Excerpts

Kiela never thought the flames would reach the library. She was dimly aware that most of the other librarians had fled weeks ago, when the revolutionaries took the palace and defenestrated the emperor in a rather dramatic display. But surely they wouldn't touch the library. After all, there were books here. Highly flammable, irreplaceable books.

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The attic was perfect for spying.

Except for all the spiders. And the dust. Wrinkling her nose, Rachel tried not to sneeze for the zillionth time, but it still slipped out. Aah-choo!

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It's quiet inside my mother's casket. Also, dark. And it smells of wood and the thick, cloying gardenia perfume she always used to like. I think they doused her body in it to disguise the odor of the chemicals they used to embalm her. Or maybe they knew she would have liked to wear her favorite scent, even now.

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Claire excelled at three things: ballet, homework, and identifying all the ways there were to die in any given situation. Like now, on this boat. She couldn't stop thinking about how easy it would be to be knocked off the side, hit your head as you fell, and drown.

Less likely: being guillotined by a fishing line.

Also unlikely but still possible: being pierced by shrapnel if the engine exploded.

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As the only squirrel at the Shelter for Rejected Familiars, Holly always volunteered for the chores that required an exceptionally fluffy tail, such as sweeping the porch.

She hummed to herself as she brushed her tail back and forth. Just a few more strokes and the porch would be spotless. She wanted everything to look as perfect as possible for their new arrival.

Today's arrival would be their first new shelterling since Charlie had left. He used to be the one who greeted the new residents and helped them adjust to their lives at the shelter -- he'd been so kind, gentle, and patient with Holly herself when she'd arrived -- and Holly wasn't sure she could fill his paws. But she was certainly going to try!

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Like many sisters, Even and Odd shared many things:

Their bedroom.

Their closet.

Six pairs of flip-flops.

Use of the living-room TV.

And . . . magic.

On even days, Even could work magic. On odd days, her one-year-younger sister, Odd, could. Years ago, before their family moved across the border from the magic world of Firoth to Stony Haven, the most ordinary town in Connecticut, the sisters had discovered they could each work magic on alternating days. Showing an imperfect understanding of how calendars work, four-year-old Emma had coined their nicknames -- and they'd stuck. Emma became Even, and Olivia became Odd.

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Kreya always wore her coat with many pockets when she went out to steal bones. As she pulled it on, she inhaled the familiar dusty smell. The leather had faded from brilliant blue to indistinct gray, and the hems were frayed, but then, after all this time, she felt faded and frayed too.

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"No kitten is that small," the text from Harrison read.

Zoe texted back, "Smaller than my hand." She crouched next to the tiny ball of fluff. Shivering, it had wedged itself between the trash can and the garage door. Zoe had spotted it when she'd dumped a bag of crumpled wrapping paper and used party plates into the can.

She cooed at the kitten, "It's okay. Don't be scared. You'll be all right." Checking around the garage, she searched for a mother cat or any other kittens, but didn't see anything. She heard the chirp of crickets, cars on a distant highway, and the hum of her family's voices through the open window of the brightly lit kitchen. But no meows.

Her phone binged with a one-word text: "Photoshop."

"If Photoshop," Zoe typed, "kitten would be riding a velociraptor."

Bing. "Sweet." Then: "Still Photoshop."

"Come see."

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Call it what it is: monster racing.

Forget that, and you die.

Tamra thought she should have that tattooed on her forehead so the idiots she was trying to train stood a chance of remembering it. Bellowing with every shred of voice she had left, she shouted at her newest crop of riders, "They're not your pets! They're not your friends! You falter, they will kill you! You lose focus, they will kill you! You do anything stupid, they will--say it with me now . . ."

Dutifully, the five riders-to-be chimed, "Kill us!"

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Mina was quiet.

Every morning, she liked to tuck herself into the corner of their farmhouse kitchen and watch her family storm through: Papa singing off-key as he poured sugar into the pot of morning oats, Mother yelling at him to add less sugar, Papa yelling back cheerfully that he could add more but not less because he was just that sweet, her older brother, Gaton, stomping in to say he couldn't find his socks, Papa joking that he'd added them to the morning oats, and the twins waddling in with Gaton's socks on their hands like puppets.

And every morning, after her family had whirled tornado-like into the kitchen, Papa would bellow, "Mina! Mina? Is Mina awake? Anyone seen Mina?"

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On the dawn of her wedding day, Mayara knotted her diving belt around her waist and climbed the skull of a long-dead sea monster. At the top, she straddled the eye socket and looked down. Below, far below, the ancient skull was cracked, and within the fissure was a deep pool of water so still that it looked like glass. She imagined it would shatter when she dived into it.

Breathe, she told herself. Just breathe.

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Gold.

Symbol Au.

Atomic number 79.

Dictionary definition: "a yellow malleable ductile metallic element."

You could say my family is obsessed with it. For my mother's fortieth birthday, my father commissioned a grand piano with 24-karat gold keys. The entire piano is covered in gold leaf and is the tackiest instrument ever played. He tried to smash it with a hammer after she disappeared, but my oldest brother talked him out of it. So he satisfied himself with sealing the double doors of the music room shut.

All of which only partially explains why I was stuck on the chandelier in the foyer, dangling upside down and hoping that the chain holding the chandelier wouldn't break.

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Turtle had stopped moving last week.

He'd warned Mayka and the others a year ago, when he first began to slow -- but he moved so slowly anyway that she hadn't believed him. Not really. She'd always thought they'd have one more afternoon. On the mountain, there was always another afternoon. Another sunset. Another sunrise. Until there wasn't.

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Roar the dragon did not want summer to end. Summer meant barbecues! Swimming with the sea monsters! Building sand castles (and smashing them with his tail)!

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Don't fall, don't fall, oh no, I'm going to fall . . . Crouching, Ji-Lin raised her sword over her head. She counted to thirty and then straightened to standing, without falling. Slowly, she lifted one foot to her knee. Her other bare foot was planted on the top of a pole, on the roof of the Temple of the Sun, at the top of a mountain.

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Sophie had only ever stolen one dream.

She'd been six and curious, two not unrelated traits. The dream had been stored in a brilliant blue bottle with a gold-flecked stopper. It was the only unlabeled bottle in the batch, and she'd thought that meant it wouldn't be missed.

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Razor blade.

Thread.

Gum.

A ball of tinfoil.

A dull fishing hook.

Kayla checked each pocket in her jean shorts, knotted the straps of her bikini top tighter, and pulled on her favorite black hoodie. She frowned at her bare feet. She'd blend in better with flip-flops, but she could run better in sneakers, if anything went wrong. After a half second, she chose the sneakers. She believed in herself, but she also believed in the supreme idiocy of people and their tendency to interfere in the most inconvenient way possible.

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For the first hundred miles, I see only the road and my knuckles, skin tight across the bones, like my mother's hands, as I clutch the steering wheel. For the second hundred miles, I read the highway signs without allowing the letters to compute in my brain. Exit numbers. Names of towns. Places that people call home, or not. After three hundred miles, I start to wonder what the hell I'm doing.

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"Your name is Eve. Remember that."

She was supposed to call him Malcolm. Pressing her forehead against the cool glass of the car window, she stared at the house. Yellow and narrow, it loomed over the lawn. She traced the outline of the house on the window: a peaked roof, two windows with shades drawn, a front door dead center. "It's a face," she said.

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On the day she was to die, Liyana walked out of her family's tent to see the dawn. She buried her toes in the sand, cold from the night, and she wrapped her father's goatskin cloak tight around her shoulders. She had only moments before everyone would wake.

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"One hour until dawn," Pearl said. She leaped off the roof and landed catlike on the pavement. "Oodles of time, if we steal a car."

Her boyfriend, Jadrien, stretched out on the roof of Outback Steakhouse. He was a shadow, a lovely shadow, against the green tin. "Come back up, Pearl,” he said. “I’ll compare your eyes to stars, your lips to rubies, and your breath to industrial-strength air freshener."

"Your charm and sincerity overwhelm me."

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"Almost there," Grandpa said.

Pressing her nose against the car window, Lily frowned at the strip malls, gas stations, and industrial parks as they rolled by. "Really?" she said. She'd expected to see something a bit more picturesque than Walmarts and Home Depots en route to her dream school -- at least a stately forest or a field with a few photogenic cows. And she should hear trumpets playing, plus a massive choir announcing in verse the approach of her destiny.

Maybe she'd built up this moment a bit too much.

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Once upon a time, in a land far to the north, there lived a lovely maiden...

Cassie killed the snowmobile engine.

Total silence, her favorite sound. Ice crystals spun in the Arctic air. Sparkling in the predawn light, they looked like diamond dust. Beneath her ice-encrusted face mask, she smiled. She loved this: just her, the ice, and the bear.

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Three blind and tail-less mice catapulted through the cat door, skidded over the linoleum kitchen floor, and collapsed in a furry heap at Julie’s feet.

"Uh, hi," Julie said to the mice.

The cat door bashed open again as Julie’s brother, Puss-in-Boots, launched himself inside...

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In the darkness, the heart of the fairy tale waited...

Julie picked up a scrap of shoelace. Once upon a time, it had been an entire sneaker. "Look what you did," she said, wiggling it under her bed. Snapping out a green vine, the Wild snatched the lace...

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