Excerpt from the Wisp ...

Amy’s breathing told Bara she was in her dorm room, but Amy hadn’t woken her. There’d been a sound. Now there was only silence, silence and the low hum of Amy’s snores. Bara closed her eyes once more. There it was again, a tapping, something tapping very insistently against the window.

There’d be no sleep until she figured out what it was. She had her suspicions. Colin … If that is you, I’m going to murder you.

A sleep-heavy torso lifted and she rested on her elbows. The blanket fell from her shoulders. The cold bit at her bare skin. Temptation. Lay back down, pull the covers back up, and ignore whatever was outside. Instead, she slipped from beneath the blankets and stood. The wooden boards were ice slats on her bare soles, and the air revealed her breath on the exhale. Dragon’s breath, her mother called it. She fumbled through the darkness to the window, drew back the curtains, and peered into the night.

Outside the storm still raged. The heavy weeping of rain had stopped, but the wind was still angry, picking up fallen leaves and branches and throwing them at the window. Tap tap tap. The fury reached through the glass pane with invisible, icy hands. The cold coaxed a return to bed, but something else held her back. As Bara looked out into the storm, she felt someone was watching.

And someone was. She’d been right. It had been a woman in the library, and that woman now stood on the edge of the forest, looking back up the window.

The Wisp was tall and thin with long limbs. Her skin was pale and glowing. Even from a hundred yards away, it glistened like waves in the moonlight. Her hair was long and silver, not grey, but metallic silver. She stood motionless, then like an iridescent dove taking flight, turned into a blur of silver and white and disappeared into the woods … only to reappear seconds later.

Amy stirred and broke Bara’s attention from what was outside. She went to the bed.

“Wake up!” she whispered.

Amy had no intention of waking-up. She lay still, seemingly able to sleep through a hurricane in a drum shop. Bara tried again, shaking her this time.

“Go back to bed,” Amy answered groggily. “Tell me in the morning.”
“There’s someone outside.”

Bara met with silence and then Amy answered with a snore. There was another tap. Bara returned to the window just in time to see the Wisp disappear into the woods. Seconds passed. She didn’t reappear. There was no losing this chance. Bara grabbed her house-coat from the back of the door and fled the room. She didn’t bother with slippers.

*The Wisp, and its sequel, the Tall Man, are available in paperback or #kindle from Amazon.

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