After When the Hills Quake.
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(Planetary Date 5 Years 4 months)
From the looks of things, the wolf-hills have a rather long cycle of waking and sleeping.
We have been debating for some time – since “our” wolf went back to sleep – if we should move down to the land that doesn’t move or stay where we are.
Three things stay on the side of staying where we are: Continue reading
I didn’t keep up with those Camp Nano updates very well, did I?
Well, it’s Wednesday, and I made it!
Depending on if we’re using Scrivener’s word counting, Camp Nano’s, or Word’s, I hover somewhere between 24900 and 25200 words.
Since my Camp Nano goal was 20,000, it’s a win! Continue reading
Okay, this was supposed to be short. It is not short. It is a riff off of a comment from a request for dark fic prompts from like 2 months ago.
It took a while.
Damon Rudd had not meant to reform. He had been living a perfectly happy life destroying anything at that pissed him off, thwarting people who got his way (heroes with overdeveloped moral senses usually, Golden Hawk and Wise Ibis and the like), being amazingly rich and getting richer, and more or less doing whatever he wanted to do. This had been working fine, until, walking behind one of his businesses, he found a woman and two children digging for food in his dumpster. This, Damon found, pissed him off. But because he was not an idiot, he was able to see that what pissed him off was not the woman. Continue reading
Abby didn’t think her mouth could get any dryer, her throat and more choked, but that phrase – that idea – where the one who’s killing the Abbies is – made her feel like her mouth was full of sand.
She tried to clear her throat and found herself coughing instead. Liv fumbled in her bag until she managed to press a water bottle into Abby’s hands. “Here, here. Why didn’t you – here, drink.”
Abby sipped the water slowly. “Yes – thank you, Liv.” She sipped more. “I want to find the Abby that’s killing the rest of us.”
Shit, was that secret information? Was I not supposed to say that? Continue reading
First: Running in the Bear Empire
Previous:42: Home
Next: 44: Tricks
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I did try to kill you.
“It would be nice to not be reminded of that,” Deline muttered. She held up her hands in his direction. “I suppose it’s hard for you to forget it.”
“The funny thing is, in most situations, it would be easy as anything to forget. You’d be dead. Your head would have been turned in. The bounty would have been collected, and I would be on to my next job.” He huffed, almost a laugh. “I didn’t think much about what I was doing – I mean, I thought about the hunt. I learned early on not to think about the deaths. They come, they go – sometimes they haunted me, but most of them just… they passed on.” Continue reading
I was noting, in the middle of the Hudson Antique Mall in the middle of a weekend trip this past weekend, that it seemed like we — T and I and our Troy friends the McPivins — end up spending a lot of our visits looking at other people’s old junk. Continue reading
“So all the people who have come through here,” Abby swallowed. She was feeling very parched again, as if the ghost mall had taken longer to get out of and taken more out of her than she’d guessed or anticipated. “All of those people, and only three of them were us. Where did the rest of us go?”
“I think you know-” Yadira stopped herself again with a small huff. “The practice of being obscure is a hard one to break. I apologize. I think that many, many Abigails have died, and that while not as many Olivias have died, many have been stranded.” She paused, and then admitted, so softly that Abby could barely hear her, “That magic is new. The fact that only pairs – and only specific pairs – can travel the malls is very new. So much has happened since the curse came down. It’s changed everything about this place, and none of it for the better.” She looked between them solemnly. “How did you come to this particular place?”
“Ignoring advice we’d been given,” Abby admitted. Continue reading
First: A story featuring a male keeper and a female Kept.
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“You don’t – you can’t – you would – what would you-” Mélanie caught herself and focused very carefully on her breathing for several breaths. “Sir. Jasper.” She looked at him with wide eyes and found that his grin had stuttered into something of a worried expression. She patted his shoulder, not wanting him upset, and cleared her throat. “I’m sorry you, you, ah, you caught me by surprise. What did you mean – what-”
“Oh, Mélanie, my sweetness.” Jasper pulled her into a tight hug, rubbing her back until she could breathe again. “I didn’t meant to upset you, I didn’t. Why does this- what upsets you?”
She peered up at him from the confines of the hug. “I don’t want you to risk yourself. I was so upset when the – when those thugs had you, and I, if you got caught, it would be horrid. I don’t want something like that happening to you!” Continue reading