“Tell me, Eliza Booker. Do you really think you can cheat death?”
Smoke filled my lungs; my breath came in strangled puffs. Around me, a circle of fire blazed—all thanks to the pyre-loving poltergeist smirking like a Jack-o-lantern amid the chaos.
Its appearance continually shifted, like shadows that couldn’t latch onto a form.
She points to my scarred neck. “You’re one of them?”
I turn up my collar and bury my nose in my book. The woman sitting across from me leans forward, waiting for a response.
I don’t look up. Get another seat, lady.
She takes the hint and rifles through her carry-on bag.
My feet pounded against the pavement as the mid-September rain cut through the late summer humidity. My dark hair was soaked, but I didn’t care. I kept running, pushing myself to keep up with the droplets falling from the sky. My legs hurt, but still I ran. The pain didn’t matter. I couldn’t stop.
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“We must evacuate!” Ojiichan warned. “Evacuate or die!”
For just a moment, there was no reaction. I trembled, not knowing what to expect. I silently implored them to listen to my grandfather.
Instead, they laughed. Not as if he had told a joke, but as if he was the joke. Worse still…
“Shush, Abigail! I’m just getting to the good part!”
I sigh and lean back in my ancient rocker. To my right, blasts of heat from the open fireplace roll over me like the flames of Hades. Toasty, Jack calls it.
I feel like I’ve been here before.
Across the room, my brother Jack leans forward in his chair, propping his elbows against the massive oak slab we call a dining table.
The people here have always thought me peculiar.
Me and my family. A tyrannical, penny-pinching father. A harsh stepmother. And, of course, cold, forbidding spinster sisters.
It’s the rumors about me that make me laugh the hardest. To the people of this fair city, I’m also a kleptomaniac who’s stolen from her own family.
August 31st
3:20 a.m.
I crept along the shadows of Buck’s Row in London, humming a song underneath my breath. Brownstone buildings loomed over me, and my foot clacked against a circular black plaque.
I giggled, a slightly intoxicated sound.
“Careful where you’re walking there, missum,” said a voice with a heavy London accent.
With my publisher’s demand for a retraction—practically a resignation in this journalistic environment—hanging over me, I approached the production booth. Through the window, I watched Clint Bell at the microphone bringing his show to commercial break.
“You’re deep in The Bell Hole, live on Eastville’s ZAP-95 FM. We’ll be back after these
Alaric and I had fled west, narrowly escaping the assassins from our world. After a month with no further attempts on our lives, I began to breathe easier and embraced Earth’s comforts—even settling into a routine. My brother, on the other hand, stayed vigilant. He didn’t believe that the assassins had given up.
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I was but a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old, the summer I worked grounds crew at Camp Sand Lake.
Sand was a given, being smack in the Mojave Desert, and it would’ve been omitted altogether in an alternate universe where “Camp Lake” made good branding. The eponymous lake, however, was a mystery. How deep was it?
The most terrifying day of my life was humid and hot—the type of weather that either makes people love summer or wish for winter. I stood in front of Rimlain Canyons, casually scanning the uneven cliff walls with Mr. Krinkleton, a librarian and fellow adventurer. Rumor had it there were riches to be found here, yet many who went searching for them never returned.
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“If we said wedding vows, do you think we’d say ‘‘til death do us part,’ or ‘‘til death bring us together’?” I raised my gray, ghostly hand to view it in the moonlight.
“I don’t know, Eliza, but d’ya think you can ask this question again after we stop two raging yōkai from…
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