Two by Twilight: Twilight Vows\Run from Twilight by Maggie Shayne

Author:Maggie Shayne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA Books
Published: 2005-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

TWILIGHT VOWS

Chapter One

Irish countryside, 1808

I walked along the path that night, as I often did. Bone-tired from working in my father’s fields, coated in a layer of good Irish soil spread fine on my skin and held fast by my sweat. My muscles ached, but ’twas a good sort of pain. The sort that came of relishing one’s own strength and vigor. Of late, I hadn’t done so any too often. I’d been taken with bouts of weakness, my head spinning sometimes until I passed out cold as a corpse. But today hadn’t been like that at all. Today I’d felt good, certain whatever had plagued me was gone. And to prove it I’d worked like a horse in Da’s fields. All the day through I’d put my brothers and cousins through their paces, darin’ them to keep up with me, laughing when they couldn’t. And I’d kept on wielding my hoe long after the others had called it a night.

So ’twas alone I was walking.

Autumn hung in the air, with the harvest beneath it and a big yellow moon hanging low in the sky. Leaves crackled under my feet and sent their aromas up to meet me as I walked by the squash patch, with its gray-blue hubbards as big as Ma’s stew pot, and orange-yellow pumpkins clinging to their dying vines. We’d have to gather them in tomorrow. Gram said there would be a killing frost before next Sabbath.

A killing frost.

A little chill snaked up the back of my neck as the words repeated themselves, for some reason, in my mind. Foolishness, of course. I’d spent too many nights as a lad, curled on a braided rug before the hearth listenin’ to Gram spin her yarns. This time of the year, her tales tended toward the frightening, with ghosties and ghoulies her favorite subjects. I supposed some of those tales had stuck in my mind. Though a man grown now, and all of twenty years plus three, I still got the shivers from Gram’s tales. The way her voice would change as she told ’em, the way her ice-blue eyes would narrow as if she were sharing some dark secret while the firelight cast dancing shadows on her dear careworn face.

’Twas a night just like this one, boy. When all seemed peaceful and right. But any fool ought to know better than to walk alone after dark during the time of the harvest. For the veil between the world of the living and that of the dead is thinning…and parting…and…

“Hush, Gram,” I whispered. But a chill breeze caressed my neck and goose bumps rose there to mark its passing. I thrust my hands into my pockets, hunching my shoulders, walking a little faster. Something skittered along the roadside, and my head jerked sharply to the right. “Only the wind,” I said, and then I began to whistle.

Any fool ought to know better. Are you a fool, Donovan O’Roark?

I shook myself and walked still faster. There were eyes on me…someone watching from the crisp, black night.

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