You loosen your tie and get out of the car into the blazing heat at the end of a long summer day. It would take too much energy to go home and cook, so takeout it is! Again.
Inside the fast-food joint, the air conditioning barely makes a dent on the swelter. The girl
A school is as good a place as any to hide from an interdimensional bounty hunter.
I sprinted down one side of a crumbling hallway while Zeke took the other, looking for somewhere secluded to try to fix the transporter.
Zeke’s dimension had been a lot like this one—similar to mine
“Ethel! It’s me! I’m at the Capri-Whitestone.”
No one stayed at the Capri-Whitestone for pleasure. The motel was the city’s most notorious site for drugs, prostitution, and public intoxication. With Hilary Cotton it could be any of the three. Or maybe all of them at once.
“What now?” Ethel asked.
“I can’t say
“Some of those subcontractors I worked with in the overseas offices couldn’t take a hint if it came with fries and a gift certificate and stuff.” Joe chuckles, the chandeliers of the hotel’s grand meeting hall glistening on his scalp. “I know we only have three minutes, Ethel, but I could tell you some
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Ethel sat with the other wallflowers and resisted the urge to deploy poison gas against the man swaggering toward her. Reginald Ashcroft was about to ask her to dance. Again.
Her father required her to speak with him occasionally on family business, but Ashcroft never failed to humiliate her in the process.
“Don’t hitchhike over Kaelan Ridge,” growled the scruffy truck driver as he downed a coke outside the gas station. “No one ever makes it across.”
A rough laugh had escaped Daena’s lips at the old-timer’s warning. He obviously didn’t know Daena Austin.
* * *
“Ethel, we’ve got another drifter.”
A thin smile
Ethel Grieves did not do dresses, yet here she was, in a dress. A ballgown, no less. It was midnight blue which paired beautifully with her elbow-length black gloves. She refused to wear pointed high heels like the other ladies, instead sticking with her regular black boots. The left one, a special gift
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Ethel Grieves knows people don’t really see her. Not past the limp, the freckled nose, the coke-bottle glasses. In the boardroom of Carmichael Holdings, she is just a secretary. The mousey little thing who files reports and pours coffee for men who sit in chairs too expensive to belong to them.
She watches their hands.
“Good news, Josh.” Despite Mom’s tap on my back, I kept heading toward Olivia, one of my sister’s bridesmaids. Madeline said the blonde was single, and a wedding reception was the perfect chance to meet someone new after my breakup. “You won’t have to spend this evening alone.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“It’s worse than we thought.” Ethel leaned over the ancient oak table and plucked a sweet, still warm tigernut ball from the tray. Her family’s favorite Egyptian chef had prepared it only a few hours ago… Well, technically four thousand years ago… in ancient Egypt. These were the perks of a crime family
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Ethel limped through the park and sat at her usual table, the chess pieces already arranged on the gray and black terrazzo squares. She handed a footlong drenched in mustard to her informant, with a crisp one hundred tucked against the tin foil, and moved pawn to e4.
“Grazie, la Piccolina,” Sam said,
I was five the first time we went camping with the rest of my scout troop. I had lots of friends back then, the kind who didn’t really care about my past or how weird I was. Whenever we went on hikes, we would pretend to be trees together. I remember looking for frogs
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