Excerpt: Blue Hour

When Nieve woke up, it was colder than she had thought it was. Adam’s head lay in her lap and she slowly readjusted to cradle it. His thin locks of hair seemed particularly long, and shone against the muddied brown of the dirt beneath them. Her fingers gentled wrapped around her brother’s curls and pressed her cold lips to his forehead. He did not wake.

It was then that Nieve began to wonder just what they were going to do next. The night by the shore had been soothing, but soon they would have to choose a direction. Here, or there. Backwards, or forwards. Home, or the unknown. She looked back to Adam’s face briefly. The rising sun illuminated his childish blue eyes, his full cheeks. She’d never noticed them before, and in an instant Nieve had swept off her sweatshirt and laid it over his small body with care. Adam hadn’t seemed so vulnerable the night before, when she had fought off his resistance and clasped his hand. His pinking fingers hadn’t seemed so miniscule as they did now and Nieve placed her hand beside his for comparison.

She had never been one for sunrises, but in that moment she couldn’t have said why. The sun was hiding, she saw now, behind its procession of clouds, terribly embarrassed by the fuss it made when it woke in the morning and dipped back down at night.

The lake water seemed to rock in front of them, something that Nieve had never seen in sixteen years of watching it. The wind around them was cool but gentle, but the waters waltzed towards them and spilled over onto the beach. She slowly rose, placing Adam carefully on the ground and wrapping her sweatshirt around his pale skin.

She hated putting her feet in the water, but the slipping layers of sand pushed her to the water’s edge. Her shoes off, then her socks, and then just the numbing cold. It was freezing, warming the air around her. The sun was a blazing red today, reducing its clouds to pleasant shades of purple. The water, she noticed, grew red off in the distance.

The turned and stood and looked at her brother, sleeping more contentedly then she ever remembered him capable. He’d always wet the bed or had a nightmare, or something, or anything. In that moment, though, he seemed more perfect than he ever had before.