Moving closer to the head of the bed, Adam prepared himself with a single deep breath to ground and center himself, at the same time framing a silent prayer of petition to the spiritual guardians who ruled the Inner Planes. He must be very careful, for one of the nurses had just come back. Despite that distraction, however, he could feel the first faint glimmerings of rapport with the soul resident in the shattered body before him - and knew that the link of soul to body was tenuous, else he would not have been able to perceive it so clearly.
But before he could stabilize the forming bridge between them, the beep of the pulse-rate monitor increased in tempo and Malcolm Grant shuddered and roused, his one unban-daged eye snapping wide in a sudden, agitated return to consciousness. Simultaneously, he started gasping, fighting the ventilator that had been helping him breathe. Alarms began going off on all his monitors as his heartbeat faltered.
"Code Blue!" the nurse shouted. "I need a crash cart!"
Even as she moved in to begin administering CPR, and other medical personnel began converging on the patient, including Dr. Stirling, Adam bent to the stricken man's ear, both hands gently steadying the thrashing head.
"You aren't choking, Mr. Grant," he murmured. "There's a machine helping you breathe. Let it do the work. Just try to relax."
But Grant deteriorated quickly, despite the efforts of the crash team, and slipped back into unconsciousness even as a nurse wheeled a defibrillator into place and Dr. Stirling positioned the paddles on his chest.
"Clear, everyone!" she ordered, and everyone else fell back.
But though she shocked the patient several times, the monitors one by one went flat. Watching helpless and silent from behind the circle of technicians fighting to save Grant's life, Adam sensed the fraying of the silver cord that was Grant's spiritual lifeline. Powerless to knit it back together, he felt a kindred psychic wrench at the moment when the cord parted. In that same instant, the fleeting image came to him of two stricken faces, a man and a woman, staring back at him in frozen horror through the windscreen of an onrushing car.
The image exploded on impact, even as an invisible breath of psychic breeze wafted past Adam - Malcolm Grant's immortal soul winging free of his broken body. The release was untimely, leaving behind tasks undone and promises unfulfilled. All Adam could do was wish the retiring spirit Godspeed in his own heart of hearts, trusting to the wisdom of the Light to redress the balance in the fullness of time.
Lost momentarily in these reflections, he only belatedly became aware that the nursing staff had abandoned their efforts to resuscitate their patient. Even as he lifted his bowed head, one of the nurses leaned in and gently drew the sheet over the face of the deceased.
"Dr. Sinclair, was it?" said a woman's voice behind him. As he turned, Dr. Stirling offered him Grant's chart and a pen.
"Could we have your particulars, in case there's an inquiry?" she said. "I actually expected to lose him on the table, but the hospital needs to have all the details, just in case any question comes up later."
He would have preferred to retreat at once to some quiet place where he could consider what he had experienced and bounce his impressions off McLeod. Even more, he wished that Peregrine had been here to sketch the faces, either direct or from Adam's description. Holding onto the images as best he could, he jotted down his sparse observations, commending the crash team for their efforts, then signed with his particulars of consultancy and licensing and handed the chart back to a nurse. He was shaking his head as he headed out of the recovery room, where McLeod had withdrawn at the first sign of medical crisis.
"Well?" McLeod said. "Were you able to pick up anything at all?"
"Something, but I'm not sure what it means," Adam said, stripping off his gown. "Here's not the best place to discuss it, though. Why don't we head on down to the hospital chapel? That's as private a place as we're likely to find on the premises."
They found the chapel empty, and settled into a pew in the rear. Closing his eyes, Adam conjured the mysterious faces and described for McLeod's benefit what he himself had shared of Malcolm Grant's experience.
"I believe Grant was telling the absolute truth when he told the officers at the scene that he'd seen two pedestrians step out in front of his car," he told his Second. "Whether or not there was anything actually there, however, is another story entirely."
"A ghost story, maybe?" McLeod said.
What his Second meant was not lost on Adam. It was a fact, affirmed by their experience as Huntsmen, that people and incidents, especially violent ones, could generate emotional and imagistic resonances that could be inadvertently apprehended by anyone sensitive enough to pick them up.
"I wonder if, perhaps, it is," Adam said thoughtfully, glancing back at McLeod. "Tell me: Were there pedestrians involved in any of the other accidents covered by this investigation?''
McLeod shook his head. "No, they were all car crashes."
"Hmmm." Adam gave the patrician bridge of his nose a thoughtful rub. "I wonder, then, if Malcolm Grant saw a ghostly manifestation of something that predates the onset of these accidents."
McLeod turned to look at him more directly. "What are you saying? That we're not casting our nets widely enough?''
"Something like that," Adam said, with a thin flicker of a smile. "From what you've been telling me, I gather that Donald and his Traffic colleagues have been spending long hours sifting through the accident reports themselves in search of a common denominator. If they haven't found one, that could be because it isn't there. I wonder what they might turn up if they were to work backwards from the first of the year, looking for any other unusual occurrences along that stretch of road - perhaps something involving pedestrians."
"That's a very interesting notion," McLeod said. "I'll pass it on to Donald, and authorize the archival work. You really think you're onto something?"
"I don't know," Adam said. "But if Donald turns up anything promising, be sure to let me know."
"Aye, so I will," McLeod said. "I'd like to see us crack this case before Carnage Corridor claims another set of victims."
Chapter Four
"SAINT Columba's footsteps," Julia Lovat murmured, looking up from the pages of her much-thumbed guidebook. "Do you suppose those marks we saw on the top of that rock by Kilcolmkill Church really are the imprints of his feet?"
Peregrine had his portable campstool firmly planted in the sand a short distance away, his travelling easel propped up on its tripod in front of him. He was overlaying thin washes of watercolor to a developing study of his wife where she sat perched above him on a large flat-topped boulder, with the intense blue-green waters of the North Channel for a background. Julia's question came just as he was trading the fine sable brush in his hand for one finer still. Lifting his hazel gaze from the paintbox, he gave her a grin.
' 'Given the way the currents run in these waters, I suppose this stretch of shoreline is as likely a place as any for an Irish-born saint to have made his landfall. As for the footprints themselves - I don't know about you, but-1 am a firm believer in miracles."
The fond look that accompanied this declaration left Julia in no doubt as to the romantic nature of his meaning. She accepted the tribute with a chuckle and said wryly, "I hope that's not meant to be an assessment of my driving ability."
"Not in the least!" her new husband averred. "You and Algy are getting along famously."
The dark-green Alvis so named was parked at the side of the narrow road overlooking the beach where the couple had just finished picnicking on oatcakes, smoked salmon, and "truckles," a creamy variety of local cheese. It was the third day of their honeymoon, the second since their arrival in Kintyre, a wild and scenic peninsula on Scotland's west coast. Among the places they had explored since leaving their guesthouse in Campbeltown earlier that morning was the spot where the seventh-century Irish missionary, St. Co-lumba, was purported to have preached his first sermon on Scottish soil. A set of footprints visible on the flattened summit of a rock near the local village of Southend was said to be a permanent memento of that historic visit.