The call from steel magnate Charles Weldon interrupted my plans to spend a pea-souper of a morning with two fingers of Jack Daniels and a newspaper. But I knew I wouldn’t regret it when I stepped into the tycoon’s home office. Whatever made one of the richest men in California this jumpy was bound to pay well.
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The wipers of the ’66 Corvette swept the rain from the windshield, but the downpour blurred Duncan’s view of the darkened road, and the headlights didn’t provide much help either. After the day he’d had, he just wanted to get home. Thankfully, the purr of the engine eased the tension in his back.
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The stars are my guide.
It isn’t their light that I follow so much as their song. Every night, I wait for them to come out, to paint the ocean waves. Water laps against my boat, and I follow the path laid out by the celestial chorus.
The king was broken in pieces.
Ezahtira shouldn’t have been surprised. Ever since the gods punished the kings for their corruption, the nation of Cadmar had suffered the Two-Taloned Curse. The First Talon turned each king into a stone-like substance at death, after which he would crumble.
My undead grandmother is my conscience.
By “undead” I don’t mean a decrepit, old woman who looks like she shouldn’t still be sucking wind. I mean a decrepit, old woman who died of a heart attack three months ago yet still manages to ruin my life.
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How in Hades could a three-headed dog escape the Underworld, cross the river Styx, and enter the world of the living without me immediately hearing about it? But Cerberus has managed it somehow. So here I am, calling his name like an idiot in the middle of New York City at what must be the busiest time of the year.
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By the time she reached the age of fourteen, the rest of the faefolk knew that she would not get any stronger.
Such a shame, they’d whisper as she drifted through the square. She’ll never find a trade, they’d mutter as she meandered through the market. It must have been her mother, they declared, infrequently caring if she could hear them or not. Was her mother a windfolk? Probably not.
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Genies don’t like to be called monsters. We monster hunters like to disagree.
Sure, they’re beautiful. Sure, they’ll give you three wishes. But you have to catch them first—before they mess with your head, or turn invisible, or shapeshift into a scorpion so that you don’t want to catch them.
Prince Stewart Johannes Percival Ashford rolled over in his antique sleigh bed, yanking the Egyptian cotton sheets over his head. “Humphrey, go away. I’m sleeping.”
Humphrey ignored the command, as he did every morning, and marched across the room. “It’s the Day of Thanks, Master Stewart, and your parents have a full day of festivities planned.”
Wisps of charcoal gray wafted on the wind. The smog gave the illusion of ghosts preceding me to the alley. Perhaps it was ghosts, the three murdered souls beckoning me to their killer. I suspected the victims, each desperate for a miracle, were lured here for their money.
A steam-powered carriage careened around the corner,
Crash!
Lase sighed. She hated doing this, especially with her brother.
“Yuck!” More banging.
“Tim, quiet! We’ll get caught,” she hissed.
“What do you even take from an apota…apot-a-carry?”
“Apothecary, you dolt. We’re here for healing ointments.”
“Is this it?” He emerged, reeking of a floral scent with swamp water highlights.
It was the fire that called Elvira out that night.
She gazed at the burning watchtower through her binoculars, and as she recognized the arsonist’s handiwork, a familiar sensation rose within her—she was closing in on her target. The sensation swelled, and she spurred her horse down the hillside into the desert valley.
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