Chapter 20: Hogmanay

The kirk was full to the doors, and every head turned when we came in.

Snow blew in behind us and the minister's wife, and a hundred candles leaned.

I had never seen the whole glen in one room without a Gow standing over it.

Hamish stood below the pulpit with his hands folded.

I would not have known him.

The wire beard hung loose on a face gone yellow and drawn, with the skin pulled back from the teeth.

His black elder's coat hung off his shoulders.

His eyes burned in the hollows.

He looked like a man who had been dug up and told to go on being a factor.

"Mr. Kerr," he said.

"You have come to the house of God."

"Where are the children?" said Niall.

"Safe in the loft, with my son."

"They will come to no harm if you do as you are told."

I smelled lamp oil.

The pews at the front were dark and wet with it, and the sharp stink rose off them in the warm air.

A hundred people sat in them, and not one had said a word about it.

I looked at the doors.

Two of the lodge men stood at them, and I heard a chain rattle on the other side.

"The doors are locked from the outside," said Hamish.

"We shall sit the watch together, as we do every Hogmanay."

"And at first light, this glen will see what it has been feeding for fifty years."

He took a candle from a bracket and held it over the oiled pew.

"If any man moves," he said, "this goes down."

Nobody moved.

I put my hand into my left pocket and drew out the glove.

I shook it off and closed my bare fist around the iron ring.

The sight came in.

I saw the kirk, every corner of it.

I saw the loft above our heads, and Angus Gow sitting on the boards with a lamp-oil can.

Two small children in nightgowns crouched against his knee.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Vampire Husband Wants to Bite Me Every Night from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.