Haunted House 24: What If?

Oct6

First: A story featuring a male keeper and a female Kept.
Previous: Magpie

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The brandy cup kept refilling.  The piles of “loot” seemed never-ending, almost as if the house was bringing more in from somewhere else. And every box and pile needed careful sorting. MĂ©lanie had several boxes full of things and had come up with several more categories – including “sex toys” and “things to tie people up with, ack” – by the time she thought to look out the window again.

The moon was up; the sun was down.  Mélanie swallowed.

“House? House, have you been trying to distract me?”  That would explain why there kept being more and more boxes.

A trunk thumped down in front of her and opened up.  Silk came whisking out – a dress. A dress worthy of a queen, or at least a Contessa.  

“You are trying to distract me.  Are you worried?” Continue reading →

Twenty-One: Revelations in the Bear Empire

Oct5

First: Running in the Bear Empire
Previous: Surprises in the Bear Empire
Next: Confidences in the Bear Empire

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Deline wished for some sort of storm, some intrusion – even a beast or another bounty hunter.  If she closed her eyes and tried, if she prayed her hardest, would a Bear show up from The Bear?

It was unlikely.  She took a few breaths and smiled at Carrone, although she thought the smile was as shaky as she felt.  

Damnit, why did this matter?  He’d already tried to kill her.  He’d already saved her life. He already hated her for using magery.  And she already wasn’t all that fond of him for trying to kill her, along with everything else.

“I haven’t lied yet,” she told him slowly.  “My name is Deline.” Continue reading →

A New World 28: Dangers of Distraction

Oct4

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Kael made her way carefully back towards her Tower.  She had imbibed more than she’d intended to, and the world was even more different than it had seemed upon waking.  Louder, for one.

She had Gemma’s “number.”  She was pretty sure that she could figure out what to do with it, but she was also fairly sure that she would end up back at the museum where Gemma worked, trying to figure out the mysteries that made no sense.

Where was Joaon? He had to know what was going on.  Where had the potions go? Where were all the potion-masters, all the knowledge that she had so carefully studied and documented?   Where was everything she had worked so hard for?

Had she abandoned the world and left it without knowledge?  It couldn’t be – she tripped over a bar that seemed to be put in the middle of the sidewalk just to annoy her and caught herself with a curse word that was definitely no longer in the local tongue. Continue reading →

Funerary Rites 25: Marked

Oct3

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Senga showed Ezer the back staircase for his side of the rooms, made certain Allayne was doing something reasonable and not fighting with anyone, and then, after a couple deep breaths, headed back to what had been her grandmother’s suite with Erramun.

After a brief reconnaissance, Senga opened up the room next to her newly-redecorated bedroom.  “It’s not the biggest room, but I think it will hold your things and anything else you want to bring here.”  She gestured in. “All yours.”

She was not expecting Erramun to freeze, nor the very slow movement he made towards the room after searching her face for – for something she couldn’t quite guess at.  After a moment, he growled quietly. “Three exits.”

“Two.  And the windows.  That door is a closet…. no, three,” she corrected.  “The closet has a stairway up to the attics.”

“Four exits.”   He moved slowly into the room, as if trying to keep an eye on her, and opened the windows.  They opened – it made a little noise of protest, but her family had always been pretty good at Preserve Workings – as all the second-floor windows did, more than wide enough for his wide shoulders and lanky body.

He left the window open and went to the door on the far side of the room.  It opened into, as she had said, a closet. He found the stairway and left that door open as well.  Then he paced to the door to the hallway, opened that, and left it open. Continue reading →

Turn, Turn, Turn

Oct2

Originally posted on Patreon in October 2018 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.

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Something about Autumn tends to lean towards long stories, I suppose.  

Here’s Autumn in autumn.

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By the nature of her travels, Autumn tended to see places, if she saw them repeatedly, during the same season every year.

So she might have been forgiven for missing this particular place, since for five years, she saw it only in the stage when spring slides into summer.

She thought it a particularly bright place then, cheerful and full of excitement and a little bit too chaotic for her tastes, even when she was feeling a little excited and a little eager.  She would stay a night, dance in their party – there always seemed to be a party – and move on with a smile, leaving behind one more drawing in their bustling bar.

It was autumn now, coming into the time when she would have to go further south or find a warmer place to settle for a few months, and a broken part in her van had pointed her in a direction she would not normally have taken. Continue reading →

A New World 27: Burning Books

Oct2

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After a moment, Kael realized that Gemma was staring at her.  She cleared her throat and, when that didn’t stop the staring, took a long sip of her drink.

“You know….” Gemma said slowly.  “The first thing you said to me started with idiots.  But I don’t see how making a plant extinct is a good idea.  And ah -” If she had been irked about the bar, she was trying not to be angry now.  “Is that how you see everything? Beautiful painting, oh, look, a potion ingredient. Lovely landscape, look for potion ingredients”

“Pretty girl,” Kael offered dryly, “either talk too much about potion ingredients, take her looking for potion ingredients, or think about the forbidden potions where a lock of her hair would be the final touch.”

“There aren’t- those are fairy tales, aren’t they?  Drop of blood, lock of hair, that sort of thing?” Continue reading →

Hidden Mall Thirty-Eight: Open Air ☁

Oct1

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Abby’s heart was pounding and her stomach was churning.  She sternly told both of them to calm down.

“I want air.”  She glared at the doorway.  “I want open air and rain and nature.  I want out.”

Vic-French murmured to one of the Livs.  The Liv responded in French. Vic started to pull back.

“I don’t know if she can get back to her own mall from here,” Abby admitted.  “Or even go through a door without help. She might be better off staying with us.”

One of the Livs translated that, just a murmur.  Abby caught a word here and there, enough to be pretty sure Liv was actually relaying her message.  Then she glared at the door again.

The Liv on her right released her hand and grabbed on to her belt loop.  Abby wondered if, when they got out of here, she’d ever stop needing to know where Liv was all the time.

They had to survive, first.  She grabbed the door, turned the handle.   Continue reading →

Haunted House 23: Magpie

Sep29

First: A story featuring a male keeper and a female Kept.
Previous: Tap Twice for Yes

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She and the house were talking – one-sided but it was still something of a conversation – up in MĂ©lanie’s bedroom when she realized that the sun was starting to set.

I’ll be back by dark with all luck, Jasper had told her.  She looked out the (now very clean) window and wondered how long it would be until true dark.

A plate bumped gently at her arm and she jumped.  “Oh!” The plate was full of what looked like a very tasty meal.  “Thank you. You didn’t have to do that, you know!”

The plate started dancing out her bedroom door and down the stairs.  She followed the plate – there were so many halls she hadn’t gone down yet, but I’m going to ask you to only go places inside the house that I have shown you, he’d said, and he might have phrased it as a request, but she was not unwise enough to think that it wasn’t an order.

She’d cleaned the dining room, his bedroom, and her bedroom.  The kitchen was already sparkling clean; she had a feeling that was where the house spent most of its – her – energy?  Time? It was hard to figure out what, exactly was going on when the house very clearly didn’t want to tell her. Continue reading →

Twenty: Surprises in the Bear Empire

Sep28

First: Running in the Bear Empire
Previous: “Disputes” in the Bear Empire
Next:  Revelations in the Bear Empire

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They walked – catching rides from local farmers twice – until the sun was just threatening to disappear behind the mountains. By the time they clambered into the slight curvature of the hill that made something that could, with generosity and broad definitions, be called a cave, they had been trading bad jokes and worse stories for more than an hour, started when Carrone told her one about a bear – the animal sort – that walked into a tavern.

“Can you
” He waved his hands.  

“I can.  Are you sure you want me to?”

He pointed at the sky.  “It might not be planning on one of your stupid man-killer storms, but it’s going to do something tonight, and I don’t want to sleep wet.  Or bug-eaten.”

“I don’t, either.”  She dug into her bag until she found everything she needed; he, in the meantime, laid out the bedrolls (there was just enough room for the two of them pressed against each other in the dubious shelter they’d found) and then dug around for cooking supplies. Continue reading →