Casita isn’t well. And she was _always_ well, so the Madrigals are going to know about it sooner or later.

She couldn’t help it, these days. Footsteps were either heavier and slower than usual or they were light on their tip toes, usually when Abuela was around.

Her doors were either slamming shut or shutting more slowly. Voices were either louder and angrier or they were whispers. Most often ...

“We all look the same in the dark,” he snarls with his ugly red demon eyes. Clearly, he is very fucking wrong. Demon bosses were pricks.

I snap forward, flashing my human sized sword. I know he can see it glow in the shadows. I hope he knows just how much damage it can do.

The demon growls, “Petty human.” Jaws reveal white predatorial canines, like any other animal.

“Petty hellspawn,” I say,...

It is nine o’clock, twilight hour. A time where musicians will be setting bows on strings, gathering a tempo. Where the clink of champagne glasses will ring to high gilded ceilings as talk of money and music and rank steals the crowd. Where gossip will spill out of their pretty mouths like a dripping hot drug.

Viktor won’t know for sure if this is how the gala will transpire. He can only guess, ...

Aang woke up in the middle of an abandoned fire nation ship thinking he was back in the war.

“Appa!” he cried out mid-sleep, the first living thing he remembered. Half awake and half senseless, the world he awoke in was just a sea of crushing, ice cold fog. He was lying on cold, hard metal that groaned under his back, and he thought he was trapped.

Use your senses, Aang thought quickly. Wind wh...

An owl has excellent vision.

_“EeeeeeeEEEk. EeeeeeEEEk.” _

It also has excellent ears.

Nothing in the blades of grass below indicates a living creature. But there is the hint of a rustle, the sniff of a nose, a brush of whiskers. And then the fatal mistake of a squeaking rat that lifts its head.

In the time it takes the rat to notice danger, it is already pierced through the neck by razor s...

“What —_ggggrhghh—- _am I?”

Haunting, it was, to hear a sentence gurgled through sparse lungs that hadn’t met air in one hundred and eleven years.

“You are alive. Welcome back, Lieutenant.”

The surrounding students held their breaths as the frozen soldier took its first steps. One, two, one, two, shuffling slowly towards them in a commandering rhythm learned from years on the frontline. Did i...

When all the world’s a stage,

Don’t make yourself memorable,

By juggling three fire sticks in the air,

Cause everone will remember,

That you dropped a stick,

They won’t remember,

That you didn’t burn your hands....

An incendiary explosive couldn’t have instilled more fear than the sound of Prinicipal Sterner’s boots clicking down the hall.

I faced Jason with a shock, “We’re trapped, so now what?” Except I didn’t dare say it aloud.

He raised a finger to his lips, shaking. The spray can in his opposite hand rattled betrayingly. It was so mute even I barely heard it, yet the shift in direction of the princi...

As you read, you figure the end of this letter will not be signed. It couldn’t. The words were too perplexing, too vague, too insane. _Why_ had this person written so many strange vowels and consonants, all to tell you that you were going to die at 8am tomorrow?

Nobody with a death threat would be dumb enough to sign their name unless they wanted you to fear them.

Unfortunately, they were so, ...

As for the way funerals typically go, _his_ had better be near indistinguishable from the ordinary.

This is the first thought Viktor has when he returns to his body from the arcane astral realm. He finds himself back among the floating, glowing tethers of his orbital commune coccoon, moments after the arcane was so very kind to show him the future of how he dies a second time.

Viktor’s physica...