I did not invite the Tongue Takers to dinner, but three extra chairs have found their way to my kitchen table. They returned early this morning. News of their arrival oozed through town like a pox, spreading across the marketplace in a wave of moaning and wailing. The cleverest of us had fled inside, locked…
Emma understands that the world might be ending. Wormholes. Soft spots. A parallel universe that’s starting to leak through a hundred different holes in a hundred different cities. One of which happens to be just outside her house, right next to the mailbox, at the end of the driveway. How much longer do we…
“I am not a necromancer,” I repeat, blood dripping off my chin with patters of splat splat splat onto the reports spilling across the interrogation table. “I’m a doctor. Just a doctor.” “Mm,” the interrogator purrs. Red flecks from the events of the past half hour speckle the words on her badge: Necrohunter Tess Belmont,…
The glade stretched out before me, bathed beneath a dappled azure sky. Flowers blossomed in the high grass, crimson poppies and sunshine flares of dandelions peering through thick tangles of green. The day was warm and the air was full of the scent of the forest, which waited, cloaked in shade, through a gap in…
Nomi knew she couldn’t eat her mother all by herself. But the idea of calling a reclamation team made a silent scream spiral out of her chest, infinite in every direction. So she sat in the corner, tucked against the bulkhead, and watched rigor mortis slowly settle the folds of her mother’s face. Nomi had…
Yael is out to the coffee shop to pick up fixings for brunch, and Alma is puttering around the house, cleaning up last night’s dishes and listening to a podcast about a royal scandal from five hundred years ago. She normally doesn’t notice the ease inherent in this little Cape Cod, but this morning there…
Not again. On the day of the ceremony. Talk about bad timing. I stare at the barrier floating in front of me, willing it to go away. It stubbornly remains. It materialized when I got tangled trying to put on my formal armor. It always happens when I get angry or nervous, losing control in…
The radio in the lab had gone to static. A remnant of a bygone era, its shallow dial returned nothing but chunky blips and bloops as May fiddled with it. Her human fingers were too analog to capture the narrow viable band. The design was as old as she was: red blocky display, no brain….
Some gods don’t get prayers. Not even a ‘thank-you.’ That’s the world we’re living in today. There’s so much stuff everywhere that humans don’t know what to pay attention to. They obsess over stupid things while the important ones fade into the background. The God of Computers, for instance? She gets prayers all the time….
Jenna did things in halves. She only ate half of a PB&J a time. She read either the beginning or ending half of books. She wore miss-matched socks, so she wore two halves of two pairs. Her dad called her Rabbit. Her mom thought that was offensive, because Jennifer is a family name, and called…
