My Vampire Husband Wants to Bite Me Every Night novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wedding Ring
Ailsa lies to Hamish Gow's tenants, cuts her hair, wounds the son who means to marry her and flees into a storm, where a silver-haired man says she is early to meet his wife.
On Martinmas rent day, I put my hand on a widow's palm and told a lie.
The widow had paid her rent on time for thirty years.
She stood in front of Hamish Gow's counting room desk with her chin up and her hand held out to me.
Behind her the line of tenants ran out the door and down the steps into the rain.
Every one of them knew why I was there.
For eleven years I had been Mr. Gow's seer.
I touched a hand, and I saw what the next quarter would bring that person.
Mr. Gow wrote down what I saw, and the families who would fail the rent were put out before they could fail it.
I had never once told him a good thing.
Her hand was cold and calloused and shaking.
I saw a warm kitchen, a baby on her knee, a fiddle on the wall, and next year's rent paid in full.
It would be a good year for her.
"Well?" said Mr. Gow.
He sat behind the desk with his black coat buttoned to the chin and his grey beard stiff as wire.
He coughed into his handkerchief and folded it away fast.
"She'll fall short," I said.
Her hand jerked in mine.
I held on and looked her in the eye.
Mr. Gow looked at me for a long moment.
He knew exactly what my face looked like when I lied.
"Give the woman her hand back, Ailsa," he said quietly.
I let go.
"Put it in the book," he said to his clerk.
"Out by Candlemas."
The widow did not make a sound.
She turned and walked down the line of her neighbours with her shawl pulled tight.
Nobody could look at me.
My nose had started to bleed.
It always does after a reading, and the headache comes behind it.
I wiped my lip on my sleeve.
Then Angus came in.
Angus Gow was Mr. Gow's son, big and fair and red-faced, with a dog whistle on a cord at his neck.
He had been looking at me for two years.
He crossed the room in three steps and set a small box on the desk in front of me.
"Saturday," he said.
"You'll be Mrs. Angus Gow by Saturday supper, and my father keeps the croft your mother rented, and you keep your bed."
He opened the lid.
It was a gold ring, thick and plain.
"Put it on and let's see it," he said.
I did not want to touch it.
I touched it anyway, because the whole queue was watching.
The sight took me so hard my knees went.
It was not Angus I saw.
It was a man with long silver-white hair tied back with a bootlace and a face.
He stood in the dark of a stone room, and he slid a plain iron ring onto my finger.
I was in a wedding dress that was not mine.
I was laughing.
His mouth came down to my throat, and I tipped my head back and pulled him in by his coat.
I had never seen my own future in my life.
I had seen everyone's but mine.
"Look at her," Angus said.
"She's gone soft over it."
I came up out of the vision with my nose pouring and a sound in my mouth that was almost a laugh.
That was the mistake.
Mr. Gow stood, came round the desk, and slapped me across the face so hard I hit the wall.
The queue gasped.
Nobody moved.
"You'll not smile at a thing I haven't told you to," he said.
Angus took me by the hair and hauled me up off the floor.
It was thick and long, and he had always liked it.
He wound it around his fist and walked me toward the door.
"We'll have the minister now," he said, grinning at the crowd.
"Never mind Saturday."
Beside the clerk's stool, a pair of sheep shears lay on a pile of fleece.
I grabbed them with my free hand.
I closed them on my own hair and cut.
It came away at my shoulders in one long dark rope, and Angus stood there stupidly holding it.
Then I opened the shears and drove the points through the back of his hand.
He screamed.
I ran.
Nobody in the line tried to stop me.
Out in the yard the post-pony stood with its reins wrapped around a rail.
I got up on it bareback, and I put my heels in.
The storm met me on the moor road.
It was black rain and a wind off the loch that took my breath.
Behind me, far off, a dog whistle blew.
I rode for half an hour with my cropped hair plastered to my cheeks.
I did not know where I was going.
I only knew the whole glen belonged to the Gows.
The one place they never went was the old keep at the head of the loch.
Then the pony stopped dead.
It threw up its head and screamed and would not take another step.
A man was standing in the road ahead of us in the pouring rain.
His hair was silver-white and tied back with a bootlace, and the rain ran down his face.
I knew him.
I had seen his mouth on my throat an hour ago.
He looked up at me, and his grey-green eyes were very tired and very kind.
"You are early, Miss Munro," he said.
"I was not to meet my wife until Sunday."
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