Etta Mae grimaced at the curtain of cigar smoke at the entrance to the Golden Stars Space Casino. Her worn loafers crunched on the carpet.
My engine room floor is cleaner than these carpets. Where are the janitor droids? She clutched her slot machine tokens. Focus, girl. You have a mission.
Read it now
Sam snatched the steaming paper cup of black coffee off the counter. His palm crawled at the heat from the cup as he stepped outside. He set the coffee down carefully on the wrought-iron tabletop where legal pads and heavy historical tomes teetered in unstable stacks.
The barista was a loser.
The shop had
Ronnie wedged his armored fingertips under the heavy stone concealing the control box. He yanked and the slab cracked apart, the noise thunderous in the tomb-like corridor.
“Oops.”
Not that he felt bad about breaking anything in Emperor Thallia’s creepy castle, but the louder he was, the better chance the mechanical samurai patrolling
Whose bright idea was it to stuff a giant venomous lizard in a transport shuttle and ferry it to the outer asteroid belt?
Well, whoever’s problem it started as, it was Holt’s problem now. A ten-foot-long, 300-pound problem.
Just another Tuesday on the Wolf Station Zoological Habitat of the Outer Asteroid Belt.
On all the nine planets, there exists no creature more majestic than the mighty water buffalo. Resilient. Unflappable. And unpardonably cute when presented with a juicy slice of watermelon.
“Aren’t you the most darling girl? Yes.” Amelia cooed as she scratched the coarse hair between Mrs. Bates’s big dark eyes.
Bates paid
The forest was alive with every one of Wren’s nightmares. Trees beckoned with branches like witch’s fingers. Reptilian skin rustled through the leaves underfoot. Unseen birds complained.
The darkness around her shifted as though it were something tangible.
Wren stumbled over a gnarled root that had crawled out of the loam. She caught herself
The shoebox rattles. A crystalline scratching sound tinkles inside the worn cardboard. I clutch it in my aching, bandaged fingers as I stand trembling in the yard of the old livery stable at the edge of the village.
It’s my last option.
If he can’t help me, no one can.
One step at a time
The creature snarled in the darkness, a thunderous sound in the humid, alien forest.
Kosuke pressed his back against the rough bark of the towering tree and drew a slow, deep breath, releasing it softly. The air smelled like wet dirt and pine, moist and dank, along with a vague coppery scent like blood.
“What a perfectly splendid location to attempt new and exciting crime!” Finneas Churchwarden—private investigator—straightened his blue argyle bow-tie. “Don’t you agree, Leon?”
“It’s Lionel, sir.”
“That’s what I meant.” Churchwarden jabbed his clay pipe between his teeth, chewing on the stem as he spoke. “Come, beloved colleague. Let us do the work
I have never seen a vegetable like this in all my days. Is it a vegetable? A fruit? So purple! Oblong with a fibrous green stem. And there’s a crate of them on the tavern’s loading dock.
Tobias probably traded for them. He always does this—trades junk to some tinker out of
I’ve spent too much time in the underworld.
Atticus scowled at his reflection in one of The Drake’s shiny hull plates. Dark shadows drooped beneath his eyes, and his skin had taken on a bluish tint. Too many months breathing the fog in the netherwoods.
He hitched the burlap sack higher on his should
The Veil between worlds smells like overripe fruit, a deep purple scent. Cloying. Decaying. Bruised.
The sanitized atmospheres of living worlds lack the depth and complexity of abandoned realms. They never smell like the Veil, suffused with the scintillating aroma of death.
I breathe it deeply.
Invigorating.
Its heavens, ever-clouded. Its ground
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