His mottled hands shook as Viktor Engel etched characters into the damp earthen brow. “The good book says it took a word to create the world, eh?” He shuffled back a few steps, flicking the scrapings from his cracked nailbeds. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” A smile crept across his face, deepening crevices under his grizzled beard.
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Crossing my arms, I scowl at his gravestone. It’s a struggle to keep this aria of screams and sobs inside the icy wind of my mind instead of releasing it into the icy wind around me. He’d only seen me cry once; I’m not going to cry now.
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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.”
Next up was the Aleuthian. It stood at the front, fidgeting with its hair and clothes with three of its rubbery appendages.
From the seat next to mine, Nimthron yelled, “Hurry it up already. Some of us don’t have three hundred years.”
Nimthron turned to me. “That’s only if it’s female, of course. Males have significantly shorter lives. But it’s nearly impossible to tell.”
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Flashes of memory assaulted me—wandering alone in a blizzard, standing on the edge of an icy sea, the word “DEAD” flashing in the air. And always, waking up in the same place.
Everywhere I looked, prismatic light reflected off a sparkling surface. And the cold crept into my bones.
I glance up at the heavens as I stride toward the launchpad. The usual thick, gray clouds churn in their eternal cauldron.
There’s no reason to be nervous, I tell myself for the hundredth time. Most of the tests have gone perfectly fine.
Our airship has the long, rounded body of a submarine, albeit one with massive engines slung along the back. The resizer agent is built into those hefty engines, so I can adjust our size at will. In theory, anyway.
The walls crumble more every day. It’s not just something you can fix with workers and stone, either. If it were that easy, we would’ve saved the city long ago.
But these magic-imbued walls are held together by our relationships—by love—and that love is fading.
Mirrors never show the truth on our birthdays. They show only fractures, pieces that we can almost hide, but never completely.
And this mirror is no exception.
I steel myself before peering inside its depths. Darksouls—the reflected versions of ourselves living in mirrors—have a persuasive air about them.
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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It was my job to lead us out of our underground dwellings when the surface was finally safe. I expected to encounter many things upon our emergence. Destruction, scorched earth. But not a summoning.
It was just lying there. Waiting for us. A metal cube. When I picked it up, it projected a trail of red footprints on the cracked ground.
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The call from steel magnate Charles Weldon interrupted my plans to spend a pea-souper of a morning with two fingers of Jack Daniels and a newspaper. But I knew I wouldn’t regret it when I stepped into the tycoon’s home office. Whatever made one of the richest men in California this jumpy was bound to pay well.
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The wipers of the ’66 Corvette swept the rain from the windshield, but the downpour blurred Duncan’s view of the darkened road, and the headlights didn’t provide much help either. After the day he’d had, he just wanted to get home. Thankfully, the purr of the engine eased the tension in his back.
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