First: A story featuring a male keeper and a female Kept.
Previous: Preparations
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“It’s weird,” Mélanie mused, as they settled boxes of goods into the back of the wagon, the sunlight coming down through the trees in dappled waves.
“Leaving? Seeing the house in the daylight?” Jasper guessed.
“Something like that, yeah. Leaving and just- well, just thinking about just leaving to go to town, I guess.”
First: Running in the Bear Empire
Previous: What’s Your Name?
Next: 36: Guests
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“Are you sure you know how to hunt things that aren’t people?”
Deline was teasing Carrone – mostly. They had been living in the cabin for four days, and she was beginning to get more on edge than she wanted to admit.
It was easy enough to settle in to a routine – gather and hunt in the morning, cook a big meal in the afternoon and settle in to bed in the evening. It was easy enough to pretend that they were just having a little rest stop along the way, getting to know each other. But Deline knew that they were hiding, and she knew that she had to get back to the capital, and she knew that with every day she didn’t – with every day she didn’t make it back, there was a chance that they wouldn’t make it back, and if they didn’t, her information died with her. And that wasn’t acceptable.
So she was teasing Carrone for losing another deer. Continue reading
Written to a prompt I found here.
Red wasn’t supposed to be out on his own yet. He was supposed to be a sidekick. He was supposed to be following Blue around still, maybe cracking wise and maybe just mopping up the henchmen that got away.
But that wasn’t what he’d signed up for. That wasn’t what he’d been training until all hours of the night for, sneaking out of study hall for, spending every minute he could in the lab for. No. No, he was a meta, a shining new example of the Modern Superhero – that h Continue reading
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The ride back was tense. Nobody spoke a whole lot, except Allayne, murmuring quietly over the wound in Erramun’s back, pulling out the bullet and healing the muscle and sinew and skin. Ezer muttered at traffic, Chitter muttered at her cameras – including the tiny button camera and mic Senga had planted in the desk, including the one Erramun had planted on a pillar, including the clever little skimmer they’d managed to get on the guards’ computer. Erramun was silent as his name.
Senga was steaming with anger and twitching with worry and said nothing at all. She held Erramun’s hand, even though he obviously didn’t need it, and the way that his fingers traced over the back of hers told her that he knew, too, that she needed it.
“There,” Allayne breathed. They were nearly to the garage. “All better. Damn, are you telling me you don’t have a Man of Steel Working in your repertoire?” Continue reading
This is written to a prompt I encountered on Pinterest from here.
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We had never come up with a cure.
Instead, we had come up with ways to deal with it. I say we, but it was my grandparents and their parents who did most of that work.
The rest of us just learned what we had to do and got on with the work of rebuilding the world. By the time I was an adult, you could barely tell that there had been a world-scarring, population-destroying mega war in my grandparents’ time.
And then, of course, the fucking aliens showed up.
They had spacefaring tech that we were only beginning to develop. They had weapons that were, frankly, amazing, and, from a biologist’s point of view, also horrifying. They had ships parked in our atmosphere.
We had zombies. Continue reading
“‘Via? Olly?” Abby moved to the other side of Olly. “What’s – “
In the grey shadows of the mall, three translucent figures were staring back at them. Two of them were definitely her. The third she didn’t recognize at first, a taller man with a gaunt face and protruding bones.
“Abby?” Olly whispered. “Abby, is that you?”
Abby hoped not. One of the two grey women was missing a good third of her throat. The other one had an axe settled in the middle of her chest. It looked—
It looked horrible. Continue reading
I’m still doing LetterMo (and InCoWriMo)! As of today I have mailed out 22 letters/postcards/cards (with one ready to go in the mail), received 3 replies and one letter-not-a-reply, and drawn castles, maps, lava, clouds, and barns.
I’ve talked about the weather a lot, Ithaca, winter activities, and whatever else came to mind – including often the paper or card I was writing on.
And Friday and today, as a reward for finishing my work self-evaluation and then for getting the taxes done and sent, I bought a bunch of stationery. Continue reading
First: A story featuring a male keeper and a female Kept.
Previous: Understanding
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“I still think you should take the silk dresses to sell.”
Mélanie had been losing this argument for three days, but she was still determined, if not to win it, to lose it having fought her battle very well.
“And I think they look delicious on you, or will with a little taking in.”
First: Running in the Bear Empire
Previous: Consummation
Next: 35: Hunting
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“Wait.”
The thing about an Imperial Bed was, even if it wasn’t exactly comfortable in an emotional sense, it was always perfectly comfortable in a physical sense. The spells that Deline used to keep her lodgings tolerable were the basis of the magic on the Imperial bed, but then there were layers and layers of other work there. One could lay here forever and not get the slightest bit uncomfortable – or at least for decades, until the spells wore off.
Originally posted on Patreon in February 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
After The Fairy Road and Planting Some Good on my blog and The Cats’ Ways and Community Service here on Patreon.
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There was not, Whitney had thought, an easy part to the restoration of the Crossroads Park. The whole thing was a challenge, and the whole thing was back-breaking work, work that ate time, hours and weeks and seemingly years passing by while she dug. The whole thing was the hard part.
That was before she got to the really hard part.
There was a corner of the park now that looked fresh and beautiful — so fresh that not only had the local newspaper taken pictures, one of the national magazines had come in to tell her story. The plantings, mostly perennials, had been picked to thrive with minimal care, the grass was trimmed weekly by a local kid who wanted something to do for a school project, and the local fae and spirits had taken to sharply … reprimanding… anyone who littered in the cleaned area or near it.
But that meant that first, the rest of the park looked far worse than it was, and secondly, Whitney was now faced with a wall of brambles where a raspberry bush and a rose bush had gone feral and started fighting over a statute of a Revolutionary War hero. Continue reading