2019 Short Stories
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04 – Invitations
Most of the time, Carmichel came in a town car, driven by one of the combination valet/security guards he employed. This time, he arrived on foot. Curt returned Carmichel’s wave as he approached. No security, not even trailing at a respectful distance, not entirely unheard of, but it changed things a little bit. It probably meant that whatever info Carmichel wanted to pass along didn’t involve something high-risk or that would put immediate targets on their backs. ‘I don’t think I’ve taken you to this place before,’ Carmichel said. ‘It’s down the end here.’ Curt followed him down a smaller side street, mostly the backs of shops, older-looking buildings, and…
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03 – Communication 101
The puppet stared at him. Curt wasn’t sure that, in a million years, he could have imagined a little yellow puppet could have inspired such rage, desperation, and…something akin to the five stages of grief. And yet it continued to torment him. ‘Fuck you,’ he whispered. The puppet – the children’s learning program on his phone – rose a little, flapped wings and smiled. ‘Come on,’ it said, ‘you can do it.’ It was the usual platitude it said when it encountered a user phrase not programmed into its response tree. He couldn’t imagine many fairy toddlers spending a lot of time swearing while learning the alphabet. There were adult…
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02 – Bedside Manners
‘If you’re not about to die, you can wait,’ Parker-2 said as soon as the infirmary became clear. ‘No problem, Doc,’ Curt said and took one of the beds towards the back of the infirmary while the twins tended to the fairy siblings. He tried not to look at the unmarked door that led to the morgue. Most people, apparently, didn’t even know it was there. He only knew it wasn’t some benign storeroom due to being “friends” with Parker-2. And right now, two cold shelves would be holding dead Solstice. Mags was right. Anyone who had fallen so far as to willingly kidnap kids probably wasn’t worth rehabilitation. There…
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01 – Override
6 Months Before Mirrorfall Curt screamed against the gag. Caught. Captured. On his way to an execution. Dead. He was dead. Unfortunately, whoever this capture unit was, they were good. His hands were cuffed tightly behind his back with no wiggle room to do anything. There was supposed to be some trick you could do by breaking your thumb, but he wasn’t even sure he had the leverage to do that. The gag was hot and wet in his mouth. Spit. Blood. Tears. The van rounded a corner, and his head slammed against the metal wall. Across from him, a little fairy boy – probably about five – shook the…
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Moving Day
A short bridging story for Stef, set between Mirrorshades and Ebb and Flow. On the morning she’d gone to Heathrow, she’d arrived five hours early, consumed three litres of coffee, lost her wallet and cried in front of security. It had been a nightmare, from start to finish. Only when finally sat in first class, and checked with the steward three times that she was on the right plane, had she even begun the process of calming down. And that had only been to make room for so many more fears, so much doubt, the unending abyss of things she didn’t know, and how very, very likely failure had been.…
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One-Shot: An Innocent Question
‘So I’m immortal, right?’ Curt lifted his head, glad of the break from the paperwork, but his mood immediately dropped again as the words fully sank in. Nothing normal ever followed Stef asking a question like that. ‘Every time,’ he said slowly, ‘you ask something like that, I wish the Demolition Man expanding foam stuff was real.’ He looked around the office – nothing was out of place – so there was nothing that he needed to immediately yank her away from. But Newbie with weird ideas in her head was equally as dangerous as a Newbie who wanted to pick up a live wire because “electricity can’t hurt me,…
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00 – Cover
Deep in Faerie, where angels fear to tread… A black tie event. A black market auction. A kidnapped agent. Six months before Mirrorfall, The Auction is a follow-up to Newbie.
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09 – Expanding Vocabulary
If there was one kind of person Curt hated more than agents, it was people who said that “everything happened for a reason”. People who stuck by that platitude when some minor inconvenience, but who could only gawp like a dying fish when you asked about something awful.Reasons seemed to vanish if you brought up childhood cancer, family members dying, people abusing animals or the utter inhumanity that humans were capable of. Things didn’t happen for a reason. Things just happened. Petersen had insisted on one condition. One test that would determine whether or not he would be allowed to be a recruit. Petersen had dragged him into Fairyland and…
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08 – Twisted Prescription
His eye was cut out. His skin was melting. The floor was black and sucking his body in. Strips of flesh, shaped like words he couldn’t read rent themselves from his skin. Petersen laughed, held his face and told him he was going to die. A wall of blood crashed down, blood turning into bricks turning into- Curt heard himself screaming. And the scream cut into the dream. He opened his eyes and let the scream turn into a whimper and into tears. The bed was drenched with his sweat, and there were spots of blood from where he’d been clawing at his chest. After three tries, he managed to…
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07 – Mirror to Be
Until Magnolia returned, there was nothing to do but study. Curt read through all of the required departmental books – familiarising himself at least a little with the faces of those people he’d be working with. After going through each of the photos, he required the recruit-accessible versions of the files for the three department heads. He quickly pursued the file for Combat – Agent Taylor – there was only so much you could assume from one photo. Still, Taylor looked like one of those rough-and-tumble guys who played rugby on the weekends. Big, tough. The kind of agent who could punch someone’s head from their shoulders. Red hair was…
