Free GNELFS by Sidney Williams Page B

slip down over the windshield to slap Gab in the face. In her lap, Heaven was trembling and sobbing, tears mingling with the blood.
    "I don't understand what happened," Tanner said, his hands so tight on the wheel he looked like he was trying to squeeze it apart. He was more frightened by this than she had realized, but that was understandable. Nothing else was, but fear made sense.
    "She's been disturbed lately, having nightmares," Gabrielle said.
    "That still doesn't explain what happened. I've read about people's minds doing things, even making them bleed, but this is not like stigmata or anything. If this was just from her mind, how could her clothes get cut?"
    "I don't know," Gab said. "It's like ghosts did it."
    " Gnelfs ? You said her dreams were about Gnelfs .”
    “Yes."
    "What could that mean?"
    “It doesn't explain anything."
    The car screeched around a corner, and Tanner ran a red light at the next intersection, drawing honks from other motorists. He avoided a collision by a few inches.
    Another block down he turned onto a cross street. It had buckled in several places, but he managed to hold the car steady as he roared along, cutting almost a mile off the trip.
    He swerved around a couple of cars and some pedestrians as the Cutlass entered the Riverland Parish Hospital grounds. A security guard making rounds looked up at him as he passed, but Tanner ignored the man and pulled into a parking slot near the door of the emergency room.
    Gab was out of the car before the engine died. At a jog, she hurried through the automatic doors and across the waiting room to the small computer desk where the admitting clerk was typing in information on an elderly man with a bandaged wrist.
    A kid in his mid-twenties, a bad bruise on his left cheek, seemed to be next in line. He was pressing an ice pack to an eye which was about to swell shut. Gab pressed past him.
    "I need help quick," she shouted.
    Coming out of her chair, the white-coated clerk stuck her head through the narrow doorway behind her and called out, "Incoming child, stat."
    Seconds later, a blond nurse with a stethoscope draped over her shoulder appeared. The gummed soles of her shoes squeaked on the see-yourself waxed tile as she rushed over to Gab and began a quick examination.
    The doors buzzed open again, and Tanner joined them.
    "Let's get her into an examining room," the nurse said. The name Cruse was on the tab pinned to her pocket. "Were you in an accident?"
    A white-uniformed man with short brown hair and a mustache appeared a few seconds later with a stretcher, and Heaven was transferred from Gab's arms to the clean white sheets.
    "Mommy." Her voice sounded weak.
    "It's okay, sweetheart. They'll take good care of you. Mommy will be right here." She silently cursed the tyranny of procedure.
    "If you want to go on in with her your husband can handle the—"
    "U h, he's—"
    "I'm a friend," Tanner explained.
    "Oh." A look of suspicion crossed her features. "Okay. Well, I'll take care of the necessary information as quickly as possible and let you join her. She's frightened I'm sure."
    Gab sat in the chair the elderly man had vacated, conscious of the blood on her clothing and hands as she answered a battery of questions about insurance and allergies, her responses to all of them being typed into the computer. Then, an eternity later, after leaving Tanner in the waiting room to call Katrina, she was led through the doorway toward the examining room.
    A gray-haired doctor with a beard that still had a few reddish streaks was already at Heaven's side, shining a penlight into her eyes. His wire-rimmed glasses had skied down to the very tip of his nose and seemed about to plummet over.
    Heaven now wore a hospital gown, and a nurse was dabbing at some of her wounds.
    The doctor straightened and looked at Gabrielle.
    "I'm Dr. Edwards," he said.
    "Gabrielle Davis."
    "She's going to be fine," he said. "Just some scratches. What the hell happened to her?"
    "She was