Tag Archives: Twilight

The First Dance at Midnight

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Nearly a year after the Cullens leave Forks, Bella Swan has a published novel, a job at The Last Page Café, and a second book that refuses to write itself. At midnight, she reaches for her pen and finds herself on a grand staircase in a white silk gown, with a ballroom full of strangers waiting below—and Jasper Whitlock staring up at her.

Somehow, they’re in Texas in 1859, where Bella is his father’s ward and his family has decided Jasper ought to ask her to dance. By morning they’re back in their own time, but neither can forget the evening—or explain the memories of a life they’ve apparently been sharing.

Between unexpected visits to the Whitlocks and increasingly comfortable evenings in Charlie’s kitchen, Bella and Jasper find plenty of reasons to want another dance. Then the Cullens return, still making plans for Bella and Edward, and discover that Charlie has become very fond of the gentleman who keeps bringing his daughter home happy.

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Under New Management

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He was perfectly solid, and Jasper felt nothing from him at all.
“Excuse me,” the man said. He had a soft voice, educated, with something of the old West in its vowels. “I’m sorry to trouble you, sir.”
“No trouble,” Jasper heard himself say.
The man studied his face a moment longer. Then he asked, quite courteously, as if he were asking the time, “Did you shoot me?”
“You’re very cold, sir,” he said. “Colder than I am.”
Jasper said nothing.

“I wonder,” the young man said thoughtfully, “which of us is the ghost.”
I chose this one because it sets up the premise in a few lines: vampires meet a ghost who isn’t impressed, and the book’s running question comes in early. The ellipsis marks where I cut Jasper’s answer, so readers have to come to the story for it.

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A Hauntingly Bad Idea

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The windows had gone the color of weak tea when she heard the creak.
It came from the corner. It was a slow, familiar sound, wood shifting against wood and then shifting back, the unhurried rhythm of a rocking chair moving under someone’s weight. Creak, and a pause, and creak again.
Bella’s whole body went still. She did not turn her head right away. She sat with her hands flat on the coverlet and listened, and the sound went on, perfectly calm, as if it had every right to be there.

Then she turned.

There was a young woman sitting in the rocking chair.

She had not been there a moment before. Bella was sure of it. She had looked at that chair a dozen times during the afternoon, disliking the way it faced the bed, and it had been empty every time. Now a girl sat in it with her ankles crossed and her hands folded neatly in her lap, rocking gently, watching Bella with a bright and unembarrassed interest, the way a person might watch a new animal at the zoo.

“Oh, good,” the girl said. “You’re awake properly this time. You kept waking up and then going back to sleep, and I was starting to think you might do it forever. It was very dull to watch.”

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One October in Salem

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Then my eyes caught on a name.

Major Whitlock.

I stayed bent over the case while the two words worked their way through recognition, because Whitlock was not an unusual enough surname to mean anything by itself and Major certainly wasn’t, but together they opened a door in my memory so quickly that the rest of the room seemed to soften at the edges.
I leaned closer to the glass and tried to decipher the lines around the name. Something about a horse. Something about Thomas. Then a sentence beginning The Major insists, after which Abigail’s handwriting shrank toward the binding and the angle of the page defeated me.
I was still trying when a man’s voice came from somewhere behind me.
“That entry’s worse than the others.”
Recognition came before reason did. My body knew the voice before my mind agreed to the possibility.
An entire country lay between the place I had last seen him and the room I was standing in.

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Locker Letters

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She opened the locker and knew immediately.
It hadn’t been there before.
The paper sat folded, deliberate, like it had been placed by someone who understood exactly how long she would take to notice.

Bella didn’t reach for it right away.
She just stood there, aware she wasn’t alone.

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The Witch, the Cowboy, & the Moonleaf Errand

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“She liked that about him. She liked a lot of things about him. The thought arrived without warning, warm and certain, and Bella felt her cheeks flush before she could stop it. At her feet, something rustled. The small fern growing between two rocks at the edge of the clearing was growing. Visibly. Its fronds unfurled in slow, deliberate spirals, stretching upward like fingers reaching for sunlight. Bella stared at the fern, then slowly looked at Mabs. Mabs sat perfectly still on her log. She said nothing. Her expression said everything. ‘Don’t,’ Bella said through her teeth.”

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