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    Between the Blood and the Sun
    Between the Blood and the Sun
    Between the Blood and the Sun
    Ebook75 pages1 hour

    Between the Blood and the Sun

    By Jennifer R. Donohue

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Hazel Smith rides west on a mare she won at a poker table.

     

    When she reaches the town of Silence, she finds a tiny but welcoming community bookended by a church and a saloon. A good place to die. But the saloon has no mirror behind the bar, and nobody but the priest himself goes to the church. The only horse in the only stable is hers.

     

    In her final hours, Hazel has to make a choice between living forever and making her death matter.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJennifer R. Donohue
    Release dateJul 15, 2023
    ISBN9781945548239
    Between the Blood and the Sun
    Author

    Jennifer R. Donohue

     Jennifer R. Donohue grew up at the Jersey Shore and now lives in central New York with her husband and their Doberman. A member of the SFWA, she works at her local public library where she also facilitates a writing workshop. Her work has appeared in Apex Magazine, Escape Pod, Fusion Fragment, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Exit Ghost, is available now. She tweets @AuthorizedMusin and you can subscribe to her Patreon for a new short story every month: https://www.patreon.com/JenniferRDonohue

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      Book preview

      Between the Blood and the Sun - Jennifer R. Donohue

      Between the Blood and the Sun

      Jennifer R. Donohue

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Between the Blood and the Sun

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      For Jim

      This is a work of fiction . Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

      Between the Blood and the Sun © 2023 by Jennifer R. Donohue

      Cover design and illustration by Elyon from thebookcoverdesigner.com

      ISBN: 978-1-945548-23-9

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

      Chapter One

      Iblew into the town that would be my gravesite on a horse I won at a poker table, a glossy blood bay mare far too good for being a cowboy pony but that was the hand life dealt her. I knew this town would be my last; maybe I even counted on it. I wasn’t going to find a cure out here, even though I’d wandered the desert for what seemed like forty years. I wasn’t a savior, and neither did I want one.

      No sawbones I ever saw knew what was killing me; they just all said that it was. I was inclined to agree.

      At first, I wasn’t sure the town was real. I thought I’d hallucinated it, whole cloth, in my sudden last moments. A town little more than its main street, with a clapboard church at one end and a copper-roofed saloon at the other. General store that also had a mail sign hung above the door. No jail. No need for law when everybody was the kind of family that good neighbors turn into. The kind of town everybody talked about, back east, if they were waxing poetic about the dream of going west. Big sky, lots of space, good honest people. No train station. No telegraph wires stitching their way across the landscape, but of course I saw plenty of those as I traveled.

      I tied the horse out front of the saloon and cast a look up the street. An older couple sitting on front porch rockers, enjoying the afternoon breeze. A pack of kids running among the buildings, boys and girls, their yelling subdued and indistinct. Or that was just my hearing again. But the town seemed real enough, not a trick of my too-active mind in my weakening body. Not a candyfloss creation of my recently awakened magical senses. My too-late magical senses.

      When medicine ended up not working, I tried to turn to other things. But even though magic, particularly witch magic, was a largely solitary pursuit, it took a couple of circles linking up together to make big magics. I didn’t have that kind of time, and I never knew that many witches. It was hard to make those kinds of inroads, and when my illness reached a certain point, I left. I couldn’t stand the idea of everybody I’d ever known watching me die. I couldn’t stand the idea of dying, of course, but that was out of my hands. Plus, I thought that using magic, or trying anyway, might’ve been killing me faster.

      I pushed into the saloon; its pressed tin ceiling and carved crown molding along with that copper roof told me that the saloon was built for a richer place than ended up growing. A couple of men slumped at the bar, a quiet game of cards in one corner. It got quieter when I walked in, crossed the boards to the bar.

      What can I get you...friend? the man behind the bar asked, looking at me from boots to gun belts to my hair, my final vanity, the last vibrant thing about me. Not a match to the mare out front, but a complement; dark straight on and full of autumn color at an angle. I’d never wear a corset or bustle again, lord willing; whatever was burning me up burned away most of what made me shaped like a woman, made those clothes an uncomfortable, sad parody of my previous form, but I still kept my hair long and braided back and up. I took it down and brushed it when I was lonely, which was most nights. I promised myself I’d cut it when it lost its luster, and it was looking like it would outlast me.

      Whiskey’s fine, I said, not wanting to look at the bottles and confront myself in the mirror.

      Whiskey it is. He set up a glass, turned for the bottle. We’ve got a broader selection, if you change your mind.

      My eyes followed his hands in spite of myself; I wasn’t raised as a gunfighter, but it came to me, with study. A woman riding her pretty pony out here alone had cause to draw iron in the spaces between towns, on occasion in town too. And I was one who always took well to study.

      There was no mirror behind the bar.

      Do you have rooms to let? I asked, when he set the glass in front of me.

      We always do, he said. His eyes lingered on my loose gold wedding

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