Niels could get used to this: Mel, in his home. They were always in the Dells, always at Mel’s place, but here…Here they were in Falkhus, lost in each other, unbothered by responsibilities.    Free.   Niels had a plan. It involved guitars and no clothes, but when Mel stood up, he put his shirt on. Niels fake-scowled and pressed his lips against the soft, salty flesh where Mel’s shoulder met his neck. “I prefer this bare,” he murmured.   Mel acquiesced, even as he half-protested, “For you, or for the world?” He tossed his shirt casually across Niels’ bed. “Can I have the rest of my tour?”  …

Cricket songs swarmed the inky black night. Talise squinted, her eyes adjusting as she looked at a massive shadow looming in front of them. A dark path of overgrown moss and cement led towards the house they were supposed to spend the night in. It was a dark and hollow night. A portal had taken Talise, her husband Stannin, and their boys, Roman and Vaughn, to this place for training. They’d work together and survive the night. Roman and Vaughn were too young enough Talise could trust there weren’t genuine threats inside the creaky walls of the house. Instead, it would be little critters and sounds that send shivers up…

A confident man would have stood tall, would have looked at the layer of mist over the graveyard and believed every step forward was the right step. Jace was not a confident man. Jace was a man with hope in his heart driving him onward past gravestones adorned with poinsettias, wreaths, and mini Jul trees that held battery-powered lights and all colors of shimmering ball ornaments.  He wasn’t confident, nor was he proud. He’d stolen a jar of life energy. Rhyss held the swirling blue goo in his hands. It was beautiful, powerful, and special. Jace had Wicca now. He had the power to bring his mom back, to save…

Deep in the woods, on a dark and misty night, a group of tall, slender, hooded beings wended—one by one, on individual paths, with spells to prevent their tracking—towards a mountain that jutted straight out of the ground with steep sides, as if just this mountain peak had been lifted up. The top was still rounded, still like it should look if it had never been lifted at all. Caen had been tracking them for some time, looking for where their paths led, looking for answers. Tonight he caught a stronger trail, a youngling that had failed to cover their trail as fully as others. The trail wrapped around the…

It was twilight in the woods. The sun had vanished but full night had yet to fall. With the mountains towards the South and East, the sun had lingered on the low horizon. It was Rylena’s favorite time of day. She wove through the sleepy woods as the night animals stretched awake, tended their young, and prepared for their hunts. Day animals rested for the night in trees, burrows, and pockets of shielding vegetation. As she wandered through the woods, the trees drooped into their nightly slumber. One group of trees all leaned toward their mother tree, her long branches stretched over them like a blanket of protection and a…

  The deathscape thundered around Cato, the sound of hundreds of Salamander feet slapping against the ground. He fled in his human form, naked with his heart pounding three beats a second, sweat pouring off him.   He was half-blind as a human, with almost no night vision. This was why they had waited until dusk.   They would catch him again. They would take him back to their caves and he would never be free. He would live in the hollow and damp, forced to feast on flesh of unknown origins, flesh that sent itself spewing out of him more often than not. Slippery, slimy, gelatinous flesh.   He…

  Five was not the fifth child. He was not the fifth best at anything. He was just the fifth Drey. His grandfather, Drey the Fourth, hadn’t spent his life being called Four.   His other grandfather, Zero, had spent his life being called Zero.   So Five was Five, even though everybody else had perfectly respectable names that didn’t make them have to explain to their teachers that they were Five the name and five the years old.   Right now, he was five hundred percent sure he did not want to go to summer camp. All the kids went for three weeks right after summer festival, as soon…

  The library lay dormant, a fine layer of red desert dust on each book. No spiders crept along the shelves. No webs adorned the uneven pages or the brass and wood scrolls.    Drey sat at a solitary table, disturbing the dust on a single wooden stool. A trail of footprints in his wake betrayed his location if anyone chanced to look for him in the library.   On the table sat his tools for the day’s exploration: a glass, fire-hewn pen with an exquisite and precise tip; a vial of red, clay-based ink; a rough slab of parchment; the Babylonian scroll.   It was this which excited him…

  The Jellywitch wasn’t real. Faust could tell because his dad didn’t believe the story when he told it. His dad had a great imagination and all, but he could only lie about important things, like when someone’s life was in danger or you asked him if he missed their other dad and he had to pretend to be okay.   This was different.   This was his dad trying to keep everything fun, and Faust wanted to help. If they went jellyfishing, that would be fun, right?    They had dispersed around the lake, exploring and clambering over rocks in an effort to be the first to find some…

It was a bright and sunny morning. From his pillow in the master cabin of his yacht, Drew could see calm waters merging with the yawning blue sky. The horizon was nothing but a suggestion, a place where the infinite ocean became a shade lighter as the infinite sky.   He had his wife in his arms — the perfect honeymoon — and his weather spell indicated calm seas for the first part of the day.   He stretched languidly against his wife, Lisanne, taking in her curves and imperfections…a dotted mole here, a crooked tooth there, a bird tattoo splayed across her pale flesh…while she lay beside him. He…