Excitement skitters across my limbs as I peer over the tops of all the other trees. I can see six-year-old Ruby Sue get off the school bus in front of her house and run straight into the woods. Toward me. Her friend.
Here in the easternmost part of the Berkshire Mountains…
Shots glanced off a yellow-leafed tree as Tee darted through bushes taller than him. He screeched as another bullet almost grazed his large ear. Taurus’s tail, he thought ERT-82’s greens would provide camouflage, but the chlorophyl-deprived foliage left him exposed. “This is Ambassador Tee, calling dispatch. Come in, Caelum Base!”
Only static.
Mark ducked away from a barrage of hail moments before the gunshot clacked. The bullet skimmed his shoulder as a gust, gritty and wet, kicked him to the sidewalk. The tornado slashing through the Indiana countryside was closing in—debris and trees rotating in a torrid sky like dust in a vacuum.
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Hanu flattened the parchment on the grass and reviewed his handwritten spell for the final time. Proper exit condition for the main loop? Check. Clearly defined energy conversions? Check. Timeout in case of emergency? Of course.
“This is it,” he said.
The maple trees surrounding the clearing rustled in response. Birds above exchanged
There were many things eight-year-old Haddie Underwood did not like—sitting still, doing her spellcaster homework, dogs—but she hated being lied to most of all.
Haddie squeezed her sister’s hand and pointed in utter betrayal at the animal inside the deep pit that functioned as a zoo exhibit. “Where is the giant panda?”
Melinda curled up on the couch, reading Little Women for the sixth November in a row. She’d received an abridged version for her seventh birthday and identified with Amy March because Amy was the only character who wasn’t yet a teenager. And maybe Melinda, like Amy, was a little bit spoiled.
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I lost it!
The one thing. The one responsibility I had in my care. And I lost it.
I raced down the corridor. My diamond-sharp claws dug into the floor, and my smooth, taut wings accelerated me forward. Suddenly, my shoulder slammed into a polished iron door. It swung back on its hinges
“What we have here is a mystery, my friends.” Ten-year-old Ana addressed the row of stuffed animals—and one real girl—that sat at attention.
The girl raised her hand, and Ana swallowed a sigh. “Yes, Mabel?”
“This is just a pretend mystery, right?”
Ana loved her cousin dearly, but, by Shakespeare’s pen,
Mrs. Smith smothered the flames bursting from Cade’s hair with a dishcloth. Brushing back her messy curls, she studied me out of the corner of her eye. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Kyle?”
I grinned at her. “Of course I do! I may only be eleven, but I take care of
It’s not easy being an intergalactic babysitter. While their parents might be working out an intergalactic peace treaty, the kids don’t have the same amity.
I grip Xuj’s shoulder with one hand and Tyler’s shoulder with the other, keeping them from clawing each other’s eyes out. If that were to happen, Xuj would win
It was a curious shop. Wedged between a formal wear boutique and an espresso bar its brick structure was weathered and chipped. Rusty chains held a wooden sign with a squiggly line running to a red X as the only clue to what one might find inside.
Well-dressed pedestrians hurried by never sparing
The wind howling across Haiz’s brown, leather wings could not drown out his roar as he sliced through the air back toward his cave. His voice bounced from valley, to village, and on toward the mountains, declaring his sovereignty over all things within his territory.
His scaled eyes scanned the ground below, searching.
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