“This is completely your fault.” Captain Quinn paced up and down the cramped dungeon cell, glowering at his android co-pilot.
INFO’s internal servos whirred as she tilted her head. “I do not see my error. I merely informed the men that the sorceress they worship is most likely not a deity, but—”
“Stop messing with your hair, girl. You look acceptable.” Smorloc’s shout echoed from the potions chamber.
I rolled my eyes at my workroom mirror. He’d yet to even see me this morning.
The glass surface rippled and the mirror’s oracle emerged from its murky depths. “Lookin’ good,” he drawled. “Old Smores got summoned to the palace, huh? I can’t believe they keep calling back the one wizard who can’t even do magic.”
A grating roar shook the earth as if the apocalypse had just dropped a mixtape featuring cat yowls and broken dreams.
The dust bunnies bounced away in terror, desperately searching for hard-to-reach corners to hide from the Terror Which Is the Vacuum Cleaner. Spencer shivered in fear. A massive pair of slippered feet trudged slowly across the carpet, pushing the tool of destruction closer and closer toward the bed.
You check your phone. “I have time to read Havok. Always love Wacky Wednesday!”
It’s a dark and stormy afternoon in more ways than one.
“Awkward…” mutters Jed, the new kid at school.
I fumble my keys to let the four of us into the house. “I had no idea a horror movie would end up making us the third wheel.”
The Piggly Wiggly smells like baking chicken as I hustle in past a leaning stack of boxed soda. The crumpled piece of notebook paper in my hand is moist with the sweat from my palm.
Three things. I can get three things. Surely I can manage that.
This time, I’ll get it right. This time, Mina will get what she sent me for.
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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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I love you. –Jack
I sat on the roof of the barn, reading the note over again. I didn’t know a Jack.
I’d already searched the school, asking every unknown boy if his name was Jack—yes, I’m that type of person.
No Jacks went to my school.
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 7:00 p.m. on a muggy summer Sunday—a time when any sane man would’ve been at home with a cold one, but there’d been word that the gangster known as Jitters was bringing in a shipment that night—and I was at the station, trying to find somebody who knew something.
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What I wouldn’t give for a chocolate cupcake. Unfortunately, Dad’s grocery shopping never included desserts. My snack would likely consist of veggies and hummus. I dropped my backpack and scrunched my nose. It’d been so itchy lately.
At least I’d get cake tomorrow for my sixteenth birthday.
I hopped onto the bus with music still bouncing through the wires in the back of my head. The hydraulic hiss of the door cut off the cries of the doctors running to catch me. I waved at them as the bus pulled out and joined the flood of neon San Diego traffic under the rose gold sky.
The visual should have been concerning, but, hopped up as I was, the pearl white road and amber horizon seemed more or less normal. People ogled me with dark faces rimmed in blues and reds.
King Falton stared at his empty banqueting hall. This would be his third midwinter feast since taking the throne. The first had been subdued in honor of his beloved father’s death. The second had been a debacle. Falton’s parents had him late in life, therefore, at the time of his father’s passing,
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