Maggie Blackbird

Snippet Sunday is a group where writers come together to share a few sentences about their current project–whether it’s a recently released novel, a WIP (work in progress), or an older manuscript that’s being revived. For my fifth post, I am sharing a snippet from my upcoming publication She Talks to Eagles, a time-travel, paranormal romance.

He’s shocked that the beautiful girl in the picture is alive…

Maybe the stories of the notorious Route 66 are true because road trips don’t result in encountering ghosts, but they do for Collin Bird.  When he spies a beautiful girl hitchhiking during a thunderstorm, he can’t believe his eyes.  It’s Rosemary, a young woman from his Ojibway community who went missing over forty years ago.

Rosemary Kakeway is dead.  Her only hope to reach the spirit world is Collin.  Before departing to the place of her ancestors, she seeks vengeance against her killers, and Collin is the man to help her do just that.

A ride with Rosemary through pea-soup fog brings Collin to 1977, where he meets a very much alive nineteen-year-old Rosemary.  The bold and wild girl is nothing like he imagined her to be as she introduces him to a time he embraces.  Knowing they are meant to be together, neither wishes to say goodbye, but that’s up to Rosemary’s spirit in the twenty-first century to decide.

Genre(s): Paranormal Romance, Time Travel Romance, First Nations Romance, Contemporary Romance
Heat Rating: Level 2
Publication Date: Coming Soon
Publisher: eXtasy Books

(Note: This is an unedited piece.)

Collin didn’t have any experience with the desert.  Driving in the middle of nowhere at night with only Rosemary to guide him left his upper leg trembling.  Maybe it was more than being out here without assistance, but the fact he was about to dig up a grave from nineteen seventy-seven.

At least Rosemary was navigating for him.  She didn’t point.  Her thoughts were in his mind, directing him through the cacti, big rocks, and plants he’d never seen before.  Thankfully, the terrain wasn’t rough but flat.  Her killers had to be locals, because only people from the town would drive this far without getting lost, especially in the days without GPS.

Part of him wanted to ask her what it was like being alive in those days, but he kept his curiosity in check.  She’d died in the most horrible and cruel way—raped, murdered, and then buried deep in the desert.

Plus, Mishoomis had already told him about that decade, and disco hadn’t been prevalent in their area, or the gas shortage, and the other pop culture moments.  What Collin loved was the freedom Mishoomis experienced in those days.  Okay, there was a reason why seatbelt use was mandatory now, along with not allowing children to ride in the bed of a pick-up truck.  And bicycle helmets saved people from brain injuries.

But what would it be like during simpler times and not being connected to everything and anything, or photographed anywhere, such as simply entering a grocery store or pulling up to an intersection for a red light?

His heart held its beat.  He was wrong.  If video footage was everywhere back then, Rosemary would’ve appeared on the gas station camera, along with her killers.  The video would’ve also captured her leaving with those men.

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