Page 65 of Highlander’s Bride

He took Bryanna’s hand and kept praying, in his head, that he wasn’t too late, after all. That the ambulance, or whatever it was called, would come any moment. He kept throwing glances at the window. The nurse and Leonie kept asking him questions—where he had come from, why he and Bryanna were dressed like that, if he needed help with his scratches and wounds—but he kept silent, ignoring them. Nothing mattered beyond getting Bryanna well.

They didn’t know that before them sat a man who held on to his sanity by a hair. That he had made an impossible choice and crossed a barrier they couldn’t even imagine. And that all he could do was pray that if God wanted to take someone today, He’d take Raghnall and not Bryanna.

After what felt like a lifetime, there was a wailing, high-pitched sound from through the door, and blue-and-red lightning flashed, but no thunder came…rather, he heard some sort of roar that was distant at first but came closer at an astonishing speed. He jumped up and unsheathed his sword, making both the nurse and Leonie jump away from him with shrieks of horror.

“Put that down!” cried the nurse.

“Why is there blood on it?” yelled Leonie.

The door opened and three people came in wearing dark-green tunics and trousers, holding small chests and rolling a stretcher on wheels inside. They stopped, frowning at his sword.

“Sir, please put that down,” said a young woman in the green clothes. “We came to help.”

Raghnall blinked. “Are ye the healers…? Doctors? Ambulance?”

“Yes, we are. Please put that down and let us look at the patient.”

Raghnall commanded himself to put his sword in the sheath. Anything to help Bryanna, even though all his warrior’s instincts screamed at him to not let his guard down.

David said ambulance. Doctors. They would help her.

He stepped aside. “Save her life.”

They rushed to her, checked her, stabbed her arm with a needle as thin as a fish bone, and attached something to her that snaked up into a transparent bottle. He hated every moment of it, itched to push them aside and not let them pierce her, hurt her, do things to her he didn’t understand… But he also remembered she had cut herself to drop her blood into that magical box that showed her the sugar in her blood. And then he himself had stabbed her stomach with something she’d called an insulin pen and that saved her life…

So he had to do the most difficult thing ever—nothing. Just stand back and watch, helplessly, desperately praying for them to not be too late.

As they put her on the stretcher and were tying some ropes around her, one of the healers turned to him. “Are you her relative?”

Raghnall cleared his throat. “She’s my wife. Bryanna Mackenzie.”

“Okay. You can come with us, Mr. Mackenzie. We have to take her to the hospital.”

He frowned. “Hospi—”

“We have no time to waste. Your wife is in a ketoacidotic coma, and it’s a matter of life and death. Are you coming, sir?”

“She’s still alive?” he asked, realizing that he was asking something that had an obvious answer.

“Yes, she is, but her condition is critical.”

They rolled her out of the house and towards a big white metal cart with a roof and a large stripe of bright-yellow and green rectangles. Inside, the cart of hell had small, blinking lights; white chests; transparent bottles; smooth black cords; and yellow-and-red things he had no name for.

He’d wanted to command them to stop, but now he knew better. She needed this. They’d help her.

They rolled her inside the hellish cart and the male healer attached more ropes to her—they connected to a black board that began to blink with colorful numbers and letters right away. The other two healers looked at him.

“Are you coming, Mr. Mackenzie?”

Nae, screamed everything within him. Dinna get into that hellish cart. Dinna go deeper into this strange world ye dinna ken. Dinna let them take ye…

But she’d come into his world, she’d stayed with him through everything, despite the deadly risk to her life.

And he’d do the same for her.

“Aye,” he said, hopping inside the cart.

The devilish cart had nothing on him.