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 sixth 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 held his breath and stopped the car.  He switched off the engine and got out to a chill.  Talk about a one-eighty from today when the heat had forced him to stay inside with air conditioning.  Now he needed a furnace to warm his chilled skin.

Being an older car, he had to open the trunk with his key.  She wanted him to dig her grave, of this, he was sure.  Picking the shovel from the trunk, he rounded the Chevy Nova to Rosemary standing with her back to him.  Her long hair fluttered in the light breeze, a veil of black velvet as mysterious as her.

Come.  Her feet seemed to skim the sand and left no impressions.

Clutching the shovel against him, Collin followed.

The shrilling of an eagle raised goosebumps on his arms and sent shivers down his spine.  He looked up but couldn’t see anything.

Rosemary stopped and lowered her head.

Still looking up, Collin squinted, but because of the darkness he could not spot the big birds of prey, but they were above them, maybe even circling.  He glanced down where Rosemary stared.  Something told him to start digging.  He sent the razor-sharp edge of the shovel into the sand, picked up a heap of dirt, and tossed it aside.

For the longest time he performed the same task of thrusting the shovel into the sand, picking up a big heap of dirt, and tossing it aside.  He’d stop, wipe the sweat from his face, and keep going.  Something said she’d been killed elsewhere, and her body dumped here why the grave was so deep.  Not even the animals could’ve dug her up or smelled her.  As for the eagles, who normally did not vocalize much, their shrilling became louder.  At times they were almost upon him, their big wings creating a breeze he welcomed to keep him cool.  He couldn’t believe he complained earlier about being cold.

Just when he didn’t think he had the strength to go on, the shovel hit something.  An eerie feeling walked along his spine like the tips of fingers.  He was in the grave now, having climbed inside to keep shoveling.  Moving to his haunches, he used his hands to toss aside the dirt.  His fingers hit something.  He brushed at the sand to find a bone and what appeared to be fragments of denim.

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