Merit flicked his tail in frustration. His best servant—Pharaoh something or other—was dead. He knew this because when he’d arrived for his morning scratch, the human had just lain there, eyes open but unseeing. The body had also been cold. Not good for curling up next to.
Still, to be sure…
A dozen people tread through the corn. Insects fall and writhe against their careful hands as they part the stalks. They curse under their breath for not sowing the seeds in tidy, even rows. Instead, the plants grew nestled close together, their rows zigzagging, mazelike across the miles of flat land.
She is missing.
For young Margery Jones, The Candy Shoppe was more than a store to buy sweets. It was a place of opportunity.
When she walked through the gilded doors, sugar and color assailed her senses. Rows of
rainbow lollipops, orange taffy, grass green gumdrops, and striped pickleberries lined the shelves. Tiny planes zipped
“Have you ever wondered how much skin weighs?” The question floated from my car’s speakers as I raced down the expressway, heading home from college for Thanksgiving break.
I rolled my eyes while answering Madison. “Yes, that question is on my mind all the time.”
She’s used to my snark. “You’d be surprised
Yellow police tape crisscrosses the entrance to Buckbean Asylum. The plastic shines under my headlamp: fresh, unlike the torn, discarded scraps half-buried by shriveled-up oak leaves. Though the asylum closed years ago, the structure remains.
So do the spirits of the patients.
That’s the rumor, at least. I’m here to see if it’s true.
The first thing Mia noticed was the blood—dark specks drizzled across fresh snow like errant paint strokes. Her boots crunched in pursuit until the spatter disappeared into a sheet of white beyond the remote compound.
Blinding wind cut at her eyes as she peered into the Yukon permafrost and shouldered her
“By my reckoning, it will be fifty years before I pose a significant threat.”
The letter was signed by Eldred Ballantyne, dated November 24, 1952, and left with a firm of attorneys who’d mailed it as instructed fifty years later. The Singer Biotechnical Institute president at the time was curious enough to open it,
I gazed at the distant horizon, where the sky met the sea. The indigo twilight slowly faded into the dark ocean.
Something in that vast emptiness called out to me. It was more than just a vague desire to see the world. It was more of a beckoning. Like a beacon from a distant
The way I see it, you find a giant egg in the forest, you have two options. You break it open or you don’t.
The lodge we’d passed through was easy to see from the edge of the crater. Stand atop a fallen tree and there it was—civilization. Like children in sight
The mold had grown since Hannah first noticed it in the corner of the warm attic—a fist-sized patch of black silken hairs with a silver shimmer. She sprayed it with bleach, then waddled down the ladder, and returned to tiling the bathroom. The doctor told her to stop working, but she couldn’t rest.
Read it now
My scalpel taps against the shapeshifter’s eggshell but doesn’t crack the surface as expected. I press harder, but the blade slides down the surface, piercing the table with a thump.
Could my researchers have grabbed something else instead of the eggs?
No, I’d seen the mother. She swiftly switched from bird, to monkey
Dawson Malone prided himself on many things—his jawline and tracking abilities most of all. His crowning achievement thus far? Discovering the Merfolk after they’d been believed extinct for centuries.
So when he heard of monsters lurking deep in the Tangauryan jungle, he pounced.
“You don’t want to go in there,” the woman
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