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He could kiss a girl, Shane thought as he hacked at the ice. If he wanted to. He just wasn’t interested.
Well, maybe he was a little interested, he admitted, blowing on his fingers to warm them. Some of the girls he knew were starting to get pretty interesting shapes. And he’d felt an odd sort of tingling under his skin when Jared’s girl, Sharilyn, wiggled up against him when they were packed into the front seat of Jared’s car the other day.
He could probably kiss her, if he wanted. He set the iron bar aside, looking toward the milk barn as the stars winked out overhead. That would show Jared a thing or two. They all figured he didn’t know what was what because he was the youngest. But he knew plenty. At least he was starting to imagine plenty.
Hauling up the bar again, he clumped over the slippery, snow-packed ground to the pig shed.
He knew how sex worked, all right. He’d grown up on a farm, hadn’t he? He knew how the bull went crazy and white-eyed when he smelled a cow in heat. He just hadn’t thought the whole thing looked like a whole hell of a lot of fun…but that had been before he began to notice how girls filled out their clothes.
He hacked away the layer of ice for the pigs and, leaving his brothers to finish up the milking, dealt with the feed.
He wished he was grown-up. He wished he could do something to prove he was—besides holding his own in a fight. As it was, all he could do was simply wait until he was older, and know that then he could take control of his life.
The land was his. He’d felt that in his bones, as long as he could remember. As if at birth someone had whispered it in his ear. The farm, the land. That was what really mattered. And if he wanted a girl, too—or a whole platoon of them—he’d get that, too.
But the farm was what counted most.
The land, he thought, looking over the snow-coated fields as the sky grayed with dawn and turned explosive at the tips of the eastern mountains. The land his father had worked, and his father before that. And before that. Through droughts and floods. Through war.
They’d planted their crops, and brought them in, he thought, dreaming a little as he walked toward the fields. Even when war came, right here, with Confederate gray and Union blue clashing in these very fields, and in the thick woods just beyond, the farm had stayed whole.
He knew just what it would have been like, turning the rocky soil behind a horse-drawn plow, your back and shoulders aching
, your hands raw. But the crops would be planted, and you would see them grow. Corn springing up, spreading, hay waving and going gold with summer.
Even when the soldiers came, even when their mortars and black powder singed the drying cornstalks, the land stayed. Bodies had dropped here, he thought as a chill crept up his spine. Men had screamed and crawled through their own blood.
But the land they had fought over, fought for, didn’t change. It endured.
He flushed a little, wondering where that word had come from, that word and the strong, almost dizzying emotion behind it. He was glad he was alone, glad none of his brothers could see. He didn’t know how to tell them that he knew the farm had been his responsibility before, and would be again.
But he knew.
When he heard the sound behind him, he stiffened and, shouldering the bar again, turned with his face carefully closed, free of emotion.
There was no one there.
He swallowed hard. He was sure he’d heard a sound, a movement, then a small, weak cry. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard the ghosts. They lived here, as he did—in the fields, in the woods, in the hills. But they terrified him nonetheless.
Gathering all his young courage, he moved around the shed, toward the old stone smokehouse. It was probably Devin, he told himself, or Rafe, or even Jared, trying to get a rise out of him, trying to make him bolt, as he’d nearly bolted the time they spent the night in the old Barlow place, on the other side of the woods. The haunted house, where ghosts were as thick as cobwebs.
“Get a life, Dev,” he said, loudly, loudly enough to calm his speeding heart.
But when he rounded the building, he didn’t see his brother, or even any tracks in the snow. For an instant, just a quick, tripping heartbeat, he thought he saw a figure there. Crumpled, spilling blood over the ground, the face as white as the untouched snow, the eyes dulled with pain.
Help me. Please help me, I’m dying.
But when he stepped forward there was nothing. Nothing at all. Even the words that rang in his head faded away in the wind.
Shane stood there, a young boy with his whole life a wonderful mystery yet to unfold, and stared at the unbroken ground. He stood there, shuddering, as the cold reached through the layers of clothes, through his flesh and into his bones.
Then he heard his brothers laughing, heard his mother call from the kitchen door that breakfast was ready and to get a move on or they’d be late for school.
He turned away, closed his frightened mind off to what he had seen and what he had heard.
He walked back to the farmhouse, and said nothing of that one jolting moment to anyone.
Chapter 1
