pallor of her skin. She didn’t work magic like this often.

“I’ll be all right,” she said.

He studied her face for a moment, then nodded. That was an agreement they both had: Don’t lie to the other.

To keep himself from worrying, he added more kindling to the campfire. The orange frames greedily consumed the kindling and poured smoke into the sky. He had to shift his position because the heat billowing out from the fire was getting too much.

The approaching man would see the smoke and head this way.

Relief swamped Pap whe heard the snap of fallen tree branches and the crunch of the dried leaves. The footsteps were uneven.

A soldier in a Royal Militia uniform staggered out of the bushes. His face was ashen and thin, his uniform stained with blood.

He spotted Pap and choked out one word: “Pirates.”

Pap caught him, a strong arm under one shoulder, and helped him to the fire. While he checked the soldier’s injuries, Ariana silently walked to the river’s edge to fill the canteen. Pap said nothing, letting her be in her thoughts.

When her halting footsteps signaled her return, he glanced up and shook his head. He doubted if the soldier would last the night.

“What caused the injuries?” Ariana asked.

“Sword,” Pap said.

She returned to her log seat. “Can I see his haversack?”

Pap passed over the leather satchel. He had one just like it. The bag contained the maps the mage-mage had drawn, and a journal kept by the soldier. Thinking about looking at the journal made Pap’s gut jerk.

“What do the maps look like?” he said instead.

Ariana leafed through them. “Sloppy. Gaps. This one...there’s supposed to be a town, and it’s not there.”

The injured soldier died a few hours later. Pap and Ariana fashioned a crude stretcher from branches and took the body to a nearby cave. The cave had been carved out of the rock when the river was higher, looking like a mouth with the lips parted in surprise.

“It’ll be safe here until his spirit departs,” Ariana said. “We could go now to get the mage’s body, too.”

But the sun was already fading into the sky with a blaze of oranges. It would be dark soon.

“No,” Pap said.

He hated the taste of that word. Bones could call the mage back from the dead or ground up into elixirs.

“I can use my magic to navigate in the dark,” Ariana said.

Pap shook his head. He’d taken some time to read the leather-bound notebook from the haversack. The team had found a pirate shipwrecked nearby. The soldier’s note in the margin chilled Pap to the core: Treasure?

They would have both seen it as a solution to the problem the Royal Cartographer created. It had made them careless.

He would not be careless.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.