In the sleepy town of Slaughtavery, all is not as it seems.
In 1745, boys began to disappear, leaving no trace behind. The town was trapped in a hush of anxiety, gripped by fear too profound to express. After beautiful Madrigal Byrne ran away on her...
Wresting her face from the suffocating folds of the cloak wrapping her in a rough embrace, Merry gulps deep breaths of misty night air, staring up into the face of her captor, her heart a hundred galloping horses in her chest.
The boy was spun from moonbeams and white silk, his eyes silver disks of light, iridescent like those of animals that can see in the dark. Strands of his long, pale hair blow against her cheeks, tickling her skin as she gazes up at his ruby lips.
اوووه! هذه الصورة لا تتبع إرشادات المحتوى الخاصة بنا. لمتابعة النشر، يرجى إزالتها أو تحميل صورة أخرى.
He is the most beautiful creature she has ever seen in her 13 years of life, and she has seen her brother's friend, Eoghan Sullivan... and loved him from afar for more than a year now. Eoghan is not pretty like this boy, and he is filled with sunshine and laughter, not with cold and danger. The beauty of this boy looking down into her face with his long-lashed eyes is terrible, suffused with the promise of death.
A shiver shakes her body, setting her lips trembling as the same dread she'd experienced last winter when she'd come face to face with a beautiful wolf crawls into her body and coils up in her tummy. That day, her brothers, Séamus and Conor saved her by shouting, waving sticks and throwing stones at the animal until he'd turned and ran away, leaving deep prints in the snow.
She knows nobody is coming to her aid today.
She is standing defenceless in the frigid shadows of the cemetery, the mist curling around her like seeking fingers shivering over her skin, trying to find a way in. The only witness of what she knows to be her final moments in this life is the ghostly girl with tangled hair clutching a baby to her bosom. A baby Merry knows, down in the deepest parts of her soul, is no longer alive.
If her heart wasn't filled with terror and the knowledge that she would soon join it in its passing, she would've wept for the infant. Instead, she is quivering in the arms of a boy who is not holding her captive just by the strength of the arms he has wrapped around her, but also by his shining eyes and his lips she can see twisting in a lazy, alluring smile.
She wants to scream, but her voice left her somewhere between recognizing traces of her beloved Maddy in the face of the gaunt girl skulking in the shadows of the tree to her right and finding herself pressed up against this ethereal boy. Judging by his height, he is around Séamus' age, 15.
A whimper escapes her lips when he slowly tangles his slender, white fingers in her hair, gently tugging her head to the side, exposing her neck to the cold night air. In some parts of her mind, she wants to believe that this is all a cruel dream and that a kick from her father, rousing her to take the sheep to the meadow to graze, would soon wake her from it. For the first time in her life, Merry longs for that kick.
She is finally ready to admit that some legends, no matter how fanciful they seem, might indeed be true.
It is time to wash her hair and scrub her dirt-smeared skin; she hasn't done that for over a week, and she hopes, in vain, that her lack of cleanliness would repel the boy, but he inhales her fragrance, groaning as if he finds it enticing. His voice whispers softly against her skin, saying words she cannot understand, conjuring goosebumps in their wake. She shivers as his lips brush over her tender skin, and then their coolness is replaced with searing heat ripping into the side of her neck.
