Page 99 of The Seven Rings
“Need to go out? Good time for a break and a caffeine boost.”
She took him down, let him out. After she got a Coke, she took it with her to join him.
“Smell that? Fresh. We can take ten minutes in the fresh.”
She got his ball from the shed, tossed it for him while the cat, who’d followed them out, watched from her perch on the doghouse.
“Okay, break’s over. I need to…”
She felt it. Sly fingers curling in her belly. Tugging, pulling. Toward the woods.
“God. Not again, not there. I have to…” The ball dropped out of her hand as she started forward.
“Jack, Jack, please watch them. I don’t know where I’ll go, what I’ll see.”
Her body felt limp and light even as her heart picked up a fast, heavy beat. The wet leaves shimmered in the sunlight, and the shadows behind them seemed too deep and darkly green.
Compelled, she walked into the woods that seemed to close in all around her. The air, thicker, wetter, dropped over her until she felt it was an effort to simply breathe.
Here and there, a sunbeam sliced through the green dim, a misty sort of light that struck her as otherworldly.
She heard the stream bubbling, small animals rustling, the insistent call of a bird, shrill in the quiet.
And there on the path, the mirror, its blurred glass surrounded by predators.
She held back just a moment, looked behind her. Yoda hadn’t followed. So she braced herself and walked forward.
Walked through the glass and into the past.
Where it was spring. The sun washed down through leaves tenderly green and just starting to unfurl. Rather than thick, the air felt light, breezy. Trilliums popped up to show their color as she remembered they had a few months before in the spring of now.
Ahead, a sleek gray dog flushed birds out of the brush. They rose in a cloud of feathers and annoyance into a sky of tender blue.
The two people walking the path stopped, looked up, and laughed.
The man, tall in his brown jacket and trousers, called to the dog.
“Behave, Rex.”
“He thinks he is.” The woman spoke, her voice as light as the air.
She wore a long skirt of dove gray and a white blouse trimmed in lace under a deeper gray jacket, its sleeves puffed at the shoulders. Her hair, richly black, curled at the sides under a straw boater.
She recognized them now. Owen Poole and Moira, the woman he married and made a family with two years after the wedding-day death of Agatha.
“He’s young yet, and full of energy.”
Moira lifted her eyebrows as Rex leaped into the bubbling stream to drink. “So it appears.”
As she started to walk on, Owen took her hand. “Moira, I wanted to walk with you here today to have a private word.”
“We’ve walked here before.”
“We have. In the past year we’ve walked together here, in the gardens, in the village. I hope you know how much those walks, those talks have meant to me.”
“And to me as well.”
“I wish to walk by your side for the rest of my life. To have you beside me, Moira. I’ve come to love you, love you deeply, and ask you here if you would do me the very great honor of becoming my wife.”
