24
Oct

El Presidio Rides North

I was absolutely certain I was going to die, and it was because I’d wanted to wash my hands. The last thought that was going to go through my head was going to be that I could have lived a long and happy life if I’d just been satisfied with that bottle of hand sanitizer. And the worst part of it was that I’d die getting my hands dirtier, what with how the zombie I was trying to wrestle off of me was covered in dirt and that undefinable zombie sludge that they seemed to create. I’d hoped it wouldn’t end like this, in a Wendy’s bathroom, while I still needed to pee.

24
Oct

The Unicorn Man

The unicorn man came to the village when Eric was seven. The unicorn man had been coming to Eric’s village long before then – longer than the basilisk man or the pixie man or even the phoenix man – and according to his aunt visited the year Eric was born, but of course he had been too young to remember.

24
Oct

Stealer of Hearts

October felt like it would never end. In the rainy late-afternoon haze, it was hard to distinguish the ponchos from the ghost costumes, the umbrellas from the vampire capes. Tom kept a firm grip on Howie’s sticky hand. Whenever they came across a wide puddle, he would give Howie arm a little tug, and Howie would float over the puddle before landing toes-first on his shiny new rain boots.

The usually peaceful bookstore was now jam-packed with adults and children alike in a flurry of colorful Halloween costumes. Near the main entrance, several young women wearing dresses made of realistic flowers giggled and took pictures of each other next to a poster on a wooden stand, until the security guard shooed them away to make room for more people.

Meet Brennan Stone, the poster read. Hear Brennan read his latest book and join us for an evening of fun and games—face-painting, Croon checkers, make your own pop-up page, and more! Don’t forget to buy a raffle ticket for a chance to win a giant stuffed Buttermumsy! All proceeds will be donated to our Free Books for Children Fund. There was a picture of a man with dark curly hair and clear blue eyes—a perfectly ordinary young man at first glance, handsome by most standards—but there was something atypical about his appearance. On a closer look, his whimsical smile seemed both impish and wise, and he could have been any age between twenty and forty years old.

24
Oct

The Stone Fox and the Bloody Hands

Saburou lifted his lantern higher, squinting at the small swath it cut into the darkness. He swallowed. Maybe, he thought not for the first time, he should just turn back.

Cleaning the monastery at the start of spring was a tradition almost as old as the monastery itself – or so the abbot liked to tell them all, when the time came around each year. Whether it was the truth or just meant to inspire the acolytes with a false sense of importance was anyone’s guess. Either way, what it meant for Saburou was that the other acolytes – and many of the fully-grown monks, come to that – conspired to stick him with the worst job they could find, out of all the tasks that needed to be done. Last spring it had been cleaning the toilets, which frankly he was surprised it’d taken them so long to get around to; the spring before that, it had been scrubbing out the rat-infested storeroom where a wet, leaky winter had rotted away almost a whole harvest’s worth of rice and gourds. No matter what they ended up foisting off on him, though, he just squared his shoulders, set his jaw, and did it, without arguing or whining or – worse yet – tattling to the abbot. When things were at their worst, he recited mantra in his head, in spite of the decidedly fleshly circumstances, or overcame the smell of old dried shit by forcing his mind into contemplation of how the physical world was truly an illusion. Which was fairly comforting, at the time.

24
Oct

The Heart of the City

1887, Sahara Desert

Lewis leaned as far to the right as he could to avoid being sick down the side of his camel. He understood perfectly why they were called ships of the desert. He’d been ill all the way from New Eden to Carthage, and it looked very much as if he’d be ill from Carthage to Timbuktu as well.

He hadn’t thought the desert would be like this. The dunes went on forever, and it was like crossing the Atlantic all over again, the endless ripple-dips and folds, and the froth of it caught in his hair and teeth and infiltrating his unmentionables.

The desert had the advantage of stopping at night, but the six or seven hours free of camel-sway only served to highlight the fact that sand was far less malleable than sea-spray, and also itchier.

24
Oct

Tourniquet

Sam had always thought he’d be doing something more thematically appropriate when the dead started coming back to life. Like walking through a graveyard, or getting trapped in a mall, or even waking up in a hospital after the apocalypse had already happened — that was a popular one. He thought it would at least happen at night, or during a storm, or maybe in a deep, atmospheric fog. Instead, it’s three o’clock on a brilliant July afternoon, and he’s trying to get his hand down his boyfriend’s pants.

“Boys, come out here, something’s happening on the news,” says Emmett’s mother, through a door that had been closed for good reason.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” mutters Emmett, shifting a little under Sam’s weight. “She has, like, the worst timing ever.”

24
Oct

The Conquests of Dr. Victor Alazon

“My laboratory assistant?”

Dr. Victor Alazon – Technician of the Shadowed Corpse, rightful resident mad scientist of Egova, and the greatest scientific mind of his generation (perhaps of any generation) – stared down at the tow-headed boy who had shown up on his doorstep.

That alone was a noteworthy event. When one lives in a gloomy castle atop a hill that is prone to thunderstorms, visitors rarely stop by for tea and cakes. In point of fact, Victor had not received a single guest in the six years since he inherited Duskspark Castle.

But even this boy had not shown up for tea and cakes. He had come seeking employment.