Ghosts of Culloden Moor 10 - Macbeth by L.L. Muir

Author:L.L. Muir [Muir, L.L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lesli Muir Lytle
Published: 2015-10-23T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Seoc could have kicked himself all the way back to the coffee house. And mentally, he tried.

He was a fool. He’d allowed a lass to ruin everything!

Why hadn’t he made his excuses and gone on his way as soon as he realized the old man was terminal? Why? Had the Battle of Culloden taught him nothing?!

There had been a mistake made, of course, and young Rabby had made it. The morning after the battle, he’d met Seoc rising from his grave and pronounced he was the 76th ghost to join what soon became Culloden’s 79. What the others hadn’t understood was that he was never meant to be counted in their number. It should have been Culloden’s 78.

The blame lay on his own shoulders, of course. He never corrected the boy even after he’d gotten his bearings and realized he was, indeed, a ghost. It didn’t take long, however, for Seoc to understand that his reasons for holding tight to the in-between was not the same as his comrades’.

The others felt cheated, he knew. They were angry to have been taken from the physical world before they’d had their fair share of it. And they longed to be revenged, or at least have their tragedies heard, and rightly so.

But for Seoc Macbeth, it was different. It wasn’t the physical world he clung to, but the next life he fended off. On the far side of that shimmering veil that appeared from time to time to beckon him onward… stood a good sized army…waiting for him.

For two hundred sixty-nine years, he’d ignored that beckoning. He’d been content to bide out eternity on the moors. After all, there was no substance to time as it passed. No regrets for time squandered, no desperate search for the meaning of his existence. And when he felt a twinge of loneliness, there were humans to examine, tellies to watch, or 78 other ghosties who gathered from time to time to play at war.

Although, he did share one thing in common with the others—his attachment to a certain wee lassie who turned out to be a witch. He’d watched her grow, watched her interact with Number 79 and others. And all along, he’d suspected she had not come in vain.

On the night of the Summer Solstice, when she’d put forth her challenge, it had all become clear to him. She was to be their savior, but she’d meant to doctor their souls first. The carrot she’d dangled before them, the chance to exact their revenge on Prince Charles Stuart himself, had been the perfect bait for the rest.

Obviously, the offer hadn’t interested Seoc, and he’d wondered, when Soni got down to the last of them, how she might compel him to leave the moor. She’d been so confident. Had she known he was not like the rest?

Of course she had. She’d told him, there at the end, that she knew the desires of his heart.

Surprisingly, it hadn’t been until Rabby was sent away that Seoc truly considered leaving Culloden.

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