Common Bonds is on the way!

 Common Bonds, the anthology of platonic stories, (one of which is mine!) is coming very soon to a shelf near you.

If you backed it, check your email for ebook deliveries and address confirmation. It's on the way!

Flash Fic Challenge: (Old Habits) Die Hard

 (Old Habits) Die Hard

Things get weird when you can't die. Two centuries ago, I used to practice my drawing and aiming skills for duels on old pots and plates, getting good enough so people would assume I'd won fairly rather than because bullets slide harmlessly through me, like I'm a sand dune. Today I found my old targets in a museum. Apparently they had some "ritual purpose".

I wonder if they'd accept the real explanation. It's not like they can kill me, right?

Flash Fic Challenge: Dancing Shoes

 Dancing Shoes

Kate pulled herself through the gap in the fence with Jackie's help and stared up at the warehouse in front of them. "That's where they keep the dancing shoes?"

Jackie shifted on his crutches, and patted the fairy flute in his shirt pocket. "That's the one. That's where they store them until they can ship them off downriver to Aris."

The grand ball was being held in Aris, the capital city, and invitations had gone the length of the land, as was traditional, inviting all who could come properly attired, with a coat to their back and dancing shoes on their feet, so that the princess might choose one of them to wed. In practice it meant that only those who could afford a pair of soft satin dancing shoes as well as their everyday work shoes or school clogs could go. Only one year-round family in their small mountain town could do that (the ones that came and went with the summer palace and its court didn't count), and it wasn't Jackie's or Kate's. Jackie didn't mind for himself, but Kate had loved and been loved by her Jessie - Princess Jessamine if you were being truly formal - since both girls were little things and Kate's mother was a summer-guard to the princess. If Kate didn't somehow get to the ball, they'd be split up forever.

Which brought him back to the warehouse. He tucked his crutches firmly under his arms, lifted the flute to his lips and played a phrase of dance music. Fingers tapped. Toes tapped. And the lock on the door danced itself open.

Kate hauled the door open and left it open so they could get out easily if they had to, looked around until she found the map of what was where, and led the way through the maze to the shelves packed with dancing shoes.

Jackie looked along the shelves, and then eased himself down to sit on the floor, his leg stretched out in front of him, and pulled out the flute again. His fingers danced over the holes. One pair of shoes twitched, then danced themselves off the shelf and over to Kate, who cradled them close with a look of delight. Jackie grinned and kept playing. Another pair of shoes danced themselves off the shelf, through the warehouse, out of the open door and up into the town, slipping in through an open window and nestling into the bed of a silently weeping boy. Yes, their presence said, you shall go to the ball!

More music, more shoes dancing their way to new owners, until every person in the town had a pair of dancing shoes to wear, and there was only one pair left in the warehouse.

Jackie finally stopped playing long enough to grab his share, and he and Kate got out of there.

All that remained on the long shelves was the single left shoe that Jackie hadn't needed, and the memory of a melody.

Flash Fic Challenge: Run, Run, As Fast As You Can

 

Elsie was making gingerbread people when it began.

"The baker is nothing but unbaked dough!" a child's voice cried, and the blob of dough under hands twisted away from her. It stretched and folded itself into a small, faceless humanoid and started towards her.

Around the room, a dozen finished gingerbread shapes stirred, rising from their trays and baking racks, echoing the words as if they were the truth.

"I'm not!" Elsie protested, groping for the large wooden spoon to defend herself. It skittered out of her reach. "I'm NOT!"

Other voices drowned her out. "Bake the baker!" came the cry. It rattled from dozens of throats, then from scores, and every bit of the gingerbread people she had made turned on her as one massed body. Their faces were blank save for the iced mouths shouting her down. "Bake the baker! Bake the baker!"

"Nooooooo!" It came out as a rising scream and she backed away as they came on, grasping hands reaching out to clutch at her, to pin her, to drag her over to the giant oven. She lashed out, knocking hands away as hard and as fast as she could, but there were more of them. So many more of them, and she couldn't swing fast enough to clear all the hands away.

Then her back came up hard against a stone wall, and the faceless crowd surged forward. She couldn't flee. She couldn't escape. There were more than she could fight off. They overwhelmed her every defence, driving her down and down and down until she was curled on the kitchen floor like the ball of dough they called her. She wept, slow tears of terror sliding from her eyes and soaking into her skirt.

And so they shouted in triumph and hoisted her up and carried her to the oven. They threw her in there, among the glowing coals, and sealed the door.

Flash Fic Challenge: Mudlark

Even the aristocratic members of parliament couldn't deny the Great Stink now. With the sewer-choked Thames running almost directly under the windows, the smell had overpowered all the precautions and preventatives they had taken to keep it out.

As a result of several members being knocked out by the Stink, Parliament had called a recess, and the rich had left to pass the heights of summer in the country.

For Ant, that just meant fewer people buying pomanders to block out the smell, and therefore less income, even though the same rent had to be paid to those now absent landlords. Which was why he'd turned to mudlarking along the edge of the river to make a few extra coins.

A ragged scarf wrapped around his face did little more for the Stink than a lifetime of becoming used to it. The summer sun baked his stooping back, and turned the tidal mud splattering up his legs to dry, itchy, dirt, as he dug his bare toes and fingers into the mud, sifting through it for anything that might be remotely saleable. Scraps of cloth, or metal, or wood, or pure dog-dirt that hadn't blended into the general muck yet (the tanners paid a premium for good dog-dirt). His questing fingers hit something smooth, and oddly cool, and he froze for a moment to get a better sense of its location.

Once found, he scrabbled deeper, scooping a hollow in the mud, and found a small bottle of the sort apothecaries used. Ant grinned. Often there was a deposit on these bottles, and if he handed it back to the right apothecary, he'd be the one to get the coin deposit back in his hands.

The bottle itself was stoppered, but empty, just a bit misty on the inside with condensation. Ant tucked it carefully into a pocket, out of sight, and completely missed the moment when the mist sealed inside the bottle took on the shape of a face crying "Let me out!"

Flash Fic Challenge: Takes One to Catch One

Takes One to Catch One

The man they were chasing whipped through a door, silk opera cloak just missing being trapped as it closed.

Ned grabbed the heavy fire-door before it quite shut and wrenched it back open. "Can't be far now," he gasped, as he pelted through. "Not like he's going to blend in."

Jack followed right on Ned's heels with a breathless nod. They turned another corner, and skidded to a halt on the edge of a huge convention crowd, a large proportion of whom appeared to be dressed as some kind of vampire. Cloaks, hats, canes, rags, fangs.

The perfect place for the man to blend into, as if he'd been aiming for here all along.

Jack swore, long and extensively.

Ned quite agreed.

They kept moving, kept looking, following the swirl of the crowd as it parted ahead of their running prey and his stolen plans, then closed in behind him (and in front of them).

Ned yelled, "Stop that thief!" and heads turned, but no one made as if they were going to help.

The swirl widened momentarily, as their prey darted around yet another costumed person with slicked back hair, cloak, and cane.

The cane flashed out sideways, hooking around the man's leg.

He went sprawling with a hiss and a snarl. The person planted the tip of their cane between his shoulders and leaned on it, apparently unshaken by the thrashing limbs beneath it.

Ned used the time to make up the distance, hurling himself into the fray. "Thank you," he managed, once he and Jack had the man secured.

The 'vampire' grinned, flashing a very realistic looking fang, and withdrew their cane. "My pleasure. It's those like him that give vampires a bad name. I really can't be having that." They bowed with wordless elegance and vanished back into the crowd without so much as a swirl of movement to mark their passage.

Ned put them out of his mind. "Right, you. You're coming with us," he snarled, and he and Jack began the long process of hauling the thief home.

Flash Fic Challenge: Old Wounds

Old Wounds

The bell over the door jangled, and I looked up as the customer entered. He was a lean man with a head of dark curls and a short beard and the sort of muscle that suggests frequent, heavy, lifting. I eyed the clean but much mended clothes and came down on the side of poor-with-steady-employment rather than brawler. "What can I do for you, Mr...?"

"Josephson." He filled in this year's name politely enough, though as ever I couldn't place his accent. "I'm looking for a good wound salve, please."

"A new wound?"

"An old one, that broke open again." He smiled ruefully and laid a hand on his side. "I was pushing too hard to get a job finished in time, and the scar didn't take the strain well."

I nodded. "Comfrey, Octavia," I ordered, and the spider automaton activated with a hiss of pistons and scuttled off along the shelves to retrieve the correct jar. While I waited, I rolled round the end of the counter. "May I see?"

He sighed, but seemed unfazed by my wheelchair. He carefully untucked his clean but shabby shirt and lifted it to reveal equally clean but shabby bandages wrapping his lower ribs, then stood quietly as I unwound them and inspected the wound.

It was a puncture wound, small and round and deep, the sort that is, as he had said, prone to split open when pulled the wrong way. Stabbed by a long, thin, knife, perhaps. I took the jar Octavia brought and sent her off after a few other things, while I measured out the herbs I wanted and ground them in my mortar, before beating them into the base cream I used for salves. The sharp clean scent filled the air of my apothecary.

I smoothed the first dose on myself. "Was the job worth it?"

"It paid for a lot of things," he said, shrugging the shoulder on his good side.

That was as good as it got for a lot of people, I knew. I rebandaged the wound, smoothing the folds down.

He smiled when I had finished, and tucked his shirt in as carefully as he had pulled it free. "How much?"

I named my price, and he grimaced faintly. I shrugged. "You wanted a good salve. You get what you pay for."

"True, true." He pulled out a thin purse from hiding and began to dig out coppers one by one, setting each down on the counter with a small precise clink, like clockwork settling into place. He got the required price laid out eventually and pushed the coins over to me with calloused fingers. "Here. My thanks."

I checked it over and handed him the little pot of salve, with instructions on how to use it.

He listened solumnly, nodded, and then vanished out of my door, leaving me to clean up the remains and close up for Easter.

He'll come back next year, I'm sure. He always does.