Welcome to a land where ignorance kills. The only way to survive is to walk the difficult road and stand against the dark.
In The Wasporcist, Lily grows tired of everyone thinking she’s mad. She knows the buzzing in her ears is more than her imagination, and calls in a Wasporcist. In Certified, Anna is a Raiser, able to raise from the dead anyone she doesn’t know. So what can she do when her best friend murders her boyfriend?
The maliche are devouring Imber’s world, and in To Dust, the only tool she has to stop them is a magic box. Shame the only ones who can work the magic are the terrifying fae in their forest home. And speaking of terrifying magic, Natalia needs all the help she can get to fight the shadows of depression in The Day The Dog First Called.
A Final Request For Mercy includes another canine, this time with a hard choice to make, while in The Chaos Shark, Ellie rescues a stray shark and saves her family.
In Not Fantasy, Beth knows that the fairy world exists; her best friends are a pink tortoise and a talking pen, after all. Her creative writing professor strongly disagrees – perhaps too strongly, Beth thinks, when strange rifts appear in his office. Meanwhile, in Shoe, Jenna learns the hard way not to take home stray shoes from the side of the road.
Finally, terminally-ill Adelaide finds an unexpected cure in the Pegasus myth come to life in Sea Foam and Blood.
A collection of YA fantasy stories with just a touch of darkness.
To Dust
Sometimes running away is the hardest thing you can do. What I want, what I really want, is to turn around right now and plunge back into the midst of the Maliche, let their rotting, stinking bodies surround me, and kill as many as I can before I die. For Mum. For Dad. For Joss.
God, please let Joss get away. Mum and Dad might be gone, but please, please… save him. I left him climbing for a rooftop, and the Maliche can’t climb, and he might be safe enough—but I have to run, and running is so, so hard when all you want to do is die.
I can’t die though, not today. Today I have to live, because in my backpack, weighing me down like guilt, is the box. It’s a perfect cube I can balance on one hand, sharp-edged and shined to perfection—a magic box, the only hope we have of stopping the Maliche forever. And I want to stop them more than anything else in the world, more than I want to die, because while there are Maliche, no one dies.
And so I run, heading north in a town that runs south towards the battle, running for life and death and salvation along a road whipped by the wind and smogged with dust.
From dust created, to dust returned. Only that’s exactly it: with the Maliche on our doorstep, there is no return. I’ve seen the bodies they leave behind, twisted, gruesome things with flesh squeezed until the insides pop, left in the sun to ferment with a rictus of pain on their faces. And the eyes. The eyes are the worst.
No. Running away is hard, but it must be done. Humanity needs to die.