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artistsway is now a thing. Weekly posts commence this weekend."What gave you the right to chase out our customers?" Becca demanded. "Sounded like he was gonna buy a diamond ring. That's serious money. More than enough to fix..." She waved a hand. "This. Boss lady's gonna have to dip into the funds for setting up the Milford location. She is not going to be happy."
"Let's get Sarah to the hospital," said the woman with the gun. "Then let's find somewhere quiet where the three of us can talk."
"Who are you, anyway?" Rae asked.
"Call me Serafina Sanchez. I'm with the men in black."
Leah hiked north along the highway. This wasn't particularly safe and probably wasn't legal, but she didn't care. Places to be. People to see. Nor did she care that she didn't know.
Rae's music hummed in her ear: Leah hadn't had time to reload the old MP3 player with music more to her own taste. "Meet Virginia", "Ave Mary A", "Anna Begins", and a version of "Barbara Allen": Sweet William died for me today, I'll die for him tomorrow—
It wasn't a vision but a knowing.
Leah walked a while longer and stopped at the first fast-food place she saw. It did have free wi-fi, as she'd hoped, and she ordered a small fries so the staff wouldn't bother her while she checked her information and sent a single email.
Leah, after all, had no power over fire. She couldn't start them, accidentally or on purpose, without doing so deliberately and with full knowledge and intent that lighting the match would cause a flame. [...] Becca by contrast had vivid memories of setting other kids' hair on fire when they teased her about her own. The fires were always out by the time adults came investigating, and no one could prove anything about any of the incidents, but however much Becca had wanted the fires to start, never once had she consciously meant to start them.
"Isn't it beautiful?" Sarah said from the storefront, presumably addressing a customer. Becca glanced back at her reference sketch, then set flame-pencil to ring. "I made it myself," Sarah continued, "and Jamal's engagement ring and our wedding rings to match. Gold and cubic zirconia, with a triquetra around the stone and Celtic-style knotwork on the band. We're having a Christmas wedding, I'm walking down the aisle to 'Angels We Have Heard On High'—"
poetree and AO3; the AO3 link has podpoem download and streaming by 
jukebox_fest story is done.Happy damn birthday to Anne's baby girl. Eighteen years old with everything to live for, Leah was now, just emerging from the chrysalis and spreading her butterfly wings.
Anne didn't know a damn thing about vodou except what was in the movies, and knew damn well the movies were all lies. But the movies were right about one thing, in real-world terms if not necessarily about vodou: casting a spell on a doll, if done right, was the same as casting a spell on the person the doll represented.
Four small dolls, hand-sewn of cloth in bright colors (one per doll) and varied shades of brown, lay in a shallow glass bowl. Miles away, four daughters went about their business, unaware of Anne's spellcasting as Anne had never been unaware of theirs.
The edge of the bowl was as perfect a circle as human hands could make. Let no evil cross this circle, Anne willed. Let no harm come to those within.
Her husband had warned her before his death, and now that Leah was adult, that warning was coming due.
Anne sealed off the spell, glowing golden around the rim of the bowl. Here's to the damned.
LEAH the guitarist, the wind mage, the diviner. RAE the reader, the water mage, the healer. BECCA the painter, the fire mage, the warrior. SARAH the knitter, the earth mage, the strategist.
When the music tells Leah it's time to let the wind carry her away, she goes. When Rae finds out her little sister's missing, she's a bit too busy with the dragon attacking her storefront to care. When Becca figures out why the dragon wanted the Driscoll sisters for a snack, she feels she and Rae have no choice but to go with Maricel, a hunter of supernatural nasties, and learn all she has to teach them. When Sarah wakes up, she'll be upset she missed all the fun...if Sarah wakes up.
"Do you want to talk about anything?" Sarah asked.
"Not men," said Becca at once. "Or relationships."
That narrowed it down hardly at all. Sarah picked a subject at random. "Seen the commercials for Sleepy Hollow?" Sarah asked.
Becca snorted. "Oh, yeah. National Treasure meets Left Behind meets crap zombie movie. Might watch it just for the cop."
"Am watching it just for the cop," said Sarah. "Will be, anyway. Unless the premise pisses me off too badly. Pacific Rim's premise did. But then Pacific Rim is a movie, not a TV series, and I'd already paid the ticket price. I don't regret it, the Mako-Raleigh fight scene alone was worth the price of admission, but."
"Mako Mori was worth the price of admission," said Becca. "You realize the sword on the infuriatingly named robot was her idea?
Rae laid one brown hand on Ashley's shin and concentrated: a green glow crackled to life around her fingers, then spread downward, popping the glass bits out and leaving unmarked flesh behind.
"Why don't you take that to James Randi?" Ashley wondered. "Easiest million ever made."
"Publicity," said Rae. "Hordes of people insisting I heal them, or their kids, and you know I wouldn't be able to turn down the kids. I'd wear myself to death before I was half done with St. Jude's."
Selfish, said the back of Rae's mind. Self-centered, heartless bitch.
Shut up, said Rae.
"Ash, two o'clock!" Rae said.
Ashley turned smoothly to gun down the oncoming zombies. "Hell," she said, as the blinking light onscreen noted her looming lack of ammo. "Grenades, do I still have grenades?"
Rae brought up her character's inventory. "I've got grenades." She faced the zombies, pressed the right key combination, and held the button for distance—there! The grenade made a perfect arc to land a couple rows back in the zombie horde, and BOOM. Zombie bits everywhere— "Damn!" There were more than she'd seen at first. Grenades were precious, but Rae was even lower on bullets than Ashley. "'Nother grenade—" BOOM.
That was the first choice; that might be the biggest choice. Danger in my future, whatever I did; safety only in the past, to which I couldn't return. Enough time in the present to steal the go bag Rae thought nobody knew about—I hadn't one of my own because I didn't have her secret—repack it with clothes that fit me instead of her, pack up my laptop and guitar, and go.Credit for the lyric quote:
I had my marching orders: Chin up, stand tall. Walk for miles in a hurry to nowhere at all. This is my test. Trust only this heart in my chest.
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kajones_writingkajones_writing. She's doing a blog tour and I'm her third stop: stops one and two are at untonuggan here and lynnoconnacht here.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif){kind=small}
crowdfunding community on Livejournal, where I started learning what it was possible for me to do. Since then I’ve experimented, to find what works for me, as I’ve been crowdfunding myself for the last two years (last month was my two year anniversary, which is part of the reason I wanted to do this), and, even though I’m not making much, I love it.
chiming
